The Four Horsemen of Pain
(HTTPS, Cloudflare, Anubis, Claude)
While I'm typically reserved, the way the internet is going has been too stark to ignore. I'm glad I archived what I needed for myself when I did, because man oh man... a lot of once publicly available documentation or files is gone or impossible to search for.
HTTPS
I can understand the desire for HTTPS and its intended function, but there never really was a great response to address the annoying issue that older browsers will never acknowledge it. And now we're in this ever revolving conundrum that older machines and software just can't reliably function without proxies or relays.
Furthermore, just ask... what has HTTPS ever done for us, really? I personally have received no benefit from it other than all of its documented annoyances.
There are still many moments to this day, where, I just want to download a _basic file_ or program on an old operating system and it becomes way more work than it really needs to be. Sure there are some burgeoning attempts with proxies (assuming that JavaScript and newer encodings aren't needed), but as time goes on that's going to become less feasible as encoding goes beyond what those old operating systems understand as well.
Hilariously some of the purported "pros" to HTTPS are actually quite awful and undermine privacy, like the geolocation API (and believe me I hate the "access your location" popups -- sure you can disable it, but configuring Firefox on every machine I use is starting to become a curated science with the cocktail of nonsense that needs to be adjusted, and of course Mozilla likes to pull the rug from underneath you like Microsoft by suddenly adding things that are enabled automatically which you never wanted). Since HTTP is considered insecure, browsers by design won't hand over that info so you unintentionally remove nags and gain some privacy. Of course this is simply the programmed behaviour of the browsers, sensitive information *could* be handed over HTTP, but since it's not, there are still less annoyances on accessing websites through HTTP.
It's going to be _hilarious_ when Google enforces 47 day certificates down the throats of everyone. I remember the good old days when you had 3 year certificates.
HTTPS is annoying me so much that I created the old.ibmfiles.com mirror for exclusive HTTP vintage access to things I (and others) need.
Cloudflare
An assumed necessary evil as the internet has become a crowded place and various entities and individuals no longer wish to respect decent behaviour (and I won't lie, it's convenient for managing DNS). But let me tell you, the Cloudflare security verifications are getting pretty old now as they're starting to flash up for every site I visit. Pick your poison -- Cloudflare "security" or Anubis. Of course I'm never going to use such things because it is the antithesis of what I'm interested in.
When everyone's eggs are in one basket you end up with these uncomfortable truths:
- Cloudflare can and does go down -- and it's hilarious when the global outages happen.
- Cloudflare can dictate who they want to serve, and at any given moment rescind, ban, or balloon your costs
- For Cloudflare "security" you need JavaScript
Anubis
While the intent of Anubis could be viewed as noble (although I have a lot of technical disagreements with my fellow Canadian who designed it; we would not mesh being placed together in the same room), anyone who wants to defeat it for nefarious purposes can easily do so. It's one of those things that punishes the users and the serious data scrapers lick their lips in anticipation and bypass it without issue with using cheap mining services. No different than traditional CAPTCHAs frustrating the humans but not the bots that perform them with ease, or heavy DRM that punishes those who buy the software when the pirates enjoy their DRM-free downloads as usual.
Another thing about CAPTCHAs is that they're as dubious as the "security questions" in brain dead password recovery systems -- because adding publicly searchable and obtainable information to reset your password is 'totally' secure! It's fascinating how many things in society are sold as functional when they don't actually provide the service(s) claimed. Or better yet, like the shredders they sell for shredding secure documents, yeah.... those long strips can easily be pieced back together. I do own one of those shredders but it's mainly cathartic; the feeling of placing all of the paper propaganda I get from the ISPs in my area straight into the shredder is so satisfying.
Perhaps another criticism for Anubis (and Cloudflare security) is that they get implemented on sites or services where it's not really necessary, breaking access to machines that can't run the JavaScript. I'm REALLY not a fan for the ethos that a website MUST be accessible with JavaScript enabled. It's one thing to reduce features when JavaScript is disabled, but an entirely different matter if the website cannot be accessed until you enable JavaScript. Anubis feeds this paradigm.
Claude
The whole reason that resulted in "Anubis" and kickstarted many of the other pains. Anthropic went to town (like going so hard to town they went straight past flavour town) illegally training their software on the entire internet. The amount of hits I got from Claude (even on defunct URLs) is absurd. You're welcome Anthropic, I guess?
The way the 'courtesy' of the internet and consuming proprietary resources and information was conducted, was always under the assumption licenses and intellectual property rights would be respected. All of the AI companies flipped this concept on its head, and nobody wants to say anything because money talks.
As a result, content is increasingly getting locked behind paywalls, account logins, JavaScript, or worse, closing up shop entirely because Google is encouraging their first party AI products leaving content creators in the dust. The irony being they're biting the hand that feeds their AI. I'm under the impression that as this continues, content creators will then shift on developing closed content "AI training" bundles and selling that to companies who need to train their models on all forms of human-created media (whether it's text, audio, visual, logic.... etc.) Of course Reddit is already cashing in on this, selling the site's content to the highest bidder, which is Google at the moment. I just love how Google and Gemini are trained so heavily on every word in Reddit, even when it's misinformation or worse, disinformation. Or the results just get hallucinated, Google wants to keep calling this site "IBM files.com" (which isn't even a valid root domain for crying out loud) rather than "ibmfiles.com" -- which I use to reinforce the fact it has nothing to do with "IBM" (capitalised) the company. It's really that bad, Google's can't train their rotten website to interpret what a valid root domain is.
Other Annoyances
I'm also noticing a general degradation in the UI design on many websites too. For instance, on Gmail or Reddit, you could instantly type your username and password in the text fields and rapidly use tab or whatever. Now... there's slow transitions and/or tab doesn't go right to the next text box as designed. Everything is just so sloppy, slow, and bloated. Nothing is 'snappy' as it needs to be, and there's an increasing focus being taken away from superior faster keyboard input. As a kid using Windows 98, I never thought computers would get slower and less responsive in the future.... damn. No wonder why the Linux terminal through exclusive keyboard interaction is becoming popular like the MS-DOS days.
This site itself has become sort of an accidental reprieve for me when I just don't want to look at, or deal with all of the internet bloat. While it is modern HTML/CSS (and quite elaborate at that despite its simple appearance), what started as a kind of joke making it "90's like" (I was inspired from Louis Ohland's 9595 Ardent Tool of Capitalism index, and liked the 90's design and extreme verticality) actually has gaining appeal now. And it's nice just having the text and files instantly at your fingertips with no layers of abstraction, all the while having dynamic light/dark modes and appropriate image filtering, best of all worlds :)
There's just no good reason to add JavaScript, so I never will.
The Walls Closing In
Pretty much the free and publicly accessible internet is over. Search engines no longer work (and Microsoft, The Internet Archive, Google -- all like shadowbanning content), everything is cached in LLMs that must be queried, everything wants JavaScript, and UI design is not done so well. I personally do not like the gaudy designs from the 90's, but damn, even those sometimes manage to be more functional. Yikes. Take Microsoft Azure or Exchange Online, the management consoles suffer from floating text everywhere that's "supposed" to be a tab or a button, but there's no visual distinguishing that it is; and because of my ADHD I sometimes have trouble guiding my eyes around these UIs. Whatever...
One can always just power on a Personal System/2 and tune out the world while listening to OPL2/OPL3 music. How're you gonna do it? You're gonna PS/2 it!
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