User:RTG/What is wrong with cookies?

It gets rarer and rarer to find someone complaining about cookies, and yet so many websites continue asking you to accept them... even though most can just do whatever they like with cookies without asking you because all of the big sites will just lock you out if you do not allow their advertisers to follow you around the internet.

Well, let's face a few things before we try to answer this question. Paranoia about being monitored and even having your browsing experience adjusted is understandable in many ways, but how many of us can really expect to have an enemy or other attacker rich and powerful enough to pay the money big businesses do for general advertising, just to single out and monitor one person? Surely, such an effort would be the forte only of policing, or big banking robberies that would draw a wall of... policing...

It's not just the cookies. I am writing this after I had a bit of a scare today, and was prompted to search up a way to figure out if any remote access or monitoring software was operating on my computer. There is no longer an easy way to do this. In the old day, before "Internet 2.0", your internet connection was symbolised in the system tray by an icon of two screens, one behind the other. The screens would be dark mostly, but if the front one lit up, you were transmitting to the internet, and if the rear one lit up, you were accepting transmissions from the internet. Unless you were running an application in the full screen, if you did not press something which commanded your computer to access the internet, but the internet icons lit up anyway, you could not fail to notice, and there would be a chilling shock. Here is the nature of the shock:- Shock, horror, your computer does not need to access the internet ever if you do not ask it to, or approve the connection. In the old day we would say the computer should not do so, and not just because we were concerned with privacy and safety. The more automatic access your computer has to the internet, the more impaired it becomes. Ever run Windows Vista? You just don't have enough memory, right? Testing, testing, testing... the internet has proven for decades before "2.0" that it will test your computer out of functionality and into your bank account.

It is often joked darkly that the main bulk of internet content is pornographic videos, and it probably isn't though there is a lot, however, the main bulk is probably video material, but in the old day of the internet, the main activity was computer gaming. Long before the internet, computer screens were mostly monochrome, but they required high definition to make nice smooth text, just like you are reading now, for people at work, crunching numbers and words. As well as the improved display, the nature of the 086 computer is that it is highly adaptable and could take graphics cards (and sound cards) decades before the internet. So the lowly word processing number crunching PC was the gold standard in computer gaming when the gold standard in gaming consoles was still Mario Bros. Having a gygabyte harddrive on a really old PC was ridiculously huge for word processing or number crunching. But not for computer gaming. For computer gaming the gygabyte drive barely scratched the surface. The GHz processor is beyond extravagant when all you need to process is a glorified notepad or calculator. But for computer gaming it was just a tease. Gygabyte RAM? Just a tickle. The driving force behind the advancing internet was the thirst for computer gaming. Not MMORPG, but rapid tests of dexterity, first person shooters, scrolling spaceships, 3D puzzle worlds, etc, etc. If you wanted a better internet, anything which interfered with your network or taking space on your RAM was, quite literally, treated like the devil itself. You'd get your business shut down completely if you tried to go ahead and put resource intensive software on a customers computer. It went without saying because it was said so much and the consequences were so significant.

Internet 2.0 was sold to us as faster and faster internet, but there is a difference between response and bandwidth, as any computer gamer can tell you. In reality, Internet 2.0 was the way we learned to spell Gaming 0.0. Just as the world of gaming was about to step through the door of the 3D world, typical of scarcity marketing tactics, the rug was pulled out. Speeds increased, but not at a faster rate than system clogging software. I have screenshots of my Windows XP running on under 400Mbs of RAM. There wasn't much Windows XP could not be updated to do that a new version of Windows can do any better. XP was spelling the end of rapid operating system advancement. So the timing was ripe to split the gamers from the techies and introduce Jersey Shore, i.e., mostly Facebook. Isn't Internet 2.0 mostly Facebook today? Just a co-incidence huh.

If you had a Task Manager or other system monitoring software for the old internet, (and if you ran it every day, you did have a monitoring software), you could list all of the processes on one page without a scrollbar. Applications could only activate if you activated them. It didn't do less stuff. It just ran less processes. It was more clear. Today, not only do you have to scroll down a page and a half of processes, your system is so splintered and divided, most of the visible processes are just fronts for half a dozen and more other processes. It's a mess, and in the old day of the internet, just like with cookies and resource intensive inactive processes, if your operating system was operating as a mess, again, there'd be war. But Jersey Shore Internet stopped all that. The Jersey Shore heads paid in enough of their money, crying out to be one of or better than the geeks who came before, that the gamers were shelved, not because they were in the way of the Jersey Shore lovers, who wanted to be part of this new thing, but because they were in the way of cookies, inactive resource intensive applications, and...

In the old day of the internet, Steam would not even get off the ground because it was not chosen (are we getting it yet?). At that statement you cry, but what about the chat groups and reviews and... But Steam killed all that stuff. We had all of that stuff except what we had was competition ensuring quality and freedom. There were many attempts to build a Steam before the actual Steam, and they all involved removing choice. Forcing you to install a software before you were able to play a game.

In the days when Facebook and Steam and "Internet 2.0" appeared... These were the days when you could choose to allow cookies or not.

There was a culture of true freedom growing on the internet before Internet 2.0. Wikipedia is not the least of the results of that free culture. It was wonderful for everybody, at least, everybody who didn't want to run big business or live in the world of Jersey Shore...

What is wrong with cookies...?

Well, see... It's not the cookies... Not exactly. It's like modern politics. Sometimes the government gives you want you want. But they give it to you in a way that you get a whole lot of other stuff you didn't want. Google used to be an amazing search engine. I mean literally, it was like a personal AI. Now even Google image search is sort of... It just doesn't match stuff up like it used to. The only exact matches it will give you are the completely exact same image you searched for. It won't give you visually matching similar results any more except for widely recognisable images. It won't give you anything new. Don't you think if that was different before... these and so many other small but significant reductions in value... that you'd complain about "cookies" too? Who wanted to buy something five minutes ago and forgot so often that you needed cookies following you around and... Oh well. Who cares except some dumb old geeks who want to fill the net with big thick glasses or something, huh? Right, Jersey Shore?


 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI