The Death of the Internet and Personal Computing

rant
opinion
technology
Author

Brian Wages

Published

April 17, 2026

The human-centered web is under attack. Do something about it.

AI-generated image for maximum annoyance

As I was driving to work one morning, I stopped to fill up the Ford Focus as the needle was moving closer to empty. While paying at the pump with my premier fuel rewards card, I was treated to an audio and visual feast of news and advertisements. There were several buttons around the screen, but none of them would mute or turn off this annoyance. I stopped filling after one gallon and chose another place to do business at.

You ask, “Wait, I thought this blog was supposed to be about Georgia’s history, lore, and wildlife?” Yes, but rants like this help explain why I built this website the way I did. A few months ago, I was using Microsoft Outlook on Windows 11 after Microsoft made the decision to inject advertisements into the inbox. Clicking something you thought was an unread email would take you to some not-so-magical place on the Internet. OneDrive kept resurrecting in my system tray as Copilot made more promises to improve productivity. I needed a Google account to watch YouTube ads on age-restricted videos. Every website wants to tell me about my rights to privacy and manage cookie settings. Advertisements weren’t just the listings above my search results, they were the search results. Are you using a VPN? Be prepared for an endless CAPTCHA challenge. You’ve all heard, if the service if free, you are the product. Even if you give these scumbags your money, you’re still the product.

I won’t be providing any in-depth tutorials here. However, I am happy to make some recommendations. Right now, the very server hosting this website has bots scanning for exposed ports. At home, my Pi-hole dashboard totals queries faster than what is humanly readable. Even professional developers aren’t prepared for these levels of absurdity.

The failed relaunch of digg.com

I’m not going to sensationalize the topic any further. If you want to keep Windows, keep it. The IoT Enterprise LTSC version of Windows has no OneDrive or Copilot creep. I highly recommend to create a local account when installing Windows.

TipCreate a local account on Windows 11

When prompted to add a Microsoft account during installation, press Shift + F10, then run:

start ms-cxh:localonly

Alright, let’s get to the recommendations:

Why pay for services to avoid advertisements and tracking? I would rather pay than to suffer death by 1000 nags. If you can’t stomach the bill, use DuckDuckGo for search. At the minimum, I’d recommend every reader of this blog at least get Pi-hole running on their home network. Deny the advertisers of your gaze.

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