10 Things I Hate About the Internet

I love the Internet, absolutely…it allows me to occupy myself when I’m bored, lets me increase my knowledge of things that I want to know more about, lets me keep in touch with my friends around the world, allows me to talk to my family via web cam FREE whenever I want, and a dozen other things I could name. Yeppers, the Internet has been one of the most important and significant inventions in the history of mankind.

But man, there are some things about the Internet that just annoy the piss outta me! And I’m willing to bet that as you sit there reading this, you’re gonna find yourself nodding your head and saying, “Yeah, me, too!” right along with me.

Let’s see, shall we?

1. Viruses - Yeah, I know, all of you Mac users out there can thumb your noses at this, but I ain’t a Mac user, so I’m always on the alert for this. For the most part, the anti-virus and anti-spyware programs out there do a really good job of preventing your computer from picking up a virus, but the fact that there are people out there who have nothing better to do than sit around and think up new and devious ways to get around your anti-virus program and screw up your computer just galls the living crap out of me! I mean, what’s the purpose of this, really? What are you accomplishing by creating a virus that does nothing but cause your hard drive to self-destruct? Did your mother not show you enough attention as a child, or what?

2. Pop-ups – One of the very first things I learned to hate about having a DSL connection was the popup ad. I remember very clearly sitting in the living room of our house in New Jersey, listening to the “boink!” “boink!” “boink!” “boink!” coming from the den two rooms away as the always-connected DSL program just installed on our computer was deluged by pop-up ads, even as we weren’t online! But the computer was always connected, one of the marvelous things about DSL, so the popup ads flourished. When I went into shut the damned thing off, there were no less than 65 popup ads on the screen! Thank God the ISP I was using at the time – Earthlink – quickly developed an anti-popup program and included it in their basic service at no charge.

3. Pop-up banner ads – This is the next generation of popup ads, and I find them even more irritating than their predecessor. This little annoyance comes up when you go to a web page and your cursor is at the top of the screen; the bar with the ad in it appears as a fairly narrow ad at the top of the page, but when you scroll your mouse across it the damned thing pops up to cover half of the page! You hit the “CLOSE” button in the corner, thinking that you’ve taken care of it, but the thing is the ad is designed to automatically return your cursor to the place it was before you caused the ad to pop up – so when you move your mouse down the page again, the ad pops up again. You have to be REALLY quick to move your cursor away from the top of the page once you close the popup to avoid this. I usually just say “screw it” and close out the whole page.

4. Redirects – When I click on a link that is supposed to show me a picture of the newest model Harley to hit the streets, I don’t want to be redirected to a page offering me free porn or a free Internet singles website. ‘Nuff said.

5. Fake “Your Computer is Infected With A Virus!” alerts – These programs, called “aware,” are especially difficult to get rid of for several reasons. First, they appear to be genuine since they are patterned exactly after Windows alerts. Second they embed themselves in your computer programming sequence so that they’re next to impossible to find and get rid of, unless you either use your computer’s “restore” function or you have a really, really good anti-spyware/aware program. Even then, sometimes a “restore” operation won’t work. The program I use, McAfee, is excellent at preventing infections such as these. They even have programs out there that show a jpeg so big that it appears to be your desktop picture alerting you to a virus infection, but in reality it’s a jpeg shown really, really big – and when you click on the box that conveniently shows up, you’re taken to a website where you can purchase a program to eliminate the virus. The program, of course, is designed and marketed by the same company that designed and spread the virus in the first place. A nice strategy – market the virus so you can market the cure. Nice. Very nice. Assholes.

6. “OBAMA SAYS” ads – Is the craze over the first black president ever gonna stop? I’ve lost count of the ads on the side of your screen that says, “OBAMA SAYS FOR ALL MOMS TO GO BACK TO COLLEGE,” or “OBAMA SAYS FOR ALL DADS TO GO BACK TO COLLEGE” or some crap like that. Obviously, the people who design these ads are trying to cash in on the public’s frothing at the mouth for anything and everything Obama, and are doing their best to make money off of it. And the sad thing is that there are droves of people out there who buy this load of crap, every single day! I got a news flash for you, people – Obama didn’t say shit about anybody going back to college, or refinancing your house, or trading in your car, or any damned thing like that, so stop being a freakin’ lemming and think for yourself for a change! Jeez!

7. Ads in general – If I want to see an ad for anything, I’ll go buy the newspaper. Which I don’t, by the way. Thank God for Mozilla Firefox which blocks ALL ads from its browser, no matter what web site you’re looking at. This is especially handy when running Facebook. (Yeah, I’m on Facebook. Deal with it.)

8. Racist websites – and I mean both ways. What, you don’t think there are racist, anti-white websites out there? What world are YOU living in? Just check out a web site called “Blackvoices.com” if you need a jolt of reality. This is the same web site, by the way, which railed and complained loudly whenever Obama was compared to a chimp, but which also ran a picture of a pig’s face next to that of Sara Palin during the election, riding on the coattails of Obama’s comment that if you put lipstick on a pig, it was still a pig. But it’s only racist if a white person does that, right? Don’t get me started…..but as I said, racist web sites of any and all kinds are an aberration to the web and humanity in general, but tracking down and eliminating them is next to impossible. It’s like trying to catch the wind in a bag – you just can’t do it. Besides, there’s this pesky thing called “free speech” and the First Amendment to deal with. Yeah, I know, the First Amendment doesn’t say that, but you know damned good and well that’s what the lawyers are gonna say in court, and the lemmings on the jury will believe it. Go figure.

9. Unwanted downloads included with stuff you really want – the best example of this I can think of is the Incredimail e-mail program I run. Every time the program updates or offers you a new service that you want or need, it will also include a program to change your default home page and search engine to their own page and search engine – and you can’t download the stuff you really want without downloading this crap along with it. I’m seriously considering dumping Incredimail for just that reason.

10. Pictures you can’t save by right-clicking on them – this little feature forces you to go back to a specific web site if you want to look at a picture you like instead of being able to save it to “My Pictures” and look at it without all the crap on the site along with it. Yeah, a minor irritation compared to the rest of the stuff here, but it still bugs me.

And that’s it. So tell me, did you find yourself nodding your head and saying, “Yeah, me, too!” at least once while reading this? If so, great! If not, well, I can’t help ya. You were born without a sense of humor, and there ain’t no cure for it that I know of.

Until next time, then…

IHC