Those of us who were able to use the Internet yesterday remember what I'm talking about. Google, Microsoft, and other big sites chose to force more drastic "updates" on the world, all at once. Familiar web sites became dysfunctional. Browsers crashed. Tasks that should have taken one hour suddenly required five hours. Using the'Net was anything but pleasant.
I seriously think that, if businesses are going to rely on the Internet even for transactions that are open to the public, the FCC needs to enforce some kind of accountability on the corporations that make the Internet run.
"Oo! Oo! We've tweaked this site so that everything looks different! Don't just use the site to do your job! Explore it, check out all these new features you never wanted, and admire how clever we are!" scream the twitchy little boys, during a day of crawling through a new, alien Internet where nothing worked and the time lost to "updating and installing apps" never stopped.
I think people who use the Internet as a business tool may want to remember the first of September, 2022, as something like "Enough Is Enough Day." I think we need legislation allowing anyone to sue if they ran into "updates" while using the Internet for work or school. And those twitchy little boys need to have a whip cracked over them, be made to sit and stay, and learn to send discreet e-mails to the customers who really give the Internet its reason for existing: "Excuse us, please, but we've been playing about with a site or app you use and we beg you, for a minimum of fifty dollars, to explore our new alternative version and see what clever but useless things we've thought of adding to it."
There are of course improvements that can be made to many web sites, and to the Internet generally. Here's a quick Top Ten list of the ones that cross my mind frequently:
1. "Smartscreen.exe": Kill it. That's a vicious cyberplot that, when you put something in front of the screen to block annoying (and, for some people, physically disabling) moving ad graphics in the sidebar, interprets that shadow across the screen as clicking on the ad. It also allows people who undoubtedly have profoundly perverted tastes to spy on what your face, and the rest of you, look like when you're using the computer. Do you know people in real life who are always saying things like "You smiled! That means you want to..." do something you don't want to do, or "What did that facial expression mean? Why do you feel that bad about..."? And they don't want to hear that, whichever way they misread what their infantile minds wanted to believe had something to do with them, what you were feeling was dust in your eye. We need to take a stand about phone and computer screens that enable this kind of behavior in cyberspace. The FCC could helpfully intercept "smartscreen" and similar programs by causing them to reflect an image back to the sender, of menacing legal wording like "It is a violation of federal law to attempt to photograph a human being without the person's informed consent. Your computer will shut down until the person you have approached has received a message from us identifying who and where you are and authorizing you to resume even your Tetris game. Go somewhere and try to get a life."
2. Automatic formatting: Do not allow any program automatically to override what any human types into any screen or program.
3. Default formatting: A big Green change most people would be happy to make, because it would save them money, would be to stop wasting so much paper. Reading words on a screen is a chore. People who want to read print everything. Make sure the default settings for all printers are for printing on both sides of the page, 1/2 inch or 2cm margins, a serif font that doesn't have to be blown up to an enormous size to be readable, 8-point as the default font size, everything single-spaced, and no wasted spaces between paragraphs or at the ends of pages. By taking the time to print things in a frugal format I find myself shaving 50% or more off the cost of printing what I read!
4. Automatic Cookie Crusher: The appearance of a little hourglass, rotating circle, or blank patch of screen space, activates an app that deletes everything but the code that keeps your device logged in, at every site. Corporations that try to gank a lot of information automatically lose the information they've got.
5. Personal Information Blocker: In the United States evildoers can do a lot of harm to a person if they're able to get the person's Social Security number (nine digits) or cell phone number (ten digits). Common uses for this information, in addition to basic spying and harassment, include using people's phone numbers to conceal the source of nuisance calls, setting up credit accounts and charging purchases to someone who never sees the merchandise purchased, and harassing cell phone owners with twenty or thirty phishing "robot calls" (usually purporting to sell insurance) every day. The FCC could be very helpful to American taxpayers by mandating that no system connected to the Internet is allowed to store any sequence of nine or ten digits. If a data field contains such a sequence, the whole system should shut down.
6. Corporate lie detection: If, e.g., a corporation uses statistical studies that actually document that a reaction occurs rarely in such a way as to deny that the reaction has occurred in complaining persons, both public and private entities could be paying Corporate Lie Detectives to design corrective fact sheets that pop up whenever corporations' product-friendly messages appear online.
This morning, for example, if you've not read it already you're about to read the headline news that a judge just ruled that glyphosate does not cause cancer.
If you're a regular reader of this site and of the documents to which it links, you already know how hard it is to prove that anything, including DDT or the dioxin released when people smoke cigarettes wrapped in bleached paper, really causes cancer. You already know that cancer appears to be caused by a long-term balance among a variety of known and unknown factors, that some people exposed to appalling levels of radiation or to any number of things classified as carcinogens never develop cancer.
You also already know that glyphosate has been shown to promote the growth of some types of cancerous tumors. You know that glyphosate affects individuals differently in every species studied but, in every species studied, the effects of glyphosate are harmful and are definitely pro-cancer factors. You know that, although most of the animals in each glyphosate study didn't get cancer in ninety days, a suspiciously large number of them developed rare, bizarre, and highly fatal kinds of cancer. (If you don't already have the documents stored on your computer, their current web address is https://www.regulations.gov/document/EPA-HQ-OPP-2009-0361-0068 for a summary with links to the documents summarized.) You know that statistics can be read in more than one way, and while Monique Perron was probably well paid to interpret the studies cited at that link as proving that glyphosate was "not likely to be carcinogenic" and had only "low toxicity," because individual reactions varied so widely, the studies can also be read as proving that glyphosate is harmful to all living things in a bewildering variety of ways.
You also know that, when human lives are at stake, human beings forget about the statistics and consider the evidence that, however rare it may be, some person or people are reacting to something in the way they say they are. Human beings do not stand there gabbling about how "healthy foods like milk, wheat, or eggs don't make most people sick" or "most living things studied have only mild short-term reactions to glyphosate during the first 90 days of exposure" or "several people have gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel, and lived to collect enough money on the bet to pay the legal fines, so just pop into this barrel and let me nail down the lid, and we'll throw you over to prove that you can't be an exception to the statistics."
The cancer patients whose claims were denied yesterday were subjected to a mistrial. The judge should not have allowed a Bayer goon to sneer that "their claims are based on e-mails" (which, as you know, can contain legitimate scientific studies) "and ours are based on science" (an oddly subjective version of "science" that fails to confront unwelcome data). The correct response to that argument is, "The scientific evidence of damage to an individual is found by comparing data for that individual, so don't disgrace yourself any further by babbling about rat studies in the presence of cancer survivors."
Anyway, a Corporate Lie Detector's job would be to prowl through cyberspace looking for images of farmers spraying chemicals on fields or verbiage suggesting that chemicals should be sprayed outdoors, and making sure such screens are replaced by a very sticky screen presenting the message, "You were about to view misleading corporate propaganda. The Bayer Chemical Corporation is hiding in fear of the accurate scientific studies of the effects their products have had on human beings." That sort of thing.
"Switching to 'diet' versions of sweet foods and drinks causes some people to gain weight."
"Most people who send money to insurance companies never get any of that money back."
"Replacing electronic devices causes waste and pollution, even if the devices are deliberately built in such a way that you'll feel eager to replace them. If you have a cell phone, a computer, or a radio, make it yours for life."
Corporate Lie Detectors would offset the evil potential of Internet censorship and would make using the Internet much more fun.
7. Update Ender: The excuse for the endless "updates" is "just the 'security' codes that allow devices to communicate with one another in 'the cloud'." Right. That we might want to allow. And, of course, the reason why web sites exist is that they allow people to update information, providing current weather readings, the latest football scores, and today's blog posts. However, "updates" should not be allowed to interfere with the functionality of expensive business machines. The whole Internet needs coding as well as regulation to make sure this doesn't continue to happen. Even if you've got stuck with a device infested with Windows 10, any time you open a new document and see your default formatting changed, use a site that provides a service to your business and find the buttons not working properly, etc., you should be able to file a complaint and receive compensation for your time. That bratty little boy who thought it'd be so clever to tweak the way the site looked should be paying for the privilege of wasting your time and adding annoyance to your day.
8. Social media censorship detector: If you use social media sites, people who either (a) sign up as your "following" or (b) search for a term you used in your post are supposed to see your post. The Internet could use a set of bots that report back things like "Twitter failed to display your tweet in your friends' Twitter feeds." It might still be up to you to decide whether a breaking news item some corporation didn't like was worth sending to each of your followers individually, or, on reflection, the joke you posted was stale and obvious and deserved to be forgotten. But you'd know when you were being censored and why.
9. Screen Freezer: Whether you find it distracting and annoying, insulting, eye-straining, headache-inducing, or downright seizure-triggering when people post endlessly moving graphics on the Internet, you should be able to use the'Net without having to look at such garbage. A Screen Freezer would allow images on the screen to move only when and as you command them to move. If someone posted one of those stupid GIF videos that flip from one image to another like windshield wipers, you'd only ever see one of those still images.
10. Mouse trapping: For one thing, you didn't learn to type so you could spend your time smearing around with a silly computer mouse. For another thing, computer mouse devices are fragile. The ones that actually looked like, well, rats actually, came at the end of cables that tended to break. The ones built into laptop computers tend to overheat and malfunction. There's even malware Out There that effectively grabs the mouse out of your hands and sends the mouse cursor bouncing around the screen, possibly ordering things you didn't want to buy, or closing an article a corporate goon didn't want you to read. Then there's the way some laptops these days are built with "mouse pads" on which different sections of a completely unmarked, unexplained chunk of the device's shell have different functions, and it's not easy, if it's possible, to tell whether touching the "mouse pad" will move the mouse cursor, change the size of the display, pull up one of two or three different irrelevant menus, or maybe delete all your e-mails and fry your motherboard. For all of these reasons, web sites are much less annoying when they rely on alphanumeric text with little or no dependence on the fragile mouse device. Make it easy to use keyboard commands to move efficiently and reliably around screens. Accept that when people are willing to use a mouse device their mouse devices have probably worn out. It would be a valuable service to humankind for somebody to search the Internet for mouse-dependent sites and prompt the site owners to correct this problem.
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