Oh.... It's because I stopped at the first ad thinking that was it. So the answer to my question is yes, my reading comprehension is in fact that bad

A company I worked for moderated for them. They got extra breaks and also a wellness/quite room, because apparently they needed it from all the batshit insane stuff they had to look at.

Edited to add: sorry, backbone was probably the wrong term to use. The actual history of Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) is actually needlessly complicated - primarily due to a (somewhat) successful sabotage attempt by our Conservative government in the early 2010s. But basically, every single new home is built with Fiber to the Home, and every single metropolitan and suburban home either has Fiber to the Home (or Premises), or at the very least Fiber to the Curb through a remediation process to replace the Conservative-implemented Fiber to the Node boondoggle. We also have a number of neighbourhoods stuck with HFC (again due to Conservstice sabotage) which while still delivering 100+ Mbit connections - are a bit of a technical dead end and will need to be remediated at some point in the future. Basically, nbnCo serves as a national broadband wholesaler providing high speed connectivity (100, 250, 500, Gigabit) to something like >95% of the population. The most remote communities are also serviced either through a fixed wireless option or satellite. Basically though, unlike the US we don’t have a significant number of people still on dial-up and haven’t had so for a very long time.

I'm just sad I'm too young to have ever seen that old internet, and what it was like... Makes me more determined to try and steer the current internet back in that direction though.

Call me an optimist, but I still hold the hope that we can one day do better as humanity than we do now. Humanity has become a "better" species throughout its existence overall. Even a hundred years ago we were much more horrible and brutal than we are now. The current trend is not great, with climate change and far-right grifters taking control. But I hold hope that in the end this is but a blip on the radar. Horrible for us now, but in the grand scheme of things not something that will end humanity. It might in the worst case set us back a few hundred years.

Yeah, Lemmy has a VERY large Linux user base, which means Windows discussions tend to get mocked or dismissed. But the reality is that Windows is still the dominant OS for the vast majority of users, by leaps and bounds. Linux runs the world’s infrastructure, but Windows is what the average user boots up every day. “This exploit only works on the average user’s OS. And it only works if the user clicks the “yes” button to escalate permissions, which they have been conditioned to always do without question. Obviously this isn’t an exploit to worry about.”