These threads with doom and gloom about the modern internet seem full of people who either never experienced or forgot what it was like at the beginning of the century. Back when the internet was fair game to anyone who kinda understood it.

Back then, you could log in as admin to any phpBB forum by copying a generic admin cookie from a shady web site. You could often then also compromise the hosting company that was running the forum, because nothing was really separated.

You would try to trick your friends into installing Sub7 so you could open their CD drive.

You could easily capture other people's data on public wifi networks in restaurants and hotels.

You could change the price of the pizza you were ordering through devtools in your browser.

You could infect half the world by emailing a picture of a blonde tennis player.

Sure, there have been quite a lot of pretty serious zero days recently. But many of them have been pretty hard to actually abuse, in part thanks to all these layers we've added over time. So I guess I'm not as pessimistic as many of you are. Especially because we all seem to be incredibly aware of what's happening and are acting on it.