Australia’s about as sparsely populated …
Sorry what? Australia’s population density is is 3.6/km², the US’s is 33.6/km², almost 10 times higher. Even if you fudge it by treating the swathes of uninhabited desert as an outlier and ignoring them, you’re still dealing with a raw number of people lower than the population of Texas.
This is honestly quite mild by website bloat standards. If that’s really the entirety of their Javascript it’s already way smaller than e.g. Medium or what this blog post considers “slightly bloated”. The fact that it’s in one file in 13 lines is also very standard. It makes no difference to the parser whether there are newlines or not, and removing them will in fact be saving bytes.
I’m guessing the performance issues with the site are more to do with how it’s coded. If it’s really bad for what sounds like a simple use case it might even be a cryptominer or something. A lot of those “random utility as a service” sites are.
I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. As far as I know it’s an issue with a driver installed on the computers, not with anything trying to reach out to an external server. If that were the case you’d expect it to fail to boot any time you don’t have an Internet connection.
Windows is bad but it’s not that bad yet.
Looks like the laptops are able to be recovered with a bit of finagling, so fortunately they haven’t bricked everything.
And yeah staged updates or even just… some testing? Not sure how this one slipped through.
That’s just a one-time pad with extra steps.