I'm no windows fanboy and I don't doubt your experience, but I honestly don't understand how this can happen. I recently did three clean Win 11 reinstalls and I was done in an hour. Maybe because I did it on slightly older hardware...
This is CANTV they are talking about. This is the company I requested a new phone line from and it took 9.5 years to get it installed.
After waiting for 3 years, I gave up ended up paying one of their technicians I randomly found working in the street. He gave me a phone line that apparently used to belong to a taxi company, judging by all the wrong number calls I got. All that just to get 4mbps DSL service in 2019.
Last year, out of nowhere, I finally got a call from the company saying they were ready to install it.
Thankfully, a bunch of companies appeared out of nowhere (a lot of them with links to people in the govt, surprise) in 2020 and we got fiber.
Oh and a couple of years ago, my parents "lost" their phone line and have been without POTS ever since. Maybe it's karma for me paying for a phone line all those years ago...
It's 100x more difficult than you think it is. I come from a "semi-sanctioned" country, and it's extremely hard. Opening a bank account is impossible unless you can travel to the US. Stripe won't touch you with a 100 foot pole.
I can't even imagine how hard it would be from Iraq, even if it's currently "not sanctioned" in theory.
See also the last presidential elections in Venezuela, where they did not even bother to pretend they did not steal the election, even under overwhelming evidence. A year later, we are still waiting for the official ballots.
That's almost the final level. The final level would be not even holding elections...
There are cases where Google might find a URL blocked in robots.txt (through external or internal links), and the page can still be indexed and show up in the search results, even if they can't crawl it. [1].
The only way to be sure that it will stay out of the results is to use a noindex tag. Which, as you mentioned, search engine bots need to "read" in the code. If the URL is blocked, the "noindex" cannot be read.
Probably because in our countries (I'm also from S.America) the reliability of the post office is questionable at best, so it wasn't something I ever really used.
It's cne.gob.ve, and that doesn't work either. They want us to believe that because the website is down, the whole system that counts the votes is down. Hey, maybe the votes are counted in WordPress...
Calling Hinterlaces "the most respected" is quiiiite a stretch. The owner Oscar Schemel, frequently parrots the govt propaganda talking points ("it's the evil empire, there's no inflation it's sabotage etc)