I just came across this article which for people who are into self hosting can take a look and participate. It's basically a tool that generating never ending web pages with non sense that load slow (but not too slow the AI tools move on) to slow down and thus cost them more to scrape the internet if enough people are doing it. You can also hide it in a way that legit user would never see this on your site:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/ https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/

damn, I should've know that I'll get this respond haha. I personally use dual boot Ubuntu 25.04 and win11 ltsc (cursed by some people's standard I know but just hear me out I hate snap as much as you do) and I just thought win11 ltsc is the closest thing (the security updates, no AI, bloat bs) to what op was looking for from my experiences:

I literally just want Windows 7 again but with security updates, driver support, and back end technology upgrades.

Yes! His thoughts are very organized and easy to understand. He really gets his points across and helps people understand the need for privacy especially in current time where our information can be scrapped without us noticing. It's just his personal blog post but he structured it better than many people's speeches.

Some AI arts might be hard to tell if it's AI but this one is pretty much the default ChaatGPT comic look, drawing style (or the lack of), no signature and the font.

what about win10/11 ltsc?