Maybe the moon lander joined NATO.

I agree. I never had ads in Windows whatsoever. The only which is still nagging me is all the crapware Windows comes preinstalled with. I can’t count how many times I uninstalled that damn solitaire collection by now.

Extra database calls, running extra logic to check if you’re blocked. That sort of stuff I guess. It does make sense, compute, storage and network resources can be very expensive if you host on cloud providers like Azure or AWS.