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BonziBuddy
- Simulacra 7y agoI really hated that program, you always had to be careful when installing software because it was getting prepackaged
- ttarabula 7y agoAh, purple simian Windows AIDS. fond memories
- jakelazaroff 7y agoThis was on all the computers in my middle school, back in 2002 or so. I wonder if this made it up to the front page because of nostalgia, or because an even younger cohort has never heard of it. What's the lower bound on ages for people who actually remember BonziBuddy?
- HiroshiSan 7y agoI'm in my late 20's and I remember bonzi buddy.
- the_jeremy 7y agoMid-20s, never heard of it.
- jamesmp98 7y agoEarly 20's, have heard of it, originally because memes and later out of curiosity
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoMid 20s, have interacted with it
- joshstrange 7y agoLate 20's, installed it without knowing it was spyware, it looked cool. Dad was not pleased.
- freehunter 7y agoWarning: bad math and faulty assumptions incoming. Considering it was discontinued in 2004 and people generally have reliable long term memories starting around 5-8 years old, I'd say the youngest person to reasonably remember BonziBuddy would be 20-23 years old. The peak of popularity would probably be 2002, when the lawsuit that shut the company down was filed, so the last group of people who would be widely exposed to BB and have memories of it would be 22-25 years old at the youngest. As someone quite older than that demographic, I had completely forgotten about BonziBuddy and seeing this brought up is definitely nostalgic for me.
- saagarjha 7y agoNot quite 20; I have never interacted with BonziBuddy.
- mijoharas 7y ago30, have never heard of it. Did I manage to miss this?
- Kuraj 7y agoLate 20's, never encountered it myself but I knew it existed
- badger_bravo 7y agoI remember installing this on my Mom's computer when I was 8 and my dad cussing trying to uninstall it. good times.
- elliekelly 7y agoSame! I’m pretty sure my parents just accepted that the BonziBuddy website would be the homepage on the family computer whether we liked it or not. In hindsight I wonder what other, less obvious, malware I installed as a clueless kid with free reign internet access.
- tombert 7y agoI had BonziBuddy, CometCursor, a toolbar for something called "Slotch.com", and RealPlayer (after they updated it to try and take over your computer) installed on my personal laptop as a kid, and always wondered why other people's computers went so slow when my computer had a newer CPU. God,
- silversconfused 7y agoCometcursor being so horrible inspired me to learn how to make .ico files with transparency in mspaint.... good times!
- jakejarvis 7y agoDitto! For some reason I used to think the more tray icons the better. But not as bad as when I tried to delete C:\Windows before it would try to stop you. (For science, of course.)
- derefr 7y agoWhen I was a youngin', I used to create meaningless shortcuts all over the desktop using those PIFMGR icons (https://i.stack.imgur.com/I1YqC.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/I1YqC.jpg). I think kids and adults aren't so different; we all just really want to collect and stare at colorful juicy berries—er, "apps"—on our screens (re: the research that turning them greyscale makes us look at them less.) Adults just have a greater need for rationalization toward practicality on top of an entirely aesthetic desire, and thus download apps with nice icons (or toolbars containing nice icons) that seem like they'd do something useful... and then just never use them.
- nullbyte 7y agoOh my god I forgot about this. Brings back good memories.
- HiroshiSan 7y agoNowadays you don't need a Trojan to collect user info. edit: pun unintended.
- warent 7y ago"In 2002 an article in Consumer Reports Web Watch labelled BonziBuddy as spyware, stating that it contains a backdoor trojan that collects information from users." My, how times have changed. These days that would be considered expected behavior.
- tomatotomato37 7y ago"The activities the program is said to engage in include constantly resetting the user's web browser homepage to bonzi.com without the user's permission, prompting and tracking various information about the user, and serving advertisements" My favorite quote, in that these activities are now essentially baked into Windows 10
- plotteddancer16 7y agoI’d categorize these activities as malware. Making unwanted mutable actions on my OS? Definitely malware...
- darkpuma 7y agoBy my current standards (which were totally mainstream in tech communities in the 90s) most modern non-FOSS software these days is malware. And some of the FOSS stuff is too, depending on what build you get.
- Causality1 7y agoHaving just this morning had to turn Automatic Updates back off on my Windows 7 box and (for the third time) fix the gyro sensor driver Windows 10's updates keeps breaking on my laptop, I feel you.
- asark 7y agoTurns out there was so much money in spyware, spam, scummy ad sites, and so on, that the corporate benevolent overlords of the Web went all-in on those exact things. All those bad actors won the war. If you want to help run the show, or if you want those who do to shower money on you, those bad activities are what you do. Also Flash (in spirit if not in fact—thanks Javascript and modern web frontend development), popups, et c. In many ways all the worst things about the mid-period Web are thriving more now than they did then.
- duxup 7y agoI worked PC tech support for a major PC hardware company back then. It was really a chore trying to tell people who complained their PC was slow to uninstall their 8 toolbars and that stupid monkey... they couldn't explain what good it did them or when they ever used them, but they sure as hell didn't want it removed.
- john-radio 7y agoQuick, list every app that's on your phone, the reason why it's installed, and the reason why you trust it!
- anchpop 7y agoWell, I trust most apps because my understanding is they can't be running indefinitely in the background without a notification (which I would notice) and can't read arbitrary files on my phone's filesystem without permission
- pmiller2 7y agoYou're moving the goalposts. Here's a list of every app on my phone that's making it slow and unusable: []
- duxup 7y agoThere aren't any that I'm not using and killing my phone if that is what you mean.
- nathanlied 7y agoYou're not being very reasonable; a more accurate way to put it would be to ask you if you have <App> installed on your phone, what good is it for you, and when (if) you've ever used it. And then getting defensive about removing it if you're told by an expert you've contacting yourself that <App> is (part of) the cause of your woes. Not exactly the same scenario as you posited.
- VectorLock 7y ago
- seeker61 7y agoI can't wait to eat that monkey
- phaedryx 7y agoWow, I opened the Wikipedia page and immediately felt a twinge of anger. What has it been, 20+ years now?
- byron_fast 7y agoI stayed at a bed & breakfast and they gave me free cheesecake after uninstalling Bonzi for them. I just wanted to browse the web faster! Didn't take much to uninstall malware back then. I probably added years to the useful life of their computer, it ate so much CPU.
- TheCapn 7y agoI remember trying to remove BB from a PC we had and having a hell of a time doing it. It wasn't just asking it to stop in Programs & Features, I was rooting it out of the registry for hours and if you rebooted without getting all of it, the talons spread. You got lucky.
- byron_fast 7y agoLucky, or an earlier version with shorter talons.
- owaislone 7y agoOne of my few friends who had a desktop computer at home had this thing installed when we were kids. He used to make it shout swear words in our native language. Can't say it wasn't fun.
- jsgo 7y agoWe were in school (computer electronics class) and we had two machines on opposing sides of a row with this installed. Granted, we had other games and stuff installed too, but the highlight was when two people would man these particular computers and use it to trash talk the person on the other side. The voice was so bad it made the whole experience more comical than it was insulting. Good times with bad software.
- unicornporn 7y agoIf you want a warezed BonziBuddy, Ramzi will help you out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x7teBrEGJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x7teBrEGJE
- Jach 7y agoIf this is the youtube video thread, Bonzi Buddy can still be made to sing... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF26ZyZRJbU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF26ZyZRJbU (RIP Harambe.)
- marzell 7y agoIt's Clippy for your entire OS! I'm very familiar with the monkey image, although I instantly recognized what it was and what the experience was probably like, and luckily never touched a computer that had it installed. Now we've got Alex/Siri/Google assistants, which certainly have a lot more utility, but they are cross-platform, always-on, and far more invasive because we allow them to be.
- kahlonel 7y agoI liked the green parrot version more.
- dsl 7y agoPetey the Parrot. The model was originally stolen from the Microsoft Agent SDK, and about a year after launch Microsoft got wind of it and made them swap it out for their own 3D model. The lovable purple guy.
- sneakernets 7y agoAlmost every single feature BonziBuddy ever "offered" was already included in Windows, but no one ever used the Windows components, or even knew they existed. So you could whip up a "buddy" using stuff already in the OS, claim it's a $40 value, and then spam them with ads. And it worked!
- Fej 7y agoA great retrospective: https://youtu.be/L958sMz1kWs https://youtu.be/L958sMz1kWs
- miohtama 7y agoLooks like the list of supported activities is say that Alexa does today. Business model seems to be the same as well.
- Anthony-G 7y agoI used to work in an Internet café in the early-mid 2000s and the first time came across BonziBuddy, it was a very frustrating and time-consuming task to remove it (and similar malware) from a Windows OS. I ran Mandriva at home but I became quite familiar with the Windows registry after lots of time spent removing various toolbars/spyware. When you learned the tricks the malware-writers used, you could remove their crap quickly enough. Still, it was like playing whack-a-mole if there were multiple different malicious programs installed on the system and I recall that removing some malware required rebooting into safe mode before attempting to remove it. Soon after this, I started to install GNU/Linux distros on the computers of friends and family to avoid the problem altogether. There was a lot more satisfaction in helping people administer their sensibly designed OS than in continually having to remediate their Windows systems where every user was an administrator and it was so easy for them to install malware.
- fouc 7y agoWasn't it a headache dealing with hardware compatibility/drivers in linux if you were dealing with an assortment of computers?
- Anthony-G 7y agoAh no. In case it wasn’t clear, I was installing GNU/Linux (Mandriva and later, Ubuntu)was for only a small number of family and friends – who had previously been asking me to “fix” (remove the crap from) their Windows systems or who were already interested in trying an alternative. They weren’t gamers, running particularly exotic hardware or business users. Interoperability between OpenOffice (no LibreOffice back then) and users of MS Office was the only real issue they came across. Otherwise, I had to provide very little support – once their systems were up and running.
- jameslk 7y agoI remember when BonziBuddy and Comet Cursor were the go-to trolling tools for gamers. If someone asked how to "hack in counter strike" one of these solutions were suggested.
- grizzles 7y agoI remember going to see a friend (a cs grad) and he had BonziBuddy installed on his computer. I asked what it did and he couldn't give me a coherent answer. Then at one point he pressed BonziBuddy to "leave" and the bear dived into the screen and disappeared into a little dot. I asked him what happened expecting a tech laden answer and he said "it went in there" and pointed to where the dot/portal had been. This odd conversation has always stuck in my mind about the power a little bit of graphics and animation can do to distract users from a bit of code's true intent.
- ohnope 7y agoThank you for sharing. I enjoyed imagining how your friend pointed and said "it went in there."
- titojankowski 7y agoAnyone remember Kevin Rose and The Broken? Ramzi's "hacker tip" -- "how to use Bonzi Buddy" https://youtu.be/oYYnF1ZeOo8?t=454 https://youtu.be/oYYnF1ZeOo8?t=454 'Be careful, some software cost money'
- robohoe 7y agoYep! I used to love their videos. Related to Bonzi Buddy, does everyone remember search toolbars for web browsers? Everyone had their own toolbar that would hijack your browser: google, yahoo, ask Jeeves, etc.
- dokka 7y agoI would love to build a harmless and open source version of BonziBuddy. One day I'll do it.
- itbeho 7y agoI wonder what the creators of BonziBuddy are doing these days?
- darepublic 7y agoDespite all the hate there was a kernel of a great idea here. This was a proto-alexa