"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."<p>My, how times have changed. These days that would be considered expected behavior.
I 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.<p>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.
I worked PC tech support for a major PC hardware company back then.<p>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.
I 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.
I 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.<p>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.<p>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.
This was on all the computers in my middle school, back in 2002 or so.<p>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?
If you want a warezed BonziBuddy, Ramzi will help you out:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x7teBrEGJE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x7teBrEGJE</a>
Anyone remember Kevin Rose and The Broken?<p>Ramzi's "hacker tip" -- "how to use Bonzi Buddy"
<a href="https://youtu.be/oYYnF1ZeOo8?t=454" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/oYYnF1ZeOo8?t=454</a><p>'Be careful, some software cost money'
One 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.
It'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.<p>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.
Almost 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.<p>And it worked!
I 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.