I remember about 10 years ago a college roommate and I ran `strings` on bonzi.exe and found some horrors. I think there are strings in there that specifically tell kids to go get their parent's credit cards and type in the numbers.
Bonzi Buddy
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Re: Bonzi Buddy
#12This reminds me of my twitch streaming theme, based on Windows 98 and it had an animated Bonzi Buddy. Still love that purple monkey to this day.
Re: Bonzi Buddy
#13Oh crap I’d forgotten about that. First experience with this was my mother calling out of the blue. “There’s this purple monkey on the screen and he’s telling me things”. For a few minutes I thought she’d OD’ed her meds.
Then there was removing that, some other more persistent malware from my father-in-law’s windows ME computer one fine Christmas Day.
Joy to family tech support.
Re: Bonzi Buddy
#14Some frontend code monkey should make this a chrome extension that appears on every page.
Re: Bonzi Buddy
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember my dad having this on the family PC at the time it was a green parrot though he uninstalled it when it was changed to the purple ape.
Was it the parrot in this screenshot? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent I think Bonzi Buddy was built on Microsoft Agent, so it would make sense.
yup that's him/it
Re: Bonzi Buddy
#16I sometimes look back in awe and wonder at how good bonzi buddy was for it's time as a _piece of software_. It was objectively ridiculous and borderline a piece of malware, but it's burned into my memory and it's functionality was fairly impressive when compared to buggy toolbar apps of today.
Wait this wasn't malware?
Re: Bonzi Buddy
#17All this, and only 16MB of RAM and 11MB of disk space required! I'm sure today this would be an Electron app that used at least an order of magnitude more resources. We certainly live in interesting times.
Re: Bonzi Buddy
#18I remember about 10 years ago a college roommate and I ran `strings` on bonzi.exe and found some horrors. I think there are strings in there that specifically tell kids to go get their parent's credit cards and type in the numbers.
> Edit: Wow this got 2 downvotes in its first 2 minutes. Do you all think I'm wrong or something? The internet seems to have some references to exactly what I'm talking about. I'm quite certain I'm not wrong. Do you need proof?
Besides the general advice not to complain about downvotes, I think that you are "Do you need proof?" sounds aggrieved, even though asking for some more evidence than "I remember" and "The internet seems to have some references" is a perfectly reasonable response. At least for the current version (tested by downloading it just now), running `strings` on it produces nothing obviously nefarious at a glance (for example, no occurrences of the word "credit", or even "parent").
Re: Bonzi Buddy
#19What a blast from the past!!
Re: Bonzi Buddy
#20Geeze, that's a blast from the past. You know it's funny- I used to periodically go looking for things to customize my desktop experience. This, those little dogs and cats, Rainmeter, Amiga workbench hacks, etc. etc. Nowadays- I supposed finally burned by enough malware and having become curmudgeonly- I want the most minimal "plain vanilla" setup I can get and pride myself in hardly ever installing _anything_.