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What is bonzi buddy virus3/31/2024 ![]() ![]() Whenever BonziBuddy launched, it prompted users to register online (as pretty much every application did in those days). On this registration form, BonziBuddy asked for the name, address, and ages of its users. Separately in 2004, Bonzi Software was forced to pay a $75,000 fine to the FTC for violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. They also had to pay over $170,000 in legal fees. When they settled in 2003, Bonzi agreed to stop employing fake "X" buttons that didn't actually close the ad, and was forced to clearly label their popups as ads. In 2002, the company was hit with a class action lawsuit over its use of deceptive ads. It was also the start of BonziBuddy's descent into earning the malware label it has today.īonzi Software, the company behind your buddy, faced a few separate legal issues in the time from 1999 to 2004, when BonziBuddy was finally discontinued. They also offered Internet Alert 99, which was a glorified firewall, and Internet Boost, which claimed to increase your internet speed by tweaking "various configuration parameters used by the Microsoft TCP/IP stack." This claim was dubious at best. No, it wasn't any more revolutionary in the 90s than it sounds now, but it was mildly successful for the company. This app let you record audio and attach a picture to email. These included Bonzi Software's original software hit, a voice email app. ![]() Bonzi was a showman and he would not be upstaged by your spreadsheets.īonziBuddy would also promote Bonzi Software's other programs, often using deceptive popups that looked like official Windows alerts. Bonzi also has had a nasty habit of randomly swinging on a green vine from one side of your computer to another, which got in the way of whatever you were doing. Ultimately, BonziBuddy was more useful as a toy than a real productivity program. That.was about it. You could open a box to enter a search term or web site address and Bonzi would pass it off to your browser, but that's even more complicated than just opening your browser directly. You could use the built-in calendar to keep track of your events. You could sync your POP3 email so Bonzi could read off your messages to you. Anyone who watched a Flash animation in the early aughts knows how much fun you can have with an early speech synthesizer you control.īeyond the novelty, Bonzi claimed to offer more practical features. You could also make Bonzi say whatever you wanted with it's text-to-speech feature. Bonzi would occasionally speak up to share a lame joke or sing a song in a nauseatingly robotic voice, but he talked funny. While speech synthesizers existed well before that, most people didn't have a user-friendly way to play with them. This is also how many young people learned not to download things just because they're free.īonzi's speech engine (part of the Microsoft Agent suite), was a huge novelty around the time it was released in 1999. BonziBuddy was free, so there seemed to be no harm in downloading it. ![]() This meant that anyone from eight year olds to their grandmothers could download the "cute purple monkey" and play with it just for fun. Third-party developer BONZI Software used Peedy as the first version of its standalone helper program "BonziBUDDY." Microsoft had intended these assistants to be bundled with other programs, but Bonzi's assistant was designed to help with everything. It would sit on your desktop all the time, talk to you every once in a while, and you could ask it to do things like.well, frankly, it wasn't that useful, but it sure was fun to hear it talk.īonziBuddy may have essentially been a worse version of Clippy, but it had one thing going for it that Clippy didn't have: It wasn't tied to office software. While Microsoft never used any of its generic characters internally, Peedy the Parrot would find a home outside the company. Microsoft also created a separate character based on the help icon to walk you through Windows XP's installation process. The Microsoft Office team decided to make their own character when they created Clippy, rather than use one of the defaults. Microsoft Agent allowed third-party developers to add their own assistants to their applications. These assistants could talk, answer voice commands, and perform actions on a user's behalf. The company even created four default characters that developers could choose from: Merlin the Wizard, Robby the Robot, Genie the Genie, and Peedy the Parrot. Agent itself was derived from code that was first introduced in Microsoft Bob (to give you an idea of how deep this bad idea rabbit hole goes). Clippy was built on a technology called Microsoft Agent. ![]()
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