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Comment by canyp | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I see the same flaw in the argument. Retrospectively looking back and saying it was good because it didn't do any of the shit companies do today; but, really, it wasn't as bad as it could be because the technology just wasn't there to begin with. Counter-factual either way, but calling it "good" is a stretch.

Not to take away from the movement, though. I think it's great.

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The technology was certainly there, BonziBuddy existed around the same time and was widely condemned as a spyware and adware ultimately resulting in its demise. Today Microsoft officially does many of the things BonziBuddy used to do and people just see it as normal.

Oh, damn, I recall that motherfucker now that I look at the picture. I was a kid back then and had no context of it being spyware.

I stand corrected in my original comment.

> In 2002, an article in Consumer Reports Web Watch labeled BonziBuddy as spyware, stating that it contains a backdoor trojan that collects information from users. 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, installing a browser toolbar, and serving advertisements.

Yeah, so not much different from modern Big Tech, lol.

Amusingly, it still seems to be available for download (and requires a whopping 16 MB of RAM): https://bonzibuddy.org/download.html

Careful, it will probably reset the home page on your Internet Explorer 6 and put a toolbar in Netscape Navigator!

At the time, that sort of behavior was expected in almost anything you downloaded, it really was perhaps even more invasive than today. Java was infamous for installing a search bar on your browser and making it hard to not “accept” it.

Digital Convergence tried to do similar with the CueCat, a low-cost barcode reader that had a hardware serial number and for which the official software to drive it required you sign up for an account with them, giving them PII. When people figured out how to neuter the serial number and encryption in hardware, DC invoked the DMCA.

Yes if Clippy was released in 2025, it would surely be stealing your data without thinking twice.

So basically like Bonzai Buddy, the first spyware that tried to help you search stuff

Ironically, the only thing Clippy was missing for it to be genuinely useful was... LLMs. Hooked up to GPT-4 + bunch of tool calls, it would've delivered far beyond what originally promised.

Which is why I'm both dismayed and impressed with how badly Microsoft keeps screwing up Copilot. This stuff isn't hard, unless you want to make it hard.

"Agentic Clippy"

I found a project ClippyJS: https://github.com/pi0/clippyjs

That adds clippy and all the other agents to a webpage. There is a PR on the repo that adds an example that hooks clippy up to a local ollama agent: https://github.com/pi0/clippyjs/pull/17

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