The English language does not contain strong enough invectives or vituperations to adequately describe my feelings towards this insidious, vicious, despicable overgrown virus which poses as a benevolent purple gorilla.
When I first got a computer, I foolishly downloaded the Monster. Being a complete computer idiot, it took me a while to learn how to get rid of it. It’s sole purposes in being are to badger you for more money for more downloads that you don’t need and to spy on your websites.
Now, almost daily I get pop-up windows advertising this thing-that-words-cannot-adequately-describe. And you can’t get rid of the window. If you click anywhere on it, including the close button, it will give you a sign-up screen. You just have to wait out its programmed time or exit the Internet. If that isn’t bad enough, recently it sent me an email saying that it’s new and improved. Just what I need. A new and improved goddamned hideous Monster. If they send me another email, I will reply that they should take their buddy and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.
I recently had the same problem. I did a “bonz*.*” search of my hard drive to rid myself of this beast. Luckily, I didn’t have to perform surgery on the registry. I e-mailed the website and gave them a piece of my mind. Never heard back, but I was never infected again. I have absolutely no idea how I got it in the first place. I VERY rarely download anything from the net unless it’s some sort of software update/patch.
I almost fell into the Bonzi Buddy scheme myself when I got my first computer a few months ago. I started to download it, and I got interuppted, so I was going to finish it later.
Before I could finish the download, I sent my computer to my tech to upgrade my burner. He asked me what in the hell I was doing with that on my hard drive and to get it off pronto. It took me awhile to get rid of all the files and I didn’t even finish downloading it, let alone install it.
My daughter downloaded it by mistake when the window for the download poped up in a site she was visiting while she was typing something and not looking at the screen. Sneaky bastards.
I used to have that thing. Now I don’t even remember how I got it off. ctr-alt-delete on offending programs that you can’t close. Or get one of those popup killer programs.
It does a pretty good job of destroying spy-ware (and in the case of such evil drek as Comet Cursor, which can bring your machine to a halt if you simply delete its files without disengaging the embedded hooks, Ad-Aware does an excellent job of removing those pests without damaging the machine).
I do not know that Ad-Aware will take out your BonziBuddy, but you can scan the site for known invaders that it will destroy.
Here’s what I did (and have never heard another thing out of them), and haven’t seen a peep outta’ my “Bonzi Buddy” since. If you look closely when BB pops up, there is a traceable link/address/phone number.
I l;unched a full scale attack at all points and told them simply them that if I EVER saw this piece of shit monkey on my screen again, he’d be a dead monkey. Somehow, a promise of destruction worked.
If that doesn’t work, I’d be more than happy to assist in a full scale spam attack they could never survive.
my little brother downloaded that little fucker INTENTIONALLY. (you can just guess how much shit he cought for that from me.)
since i always close everything with the close program window on startup, he didn’t bother me that much.
when i figured out what he was there for, i got a kick out of using his voice synthesizer to say “i am an insidious marketing bitchslut and i am a crackhead and i just anally raped your mother! so HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! and i strangled your dog!” right before i deleted all of his files and took him out of the system registry.
and then i sent a copy of the ‘assmunchies’ server-killer virus back to their main site.
I will testify that AdAware kicks some serious ass, and then takes down the proverbial names. It found 31 spyware components on my system - including the motherfucking Comet Cursor, which I thought I had got rid of!
Bonzibuddy stole my soul. In the end the only thing that worked was… well, I had to spend a long time getting into far eastern religions just so I could access a higher state of consciousness, enabling me to reach directly into the screen, pull him out, and kick all of his teeth out of his head before whacking him to death against my desk. “Hi - EEK! - I’m - EEK! - your - EEK! - buddy - EEK!”
Anyway, did I learn my lesson? Did I sausage.
I download more crap like that every day. I have Ad-Aware but I kinda like CometCursor… hey, don’t all spit on me at once… but yeah, 95% of what I download is garbage. I think the problem is that it promises to be my friend. And I so want a friend. So I download my new shiny free friend, who’s going to spend all day strolling around the net with me, and it takes me $500,000 of credit card bills before I realise it’s BONZI in disguise. He’s always behind EVERYTHING. His is the purple hand up Bill Gates’ arse, working him like a glove puppet.
Maybe I’ll go get some Microsoft Agent pals to cheer myself up. Their antics never cease to amuse me! Ha! Ha! Ha!
The scary part about all this is that I know someone who downloaded it and installed it on their computer intentionally.
(Of course, this was the person I had convinced in prior years that John Lennon and V.I. Lenin were related and that mosquitos helped to build the Panama Canal. :rolleyes: )
BonziBuddy is meant to be a warning to people who actually own pet monkeys, and what happens to them after you stick their tail into an electrical outlet and give it cocaine.
Another vote for Ad-Aware. I didn’t have it the same time as that little Bonzi bastard, but I run it regulalry on my system now and it is a great thing.
It’s supposed to be your friendly monkey who will entertain you with jokes, manage your downloads, and enhance the appeareance of your screen. What it does is badger you every few minutes with a pitch to buy extra stuff he can do for you, such as teling jokes, which, altho promised initially, it will not do unless you pay. If you tell it no, it will give a hurt look and go up to the top right corner of your screen, from whence it will emerge a few minutes later with the same song and dance. And it will do that ad nauseum. I just don’t understand how the company can stay in business with a product that no one wants and everyone wants to get rid of. I guess there are enough newbies, like myself, who don’t know better.
When I get home to my home computer, I will download AdAware. I’ve been very hesitant about downloading anything since BonziBuddy and Comet Cursor. Shortly after I downloaded Comet Cursor, my hard drive crashed. There may have been no connection.
I will also search for the website of BonziBuddy and tell them to fuck off. I wonder if I can file a harassment suit?
Heh, I’m glad I use a Mac with OS X… They haven’t bothered to port this shit yet. My system’s clean as ever… of course, I’ve seen this stuff at school on the eMachines they bought to save money. They’re all chocked with this sort of crap, and they crash all the time. I’d use the Macs, except that they’re all 5 years old.
Well, this whole bonzi thing has just confirmed what I have suspected ever since I took that primatology course:
MONKEYS ARE EVIL!
Frankly, I’m ashamed to be a member of the same family as these godforsaken creatures. The very sight of them - their scrunchy faces, their mutant feet, their tails or absence thereof, their foul banana-sucking butts - makes me want to gag.
People have tried to tell me that it’s all in my head, that I just feel this way because the primatology professor was a female post-lobotomy version of Dr. Evil. Hah.
So, for the folks still in the dark, here’s the motto you should live by:
Monkeys and gorillas are bad bad bad bad. Never download anything that promises to equip you with a monkey.