Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

I'll start with, wow, that's pretty cool and entertaining. As another commenter said, a reminder of the whimsicalness of the 90s internet.

sigh, then along came Comet Cursor to remind us why we can't have nice things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Cursor

The "can't have nice things" part comes from the tracking that came along with it. Comet Cursor was a pioneer of what would become the modern web!

View on HN

My parents were so mad at me when I installed Comet Cursor on the family computer.

I was 9 years old, and I think I had grabbed it from a shady site that had modified it to stuff it with additional adware and malware...the computer went really slow after I installed it, but I had a totally badass cursor that looked like it was being electrocuted, so overall I think it was a fair trade.

As the above points out, that "shady site" was possibly just the official Comet Cursor website. They themselves were an adware company and a weird, direct bridge from 90s "whimsy" web to modern ad tracking and adware.

"the computer went really slow after I installed it"

This version also appears to be using a lot of system resources. Firefox on Linux is idling at about 6% CPU while reading HN. Go to that web site and the usage goes up to 80% to 90%. Come back here and CPU goes back down to 6% or so.

Interesting, but no repro on macOS/Safari. macOS/Firefox, however, will take up about 50% between the "Firefox" process and a "Firefox isolated web content" process.

This was back in an era when your Windows computer started to feel slow (which inevitably started to happen after a few years) was to take the standard recommendation and reinstall the entire OS. It's so far from the world of an advanced Linux SysOp.

Just to note: CPU percentage isn't that useful these days. CPUs can throttle back their clock speed quite far, so you'll often get numbers that are meaningless that way.

Your conclusion is fairly like to be correct though.

I recall Cursor Mania which was a similar idea. It bundled Smiley Central which was a necessity to out-smiley your contacts on MSN messenger. It also prefigured emojis. And it almost certainly came with a generous helping of malware.

Glory days, nonetheless.

Looks like someone continues paying to renew smileycentral.com and cursormania.com every year, but appears to be doing nothing with it. (NXDomain)

The dream isn't over yet.

> I had a totally badass cursor that looked like it was being electrocuted, so overall I think it was a fair trade.

that phrase managed to bring the 9 years old mindset back in my mind. That was awesome, thanks a lot.

One of the founders of Comet was a friend of a friend. We chatted about it a bit. They really seemed like earnest folks who stumbled on a way to monetize virality in the early days of the internet. There was absolutely no framework for ethics of data collection and even they seemed kinda shocked at how easy it was to do back then. I think once the money was flowing in, it was too hard to stop.

Malware like this used to be so common; software that did something useful and then on the side also installed some horrible user-hostile thing. Adware and search hijackers, too. Fortunately that's mostly ended on desktop but it's a constant battle on mobile devices still.

It just moved to the cloud where you can't uninstall it.

I used to enjoy trying to delete malware (mostly porn advertising) off lab computers in college. There were a couple I could just never get rid of and I checked all over. They were buried deep and had roots throughout the system lol.

Used to? Its the whole business model of social media.

Fortunately that's mostly ended on desktop

...you mean, it's now built into the OS and even harder to remove.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29415031

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28449607

I'd rather trust my OS company with privacy-related shenanigans than some random company selling it to some other random company.

> The company was criticized for secretly tracking users who installed the software, each of whom was given a unique serial number

Doesn't seem too out of the line nowadays, does it? Even Microsoft recommended users uninstall the program. Wouldn't it be wonderful if they had kept their distance from such practices?

Nowadays Microsoft lets malware writers run roughshod on their platforms with impunity. (See: the unbanning of the node-ipc supply chain mass-file-deletion virus author)

comet cursor, and bonzi buddy, and all of its ilk

the beginning of the presently ongoing shitshow of tracking and privacy violations to earn revenue.

_daisyyyy_ _daissyyy_

Bonzi Buddy was particularly insidious because it was so close to being useful/fun and instead was just glorified malware.

I desperately want a Bonzi Buddy plushie, however. Just for the lolz.

You can buy a Bonzi Buddy NFT from the original authors, which is _somewhat_ the same!

RealPlayer lol

(buffering)

I remember Comet Cursor using drive-by install techniques, back when browser security basically didn't exist, so you would find it installed after visiting certain websites, and there was at least one example of advert iframes setting off the background install.

IIRC dilbert.com was an example of a significant site that did this (I stopped visiting for that reason, or something very similar if it wasn't Comet Cursor) either directly or through an advert it carried.

Somehow that reminds me of startups like Contentsquare.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com