The World of Sketchy 2000s Downloads

Sorry if I sound a little sick in this video, I'm still recovering from Covid :'(

I managed to install so many “Free Minecraft” applications as a kid that I bricked the entire home computer and we had to get a new one. Best part is, I don’t think my parents ever realized it was me? They just thought it gave up the ghost randomly

I installed all the Smiley Cental/Cursormania stuff and never knew it was malware until years later. It made me sad, like learning an old classmate of mine ended up in prison.

"10 year old with free reign on the family computer" is such a mood lmfao

The email saying "omg did you hear Michael Jackson died" hit a core memory for me, truly 8 year old me was shook and emailed everyone that week about it

Seeing those pre-emoji era smileys is like peeking into some kind of alternate reality

Cursor Mania takes me back. I hope my parents eventually forgave me for willingly installing viruses all the time

I felt so stupid for downloading Bonzi Buddy. It’s healing to learn decades later I wasn’t alone.

I was always pretty good at recognizing sketchy downloads. I always knew to uncheck “install our toolbar?” when downloading a program. When using Limewire and Kazaa there were different signs that a song was legit such as the size of the file. Whenever I did download a Trojan or something like it I had software like Malware Bytes that would make quick work of removing it. One time though, my mom’s friend and her son came over to stay and I let him use our computer and all of the sudden porn started popping up out of nowhere. And not just any porn, stuff involving women and horses. I wasn’t able fix that myself.

The anime-like desktop buddies made me smile. I remember they briefly got really big in the late 2000s when there was this particular type of buddy that was designed so that you could easily override the images. Essentially there were giant collections of skins online so your favorite anime character could sit on your desktop with you. I remember even drawing a few of my own back in the day. I had to look it up again but i think they were called "shimeji" They were better than useless: intentionally annoying. They were programmed to walk around your screen, pick up the windows you're using and throw them across the screen. And better yet, they could multiply! They literally had this mitosis animation where they would really random split into two. So there longer you had it open, the quicker it would eat up all your RAM until you're struggling to get your computer to access task manager at all to kill all the shimeji. The internet back then was wild, I kinda wish the kids of today understood the desire to not just optimize your devices for performance, but to intentionally degrade them for laughs

dude the editing in this video is crazy, i can't imagine how long it took to make all those silly email edits or you adding toolbars to your arsenal. so well done!!!

my dad was an IT guy, so i was taught to NEVER download random stuff, no matter how appealing they might be. i was also too scared to turn off my 3ds before saving, as i didnt know what was gonna happen

I adored and still love the desktop pets, something about having a cute little critter go about it's business while I browse just gives me joy. This even popped into my recommendeds right after I installed one of those phone pet apps, currently watching this with a tiny shadow the hedgehog flying around my screen lol

I still have extreme fear and anxiety when it comes to viruses. The thought of not having control over something you put so much into or losing everything on it makes me never want to touch technology

story time: when i was first introduced to emulation, i went on a shady ROM website on the 5000th page of google and it gave me Smitfraud which made my computer play terrifying online radio shows in the background and made popup ads spam the pc and it traumatized me for life to the point where i was genuinely afraid of getting malware again

There is nothing more nostalgic to me than the "You've got mail!" sound

When I was a kid I downloaded a game that had a virus in it that would mess up my computer's display. My solution? Every time I wanted to play it I would make a System Restore point, because apparently playing it was SO FUN it was totally worth going through the trouble of fixing it every time.

Yup. I totally added the cursor and smiley toolbar to our family computer... We also used Limewire and searched for songs by typing the song's name and "mp3" into Google. Eventually the computer crawled so slowly from all the malware and viruses. What a time to be alive!

Club Penguiner here. I can confirm that those silly coin generators actually did work. It was the only time a "free currency generator" ever did anything, and I loved those coins till CP shut down

This makes me thankful that I grew up with SOG's Virus Investigations series that made me aware of how bad viruses can get & what to avoid.