The world's friendliest malware, revived
BonziBUDDY, but honest. A purple gorilla for your desktop who collects nothing, with shell-fur rendering, cyber security tips with sources, a Windows 95 download page, a counter of how many people ran a stranger's .exe, and a question for 2026. We tried desktop agents once before. What did we learn?
What hooked me
In 1999 a purple gorilla sat on millions of desktops, told jokes, sang, and quietly collected whatever it could. Everyone who used Windows then remembers him with the exact mix of affection and horror that makes a good case study. I wanted one for a security and HCI unit, and the only honest way to study a charming piece of malware was to rebuild the charm and do the opposite on every point of trust.
What I built
A desktop buddy in Tauri 2 and Rust. You pet him, drag him around, double-click to ask him things. He waves, dances, falls asleep, and follows your cursor with his eyes.
- The fur. He started as a layered SVG, then became a three.js model with shell fur: two dozen layers of noise-cut strands, an anisotropic sheen, and fur that sweeps back and settles when he moves. Fling the window across the desktop and the fur streams.
- The honesty. AI mode is off by default, and while it is off the app has no network access at all. Switch it on and he talks to a gateway you choose, from Azure to a local Ollama, after redacting anything that looks like personal data. A Privacy ledger shows the exact bytes.
- The lessons. Thirty tongue-in-cheek HCI tips and a cyber security info pack of thirty-six, each with a real source, plus labelled parody pop-ups that show the dark patterns the original was accused of.
- The site. A Windows 95 setup wizard with a literal unsigned .exe to download, and a counter of how many people did. SmartScreen warns you. That is the lesson, in one dialog. There is a Netscape window with the longer argument, and a Minesweeper, because in 1999 it was the only program on the computer that didn't want anything from you.
What I learned
Trust is cheap to earn and expensive to spend. A friendly face buys a lot of goodwill, and the whole design question is what stops that goodwill being spent against the person. The number on the download page is the same lesson, counted.
The bigger thing took me a while to see, and someone else pointed it out first. In 1999 we put anthropomorphic agents on everyone's desktop. They watched, interrupted, remembered, phoned home and tried to be your friend, and we spent the next few years deciding that was annoying, manipulative or malicious. In 2026 we are doing it again with agents that can read the screen and open the files. So the gorilla is a way to ask the serious question without being earnest about it: if we are putting agents back on everyone's computer, what did we learn the first time? The app is my answer. Agency stays with the user, network access is explicit, memory is legible and erasable, whatever leaves the machine can be read, local inference is possible, controls mean what they say, and nothing acquires a permission just because it would be convenient.