in early 2000’s, internet access was extremely fucking expensive, so most software was peer-to-peer shared, not even by torrent, but on CD’s or floppys, or local neighborhood ad-hoc and internal ISP networks
Uh no. I was there. In 1995 or 1996, I may have still used a shareware CD-ROM, or some less-legal compilation CD-ROM, but in the 2000s the most common way to install software by far was to download it over the internet.
And there was no access control whatsoever. A literal spyware with full access to your system, that only puts a purple fucking gorilla on your screen, that runs around and does absolutely fucking nothing? Sign me the fuck in. If your virus did something even something remotely useful, like show weather and currency rates, then you could rest assured that it would infect every single computer in the country.
I think the point of the post is that back then people were warned against installing bonzi buddy and such, and we were told to install software only from trustworthy sources. Spyware software rightfully flagged such software as malware too. Nowadays, there are appstores full of banal apps which harvest much more personal information about you than bonzi buddy ever did and we’re not batting an eye about it, and even though we have “Access control” we just happily click accept when our calculator wants to read our emails, and we’ve accepted it as a normal way of doing things.