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In what fucking universe is this even remotely true? I don't know about you guys, but around those places, 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. And the way it got there was mostly from shady CD stores around the corner, where owners paid fortune to download shit and made it back selling it, or PC journals with CDs where they were just filled it up to a brim with whatever garbage they had to boost value.

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.

If you were savvy, though, what you'd do is forever sacrifice 50% of your CPU and RAM to the anti-virus and pray to fucking gods you don't touch anything newer than the last version of it you have. Because anything uncaught can and will infect absolutely everything and anything the computer has access to. And your only option would be to just nuke the entire system with all of your data because because any backups you make would also get infected.

Even later, when broadband got cheap and widely available, the internet was for a long time a complete shit show. Remember Flash? Every single ad and every other site used Flash. That shit, along with java applets, was equivalent to automatically downloading and executing any app you see, before you actually even see it. It was also filled with shit like rapidshare and depositfiles, with questionable content and ads on ads over ads, as there was a financial incentive to spam that garbage everywhere and bury anything half-legit under it.

Kids these days really got it easy. See an app requesting something you don't think it needs? Just say no. Us, boomers, didn't have such a luxury. By the time you suspect anything shady going on, it was already too late. There is a downside, though, that manufacturers control what you can and cannot do. It took, like, almost a decade for trivial things like screen recording to even be possible on Android, and things like CheatEngine are straight up impossible. But hey, I'd say that's a reasonable price to pay for not being completely paranoid.