And those viruses were probably less intrusive than most, if not all of the tech we have today.
Back then, a small group of people were probably spying on you. Now everything you touch and everywhere you go is doing it.
I remember when Alexa was considered a trojan.
I mean, it still is, but now people willingly put it on their coffee table.
Back in the day you got spyware and your computer was host to it but you also got a purple gorilla for your desktop. Nowadays you pay a hundred bucks for the spyware and all you get is a shitty speaker with a subscription that never plays the song or artist you want to hear.
Today, I asked Gemini to play my Lofi playlist (my car has smart bullshit 'cause EV) to help my kid relax during a road trip, and it started playing music from the Rocket League soundtrack (and no, it wasn’t the lofi releases).
I remember when Google Assistant came out more than a fucking decade ago and it was vastly more capable of correctly interpreting speech, but they just kept cutting its capabilities to save on compute.
Now, Gemini is just as fucking dumb right out of the gate, but you can pay Google a monthly fee to get the “better” version, which I’m sure will only be better for a little while until they make it dumb too and introduce a higher tier to bilk us some more.
…but what about my Gator shopping browser plug-in!
Or you had cable tv.
