Friday, June 25, 2004

terminology proposal

i hear a lot about people's machines becoming infected with spyware or infected with trojans or infected with adware or ...

i'm sorry, since when are these things considered infectious? if i connect to a network that has a spyware infected machine on it, is my computer going to become infected? how about if i share disks/programs/word documents/etc with such a machine? no, of course not...

VIRUSES infect, not spyware or adware or whatever... i realize people need a way to indicate that very bad software has been installed on their system but lets not confuse the issue by using terms that already have a different meaning in this field, lets try a new word shall we?

we could use "contaminate"... 'my machine became contaminated with spyware'...

but maybe "contaminate" is too fancy (thus "afflict" is also out of the question) or maybe just not pejorative enough... then the answer is simple - the word we want is "poison"... 'my machine has been poisoned with spyware'... that conveys that something noxious has gotten onto the system and it is quite pejorative...

0 comments: