has anti-virus' time come to an end?

no, i'm not talking about the end of the anti-virus industry or the technology, i'm talking about the term itself... that's what came to mind when i read rich mogull's post about the lack of need for anti-virus on the mac...

i think it may be time we retire the term anti-virus... it's no longer a completely accurate description of what the technology (or people) does... there hasn't been a stand-alone known-malware scanner that just detected viruses for a long time now... it's also become negatively loaded...

rich's post demonstrates this negativity (without being unreasonably anti-av, nor a rabid mac fanboy)... 'do mac users need anti-virus' indeed...

let's phrase it a different way, though - if there exists malware for the mac (and there does, it's in the wild and being actively spread by financially motivated cyber criminals) should mac users use tools to help them protect themselves from that malware?

it's hard to imagine these are actually the same question under the covers, it's so much easier to say no to the first one and so much harder for the second... harder still if you consider that mac users are no more immune to social engineering than anyone else and exploiting the user (rather than the system) has long been the primary method of getting malicious code executed (exploiting the system is generally just an optimization)...

granted all these additional considerations load the question in the opposing direction, but even without them i think you'll find that you'll get a faster no response to "do mace users need anti-virus" than you would to "do mac users need anti-malware"... the term anti-virus has come to be something people have a knee-jerk reaction to and only accept it in situations where it seems like a necessary evil (otherwise it's just an unnecessary evil) while no similar reaction has evolved yet for anti-malware...

anti-malware hasn't been loaded down with the baggage of all the anti-virus industry's mistakes and if those who adopt the terminology shift are smart and reinvent themselves rather than just relabeling themselves then perhaps the term anti-malware will remain baggage-fee...