Josh the Aspie’s Blog

Welcome back to Josh the Aspie’s Blog for the fifth installment in the ‘Wares series, where I explain the meaning behind different terms that include “ware” used to describe software and hardware.

Bloatware is software where more and more features have been added over time, causing the storage, memory, and processing requirements of simply loading the program to grow, and grow, and grow.

Synonyms include “featuritis”, “feature creep”, “software creep” and “creeping featuritis” among others.

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I am currently doing a series of posts defining certain terms that are often used to describe certain kinds of software and hardware - collectively known as ‘ware when used in these terms.

Malware is short for “malicious software” and refers to any software that harms the performance, confidentiality, integrity, or accessibility of the machine on which it runs.

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Simply put, a Virus is a piece of software which makes copies of itself and spreads itself across the internet. In some circles of the Information Security field, people insist that a virus also requires some level of user action in order to propagate, such as opening an e-mail or running a program.

This ability of a virus to copy it’s self is called self-replication.

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A “darknet,” or “dark network” is a collection of computers that is in no way connected to the internet.

Two computers connected only to each-other form the simplest form of darknet. Another form would be one or more routers connected to each-other, with other computers connected to them, but no router or computer having a connection to the internet.

-Josh the Aspie

The hacker is a computer or electronics savvy person who uses their skill to test or alter the performance and function of a system.

Hackers may be those who build HAM radios from components, those who build custom systems from the board up, or people who improve their system performance by altering the software packages on them. Hackers may also test the security on an online system as a part of improving that system.

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A Cracker is a computer savvy person who uses their skills to defeat the security on other systems. He does so to gain access to that computer system’s resources. The cracker then either damages these resources or exploits them.

Cracker exploits include stealing trade secrets from a company, stealing processor power to use on their system, and using the system to forward connections and actions in order to make their activates harder to track or make further attacks easier.

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This is part three in a series of articles where I define different slang words used to describe different kinds of Hardware, or Software - often clumped together as ‘ware when talking about these terms.

Crapware is a term that has recently been popularized in the computing world. Crapware is basically a way of describing, in one word “All the crap that comes loaded on computers”.

Crapware describes the majority of the software that has been pre-installed on your computer without your asking for it. This is especially the case if you can’t think of why you would ever want it. Most of the computers you buy from an online retailer like Dell or a big box store like Best Buy is going to come with a large amount of software pre-installed on it, much of it trial or partial versions of that software that you’ll never actually use. This is Crapware.

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For those of you who are new to Josh the Aspie’s Blog, I’m currently working on a series of posts to let people know what certain terms on the internet mean when it comes to software.

In cases where the meaning is somewhat nebulous, I give the terms as I use them, rather than the meaning as used by the companies that don’t want the term applied to their software. Most of these terms have at least a partially negative connotation, so you can see why most companies wouldn’t want those labels applied to their software.

In this installment I’ll be talking about “Spyware”, one of the phrases most commonly applied to internet software.

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This is a fairly common computing term in the programming circles I frequent. Unfortunately most of my non-programming friends, and even some older programmers I talk to don’t know what the color of someone’s “hat” has to do with the internet, or programming.

The short answer to this is that in old westerns and cartoons about westerns, the hero wears a white hat, and stands for honesty and doing the right thing. The villain, meanwhile, wears a black hat, and is the villain because he doesn’t care who has to get hurt for him to get what he wants. Sometimes a hero will wear a black hat, and the villain a white one, but it’s relatively uncommon, and usually comes up when the villain thinks himself to be a hero, or when the hero has a dark past he has to overcome.

This is similar to how in many books and movies the good knight wears white, or has glistening armor, while the villain of the story wears armor painted a matte black.

Grey is simply the color in between these two extremes. However to get a more in depth understanding of all this, we’re going to have to look at what colors tend to represent in the culture that spawned these idioms.

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There are a lot of different kinds of software available to be installed on the internet. Many of them are available for free. Others aren’t.

A lot of the time, certain terms are bandied about the net about this software, and to someone who isn’t an experienced netizen, this can be rather confusing. Even worse, most companies that produce software that is in one of the negative categories create their own definitions of these terms, so that they can artificially exclude their software from that category.

So I figured that over the next few days I would provide descriptions of these terms, and give examples of software that fits in these categories. Keep in mind, these are the terms as I use them, and some people will have differing definitions… such as anyone who produces any of the software I place in these categories.

Today we’ll start with Adware.

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