What with all of the Trojan horses, viruses, worms and other evil bits of programming whizzing about the Internet, seeking whom they may confound, I have come across the term "malware" as a collective noun to describe them all. The interesting thing about this noun is that it is defined by the (evil) intent of the maker. Is this word in sufficiently wide use to have earned a place in the lexicon or is it suspect, growing out of computerdom, of being a passing buzz word which will ebb into obscurity?

Sounds like a useful enough word to catch on.
(and all the useless stuff kids talk usinto buying at the checkout stands would be mallware )

Since my online time is divided bwtween word-related sites and computer-security related sites, I use malware almost every day. It gets rather tedious having to specfify trojans, worms, viruses, spyware, ec., and malware is a very useful catch-all. I can't speak for its life prospects, but the phenomena it describes aren't going away, that's for sure.

I like the word. a good coinage.

glad I have a mac. not that there aren't bad progs, etc., for macs, just not nearly as many. not trying to start anything. truly.

I confess that in a dark rarely-acknowledged corner of my mind, I think up appropriate tortures to which the people who write and propagate such malware ought be subjected. Dante has nothing on me! Of particular inspiration is this text from the Mikado:

My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time--
To let the punishment fit the crime--
The punishment fit the crime;
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment!
Of innocent merriment!

In keeping with this theme, it occurs to me that their telephones ought be so wired as to disconnect without notice several times during every conversation, their televisions to flip to another channel in the middle of the movie and refuse to flip back, their showers to switch from hot to cold and back again without pattern nor warning, their cars to wander off in the night so as to be lost by morning, their salt to turn sweet and their sugar to turn salty and all their chocolate to have laxative effect. And that's just for first offenders.

In keeping with this theme, it occurs to me that their telephones ought be so wired as to disconnect without notice several times during every conversation, their televisions to flip to another channel in the middle of the movie and refuse to flip back, their showers to switch from hot to cold and back again without pattern nor warning, their cars to wander off in the night so as to be lost by morning, their salt to turn sweet and their sugar to turn salty and all their chocolate to have laxative effect. And that's just for first offenders.

Great ideas, all of them. Let's hope they all appear before your bench.

All writers of computer malware
Who infect our systems with worms,
Shall write infinite programmes
On ’puters with no RAMS
For fictional software firms.
For the nerd, freak or anorak, driving us crazy,
Our punishment is quite noble:
With a screen that’s blue,
And a keyboard askew,
To write hacking progammes in COBOL


My object all sublime etc etc ...

(apologies to W.S.Gilbert)

For second offenders: may their shampoo be laced with itching powder; their beds levitate at dawn, to the heighth of a tall man; may they be infested with the worst sort of earworm (dah da DAH dah daaaaaah da dah...).

Then, one of the latest worms installs patches to protect against the old worm:

http://www.crn.com/components/Nl/direct/article.asp?ArticleID=43977

The Blaster virus has played havoc with many of the computers where I work. Since the antivirus software didn't know about it, it hit a lot of us. My lappie got snaffled, but neither of my desktop machines got hit. I ran the patch program on everything as soon as it became available, but for some reason it didn't always "take" on laptops. I ran it a second time and it fixed the problem.

There is no hell too hot or too deep for virus creators.