Hacker News Reader

Comment by groestl | Hacker News Reader

Malware is, by definition, computing that is done without its user's informed consent. There are many examples of malware that a laymen wouldn't readily classify as such. This page has a long list of examples where Microsoft's software or behavior is unethical. However, Excel is not in this list, as far as I can see. So you're right on that account.

View on HN

No. Malware is, by definition, software that performs actions which have a malicious intent. Hence, the name.

A software's author can have the best of intents, it would still be malware if it's perceived to be malicious by it's users (see: state trojans, opt-out telemetry)

Requiring "user's informed consent" would make 99% of software malware for 99% of users. The majority of what software does is magic with hidden layers and data polling in the background from various sources, but that doesn't make it malware just because the user doesn't understand.

> would make 99% of software malware for 99% of users

Well...

Joke aside, its not like I came up with this definition.

You omitted a piece of the definition:

> Malware is software that is installed on a computer without the user's consent and that performs malicious actions.

https://www.mcafee.com/en-us/antivirus/malware.html#:~:text=....

I did not. "Malicious action" is the result of violating informed consent, and as such redundant. I'm not surprised that McAfee left out "informed", btw.

99% of software IS malware for 99% of users

>Malware is, by definition, computing that is done without its user's informed consent.

Do you manually inspect every CPU clock cycle spent, or every data connection or packet sent by every piece of SW running on your system, to make sure it was all done with your consent?

Trust is a different topic entirely.

I do like to run tcpdump regularly. For a while I ran my home laptop thru an allow-listed proxy, and I was quite surprised at the results, and how little I had to allow to get what I needed done. A lot of software is phoning home. I would have thought that open source folks didn't do that, but standards or expectations have shifted. A browser that took over your DNS would have been anathema in the 90s, but now we trust the local networks even less.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com