Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 5th Nov 2009 17:29 UTC
Computers are taking on ever more important roles in our daily lives. They used to be simple tools to get simple things done - work-related, mostly, maybe a few simple games, and that was it. However, over time, they have become the central hubs for all sorts of data - including precious data. For his Master of Fine Arts thesis project, Zach Gage illustrated just how important our computer data has become.
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Member since:
2006-01-26
Actually, pretty harmless stuff that is generally classified as "distributed computing" software.
Examples include BOINC, distributed.net's dnetc, Seventeen or Bust's sb.exe client, etc.
Being a member of several distributed computing forums and mailing lists (and even committing changes to some of them), I often see people reporting "<some famous company>'s antivirus product has flagged <some app> as malware, how can we get it removed from their list?".
Often times the very purpose of the software is what causes it to be labeled malware, namely: It runs in the background (often as a service, or program that starts up automatically), it eats up CPU resources, it downloads new work, and uploads results to the server, it reports some basic usage info (for statistics purposes).
While these activities don't destroy data, neither does the majority of malware out there. Most of it is classified as malware simply because it's running without the user's knowledge, regardless of what it actually does.