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New post: It's insane, the things you can get simply by asking

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blog/2021/september/not-harmful.html
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<p>But what does it mean to be "harmful", anyway? Let's open a dictionary (or just dictionary.com) and see:</p>
<blockquote>harmful: adj. causing or capable of causing harm; injurious: a harmful idea; a harmful habit.</blockquote>
<p>So <strong>a piece of "harmful" software would be one that caused the user harm or is capable of doing so</strong>. I specify the user because software meant to facilitate piracy might "harm" a corporation's profits, or a tool to break through firewalls might "harm" a control freak's attempt to filter the outside world, but I do not think a reasonable person would consider any of those programs harmful. The user in this sense must also be extended to the computer the user, well, <em>uses</em>, as impairing a person's tools would also impair their ability to complete whatever tasks they were using the tools for, thus harming the user albeit indirectly.</p>
<p>Right and away, we can consider all malware and viruses to be "harmful" under this definition, for hopefully obvious reasons. If a program is so poorly written that it results in catastrophic data loss or leaks information to parties said information was not intended for, it is harmful because it has done tangible harm to the user. But much like trying to determine what's <a href="../../2019/december/death-of-a-gopher.html">bloat</a> and what's not, the waters turn murky from here. What makes a program harmful, if not for its actual capacity to do harm to the user? According to the types of people who unironically still use "considered harmful" in Current Year, some of the reasons include:</p>
<p>Right and away, we can consider all malware and viruses to be "harmful" under this definition, for hopefully obvious reasons. If a program is so poorly written that it results in catastrophic data loss or leaks information to parties said information was not intended for, it is harmful because it has done tangible harm to the user. But much like trying to determine what's bloat and what's not, the waters turn murky from here. What makes a program harmful, if not for its actual capacity to do harm to the user? According to the types of people who unironically still use "considered harmful" in Current Year, some of the reasons include:</p>
<ul>
<li>complexity of the code</li>
<li>number of lines of code</li>
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<p align=right>CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 &copy; Vane Vander</p>
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