Malicious adj.

Having the nature of or resulting from malice; deliberately harmful; spiteful: malicious gossip.

The American Heritage© Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Hrm, no OED handy at the moment, the yankee one will have to be good enough. Malicious is a synonym for malignant – a word somewhat related to my domain name[1].

I tried to download my favourite Windows
SSH client today from it’s usual URL and was stopped in my HTTP tracks by an ever vigilant watcher! A watcher well taught in the lore of URL-filter; learnt from a source that shall remain unnamed[2].

I thought to myself: What kind of idiocy is this?! In what way is this humble SSH client, this paragon of security, malicious. To who does it mean harm, where hides the spite? [3]

I shook my head and raised my finger to the watcher on the wire. Then laughed, for it has little power over me, I obtained my hit of delicious TCP/IP encipherment from another
source.

On a more serious note. Blocking putty is utterly retarded, not only is putty in no way “malicious” but the act of blocking it in this way forces one to seek out another location to download it from. For a popular tool such as Putty you’re likely to find an official mirror first-go; but what if you don’t? And what if you’re not in the habit of checking signatures (most people I assume)? Does this increase the chance that you’ll download a version of a tool from an unofficial source that has some special extra – a feature that really is malicious? There seem to be quite a few sites devoted to issues related to URL-filters and other “censorware”.

[1] Sometimes I do wonder if it is time to throw out Malignity.net as a leftover of a past age. If that ever happens I’ll likely switch to yvan.seth.id.au, which currently redirects to malignity.net anyway.

[2] But be assured, it is not a wise and venerable, thousand year old monk who lives on top of a mountain; nor a timeless and grey bearded wizard who wanders the earth doing good.

[3] Is it possible that the tool is malicious because it is a security tool? Since the very act of encrypting traffic could be illegal
in some places? It should at least be a different categorisation.