Notes
[1] Matrix Reloaded is said to be the first major motion picture to accurately portray a malicious hack. When Carrie-Anne Moss's superhacker Trinity sets her sights on a power grid computer, she is shown correctly running Nmap, a popular freeware port scanner that sends packets to a machine or network to discover what services are running (Poulsen, Citation2003).
[2] The same could be said of the reportedly increasing quantities of ‘spyware’ and ‘adware’ being secretly installed on individual consumers' machines. IMesh, a popular file-sharing application, ‘bundles’ an application known as Marketscore. All the user's Web traffic is then routed through Marketscore's servers, where it is analysed to create research reports on ‘Internet trends and e-commerce activities’. Even data entered on secure Websites such as passwords, credit card numbers and bank account numbers are accessible (Delio, Citation2004). Marketscore is ‘adware’; it performs many or all of the same functions as its illegal cousin ‘spyware’, but alerts users to its presence and intentions—a reference to the program may be included in the legal jargon of one of the on-screen installation agreements that computer users routinely accept, for example (Eunjung Cha, Citation2004, p. A01). In December 2004 Microsoft purchased computer security firm Giant Company Software Inc., and announced in January 2005 its intention of entering the computer security market by releasing Giant's product, by then known as ‘Microsoft Windows AntiSpyware’ (Musgrove, Citation2005, p. E05); it has since been redubbed ‘Microsoft Defender’.