Adware is an advertising computer program that can be put there by other people on someone's computer, sometimes without their permission. It is controversial because sometimes businesses put the program there so they can see what people are doing or what web pages they are browsing. They then put an advertisement that is of the same subject as the web-page the person is looking at. This can be good if the person is trying to buy something, but many people do not want advertisements. Many people also do not want other people to find out what they are doing or what web pages they are looking at. An example is in the popular peer-to-peer file sharing program, Kazaa. When someone downloads it, it installs adware on their computer that then sends advertisements to the computer. Some people do not like this so they use an illegally changed version of this program called Kazaa Lite.
Removal tools have been developed to assist users in clearing out these unwanted programs.
Like many programs that people use for security, the program must be changed often. Updating allows the removal tool to recognize new types of adware. This can be done by downloading files over the internet using the 'update' option in the program.
Gender
Gender is a word that is used to talk about how people express masculine (traits most people think of as male) or feminine (traits most people think of as female) traits. It is commonly used for a person's sex (male or female) but this word only means someone’s biology (body parts).
"Gender" comes from the Latin word genus which meant "kind" or "type". In the few hundred years before the 1950s, the term 'gender' was used only in the field of grammar. In 1955, a scientist began to use the word "gender" in new ways when referring to people, in a way that was related to their 'sex' but not quite the same. The term was not applied to other animals. They continued to have different “sexes”.
Before the 1950s, the term 'gender' was used only in the field of grammar, and only to distinguish a category of words that are called 'feminine nouns' from other words that are 'masculine nouns'. Early Indo-European languages~had three genders. Languages that come from Latin like Spanish, French, and Italian have lost one, and their nouns are either feminine or masculine in gender. For example, in Spanish, 'house' ("casa") is feminine, and 'day' ("día") is masculine. Some languages still have three genders, like German. Outside of their grammatical category, the word 'gender' was not used to refer to people. At that time, when one spoke about someone being either 'male' or 'female', the word used was "sex".
Merriam Webster officially recognized the pronoun "they" as a singular use pronoun in 2019. According to the dictionary, the word had actually been used as a non-gender binary pronoun since the 1300s. Around the time Merriam Webster made this announcement, artist Sam Smith announced that their correct pronouns were actually they/them. Typically, for those who identify as female, the correct pronouns are she/her, and for males, he/him.
See Grammatical gender for more detail.
Many people often use the terms "sex " and "gender" interchangeably, however, some people now assign them two different meanings. They use the term "sex" to refer to the biological assignment of an individual, which is often based on scientific knowledge. This biological determination is often made at birth. Doctors often assign sex by looking at pre-natal images or directly inspecting genitalia at birth. This determination is still based on our beliefs on gender and sex being the same. The problem lies in what happens when an individual falls outside of the typical categories of "male" or "female". Some medical professionals have turned to the Karyotype method to look at the sex chromosomes to determine biological sex. "Gender", on the other hand, is considered by some to be more of a psychological factor. To them, gender is determined by our expressions, and behaviors rather than scientific knowledge.
Typically, gender has been described by using terms such as man, woman, or even transsexual. These terms are applied to people based on their sex, or sometimes on the basis of culturally constructed characteristics. Although many people may be biologically assigned a sex, the gender they believe themselves to be may not align with this sex. An individual's gender is often assumed by outsiders based on cultural norms: outward appearance, body shape and size, physical activity, etc.. Although an individual's gender identity is determined by psychology, a gender identity can be constructed by wearing particular clothing, language, actions and such, that are associated with that gender in a given society. Psychologist and Feminist Anthropologist Anne Fausto-Sterling calls this embodiment.
In 1955, John Money created the term gender role and began to use it to mean something different from sex. Gender roles are how a society views different genders and how they should act. An example of this would be how some people believe feminine or female people should cook and clean rather than play sports. These roles change over time and differ based on different cultures, but are often ideas that are created by people rather than coming from nature.
The term identity means the mental image someone has of themself as well as some kind of similarity with others in some particular way. Gender identity, specifically, refers to the experiences someone has that are similar to a person of a particular gender. This gender identity affects how a person views themself as well as how they interact with others. Developmental psychologists have found that the development of an identity begins in early adolescence. Learning about what it means to be a particular gender also starts at an early age. During adolescence, children begin to internalize the gender roles in their surroundings and "gender intensification" occurs. Gender intensification means that the child feels more pressure to conform to socially sanctioned gender norms, resulting in deeper gender role differentiation for boys and girls. Biological, can affect gender identity development as well. Research done with animals has shown that pre-natal sex hormones affect the sexual differentiation of the brain.
‘Binary’ comes from the Latin word bini meaning two together. As such binary refers to an idea in which there are only two possible options that are often opposite. This is how most people thought of gender throughout history in many parts of the world with male and female being the only two options.
Thinking of gender in this way can lead to a society with strict gender roles that are in place for a long time to think that those are natural or biological roles that each option has to conform to at birth. Examples of this are women who are not allowed access to education or jobs or men who are expected to not be emotional or soft. Strict binary gender roles are also often tied to reasons for oppression of sexualities outside of the majority. Societies often enforce gender binaries due to concepts like tradition and the idea that their stability relies on keeping this binary in place.
The term LGBTQ is constantly evolving and adding terms to the acronym as knowledge of the community becomes more widely known. As of 2020, the acronym has expanded to LGBTQQIAAP, which stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Ally, and Pansexual. The community is, however, mostly referred to as the LGBTQ+ community.