Internet glossary

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Macro virus - A virus contained in and spread by a macro language program that supplements a word processed document or spread sheet. These are by far the most common type of viruses now, and they can easily be spread in attachments to e-mail. Never open an e-mail attachment without running anti-virus software first.

Mailbomb - Flood a single e-mail address with a high volume of mail. Used to retaliate against an individual or organization that has bothered the sender(s) in some way. Please note that the practice violates all ISP user agreements and wastes bandwidth and resources. Its effects go far beyond the annoyance to the addressee. Don't try it!

Maillist or Mailing List - A (usually automated) system that allows people to send e-mail to one address, whereupon their message is copied and sent to all of the other subscribers to the maillist. In this way, people who have many different kinds of e-mail access can participate in discussions together. Internet glossary.

Mashup - A web page or site made by automatically combining content from other sources, usually by using material available via RSS feeds and/or REST interfaces.

Megabyte - Technically speaking, a million bytes. In many cases the term means 1024 kilobytes, which is a more than an even million.

Meta - A prefix meaning "information about".

Metadata - Information about data, or more specifically, the descriptive information provided in meta tags in an HTML or XML document header about that document. Active efforts are ongoing to propose standards for machine and human readable metadata to be used with web resources to aid in resource discovery. Internet glossary.

Meta Tag - A specific kind of HTML tag that contains information not normally displayed to the user. Meta tags contan information about the page itself, hence the name ("meta" means "about this subject"). Typical uses of Meta tags are to include information for search engines to help them better categorize a page. You can see the Meta tags in a page if you view the pages' source code.

MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) - Originally a standard for defining the types of files attached to standard Internet mail messages. The MIME standard has come to be used in many situations where one cmputer programs needs to communicate with another program about what kind of file is being sent. For example, HTML files have a MIME-type of text/html, JPEG files are image/jpeg, etc. Internet glossary.

Mirror - Generally speaking, "to mirror" is to maintain an exact copy of something. Probably the most common use of the term on the Internet refers to "mirror sites" which are web sites, or FTP sites that maintain copies of material originated at another location, usually in order to provide more widespread access to the resource. For example, one site might create a library of software, and 5 other sites might maintain mirrors of that library.

Modem (MOdulator, DEModulator) - A device that connects a computer to a phone line. A telephone for a computer. A modem allows a computer to talk to other computers through the phone system. Basically, modems do for computers what a telephone does for humans. The maximum practical bandwidth using a modem over regular telephone lines is currently around 57,000 bps. Internet glossary.

MOO (Mud, Object Oriented) - One of several kinds of multi-user role-playing environments.

Mosaic - The first WWW browser that was available for the Macintosh, Windows and UNIX all with the same interface. Mosaic really started the popularity of the Web. The source-code to Mosaic was licensed by several companies and used to create many other web browsers. Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, in Illinois, USA. The first version was released in late 1993. Internet glossary.

MUD (Multi-User Dungeon or Dimension) - A (usually text-based) multi-user simulation environment. Some are purely for fun and flirting, others are used for serious software development, or education purposes and all thatlies in between. A significant feature of most MUDs is that users can create things that stay after they leave and which other users can interact within their absence, thus allowing a world to be built gradually and collectively.

MUSE (Multi-User Simulated Environment) - One kind of MUD - usually with little or no violence.