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The Pure Software Act of 2006
lurker412 writes "The MIT Technology Review features a proposal by Simson Garfinkel to provide honest labels on software in the same way that the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 forced manufacturers of foods and drugs to divulge the contents of their products. The proposal targets adware, spyware and other unsavory practices. It suggests that by requiring software manufacturers to include clear icons for each nasty behavior--rather than hide the disclosures in seldom read or understood click-through SLAs--end users will be better protected. Garfinkel specifically lists eight types of sneaky behavior, but the list is not meant to be exhaustive."
Anyone see the name as "Simon and Garfunkle"?
I'll go back to work now...
How do they plan on labeling software solely distributed over the internet? I'd venture to say that 90% of the spyware that's out there comes through download-only software (DivX, peer to peer software, etc...).
Spyware is a big problem which isn't Window's fault. Because windows is the biggest, it gets targetted by spyware. You can still right a program which uses 100% CPU Usage and makes everything really slow,etc. for another OS, no matter how secure. Unfortunetly, its targeted at windows. My friend thought that windows XP was horrible because it was running so slow. On a 2ghz, it would take 5 minutes to load IE. I showed him Ad-Aware from lavasoft. It detected 589 spyware objects, quite a few of them different. I found that a big problem with spyware, is not only the spying, yet the fact that it slows your system to a hault. If this works, and makes spyware go away, or atleast well known spyware label itself (such as gator), I will rejoice.
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"Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions." -- G. K. Chesterton
The Pure Software Act of 2006
100 years ago, Congress passed a law requiring honest labeling of food and drugs. Now the time has come to do the same for software.
By Simson Garfinkel
The Net Effect
April 7, 2004
Spyware is the scourge of desktop computing. Yes, computer worms and viruses cause billions of dollars in damage every year. But spyware--programs that either record your actions for later retrieval or that automatically report on your actions over the Internet--combines commerce and deception in ways that most of us find morally repugnant.
Worms and viruses are obviously up to no good: these programs are written by miscreants and released into the wild for no purpose other than wreaking havoc. But most spyware is authored by law-abiding companies, which trick people into installing the programs onto their own computers. Some spyware is also sold for the explicit purpose of helping spouses to spy on their partners, parents to spy on their children, and employers to spy on their workers. Such programs cause computers to betray the trust of their users.
Until now, the computer industry has focused on technical means to control the plague of spyware. Search-and-destroy programs such as Ad-Aware will scan your computer for known spyware, tracking cookies, and other items that might compromise your privacy. Once identified, the offending items can be quarantined or destroyed. Firewall programs like ZoneAlarm takes a different approach: they don't stop the spyware from collecting data, but they prevent the programs from transmitting your personal information out over the Internet.
But there is another way to fight spyware--an approach that would work because the authors are legitimate organizations. Congress could pass legislation requiring that software distributed in the United States come with product labels that would reveal to consumers specific functions built into the programs. Such legislation would likely have the same kind of pro-consumer results as the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906--the legislation that is responsible for today's labels on food and drugs.
The Art of Deception
Mandatory software labeling is a good idea because the fundamental problem with spyware is not the data collection itself, but the act of deception. Indeed, many of the things that spyware does are done also by non-spyware programs. Google's Toolbar for Internet Explorer, for example, reports back to Google which website you are looking at so that the toolbar can display the site's "page rank." But Google goes out of its way to disclose this feature--when you install the program, Google makes you decide whether you want to have your data sent back or not. "Please read this carefully," says the Toolbar's license agreement, "it's not the usual yada yada."
Spyware, on the other hand, goes out of its way to hide its true purpose. One spyware program claims to automatically set your computer's clock from the atomic clock operated by the U.S. Naval Observatory. Another program displays weather reports customized for your area. Alas, both of these programs also display pop-up advertisements when you go to particular websites. (Some software vendors insist that programs that only display advertisements are not spyware, per se, but rather something called adware, because they display advertisements. Most users don't care about this distinction.)
Some of these programs hide themselves by not displaying icons when they run and even removing themselves from the list of programs that are running on your computer. I've heard of programs that list themselves in the Microsoft Windows Add/Remove control panel--but when you go to remove them, they don't actually remove themselves, they just make themselves invisible. Sneaky.
Yet despite this duplicity, most spyware and adware programs aren't breaking any U.S. law. That's because many of these programs disclose what they do and then get the user's explicit consent. They do this with something that's called a click-wr