Consumer Friendly Downloads?

* * Beatles-Beatles writes to tell us Yahoo and AOL will be offering a new anti-spyware initiative to begin next year. The new initiative will allow vendors to get their software "certified" as easy to remove and not containing spyware. From the article: "It creates market incentives that will change how consumers see software," said Doug Leeds, Yahoo's vice president for product justice. Backers of the initiative believe that consumers wouldn't benefit much from a system in which good products simply display seals of approval. "They are looking for us to do it for them," Leeds said."

Comments

Problem: Humans suck.

[mister_llah]

I'd really prefer to see some kind of meta-moderated system by users to rate software as clear of spyware as it would give small vendors more of a chance.

Well, I don't know about that, those systems can cause problems, too.

I have come across a few very suspicious programs on download.com (where they use a rating system on satisfaction with the program) ... that I skimmed through the comments on. There seems to be a way to generate user accounts... so people put programs out with trojan horses, made a bunch of fake accounts, and upped the ratings... you had to really skim to see the 2 or 3 users who had the "THIS IS MALWARE" messages. ... now, this can be avoided, sure, but it will always be a problem... such a system, if disrupted once, would lose a good deal of credibility.

Also... there is the problem of trolls, plants (that is, if the spyware pals decide to just sit and make new accounts and do it all manually), and kiddies.

===

Perhaps I am too much the cynic?

It *could* work...

It would have to be *really* well thought out and programmed. It would also need to get a good following rather quickly and remain free.

Submitter is a link spammer, does /. care?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only person who has noticed the numerous stories that get posted by *--Beatles-Beatles? Am I also the only person who has noticed that the link used in is name is a constantly changing URL (depending on the story) with pointers to various scammy sites? Is it not obvious what he's doing? He's using the awesome PageRank of slashdot do promote his sites based on searches that have the word Beatles in them.

It's a small price to pay for free advertising. Find a story, summarize it in 5 minutes, post to slashdot, and get a pagerank boost that advertisers would pay hundreds (or maybe thousands) for. (Text links on high-ranking sites is big business - just ask oreilly).

Slashdot should at least put a ref=nofollow in the links to submitters (or better yet, only link the submitter's name to his/her user page).

Small business owners will pay, though.

[lwagner]

Way back in March, Slashdot carried an article saying Office Depot will only carry Windows XP approved software. I also think a big company only supporting a few software titles (and probably charging a bit to do it) is bad too.

Ah, my friend, but you forget that is for for small business owners such as myself who couldn't care less about the variety of software -- we just want our stuff to work. Do you know how much time I spend playing "IT Guy" for our company? It is truly not fun.

Give us our MS-Office, our devices that plug in correctly, our specialized apps, and just make everything work. We'll pay extra.

Download.com

[goraknotsteve]

I don't know if I'm being simplistic about it but I've tended to go with www.download.com for anything extra I need - like an avi converter or free audio editor package like audacity. Judge the download by other peoples reviews as to whether it does the job without installing any nasties. GnS