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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."
This sort of sounds like a recycled verisign sig. Unfortunatyl i doubt it would mean much to anyone at first. The majority of uasy 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."sers i encounter think you only get trojans from visitiing porn sites and spyware from the same.
Maybe this is a good thing. The interweb won't be the same.
People really don't care about their products being "certified". Go out to the store and buy any usb wifi adapter you can find. In the installation guy it tells you to make sure that you hit "continue anyway" when your computer warns you the drivers aren't certified. I don't think not wanting to hit continue anyway is a valid reason for returning your new adapter.
Way back in March, Slashdot carried an article saying Office Depot will only carry Windows XP approved software.
Don't get me wrong, I think spyware is bad. I also think a big company only supporting a few software titles (and probably charging a bit to do it) is bad too.
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. Otherwise, we will just further entrench big monopolies.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
... is only as strong as it weakest link.
It all boils down to:
- Do we trust AOL and Yahoo to be honest in this sort of thing.
- Do we trust that AOL and Yahoo have the technical capability to effectivelly detect both reported and not yet reported forms of spyware.
What will it cost?
.: Max Romantschuk
Sure, it is old hat, but one of these days, there might be a "(insert company name approved) software" program that actually holds its weight and is useful/consistent/trustworthy...
... perhaps AOL/Yahoo will do it better? ... of course, considering the advertising on Yahoo... I'm not going to count on it from them, but it might inspire a knock-off.
I'm not exactly saying infinite monkeys/infinite typewriters, here, I'm just saying we've only had one major company do this so far (as far as I know)
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Let me get this straight. One company decides what is malware and what isn't. Ask yourself this, would Sony's rootkit have been considered a safe download? I think you'd find the answer is yes. This isn't an objective panel of experts deciding what is safe or what isn't, it's a company and this inherently flawed.
I find it hard to believe that any company, regardless of their otherwise good intentions, would refuse money from a company as Sony. In short, it may work in stoping the small spyware vendor but this is not nearly enough.
Simon.
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).
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.