January 25th, 2006
Badware coalition wants your horror stories
If you haven’t heard of "badware" before, you will now. A coalition, which includes sponsors Google, Lenovo and Sun Microsystems, and organizers the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK with an assist from the Consumer Reports’ WebWatch project, formed the Stop Badware Coalition to combat spyware and adware–which it dubs "badware":
There are several commonly recognized terms for specific kinds of badware - spyware, malware, and deceptive adware. Badware is malicious software that tracks your moves online and feeds that information back to shady marketing groups so that they can ambush you with targeted ads. If your every move online is checked by a pop-up ad, it’s highly likely that you, like 59 million Americans, have spyware or other malicious badware on your computer.
StopBadware.org is a "Neighborhood Watch" campaign aimed at fighting badware. We will seek to provide reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help consumers make better choices about what they download onto their computers. We aim to become a central clearinghouse for research on badware and the bad actors who spread it, and become a focal point for developing collaborative, community-minded approaches to stopping badware.
The coalition wants your badware horror stories, and will publicize the offenders. Suzi Turner at our Spyware Confidential is cracking the whip as well…
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
