Monday, 7 August 2006

Traffic Diversion Sign Held by Google

We've seen companies wage legal wars against organisations and users accusing them of being spammers. The new venture of Google, teaming up with The Stop Badware Coalition (TSBC), is an effort to protect Internet users from skeptical looking web sites or another battle in the tech world? Google has begun alerting people whenever they click on a search result that may take them to a dangerous web site.

If a user attempts to access a web site via Google that TSBC has deemed dangerous, he or she will be routed to the group's general warning page, which provides a non-specific explanation that "The web site you attempted to visit has been reported to StopBadware.org as a site that hosts or distributes badware." Badware is the coalition's all-encompassing word for "software that fundamentally disregards a user's choice over how his or her computer will be used."

"We're not going to say don't do it," said John Palfrey, a professor at the Harvard Law School and one of the driving forces behind the effort. "What we want to do is basically give people some more information about what might happen to their computer."

"We very much encourage other search engines to join and use the data in the same way," he said. "We're quite open." Techies and end-users alike are encouraged to report other digital purveyors of malicious code to the TSBC. Think of it as a neighborhood-watch program for the Internet – with some heavy-duty muscle-support from Sun and Lenovo in addition to Google.

The question is whether Google and/or the TSBC are going to find themselves on the receiving end of some litigation from companies who don't much care for having their wares deemed bad. After all, we saw companies like Claria, formally eWallet, do it when it filed a libel suit against PCPitstop.com for deeming Claria's products as spyware. Claria also convinced McAfee, Microsoft, and Aluria to reclassify its products, which stirred up some controversy in the tech world.

One the other hand, Stopbadware.org said, "Hopefully this next step will bring us that much closer to fulfilling our mission of providing people with reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help them make better choices."