Industry and academia have joined together in an open source-like initiative to stop spyware, an excellent idea indeed.
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 to make better choices about what they download on to their computers. We aim to become a central clearinghouse for research on badware and the bad actors who spread it, and to become a focal point for developing collaborative, community-minded approaches to stopping badware.
Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Oxford University’s Oxford Internet Institute are leading this initiative with the support of several prominent tech companies, including Google, Lenovo, and Sun Microsystems. Consumer Reports WebWatch is serving as an unpaid special advisor.
They are asking people to send in reports of spyware and to get involved. The more information they get, the more they can share. Thus, we can all work together to stop badware.