Time to vote, and the Firefox spyware that wasn't...

Some of you may know that I'm the moderator of the security section for .NET magazine - a great little mag. Well, it's time for their annual "Best of the Net" competition so you need to go and vote for the best security site / product / whatever. Some familiar faces there, including Webroot, GRC.com and my good pal Bill P with Winpatrol.

And as for the Firefox thing? Well, for some reason rumours have been flying around that an Antiphishing toolbar for Firefox "contains spyware". Now, with a bit of digging, the source of these rumours seemed to be (amazingly) the Netcraft toolbar. Problem is, these rumours have been flying around since as far back as May - so I'm a little puzzled as to why this has suddenly come up again. With that in mind, check out this writeup over at Spywareguide.com. I really can't see what all the fuss is about, but at first glance it looks like the Toolbar terms and conditions weren't clear enough.

However - is that really true? Reading through it made perfect sense to me. Could the real issue here be that (horror of horrors) the end-user didn't read the terms correctly? Or is the problem a combination of both? Remember, we're not talking about some six-thousand word EULA written in Japanese here...it's a collection of fairly short bullet points.

I find this vaguely worrying for all concerned - especially when you remember about things like this. Of course, licences are all over the place at the moment - what with Javacool's app hitting the shelves (so to speak) and FaceTime's own pet project in the pipeline. Now, the demand for these tools must have been out there for them to have been created. But is the issue here that people are becoming less willing to read the licences, or that they need more help to cope with the blizzard of techical (and, more likely, incredibly fictional) terms used in the worst of the worst? In the case of the Netcraft Toolbar, I'd say the problem is definitely seeing certain "trigger" keywords and immediately fearing the worst (banner ad for example, even though this is clearly talking about the website rather than the toolbar. Ever placed a banner ad on a toolbar? No? Exactly). People jump to conclusions, and a witch-hunt begins.

And yet...we know from experience that many (well, most) EULAs suck, big time. Maybe years of awful clauses and heaps of jibber-jabber have attritioned the end-user to the weary-hearted stage of "don't really care anymore".

That would be a damn shame.