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What software can you trust?
Trust is a curious notion online. We often have people who are very suspicious of what we write, and then cheerfully accept something that a blog post they found in Google wrote about having seen a report of about an article found on a rumour site. Sorry if I sound bitter.
When it comes to software, it seems that the situation can be even worse, and I'm guilty of maybe being too fast to trust as well.
I started thinking this about a report on Coding Horror of a Google Mail backup utility that was programmed to email usernames and passwords back to the author.
There's no need to use the main email software for this so no one was any the wiser until a programmer did some research and noticed the outgoing email.
The good news is that this programmer changed the receiving Googlemail account and deleted the user details. Of course, we only have his word for it.
What can be done?
I'm not even sure if there is an answer here as it is so hard to be sure of where software has come from. It's one reason I've stuck with the Opera browser so long and put up with the lack of addons. Firefox Addons are great but I'm never completely sure of who has created them or what they do.
Having said that, when I submitted a widget to the Yahoo Widget Gallery, they did actually check the code. I know this because they rejected it (here comes the bitterness again though it was with good reason). So there are places you can trust.
So I think I'm going to stick with software from companies know. And keep my ear to the ground if I want to install something else. That is at least one advantage of Open Source, that people can check easily if they want to.
Posted by Tim Smith on March 11, 2008 | Permalink
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