I’ve had Andrew Clover’s IE parasite detector installed on this site for quite a while. IE is notoriously susceptible to security flaws: it leaves itself open to all sorts of exploits and hacks by downloading and installing malicious software at the drop of a hat without a user’s knowledge. So in the interests of being a good net citizen–and to help debug this problem–I put it on sirens3.com a few days ago.
For the record: I have never, nor will I ever, put spyware, malware, or any other remotely shady piece of code on any website.
Today I got my first angry e-mail. The person accused me of installing a piece of spyware that I’ve never even heard of, which was actually just found by the parasite detection script. I explained, hopefully clearly, my position on spyware and that I will never be a party to its use; I haven’t received a response yet. But this negative feedback has put me in something of a moral bind: do I remove it from the site and let people who are infected go on their merry way, or do I do the ethical thing and leave it but risk having Sirens’ reputation damaged through similar misunderstandings?
Stating it like that, I think there’s only one choice.
