As we move into our 3rd year we would like to ruminate on some of the highlights through our years. Starting with 2006 coverage we will move forward to the present day.

Highlights from 2006

StopBadware attracted notice from the beginning. Launching the project combines the efforts of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Oxford University’s Oxford Internet Institute with Sun Microsystems, Lenovo, and Google.

Within the first year, StopBadware did not pull punches. Using the badware guidelines as a basis Stop BadWare was able to identify problems in both AOL 9.0 and Kazaa. AOL’s next release responded to many of the concerns in the StopBadware’s report.

In addition to those actions StopBadware has helped to monitor to spread of malignant software by testing and screening thousands of URLs.

We had good beginnings and have made substantial progress during the following years. Next week I will spotlight some news from 2007.

StopBadware is proud to announce the availability of Review Request History on our Stopbadware.org website. In an effort to be as transparent as possible with our data and status of the review request process, details of a specific review request can be found on our Stopbadware.org website.

On the Report Search page, all sites reported to our clearing house will display a new column called History. When a site owner clicks the black icon, a page displays a blue box at the top with the date the site was initially submitted into the clearinghouse.

Sites with a red icon contain additional appeals information. When a Review Request is initiated, another blue box appears displaying the date the appeal was created, the last time the appeal was updated, and the current status of the appeal.

The grey boxes represent correspondence from a site owner to us. The text of this correspondence is displayed only if the user specifically requests that this data be made public by checking a checkbox on our Review Request form. Correspondence from us to a site owner will either be encapsulated in an orange box or a green box depending upon the status of badware found on the site.

We’re very excited about this new functionality as it will allow site owners to see the status of their request as well as all correspondence back and forth. We have additional enhancements planned for this functionality as well, so stay tuned!