My state-wide teaching tour continues next Monday, March 26, 2012, 6:30 p.m. at the Bethany Library in Bethany, OK.
My class, “Fight the Internet Bad Guys and Win!” will teach you how to defeat the Internet bad guys who want to mess with your life. The class is free, one night only, and will last about 90 minutes. If you use a computer, you should attend. Visit my website for more details.
One section of the class covers safe Internet browsing, demonstrating that what you don’t click on is just as important as what you do. The Internet is crawling with websites run by scammers, who want to trick you into clicking on things that lead to misery. Bogus emails clogging inboxes are also trying to trick people into falling for the scammer’s latest scheme.
Using a high-quality, properly configured browser like Firefox is the first step in protecting your Web browsing experience. Safe surfing can also be enhanced with the addition of a website rating tool that will warn you if you are about to visit a potentially dangerous website. My favorite tool of this type is called Web of Trust.
Web of Trust (WOT) is a free security addon for your browser, and is designed to warn you before you interact with a risky website, keeping you safe from online scams, identity theft, spyware, spam, viruses and unreliable shopping sites. WOT is compatible with Firefox and Internet Explorer, with limited-feature versions available for Opera and Safari. Download and install WOT at www.mywot.com.
Web of Trust works by allowing WOT users to rate websites that they visit. Ratings are gathered in four areas: trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety. Users give ratings in each category from dark red (the worst rating) to dark green (the best rating. The ratings are then analyzed and compiled, and an overall rating is given to the website. When visiting a website, these ratings show up as a small symbol in the browsers toolbar. The ratings are also visible in other very useful places, such as Google search results and embedded email links. There are currently around 30 million WOT users and over 34 million websites have been rated.
One example that I came across demonstrated very clearly just how useful a service Web of Trust can be; that example was the rip-off website FinallyFast.com.
Perhaps you’ve seen the TV commercials for FinallyFast.com; I know that I have, as they have aired on most all major networks. They feature regular-looking computer users complaining about poor computer performance. The first red flag that I noticed, signaling that something wasn’t on the up-and-up, was the Apple Macintosh computer that was displaying a Windows “blue screen of death” error message. Perhaps that’s nitpicking, but the ad does flash a notice on the screen stating that the website “is for PC computers only.” The commercial goes on to encourage folks to visit FinallyFast.com and run a bunch of “free” PC repair tools, so that their computer can “run like new.” Joyful computer users (including one lady using a Mac) are shown exclaiming things like, “Dude! It’s finally fast! FinallyFast.com!”
If it’s true that “there’s a sucker born every minute,” then many a sucker has fallen for FinallyFast’s cleverly contrived con job. After paying for and installing the “activated” FinallyFast software (a requirement if true “repairs” are to be made), thousands of PC users have been horrified to learn that the software actually installs multiple viruses and spyware programs. Stories of mysterious, recurring and hard-to-remove FinallyFast credit card charges abound.
However, if these same people had been using Web of Trust, they would have been greeted with a giant warning message when trying to visit the FinallyFast website. The same warning message appears when visiting FinallyFast’s related websites, FastAtLast.com and Ascentive.com, as well as other scam websites like PCMatic.com, MyFasterPC.com, MaxMySpeed.com, SpeedUpMyComputer.net and PCPerformanceClinic.com. Many wasted dollars could have been saved and headaches avoided.
Is a sucker really born every minute? Maybe so, but they can keep themselves out of trouble by using Web of Trust. I recommend it; trust me.