MyWOT

WOT (Web of trust) is firefox add-on for voting on security of sites and getting warnings. It was recommended in one blog, and I wanted to give it a try.

The idea of the software is quite nice, a community based votes on sites and warning system. The single fear is that it might happen to become a web tool of revenge between competing security advisors, companies and tool developers. Everyone in this market has strong opinions what is legitimate and what is not, and this might be imposed on users. I have yet to know what stoppers are in WOT to protect from this behavior.

That’s why I have tried to install the add-on and ultimately failed. First time it installed, my firefox hanged in the background on restart and I had to kill it. It looked like that the WOT is installed, however it was not activated and no ratings were given.

Thus I have decided to reinstall it. The reinstall went smooth, and an agreement screen appeared, where I confirmed that I want to participate. Sadly, nothing changed, and I still can’t rate anything, or even see ratings.

The funny thing is that to access forum and (probably) the support, you need to be a member, and that means you have to have an active working copy of WOT. Thus I am not sure I’ll want to try fixing WOT installation again.  Even if they might be caused by VISTA or firewall settings (no warnings though, and I assume in the 1mb download there is the site list).

Also, WOT settings page works interestingly, it looks like the apply button is disabled, but that’s might get caused by installation problems.

More information can be found at http://www.mywot.com.

UPDATE

Couple of restarts later the extension started to work. And props for mywot.com support. Will post the results of testing the extension later.