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Filed under: Security, Beta, Browsers

Web of Trust (WOT) extension now available for Google Chrome

It's starting, people. Big name browser addon developers are starting to show Google Chrome some love. So far, we've seen AdSweep, RoboForm, LastPass (a personal favorite), and a few others.

Web of Trust is now onboard as well, announcing the release of their extension today. I've written about WOT before -- it's a great addition for anyone wanting a bit of added security and safety when they browse. It's listed in my 6 Windows tools to prevent PC problems on your own and 14 useful Firefox addons.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with WOT, it's a kind of community-powered rating service. Users submit trust, privacy, reliability, and child safety scores for sites they visit. When you browse a site that's in the WOT database, you'll see the result of those ratings in easy-to-understand color coding. Green is good, red is bad, yellow means exercise caution.

If you happen on a particularly bad site, WOT will block it completely and display an alert page instead and give you the choice to bail out or disregard the warning and continue.

The WOT .crx extension for Chrome can be downloaded from the Wiki, though it's a bit hidden in all the text. Here's a direct download link to make things easier for you. Like other recent extensions, you'll need to be running Chrome's developer channel build to use WOT.

Filed under: Social Software, Search

Color coding Wikipedia entries based on author reputations

Wikipedia color codingYou can't trust everything you read on Wikipedia. Of course, the same is true of the newspaper or pretty much anything else you read. But since pretty much anyone can edit Wikipedia entries, readers really have to take entries with a grain of salt.

Computer engineering associate professor Luca de Alfaro at the University of California, Santa Cruz has developed a tool that help you relax your skeptical genes a bit. His program color-codes phrases in Wikipedia entries based on the author's reputation.

de Alfaro's program will analyze 40 million edits on Wikipedia's 2 million English language pages. The text on those pages in then colored in varying shades of orange. You should pull out the salt shaker before reading the deepest orange phrases.

How does it analyze an author's reputation? By determining how infrequently someone has bothered to change or correct your article. The longer your original text stays up, the more reputable you are deemed. This works great for a large site like Wikipedia where users from around the globe are regularly reading and updating. It probably wouldn't be nearly as effective on a smaller, less active wiki.

Right now there's a demo page up and running that has scanned 1,000 pages.

[via Boing Boing]

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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