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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: Security, Windows, Browsers, Windows x64

AVG offers standalone realtime web page scanning for Firefox and IE

AVG's LinkScanner browser protection isn't a new offering - it's been part of their antivirus protection suite since the release of version 8. Today, however, they have decided to release LinkScanner as a stand-alone plugin so that you can add its protection to your browser even if you don't run AVG as your Windows antivirus app.

The concept is similar to Web of Trust (which was one of my Firefox addon picks last year) in that it's designed to provide trust alerts and block access to potentially harmful sites. The toolbar includes both a search protection feature and "active surf" protection.

Links within pages are scanned and given a green check if determined to be safe, yellow exclamations if caution is needed, or a red x if unsafe. With active surf enabled, site will be blocked even if accessed directly from the address bar - LinkScanner will instead present a large, red warning that you're treading on dangerous ground.

AVG claims that one in eight users of LinkScanner has already been protected from a malicious site. While it may not be your cup of tea, LinkScanner could be a good way to keep less savvy users you know out of trouble - your parents and friends, perhaps?

[via AppScout]

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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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