“Warning about ‘dangerous’ websites”

“WoT” = “Web of Trust” wants to censor your surfing!

Additional note about McAfee Site Advisor (below)

There are more or less good tools, such as the add-on “WoT” (“Web of Trust” – better: “Web of Trouble”) for Firefox, Google Chrome. Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari, that warn about dangerous websites – i.e., such where you could catch a virus, which spy in your computer, attempt “phishing” (finding out accounts and passwords) or also in betraying ways try to make you sign for an unwanted paid subscription. In one world: Internet criminality.

Since quite some time WoT is, however, abused for censorship! Because it is also made to “warn” about website that contain undesired information and opinion, not the least such which deal with alternative medicine. These are partly classified under the category “Child safety”! It is really a heavy abuse when alternative medicine is classified as harmful for children!!!! In that way such basically good applications are themselves abused to limit personal freedom and for brainwashing, and that maybe by certain authorities and pharma organizations (that may have a number of agents “rating” in WoT)… The only “danger” is here that such sites may reduce profits and power of certain lobbies and big companies… Bad health is, after all, a real gold mine for them!

An honest application of this kind only warns about unsafe sites, but not because the content doesn’t fit some persons narrow minds…

A few examples of such sites are:
such that inform about the use of sodium chlorite NaClO2 (not to be confused with sodium chloride NaCl!) as a remedy (search under “MMS” and “Jim Humble”),
such that inform about homeopathy and herbal cures against borreliosis.

There are many more such websites. Here you can, therefore, without any risk click on so that you can read what they obviously don’t want you to know… The “warning” is only a dirty trick to lead surfers around by their noses and scare them off.

Everyone must be free to form his or her own opinion about such sites and, for that purpose, be allowed to see the contents. Otherwise this boils down to manipulating mind control in a way that reminds of criminal conditions, as they were or still are in certain communist countries!

A recommendation
Deactivate or uninstall WoT and instead install one (or two, which also works) of the far better applications that DO NOT want to censor: McAfee Site Advisor, Calling ID, Link Extend, Browser Defender, M86 Secure Browsing (earlier Finjan Secure Browsing), Norton Safe Web Lite, Site Information Tool, Dr. Web Link Checker, AVG LinkScanner or Traffic Light (the last regrettably doesn’t function fully unless BitDefender’s antivirus program is also installed). Some antivirus programs also have their own add-ons for various browsers that, however, work only with the corresponding full program.

So far, these applications are not trying to censor your browsing only because some narrow-minded hypocrites regard certain websites as not being serious or even as being unscientific and want to dictate for us, which we are allowed to visit and which not. The recommended applications ONLY warn about unsafe sites, as it should be.

If, however, you do want to use WoT, the following settings are highly recommended – description for Firefox, analogously in other browsers. In the Firefox menu, click Tools > Add-ons > Extensions and go to WoT. When there, click Options and then on the page that appears:

Ratings: mark „Vendor reliability“ and „Privacy“, but unmark „Child safety“.
Warnings: mark „Moderate“ (or, maybe, “Normal”).
Searching: mark „Lowest rating“, „Ignore child safety…“, „Show only negative ratings“ and all entries under „Select when ratings are shown:“
Popup: don’t mark anything! (Otherwise you will have the annoying popup window also at false alarms.)
Advanced: mark „Login automatically…“ and „Recreate the toolbar…“ but no other entries.

Thus you will, when searching in Google or in the WoT toolbar, have the colored WoT rings only when it gives negative ratings, but no screen filling popups.

You can additionally install 1-3 of the above mentioned browser protection applications in parallel, such as Link Extend, McAfee Site Advisor and/or Calling ID. Then you can comfortably compare the indications and more easily recognize false alarms.

This way, WoT can in a certain sense even be useful! If ONLY WoT has a red mark an none of the other browser protection applications, I take it that there is something potentially interesting to see!

Additional note about McAfee Site Advisor

I long had the McAfee Site Advisor that to me appeared just as “useful” as WoT ... i.e., not really useful, bit in a similar manner a bit informative.

I have another program that I keep running all the time: MAXA Cookie manager. It is a very good program that watches cookies and automatically deletes those that are not in a whitelist.

Then I once in the beginning of 2014 discovered that MAXA began to regularly delete some 550 cookies! Apparently all adware. What was going on?

I searched and tried... until I found out that the spook ended when I deactivated the McAfee Site Advisor.

So I uninstalled that Add-on (or rather Ad-on...) from my Firefox.