Do We Trust The Web of Trust?

Betrayed by a browser: The scandal surrounding the snooping ‘Web of Trust’ add-on for Chrome and Firefox proves that when it comes to the internet, there’s no escape from data collectors

An alleged 140 million internet users use the Web of Trust (WOT) browser add-on to protect them from data snoops, hackers and rip-off artists when they’re using the internet. However, the manufacturer (myWOT) was caught offering highly volatile user data on the data market: Lists of all the web addresses that millions of WOT users visited within a period of one month – In fact, the sample data set acquired by NDR reporters contained the detailed surfing histories of millions of WOT-users. An anonymous statement provided by the manufacturer claimed that it was just an accidental slip-up, and promised that the situation would be fixed.

Make Your Computers Boot Faster

If your long-serving computer keeps booting up at a slower speed, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to buy a new one. How you can more than double the boot-up speed?

It’s usually only a matter of time before the boot-up speed of a Windows computer starts dropping.

This often happens because of a magnetic hard drive that is gradually getting filled up. Such a hard drive may contain several tools of varying degrees of usefulness, which automatically boot up along with the operating system. This is combined with the everincreasing fragmentation of the system files.

Make Online Payments Secure

Online payment services can only score if they strike the right kind of balance between security and comfort. Using Germany as an example, we’ll tell you how you can do just that

Cash or card? Online payments aren’t as simple as payments that are made at the shop. When it comes to the virtual checkout counter, you have to choose from an average of five different payment procedures. In addition to classic offline methods such as those involving bills, direct debits and credit cards, the group also covers online payment systems such as PayPal, giropay and paydirekt. When it comes to being an intermediary between customers and retailers, these are the services that are more or less trustworthy. In addition to being both quick and easy to use, they do not force the buyer to hand payment data over to the online shop. We took a closer look at the most popular online payment services, and we’re going to point out the pros and cons. The table at the end of the article contains a compact expert assessment of the security and comfort levels.