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As you have noticed, ratings stopped loading ~45 minutes ago. Our hosting provider is apparently experiencing quite serious problems with their load balancers. They are working on the issue right now and hopefully the problem will be fixed shortly.

4:45 PM UTC: After an hour that felt like a week, we're finally back online. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience!

Apr 30th: It turns out the outage was caused by a software problem in one of the load balancers, which was fixed only after the malfunctioning unit was unplugged from the network. We have taken other precautions to make sure the downtime will be shorter should a similar situation occur in future.

Web 2.0 is really awesome. While I was sitting at my home computer late at night, Esa was being interviewed by Chris Heuer in Blogtropolus, the blogger's lounge at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The time difference is 10 hours, but I saw it live, and got to participate by chatting with 200 others watching remotely.

You can participate too! The fine folks at Ustream have cleverly posted all the interviews, and they will continue live video feeds for the rest of the Expo. Not only can you see our budding talk show star Esa, but you can hear from other industry "movers and shakers" about cool new apps and trends.

Watch Esa's star turn here.

Tim O`Reilly, founder and CEO of O`Reilly Media, kick-started Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. He emphasized the value of collective intelligence and pointed out that the journey of people-driven applications has just began. Couldn't agree more! Check the photos and follow the event online.

Version 3 of WOT has now been officially launched at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco! The new WOT Website Reputation Scorecard combines the collective power of millions of human eyes with data from automated blacklist services, such as phishing site listings. The scorecard also lets community members to share their valuable insights with others by entering their comments on websites and companies. Read the entire story.

I want to thank all WOT users and the beta team members for valuable contribution: ratings, comments, great ideas, and support that has made this all possible!

The second Web 2.0 Expo, co-produced by TechWeb and O'Reilly Media, is a conference and tradeshow for the rapidly growing group of companies categorized under the Web 2.0 buzz word. It gathers entrepreneurs, marketers, designers and VCs in San Francisco for the rest of the week.

WOT and Against Intuition are participating in the meeting for the first time this year. We are also one of the sponsors of the Bloggers Lounge, the social hub at the Web 2.0 Expo, where bloggers, journalists and entrepreneurs can meet and network. As a part of our Web 2.0 activities we will give out a press release on the new version of WOT:
WOT, people-driven Internet security, launches Website Reputation Scorecard.

If you happen to be in the neighborhood, meet us in the bloggers lounge!

In a recent 8 Falcons interview with Internet safety expert Jace Galloway, she stated that the biggest online threats to children are

• Electronic bullying
• Social networking sites
• Pornography
• Sexual predators
• Lack of knowledge

Did you know that for added protection you can tweak the warning level for child safety separately in the Settings section of the WOT add-on? Child safety is the rating which indicates whether the site contains age-inappropriate material of a sexual, hateful, or violent nature. For the highest level, click the + to fill in the warning bar and check Protect me if no rating is available. You can also set the system to block access to certain sites instead of merely giving a warning—very useful if you share your computer with kids.

8 falcons is a growing site dedicated to keeping children safe online. They provide instructional materials for parents and teachers, a blog, and podcasts and videos covering the latest online safety issues. Associated with them is What’s Your ISQ?, a site focused on security in the workplace. Both of these organizations use Web of Trust and have shared WOT with their site visitors. Please check out their sites.

The WOT development team is happy to announce the release of the WOT 3 beta version! This release introduces excellent new features and improvements, focused around the much anticipated Website Reputation Scorecard.

Our aim is to make WOT more useful and relevant by providing a means to reveal underlying data explaining a site’s rating, and allowing community members to leave and share comments. Take a look at these real life scorecards:

http://www.mywot.com/scorecard/ibm.com
http://www.mywot.com/scorecard/errorsafe.com
http://www.mywot.com/scorecard/spyware-secure.com

All of us at Web of Trust thank our enthusiastic beta testers who are valuable participants in the development of the next release of WOT. They help us continually improve WOT by sharing ideas, and leaving comments and feedback in our forum and directly to the developers.

According to the FBI’s annual report on Internet crime, men lost 67% more money than women in 2007, with an average loss of US $765.00. Over 206,000 complaints were made, a little less than in 2006, but total losses were at their highest level ever, nearly $240 million. Online auctions, non-delivery of merchandise or payment, and credit card fraud were among the most common complaints.

Only one in seven of the complaints ever found its way to law enforcement, but jurisdictional issues impeded investigations due to issues with multiple victims, multiple states/countries, and varying dollar loss thresholds used for initiating investigations. The vast majority of the bad guys (75% are men) were in contact with the complainant through either e-mail or via the web. So be careful out there!