GiveAwayOfTheDay at it again

Discussion in 'other software & services' started by acr1965, Dec 19, 2011.

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  1. acr1965

    acr1965 Registered Member

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    Giveawayoftheday.com has today's offer as Tipard DVD Creator from Tipard.com. The program's site is listed by hpHosts as a malware distribution site and has a Red WOT rating (mainly as spammers). GAOTD, for whatever reason, has apparently decided to censor posts pointing out the hpHosts or WOT rating both on the giveaway page comment section and in the GAOTD user forum.

    http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/tipard-dvd-creator/

    Here's the WOT and hpHosts pages for tipard.com
    http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/tipard.com

    http://hosts-file.net/default.asp?s=tipard.com

    hpHosts has tipard.com classified as "EMD" which stands for:

     
  2. guest

    guest Guest

    hpHosts is too sensitive, even KC SUMo website and servers are blocked by them (not a "false positive" - I contacted hpHosts devs).

    And WOT isn't meant to be 100% reliable.
     
  3. PJC

    PJC Very Frequent Poster

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    WOT isn't 100% reliable, but others aren't, too.
     
  4. guest

    guest Guest

    Yeah, and I prefer WOT over the alternatives, I got a good WOT activity score. :D
     
  5. ViVek

    ViVek Registered Member

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    WOT=Waste of time
     
  6. axial

    axial Registered Member

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    I stopped going to GAOTD because I kept getting NOD32 alerts about the favicons, e.g:
     

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  7. J_L

    J_L Registered Member

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    Test the program yourself before spreading anything. Check with VirusTotal, Anubis, Comodo Valkyrie, heck, even send to AV laboratories and see for yourself.

    GAOTD has the right (and probably a good reason) to manage their website like that.
     
  8. Hungry Man

    Hungry Man Registered Member

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    I like the concept of WOT, it's an interesting reputation based "web of trust" and the idea behind it is, imo, really cool.
     
  9. acr1965

    acr1965 Registered Member

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    GAOTD can (and do) manage their site however they choose. I never said it's not their right to do so. Nothing I have stated is untrue and I have the right to speak the truth. If GAOTD censors relevant posts, especially regarding giveaway programs from sites with serious accusations of malware distribution and phishing and even less serious, but still relevant, accusations of forum spamming then GAOTD opens the door for criricism. They don't get a free pass and I don't have to look the other way. Of course, you can do as you choose as well.
     
    Last edited: Dec 20, 2011
  10. PJC

    PJC Very Frequent Poster

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    What do you use instead of WOT?
    TrafficLight?
     
  11. How good is the Traffic Light?
     
  12. m00nbl00d

    m00nbl00d Registered Member

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    That's really shocking coming from you. :D You think that users shouldn't have to deal with security, yet you like a service that gives lots of credit to user ratings. :eek:

    Even, at least, one of the WOT's trusted sources seems to be too sensitive. That trusted source was already mentioned in this thread.

    If you open this link, you'll see it was last verified/updated in 23-04-2010. Way more than a year ago.

    That data was added to WOT in 10/01/2011, according to this link

    I mean, don't these folks verify the validity of a clean/dirty website more often? If they can't, perhaps they should reconsider about having that many partners. Sometimes more doesn't equal better.

    And, hpHosts, don't they verify them more often either? If they can't, maybe they shouldn't have that many entries in their services. Again, more isn't always better, and you prejudice small websites, that at some point could have been hacked. If these services don't come to realize it, they won't complain to services like WOT, etc.

    I used to like WOT's concept, but the more I came to know, the more I started to dislike this kind of service.
     
  13. dw426

    dw426 Registered Member

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    I agree that it's weird to see Hungry complimenting such a flawed service, lol. Users as a whole are stupid and biased, and WOT gives them a lot of power.
     
  14. guest

    guest Guest

    Lol, WOT is all about reputation (not to be confused with definitive classifications). There is no better way to measure reputation than the one applied by WOT.
     
  15. dw426

    dw426 Registered Member

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    Disagree. WOT can be gamed quite easily. We're not talking about the kind of reputation system IE Smartscreen employs.
     
  16. guest

    guest Guest

  17. Hungry Man

    Hungry Man Registered Member

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    I like the concept, not the implementation. If I were handling a reputation based system I would not give so much power to the user in that a user can write a comment and have it posted immediately or a user can have so much influence on a sites rating.

    This is essentially the main issue I see as well.

    Conceptually the idea of trust is really interesting and I would love to play with a system based on user trust similar to how WOT implements it. I think we pretty much agree that the implementation of WOT is flawed.

    With all systems based on trust there are "authorities" who decide what is to be trusted or distrusted. WOT makes the users the authorities, with the motivation for their participation being somewhat unclear though ideally altruistic - with Digital Certifications Systems PKI we have Certificate Authorities acting as the authorities, with their motivation being ideally altruistic but practically monetary.

    WOT has users audit themselves, CA's are usually audited by some other group. Both systems are flawed, as we've seen time and time again. But conceptually they're both really great ideas.

    If I were to implement a trust system I wouldn't use either system but it would be much closer to WOT than the CA.
     
  18. guest

    guest Guest

  19. Hungry Man

    Hungry Man Registered Member

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    I wish they'd go into more detail.
     
  20. guest

    guest Guest

    Did you read this link entirely? There are many details there.

    Or, as usual, did you read one paragraph and traced a conclusion? lol
     
  21. Hungry Man

    Hungry Man Registered Member

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    I'm reading about Bayesian inference right now.

    This is very interesting.

    Do you happen to know how MS handles reputation to stop malicious spamming of files across VMs or a botnet in order to boost reputation?
     
  22. guest

    guest Guest

    I don't. All I know is that, apart from their own mechanisms to gather the relevant data, they have agreements with these specialized data providers: http://www.microsoft.com/security/resources/providers.aspx
     
  23. Hungry Man

    Hungry Man Registered Member

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    Thanks for the link.

    From WOT.

    They give some information at least.
     
  24. guest

    guest Guest

    Well those details would be pretty much incomprehensible for the average user (mathematical formulas, sophisticated algorithms and the like). You can always contact the developers directly for more information at http://www.mywot.com/en/forum
     
  25. Hungry Man

    Hungry Man Registered Member

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