With all the different dodgy web sites out there, and all the emails trying to encourage us to visit them, it is perhaps time to look at some web sites that can be used to check the trustworthiness of web sites.
The first (and frankly the main reason for this posting) is https://www.scamadviser.com (Scamadviser). Visit this site, enter a website address (such as www.port.ac.uk) and see their assessment of how trustworthy a site is.
It is certainly worth checking if you are about to hand over some money to a web site you have never used before. Just check the location bar at the top of your browser window :-
Different browsers and operating system all look different of course, but there should still be somewhere within your browser that shows the current location and it will look somewhat like the above.
In a similar way, the “Web of Trust” website (https://www.mywot.com) also allows you to check on the trustworthiness of a particular web site. It can even be added to the browser as an extension.
On a different subject, Snopes is a web site dedicated to checking on the validity of certain kinds of news stories – in particular those stories spread over social media. For instance the story about gangs throwing eggs at cars to obscure the windscreen has been shown to be false.