I wonder who they hire to look at these web sites and rate them? Maybe this site happened to fall into the hands of a Google-hater or Mac-hater for review? I don't know, but my own experience tells me that I were ever in the position to buy such a service, Fortinet would be at the bottom of the list.
One could argue that maybe the web site was hacked and showed porno for a short time and that's why it was rated the way it was. I would counter back that Fortinet has a responsibility not to slander employees of the organizations that use their service. They are a security firm and could, for porno and other "bad" tags, send the web site to a level 2 person before applying the tag. The analysis would go something like this:
1. Did the web site ever have a different rating? If so, it probably deserves a rating like "Hacked" which means that it temporarily goes somewhere "bad" but the person who went there did not intend to go somewhere "bad".
2. If they never saw the web site before, then can they infer anything by looking at the forensics (whois, archive.org, does anyone link to them, etc).
3. Then, if they do say it was "Hacked", come back regularly to see if the rating should change.
This lets the organization block "hacked" web sites, while not impugning the reputation of those who innocently go to those web sites.
Seems like something a responsible organization would do. I hope that Fortinet would consider such a course of action for themselves since I believe that they want to do the right thing (proactively try to apply responsible ratings) vs doing the make-a-quick-buck thing (report whatever they want and let the users tell them when they make a mistake, or hide behind "the organization is not supposed to take the ratings literally and should do their own investigation" - like that ever happens).
Update: after reporting the problem to Fortinet, they corrected it in less than an hour. That normally does not happen this quickly when I report errors to them, so maybe it was the fact that I publicly tweeted it to their Twitter address @Fortinet that got them to act quickly (hint for others out there who have rating problems). In either case, I appreciate their quick action, but wish that they acted, in my opinion, in a more responsible manner to start with.
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