[time-nuts] Austron 2202

John Miles jmiles at pop.net
Tue Jan 16 16:44:41 EST 2007


The seller can see all the bidder information as usual; it's only other
users who are denied the information.  There is some good in it, to be sure:
you can buy (expensive) gifts without tipping your hand, and you no longer
have to feel guilty about bidding against your friends!

The trouble is, by their own admission, eBay lives and dies by community
self-policing, and you CANNOT improve security in a system by reducing
transparency and accountability.  All you can do is fool people into
believing that they are safer.  The "bad guys" will continue to do exactly
what they do now, which is to blast out millions of phishing attempts to
email addresses that usually don't even belong to eBay users.

Meanwhile, shill bidding is now as easy as creating a spare account using
your neighbor's WiFi access point and keeping it around for those occasions
when you feel like you could use a few extra bucks.  It is completely
undetectable by users, because no suspicious bidder-seller ID correlations
can be spotted.  If you believe eBay's automated tools are capable of the
necessary degree of awareness, I have a bridge for sale in the "Public
Infrastructure, Used" category, starting bid $1, no reserve.

A better way to achieve their stated goal would be for eBay to develop and
maintain their own best-of-breed email system, and publicly prohibit any and
all involvement of standard email from eBay's operations.  It should be very
easy to warn people against fraudulent eBay and PayPal messages: "If it's in
your email inbox, it's fake."

Spoof email only works because email is a horribly-broken communications
protocol that should never have been used for any commercial purposes.  But
hey, taking responsibility for user-to-user communications would only
improve eBay's security, their users' online safety, and the company's
public image.  It wouldn't eliminate off-eBay transactions, which is clearly
their *real* motivation in masking bidder IDs.  The condescension they are
showing is even more annoying than the actual policy.

-- john, KE5FX


-----Original Message-----
From: time-nuts-bounces at febo.com [mailto:time-nuts-bounces at febo.com]On
Behalf Of Didier Juges
Sent: Monday, January 15, 2007 4:56 PM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Austron 2202


Well John, I need to think about that one. If you click on the high
bidder, you do get quite a bit more information than with the old
system. Even though the information was available, it would have been
hard to put it together. With this new system, they give it in summary
form, so in that respect, it is an improvement and will help seller
evaluate bidders, and may also help the serious bidder to understand
better what he/she is up against, even though loosing the link to what
another bidder may have bought and what he paid for it is a problem.

I guess maybe eBay felt that putting that much information in summary
form for all to see was a little bit too much (if it had not been
anonymous) and would have made many buyers uneasy.

Do you know if the seller has more information about the bidders than
what is available to other users, under this new system?

So, there is some good and some bad, I am not sure which outweighs the
other at the moment...

Didier KO4BB


John Miles wrote:
> eBay has a zillion different servers; they aren't all updated at once for
> obvious reasons.  Also, their changes tend to be rolled in incrementally
as
> new listings appear.
>
> My understanding is that within a week or two, unless eBay management
comes
> to their senses, the list of bidders in all auctions will look like this:
> http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190069406071
>
> -- john, KE5FX
>
>


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