Hashemian Blog Web Tools, Financial Markets, Technology Wednesday, March 26, 2008 eBay Bids Commission Junction and ValueClick Well  It was bound to happen. A few days ago I (and surely many other eBay affiliates) received an email from eBay announcing the unveiling of their very own affiliate site (dubbed eBay Partner Network) and their April 1st departure from Commission Junction, a ValueClick company. May 1st is the final cut-off date for the affiliates to complete the migration. That means many sites like this one will be busy porting their application over to the new eBay platform. That is specially true of sites (again, like this one) that leverage eBay Developer API's to search and display relevant eBay items on their pages. While I'm sure this is sad news for Commission Junction and ValueClick, I wonder what took eBay so long. This is a company with vast resources and talent and hardly in need of a middle-man company to handle their affiliate transactions. While eBay has been lurching, companies like Google and Amazon have gone on to produce numerous services geared towards affiliates and developers and have reaped the rewards. As for the affiliates both offer solid in-house products in the forms of Adsesne (Google) and Amazon Associates. Perhaps eBay's stalling is indicative of some internal synergy problems coupled with some recent high profile departures. Thankfully for eBay, their core auction business seems to have remained intact and it would provide a solid platform to launch some of these new initiatives. We'll see if eBay can finally catch up with the rest of the titans. Meanwhile many of us will be busy migrating our little affiliate sections to this new platform. More info on affiliates.ebay.com. ebay,amazon,google,adsense,affiliate programs,commission junction Labels: adsense, amazon, ebay, google <eBay Bids Commission Junction and ValueClick Well> // posted by rh 1 comments Tuesday, May 01, 2007 eBay Phishing  Phishing is not a new phenomenon. Just like anyone else I've been getting them for years now. They are so obvious that I just report them as spam without opening them and move on. I wonder when these guys will get tired of the usual impersonations and get on with more exciting trickeries. At least that'll keep the cat and mouse game more interesting. I'm tired of the garden variety names consisting of WaMu, Citibank, Chase, Amazon, and eBay. So today, just for fun, I decided to open up a couple of these emails and check them out. Both were purportedly from eBay bidders sending me messages about some product I hadn't listed on eBay, the last time I listed an item on eBay was some 4 years ago. Both were obviously sent from the same source. Inspecting the message sources I noticed that the links were actually crafted using the redirection facilities of a couple of big online names. One was via an AOL page, and the other via a Froogle page. Clicking on either whisked my browser to a page that looked uncannily like an eBay login page. I must admit that I was impressed. The login page was absolutely identical to that of eBay's. The dead giveaway was the URL line displayed in the browser, but I could see how someone would just overlook that oddity. The host portion was actually an IP address (instead of signin.ebay.com), and even a non-standard port number was specified; 82 instead of the missing port which would default to 80. The rest of the URL however bore a total resemblance to what you would normally see for the eBay login page. Switching from my IE 6 to Firefox 2, I was happy to see that the site had already been reported as a phishing site and Firefox immediately popped up a forgery warning, alerting me to the site's dubious status. Then I tried IE 7 and I was happy again to see that the site raised a red flag with that browser as well. Obviously the anti-phishing measures in those browsers were working, at least in this case. I then proceeded to enter some bogus login credentials and I got what I expected. Upon submitting the information, the page displayed a pathetic apology message about being sorry for the inconvenience and even tried to relieve any possible alarm by exclaiming: "Rest assured that your private data is in a safe place." No doubt my fake data was safely and warmly embraced by the phisher and no sooner had I submitted the page than it was being tested on the real eBay login screen by the miscreant. Of course the average absent-minded user would just grunt at the error message and then click on a now-legit link to go to the real eBay login page, mindless of the fact that his credentials had just "safely" fallen into the wrong hands. That user wouldn't even notice the suspicious signs in the error message itself, like "apparently" spelled with one "p" or the misuse of the word "costumers" instead of "customers". With all their technological prowess and creativity, don't these guys have a basic spellchecker to at least feign a professional apearance, er, appearance? phishing,ebay,firefox,ie,hackers,redirection hack Labels: ebay, firefox, hackers, phishing <eBay Phishing> // posted by rh 0 comments Sunday, November 19, 2006 PS3 and the culture of impatience  Judging by video games today, we have certainly come a long way. I remember my first video game. I must have been about 13 or 14 when we bought it at a tag sale. It was one of those consoles that you hooked up to the TV and it pretty much offered a crude black and white ping pong game that you could play against the console or an opponent sitting next to you. Plain joysticks slid two sticks up and down on the screen and a square ball bounced back and forth over a thick line bisecting the screen. I played that game countless times against a wall or on occasion, my sister. I think that console is still somewhere in the bowels of the house where my parents still live. My fascination with that game, or any video games for that matter, is no longer there but I can understand the excitement a kid (or an adult) might have for video games today, but only to a point. What amazes me the extent some people go to obtain a video game, a book, sports or concert tickets, or whatever these days. Are these items that important or that time-sensitive that require so much sacrifice? Perhaps I don't see the urgency the same way some people do. Take the PS3 as an example. Do people really need the console so bad that they are willing to camp out for days to be one of the first to have it? We all know what will happen to these video games in a not too distant future. The novelty will wear off and eventually they will end up in the attic or some storage room, just like my old video game. Then most likely they will find their way to a landfill. I was browsing eBay the other day and noticed a final bid of $15,000 for a PS3. Probably a bogus bid, but I think $3,000 was in line with how much a PS3 could fetch on eBay. To me, even the $600 retail price tag seemed outrageous. But then again, I guess I just don’t comprehend the exaggerated passion and zeal some people have for something as commonplace as a video game. I hope I never comprehend it. video games,ps3,playstation 3,sony,ebay Labels: ebay, video games <PS3 and the culture of impatience> // posted by rh 0 comments

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