Online payment transaction fee’s have always been a big problem for small e-commerce start-ups. When it costs 2-5% as well as a largish per transaction fee, it’s something akin to walking a tightrope trying to maintain profitability, and when you sell cheap items, it gets even worse. Consider that a song online goes for around 99cents, and then wonder how you could sell them using your existing online payment charges.

Payment services like Paypal have proven that money isn’t really money until it’s withdrawn from their service, (thereby avoiding huge unnecessary fee’s), and look at how popular that has turned out. Right now, online payment services like Paypal are starting to make the direct credit card services look extremely bloated (charge wise) by comparison.

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Never one to miss a chance to have a jab at Microsoft, I came across this article on TheRegister.

Without getting into too much detail, (you can read the article yourself if you want copious amounts of detail.) It appears that the Microsoft Newham council win might have more to it then meets the eye. In fact, to put it quite bluntly, TheRegister poked holes all though the report that won MS the deal. It seems to have some very questionable aspects and assumptions. (I’m deliberately understating it.)

Like I said, read the article for yourself, at the very least, it’s good for a laugh.

Regards

Franki

Cyber Security Tips are available from the CERT folks. They are from the government and they are here to help you.

Well in this case they actually have a bunch of helpful information. They explain a lot of the common scams like phishing, how to avoid spam, and so forth.

CERT stands for: United States Computer Readiness Team by the way.

[Franki: It should be added that these guys are the same US government security folk that suggested that a possible alternative to IE security woes was to use a different browser.]

Google is our favorite search engine at htmlfixit.com for many many reasons. First it produces the most relevant search results. Second it has an entire Linux section. Third, even though it accepts paid ad’s (and pays us something for ads on a page here or there), they have not used pop-ups, they don’t compromise the result for people willing to pay, etc. Let us hope that third feature remains!

Anyway for those visiting today, they are celebrating a sixth birthday as is evident from the banner on the site. HTML fixit, in it’s second year now says: Happy Birthday and Many More!

This site has covered stupid computer related patents for some time now, so here is another one to add to the list.

In short, Microsoft has just been granted a patent for the practise of using the tab key to navigate down links on a web page.

My impression was that patents were supposed to be “non obvious” processes, and yet the simple and long-standing process of tabbing though the various fields of a window, when applied to a web site, suddenly merits a patent? When oh when is the patent office going to get some Tech knowledgeable reviewers? (Also they should stop trying to run a government service department at a profit.)

I’ll say it again, there is dumb, there is dumber, and then there is the US patent office. Their department logo should read “Helping Microsoft maintain it’s convicted predatory monopoly status.”

Read the story in detail at The Register.

Regards

Franki

California MCLE, CLE and Continuing Legal Education is a neat site, it has many many sample contracts. For example use the search feature to look for Microsoft and SCO, or find leases for real estate by Amazon.com. Fun to look around.

Not too long ago, I wrote about a case in the US where a guy was reading the e-mail of his clients, and was subsequently found to be innocent of any illegal activity. Well, the ruling has some even scarier implications and it’s those implications that have lead to a privacy group and the US Justice Department working toward the same end. The end in question, is of course stopping it from being legal for ISP’s to snoop on clients e-mail.

Wired news have covered this story in detail, so rather then duplicate their work, I’ll simply direct you to their article here.

Regards

Franki