Ebay has announced a significant hike in the fees it charges sellers to list an item for sale. The most significant up front increase is the gallery picture increase from $0.25 to $0.35. While the gallery picture size is apparently to be increased, one would have to wonder what increase in cost at Ebay is causing the fee hikes. On the backend, they are increasing the base percentage of each sale taken from 5.25% in most cases to 8%, a significant hike. Ebay answers questions here, but the one they don’t really ever answer is why should the cost of delivery not be declining instead of increasing? They of course have employees and hardware, but the main commodity is electrons and the cost of delivering them should be declining.

Or does it. The FTC claims victory in shutting down 6 porn spammers. However, they cannot find most of the people involved. It is good that they go after the businesses advertised of course, but most of the actors in these plays just pop up tomorrow under a different business name. Good luck tracking it down and shutting it off. We can hope — foolish though we may be.

Techworld has an article here, detailing security flaws in both Apple iTunes, and Microsoft media player. The iTunes flaw affects both Windows and OSX versions and involves downloading malicious playlists. The MS Media player flaw involves the DRM (Digital Rights Management) subsystem that Microsoft created to force you to comply with the recording and movie industries draconian policies. So now it can not only stop you from backing up your legally own digital media, it can also give you Trojan horse that can totally compromise your PC, or even worse, your online banking.

Be sure to load any updates provided by both Apple and Microsoft if you do not wish to be affected by this.

IBM just announced [PDF] that they will allow free use of 500 of their patents in Open Source programming with no strings attached.

This is fantastic news, patents were set to be the next battleground that MS and co may drag Linux and OSS (Open Source Software) into, in order to potentially create more uncertainty about OSS . This move of donating free patent usage for OSS is likely to spread to other companies as they will not wish to be overshadowed by IBM’s support of Linux and OSS in general. IBM is actually in support of the EU software patent initiative, which makes sense because they have more IT patents then pretty much anybody. We can only hope that once they are making most of their money from OSS support contracts, they will see the light and join the fight to stop the big boys using patents to fight off the little boys. In the mean time, their large investment in OSS, and their massive patent portfolio might make people looking for a quick bit of cash think twice about picking OSS as a target. (SCO appears to be learning this lesson the hard way.)

(more…)

The recent Can-Spam laws in the US that require that spammers not use fake from addresses has backfired to some extent in that the spammers are now sending bulk mailings out several hours before registering the domain they were sent from. The result is that thousands of messages get stuck in mail queues waiting for DNS resolution that never comes, and all those mail servers send out DNS queries over and over trying to find out where to bounce the messages to. The result is excessive load on DNS servers all over, sometimes with DNS failure as the result.

This may ultimately backfire on the spammers in the long run as if the can spam’s no spoofing rule doesn’t work, they may end up with “opt in only” rules, where they can only spam people that indicate they want to receive the spam. In the meantime, ISP’s and hosting companies will have to set-up redundant DNS servers and up their bandwidth to cope with the deluge.

(more…)

In what must be a big surprise to everyone (not), another big flaw in IE has been found that effects even XP SP2 systems that can have you infected just by looking at a malicious web site. Secunia have upgraded its advisory to “extremely critical”, which is their strongest warning.
Read more about this nasty flaw at Techworld.

Also recently discovered are a couple of security flaws for older versions of Firefox, Mozilla and Thunderbird, so if your not running the most recent releases, you should update. The current versions of all apps are apparently unaffected by the flaws.

This article on TheRegister details the recent release of the MS anti-spyware software that Microsoft just bought from Giant and released as their own. As the Register guys point out, and as I have previously done here, it is somewhat ironic that MS might be planning to profit from a solution to a problem they mostly created in the first place.

A good read.