Kiko, a Web 2.0-ish calendar company, recently sold itself on eBay. The buyer was Tucows, a company that you may know from their venerable and giant software download archives. Their CEO, Elliot Noss, says in his blog:
[There is] one big reason why we bought Kiko. We needed the functionality, quite desperately, inside of our email platform and it was going to take us a long time to get it. Especially at the level of sophistication Kiko has.
I’ve been getting unrequested messages from the eBay Developer Zone site over the last couple days about email address changes. I have a Developer Zone account, but I haven’t touched it for months if not longer. I sent an e-mail to them about it, but haven’t heard anything.
I just got yet another one of these and I think I see what’s up. Check out the registered email address. Somebody found a hole.
I don’t remember when I bookmarked this URL, and I don’t know how long this has been a problem or how long it will last (presumably not very long if word gets around), but I hereby present for your amusement the Magical Endlessly Redirecting eBay URL:
http://cgi1.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?MyEbayLogin
(You have to be signed in to see the MAGIC. Also, it’s only theoretically endless – your browser will eventually give up.)
Despite my periodic criticisms of eBay (1, 2, 3) I remain a devoted user. One thing it’s great for is selling things that require a lot of explanation – because, unlike with a tag sale or classified ad, you don’t have to repeat that explanation to every potential buyer. You write it up once and eBay does the rest.
I’m pretty tough on my hardware, so when I sell things the “explanation” is often a laundry list of defects.
Several weeks ago I ranted about eBay’s problems with phishing and some things I am surprised they aren’t doing in response. I’m afraid I’ve got a similar complaint today.
I’ve been searching for a present for someone (I can’t be more specific for risk of ruining the surprise!) and noticed that many of the matching items that were coming up in my searches were being offered by sellers in the UK. At least that’s what I assumed, because the prices were in Pounds sterling.
A lot of eBay phishing scams take you to websites that not only mimic the look of the site they’re impersonating, but actually contain live links to that site and even use images hosted there.
I just got one today: an email with the ironic subject line of “eBay Fraud Mediation Request.” I always take a look at these to see if the scammers have any new tricks. I even click on the links (being a Mac user emboldens me there). This one took me to a site called www.signin-e-bay.com (I’m omitting the full link that takes you to the scam pages). The page was full of links to real eBay pages and used images hosted on eBay servers.