Archive for Secutity
Beware of bidpax.com
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A few weeks ago Facebook carried an advertising campaign for a business called BidPax, a so-called penny auction site. Briefly, you pay BidPax for bids to be placed on their auctions. Each bid costs about $.70. When an auction starts, bidders use their pre-purchased bids. Each bid placed increases the price of the item being sold by one cent and adds 10 seconds to the duration of the auction.
Obviously, anyone who wins such an auction appears to get the item at a huge discount — provided they are prepared to forget that each one cent bid cost $.72. However, even allowing for this, the history of auctions on BidPax suggests that the winning bidder is indeed saving huge sums when compared with the recommended retail price of the items won.
Read More→Odd currency conversion from Paypal
Posted by: | CommentsI was about to buy an eBook about iPhone application development for $USD7.99
Luckily enough I happened to notice that the currency conversion to AUD was not only wrong, but out by a factor of 100! I was just a whisker away form sending the lucky seller over $1,000 AUD
It seems to be an issue with Paypal, rather than the specific site, although I cannot prove this assertion. If you’re buying on Paypal from Australia I strongly suggest that you check the amount you are about to send before clicking on “Pay Now”
Anyone else seen this?
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A hostile network like the wild west without a sheriff!
Posted by: | CommentsI am constantly amazed at the difficulty I have convincing clients/friends and others that connecting a PC to the internet is one of the most dangerous modern activities.
It seems that the most prevalent attitude is yes, but it won’t happen to me.
Well, the truth of the matter is it can, it will … and it probably already has!
Here’s a quote from a recent report on A Current Affair
Michael Roggenkamp is proof it can happen to anyone – he’s an academic specialising in information technology who had over $20,000 stolen from his savings account.
This, and hundreds of thousand more, was stolen with the help of a “trojan virus”, a simple software program that installs itself on your PC, collects your passwords, and sends them to the bad guys who then rob you blind. In this case, they were pretty greedy, emptying bank accounts over a few days. If they, the Bad Guys that is, were a bit more patient, they could probably skim funds from many accounts over periods of months or even years!
Anyway, take note of the title The Internet is a hostile network like the wild west without a sheriff ! which is the by-line of http://www.firewallguide.com/
Check it out, and make a genuine assessment of the risk that you face each time you fire up Internet Explorer.
