Posted via web from Falling Toward Apotheosis

My exposure to computers prior to that time had been hanging out in the local Radio Shack while the long-suffering employees kindly let me tinker with the TRS-80s. In fact, I’d go so far as to check out books on programming from the local library and then bring them with me to Radio Shack to experiment. The Atari 2600 was one of the first pieces of computer technology that entered my home (my father’s TI-58C notwithstanding)—and in fact in those days Atari even marketed it as the “Atari 2060 VCS” for “Video Computer System.”

I specifically remember finding the hidden easter egg in Adventure in the early eighties (all on my own—there was no Gamefaq or Wikipedia in those days) seeing the programmer’s signature and desperately trying to figure out if there was a way to access the source code or any other hidden features through that screen. In fact I probably spent more time playing around in that one hidden room to look for additional secrets than I did actually playing the game.

The fact is that it’s never been only about hardware tinkering. Sure, I had fun hacking around inside PCs, building a Z80 system from scratch, and so forth, but there was also plenty of room for software tinkering even back then, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with how physically open the computers or other devices were.

Today these opportunities have only expanded, with many more software development platforms available, more secrets to discover, and more opportunities to share and collaborate on findings. Back in 2007 when I was fiddling with my first-generation iPhone and trying to get it unlocked to work up here in the Great White North, I learned more about the iPhone OS than I ever would have with a screwdriver and soldering iron.

I don’t care how many screws you put into the casing of any modern device—there’s nothing in there that’s much worth looking at any more anyway, and that’s not Apple’s fault, but rather the inevitable result of progress. I have great respect for Cory Doctorow, but in this case he’s tilting at windmills; to put the power and capabilities of an iPad into tinkerable hardware it would likely end up being the size of a large suitcase, at best. The Makers among us may be okay with that, but I’ll pass—I’ve already had a Compaq Portable and really have no desire to return to those halcyon days.

Data transaction security in MobileMe’s web apps is based upon authenticated handling of JSON data exchanges between the self contained JavaScript client apps and Apple’s cloud, rather than the SSL web page encryption used by HTTPS. The only real web pages MobileMe exchanges with the server are the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files that make up the application, which have no need for SSL encryption following the initial user authentication. This has caused some unnecessary panic among web users who have equated their browser’s SSL lock icon with web security. And of course, Internet email is not a secured medium anyway once it leaves your server.

Of course, whenever a comment like this is made, you can rest assured that there will be more than a few people who will be eager to check it out—in many cases simply out of idle curiosity.

Several posts in the comments to the above article (mine included) make the situation quite clear: The data exchanges between the MobileMe back-end and the user’s browser are definitely not in any way encrypted. Data transactions travel “in the clear.”

I won’t bother boring anybody with the details: Jens Alfke and Thomas Robinson have both already done an excellent job of clarifying the actual facts involved. However, despite this, the spreading of misinformation seems to continue largely unabated. In comments and responses to these posts, “Prince McLean” backpedals slightly in claiming that he never claimed that MobileMe was actually encrypting data, but that he was rather merely referring to the authentication aspect of the JSON apps that would prevent somebody from spoofing a MobileMe server. However, in the original article he goes on to say:

If Apple applied SSL encryption in the browser, it would only slow down every data exchange without really improving security, and instead only provide pundits with a false sense of security that distracts from real security threats.

The suggestion therefore obviously being that the JSON methodology he discusses is somehow better than SSL encryption, since SSL would not really do anything about “improving security.”

Statements such as these would clearly lead most readers to believe that MobileMe is in fact securing their data. Certainly this was the impression that I was left with on an initial read, and I was obviously not alone in this as I originally found the article linked on Daring Fireball, where John Gruber was initially under the same impression.

More importantly that this, however, is the new flavour of misinformation that now seems to have spread as a follow-up. In reading the responses from “Prince McLean” it is apparent that his tactics have changed to suggesting that his comments about SSL not providing any enhanced security are based upon his feeling that there really is no need to encrypt traffic on the Internet—that most “security experts” are really just evil sheisters promoting their own agendas by making us believe that sending confidential information around unencrypted is somehow a bad thing.

For instance, in a comment made by McLean in a response to Jens Alfke’s post, he states:

You also would never say your credit card number over the phone when ordering a pizza because somebody might be listening into your unencrypted phone conversation. Right.

Of course, if somebody has the capacity to sniff your local network traffic, you have already been compromised. They’re probably also going through your house taking DNA samples so they can clone you and replace you with a fake you.

The point that he seems to be missing here is that SSL encrypts your data in transit before it leaves your computer. The suggestion made elsewhere that Internet e-mail is inherently insecure anyway holds no water, since there’s a world of difference between sniffing SMTP sessions at a backbone router and doing it between your computer and the server.

The real goal of data security in this case is to secure the session between the end-user device and the destination server. This is the one area in which traffic is most vulnerable to interception and eavesdropping.

While one can acknowledge that the average user at home may be relatively unaffected by this (provided they’re using a properly WEP or WPA-secured wireless network or a wired connection) the whole argument breaks down significantly when dealing with the mobile user hopping across WiFi access points. Most public WiFi hotspots are unprotected, and therefore any hacker with any number of easily-available tools can sit in the local Starbucks and sniff away at all the data travelling unencrypted over-the-air.

WEP and WPA exist for a reason, but these unfortunately get in the way of most public hotspots by requiring a password to be used, so more often than not no encryption is used at all in these locations.

This is further complicated by the proliferation of “free” WiFi hotspots out there that are actually being run independently, and some are even downright honeypots for intercepting and capturing whatever data they can. I have actually investigated a few of these, and while I’d be digressing by going into detail, the short version is that you should avoid any hotspot with a name like “Free Public Wi-Fi Access” like the plague.

As for real vs perceived threats, the balance is in creating a false sense of security versus recognizing that there really is no security present in this case. Suggesting with a bunch of bafflegab that the JSON exchanges are as secure as an SSL connection is definitely providing a false sense of security, luring the user into assuming that the transactions between the browser and MobileMe servers are every bit as secure as those with an HTTPS service like GMail, when in fact this is patently untrue.

Now, for most of the transactions that I would engage in via a web browser in a public location, I probably don’t care all that much, but at the same time it’s important that people understand that sending out e-mails that might contain sensitive information is a bad idea in these situations. Educating people on the risks of such things is never a bad thing, while spreading apologist propaganda that leads people to believe their data is secure when it’s obviously not goes much too far in the opposing direction.

(Disclaimer: I am a security consultant as part of my day job. I write for iLounge as a part-time hobby. My full-time job is doing IT Consulting for major corporations and Canadian Federal Government agencies. My credentials include discovering one of the only security flaws ever found in Novell’s GroupWise product).

Even the recent improvements to the web mail and address book interface were met with mixed reviews, with the general feeling being that it was about time Apple caught up with the other technology out there.

However, I think that many people are really missing the point of what .Mac is and what it’s intended to be. Each of the .Mac services, taken separately, don’t necessarily have much to recommend them…. There are certainly better e-mail services out there, better online storage services, better web hosting services, and so forth. However, few of these “solutions” integrate all of those services together in the way that .Mac does.

More to the point, few of these other solutions can offer such an insanely easy turnkey solution for the average Mac user. For one relatively low annual fee, one gets all of the possible online services that the average user would need, rolled up into one nice neat package that “just works” for the most part with the technology that is already built in to Mac OS X.

.Mac’s detractors often quote how much more cheaply they can get e-mail services or web hosting from other providers. GMail seems to be a favourite point for these folks to quote how there is a wonderful free solution out there for both e-mail and file storage, and there’s therefore no reason anybody should ever pay for e-mail.

Now, I for one firmly believe in paying for any service that I would rely on, and for me, e-mail is absolutely mission critical, period. I do not believe that Google is as altruistic an organization as many would want to believe, and therefore have no desire to stake my e-mail on a “free” service. Certainly, Apple’s not necessarily any better, but at least I know what they’re getting out of providing me with e-mail service: $99/year. Apple’s motives are clear, as is the likelihood that they will continue providing this service as long as enough people are paying for it.

Certainly, there are other good inexpensive commercial solutions for e-mail, web hosting, and online storage, but these ultimately end up being standalone services, and one has to shop around a bit to find out what is going to work best, and play the game of trying to integrate these services both into the Mac OS experience, and with each other.

It’s not that these aren’t good services—they are, but to compare them to what .Mac offers is actually somewhat unfair. .Mac is really not trying to be all things to all people, but is rather a basic solution for the average Mac user who wants one-stop shopping for a place to get e-mail and build a few snazzy web pages to share a few pictures of the kids.

It’s an unfair comparison to price out individual services and then try to suggest that you can get the same functionality as .Mac for less money, because you’re still missing a lot of the integration by doing so, both between the services themselves, but more importantly between OS X and the online world.

As I said in a previous post, I switched to a Mac to simplify my life. I never even really thought about building web pages until iWeb, as the idea generally seemed to be not worth the time and trouble. Today, however, the tools I use all have a “Publish to .Mac” button or menu option tucked conveniently within. Build a web page, push a button, walk away. This is how technology is supposed to work… Quietly, in the background, and with a minimum of fuss in order to achieve a desired result.

These same applications will export web pages to a directory structure, of course, but without .Mac one would still need to get those up onto a server somehow. Granted it’s a trivial experience for somebody with a bit of technical knowledge, but it still takes more time and fussing around to do, and even designing an automator workflow to do it is still an extra step that one shouldn’t need to bother taking when a solution is there that already does the job.

Again, however, this is me speaking as a technology person, who would know how to do this… In my case, it’s mostly about efficiency of time, and not really wanting to be bothered complicating my world when I can just get one-button publishing instead. However, looking at the other person I live with, who is not technology-savvy, this would be a much more cumbersome experience. After all, what is simpler? Pressing a button and getting a web page? Or exporting to a file system, finding those files, and then figuring out how to upload them somewhere else.

Another example of how .Mac “just works” away quietly in the background was encountered when I lost my Powerbook hard drive last summer…. I was away on a project in Halifax for a couple of weeks, and my drive simply stopped spinning one morning. While I had a full backup at home (courtesy of SuperDuper), that was back in Toronto, so did me little good on the project I was on. With an external hard drive and my OS X install CDs, I had my Powerbook back up and running in under an hour, but of course that was just a clean install. This was where the .Mac sync services and iDisk backups came to my rescue…. I fired up the System Preferences, entered my .Mac credentials, and then just watched as it basically downloaded all of my mission-critical data—mail preferences, e-mail messages, address book, calendar, documents in progress, and even my Safari bookmarks and keychain. Within two hours I was up and running with everything I needed, and was able to continue working as if nothing had happened.

Now, I certainly could have done this with a myriad of other online services, but the point was that I didn’t need to. Further, the configuration of this took a trivial amount of time, both originally and even later to restore my data. Once it had been configured (months before this happened), it just worked away quietly in the background, and I simply didn’t have to worry about it.

I think many of the people who demand more from .Mac don’t fully appreciate the elegance of it’s simplicity, much like any other Apple product. For instance, those who would suggest that the web hosting needs PHP and MySQL support are the same folks who would demand that the iPod add an FM radio, a voice recorder, and a web browser. None of these extra “features” are required to deliver the basic functionality of the product, which does a very good job of delivering those features that it does have.

Now, that having been said, I don’t think for a moment that there isn’t much room for improvement in the .Mac service offering, but that improvement doesn’t need to be in the area of turning it into a full-fledged web hosting service, or adding needless complexity to the other areas of the service. Rather, a few minor modifications to improve the user experience, and allow people to use the service more transparently are what is in order.

The new WebMail and Address Book interface were huge steps in the right direction, IMHO, but some basic server-side rules and spam filtering now need to be added to the mixture to provide a more “complete” web-based solution. These are things that improve the user experience and in fact reduce the complexity (by ensuring that the webmail experience more closely mirrors the Mail.app experience).

Further, the ability to allow for alternative “FROM” addresses to be used on the .Mac e-mail would be desirable. Obviously, the problems with mail forwarding in and of itself are a difficult issue, and perhaps this is why Apple doesn’t want to go there (the average user is not going to be dealing with forwarding their other mail to .Mac in most cases), but it would be a large boon to those people who want to switch to using .Mac to store their e-mail without having to switch to using a mac.com address. The same could be said for web page hosting, although this is obviously less of an issue, since redirection services exist for those who know how to use them (and those who don’t aren’t likely to care).

Another HUGE issue from a user experience point of view is the access requirements for .Mac groups. The groups are a wonderful but very under-utilized feature, since if you want to invite people who aren’t already .Mac users, they have to go through signing up for a trial account. The result has been that those who don’t have a bunch of friends already on .Mac don’t really get much traction on the .Mac groups. There needs to be a way to sign up for .Mac groups without going through the trial account registration (which will also scare most Windows users away in principle alone). Even a simpler sign-up page that just provides a basic Mac.com userid and password without requesting so much additional information would probably go a great distance in simplifying this experience. This is one area in which .Mac most definitely does NOT “just work.”

The bottom line, however, is that while .Mac needs to grow and expand somewhat to improve the user experience, the service itself does a very good job of providing what it’s designed to—a simple one-stop-shop for all the basic online services that the average Mac user is likely to need, wrapped up into a simple package that is tightly integrated with the Mac OS.

A topic I’ve been meaning to espouse on for some time is exactly how I’ve managed to go from being such a die hard geek to being somebody who enjoys using Apple’s technology (not that the two are mutually exclusive).

A close friend of mine has taken great joy in telling people how my views on technology took a dramatic shift shortly after I got an iPod, and of course while that may sound overly simplistic, it’s essentially true.

Firstly, I am what most would call an übergeek. My fascination with computers and all things technical goes back to my early childhood, when I used to hang out at the local Radio Shack and fiddle with the TRS-80’s and Tandy Colour Computers. I built my own Z-80 based machine when I was about 12, installed my first Novell NetWare network when I was about 14, and have been on the Internet since before most people even knew there was an Internet (no, kids, the World Wide Web is not the Internet).

In that time, I have always been a fairly die-hard PC user. I was never overly fond of Windows, having eschewed it in favour of OS/2 until such time as I really had no other option than to become assimilated by the great Microsoft collective (although to be fair, Windows 95 did start to look a bit promising compared to what else was out there at the time). Although I had once owned an Apple IIe, I never considered the Macintosh computers that succeeded it to be much more than toys. Sure they were great for desktop publishing and other work like that, but nothing that a real hardcore geek would ever use…. An operating system without a command prompt? What was that all about.

Further, in the professional world in which I worked, nobody was really out there using Macs. Windows pretty much carried the day at that time, and on the few occasions I encountered Macs in my job, they were pretty much isolated from the rest of the world—relegated to special-purpose tasks such as graphics publishing and so forth, and seldom even connected to the networks on which I tended to hang out. Mac support was seldom (if ever) required, so they could be safely ignored as those “other” computers that no serious computer user would ever use.

My Foray into the world of Digital Music

When the MP3 phenomenon hit in the late 90’s, I was fairly quick to jump on that bandwagon, and by Christmas 1999, I had a Creative Labs Nomad MP3 player (note that I’m not talking about the Nomad II, or Jukebox, or any of those which came later—this was the original Nomad… 32Mb of RAM and a parallel port interface to transfer your music). However, as a concept, this was very cool, and the idea of being able to carry even a few songs around on a portable player like this was something I had been wanting to do for a while.

Of course, the nature of the technology was such that I tended to replace the songs very seldom, and the Nomad gradually fell into disuse. I needed something with more capacity, and began looking at the Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox that came out a year later with a serious case of techno-lust. Of course, the price range was not particularly reasonable for me at the time, and I therefore took a “wait-and-see” approach, deciding instead on upgrading to an Iomega “HipZip” player… The 40Mb inexpensive replaceable media (Clik Discs) seemed a brilliant idea at the time (a time when 40Mb of Compact Flash memory would have set one back close to $500). Again, I used this for quite a well, but it, too, gradually fell into obscurity. I just didn’t feel like listening to the same music all the time, and changing the music just wasn’t all that convenient.

Throughout this time, I was somewhat aware of this thing called an “iPod”, but of course it was an Apple thing, for Macs only, so it never gathered much interest for me.

By early 2003 I had pretty much decided that the only way to go was with a hard-drive based player. I needed to be able to carry ALL my music around with me, all the time. Well, at that time, the only two games in town were Creative and Apple. Again, the iPod just looked a little “goofy” to me, seemed too simple, and was too much of an “Apple thing.” On the other hand, Creative had just released their 20GB Jukebox ZEN, which had portability, capacity, AND USB 2.0 transfer speeds going for it. I had always been quite happy with Creative’s stuff (even my original Nomad, not to mention a multitude of PC sound cards and other accessories), so I took the plunge and picked one up.

At that time, my entire music library fit nicely into 20MB, with quite a bit of storage space left over. The Jukebox ZEN itself worked quite well, with a reasonably decent menu system, albeit a small screen, and pretty reasonable sound quality. The software on the other hand, was much less intuitive. Creative bundled their own software application, and for a time I wrestled with it until eventually picking up a replacement in Red Chair’s Notmad Explorer. Notmad seemed like a simple enough concept—manage the content on your Jukebox as you would any other file system, replacing a tag-based index for a file and folder structure. Bi-directional drag-and-drop was supported, and even something of a “sync” feature that would do it’s best to synchronize with a hard-drive based music library, although success with that was often limited, and the number of options available for file naming and syncing just proved that sometimes you can have too many choices.

While the Jukebox itself worked well, the hassles with getting music on and off of it, and the fact that the interface wasn’t quite intuitive (small screen, too many menu layers, etc), meant that it too didn’t get used as much as I would have liked. Of course, the fact that it wasn’t the smallest of devices didn’t really help either.

It really wasn’t that I didn’t know how to manage my music, as I am a very technically literate person… The reality was that I just really couldn’t be bothered—there were things that I would much rather be doing with my time than organizing, transferring, and cataloguing my songs, or messing with software applications that didn’t quite work as well as they should.

During this time, I also experimented with a number of home digital media systems—devices designed to take music from a computer’s hard drive and stream it over a wireless network link to a home stereo system or other remote speakers. My use of the Creative Nomad prompted me to pick up the Creative Wireless Music System, since again this seemed like a good solution at the time. However, that experience proved to me that Creative Labs, while they may know digital sound equipment, most definitely did not excel in the area of wireless networking. My second device was the Linksys Wireless Media Adapter, which seemed to have the reverse problem (Linksys, of course, knew how to build a networking device, but the PC-based software and on-screen menu firmware was limited almost to the point of being frustrating).

In looking for a better solution in that area, I eventually came across the SlimDevices Squeezebox. I ordered one of these, and within a few days had ordered a second one, replacing both my Creative and Linksys devices without hesitation. The Squeezebox had the advantage of on-device displays and menus, as well as a very good server-based software to catalog music and control the devices.

It was this foray into SlimDevices that I think first made me take a look at iTunes. One weekend, as I was exploring the various options and plugins for the SlimServer, I came across some neat features related to iTunes integration. Having long ago developed a disdain for most of the other options for music management on a Windows PC, I decided to download iTunes and take a look.

The next morning I went out and bought an iPod.

The Thin Edge of the Wedge

The fact is that the simplicity and intuitiveness of iTunes demonstrated the problem that I had been having all along—I was spending more time managing my music than actually listening to it. I had always known that Apple prided themselves on making simple and user-friendly apps, but I had always associated “user-friendly” in that context with unsophisticated. While iTunes didn’t necessarily have every feature that one could think of, the necessary stuff was all there, and it was there in a very easy-to-use fashion. Where most Windows-based music library software had you worrying about file names and directories and the underlying file system, iTunes took the logical step of insulating the user from that, concentrating instead on organizing music by indexed tag information. Certainly, the files still had to go somewhere, but as the end-user managing the music through iTunes, those were details I didn’t need to know or care about beyond giving it a common library location.

Of course, being a technical user, I explored all of the facets of iTunes, and spent some time going under the hood and looking at the database files and seeing what I could do with it. However, those were things I did because I wanted to, not because I had to.

Further, the integration with the SlimServer devices was brilliant. I came home one day after creating an On-The-Go playlist on my iPod, dropped by iPod into the dock, and by the time I got to the living room, the playlist was available on my Squeezebox.

To me, this was the first foray into a realm where things “just worked” It identified something I had been striving for in my use of technology for many years… The fact that technology should simplify our lives, not complicate them. While it’s okay, even beneficial to understand technology, it shouldn’t be a pre-requisite, any more than driving a car requires knowledge of auto mechanics.

The simplicity of the iPod solution became even more apparent when I handed my iPod to my wife, who is most certainly not a technology person, and she was able to navigate it and figure out how to access all of the basic functions in under 30 seconds.

Around this same time, I also transitioned from a Palm Tungsten T3 to a Blackberry device for much the same reasons… While Palm OS could do a whole lot of really neat and cool things, getting it to manage the important details of my life was often more of a struggle than it was worth. Like my music, I was spending more time managing my calendar than actually following it. The Blackberry, on the other hand (with an Exchange server on the back-end) was another example of technology that “just worked.”

Contemplating a Switch

At that point, the rather nebulous concept of making the transition for Windows to Mac OS X started to become a bit more firm in my mind. I had played with Powerbooks at a couple of local Apple resellers while shopping for iPod accessories (there were no “Apple Stores” in Toronto in those days), and I really liked what I saw. In fact, on one occasion I even went over to the online Apple Store and configured a Powerbook for my needs so I could get an idea of what I’d be looking to spend.

In addition, the fact that OS X was in reality a derivative of BSD Unix “under the hood” was in and of itself very appealing. I had been playing with Linux for about seven years at that point, and I really liked some of the things that I could do with it. Unfortunately, despite numerous attempts by the Linux community to produce a decent GUI, driver support, and business productivity applications, Linux itself still fell short as a desktop OS. I ended up keeping a dual-boot configuration around so I could boot up Windows to do my day-to-day work, and Linux when I wanted to do more “low-level” networking and programming stuff.

Ultimately, though, the problem was that as sexy and powerful as Mac OS X looked, the question I still had to answer was whether somebody in my particular line of work could actually take the plunge without losing too much of the functionality I had come to know and love from my Windows world…

The Next Step…

Despite the Powerbook having a great appeal, the combination of potentially losing functionality and the price point itself prevented me from ever really exploring it until almost nine months later.

During the summer of 2005, I purchased a pair of new laptops for my wife and I, and by that time I had mostly abandoned the concept of making the switch to OS X. I was embroiled in the use of a number of Windows applications, from Microsoft Office to Project to Visio, not to mention a number of networking related tools, all of which just made a transition to OS X seem impractical at best.

However, later that summer, it occurred to me that I should get a dedicated “music server” for my Squeezebox devices, since I was now relying more and more on a laptop, my desktop computer (which had traditionally done the job), would not always be on, and would be performing other tasks. For this purpose, a Mac Mini seemed an ideal solution—SlimServer would run on OS X, iTunes of course lives on OS X, and I doubted that I would find a Windows or Linux-based machine with as small of a footprint as a Mac Mini at even twice the price. I also figured this would be a good chance to play with OS X a bit more, but that was really a secondary consideration.

So in late August, the Mac Mini came in, and I set it up with all of the necessary software to support my digital music collection, both for streaming to the Squeezeboxes and syncing my iPods. The idea was that this would be a box that would sit rather unobtrusively in the corner, and not be used for much else.

However, something happened in the process of setting this box up. I began to explore Mac OS X more fully, and I began to explore the Unix capabilities of the box (after all, SlimServer was heavily based in the Apache and Perl space, and require a little bit of Unix-geeking to get running properly). The combination of power and simplicity once again impressed me.

In addition, Apple had quite cleverly bundled a trial edition of Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac. I had always had vague ideas of Office being available for the Mac, but hadn’t really explored it until now. I fired up Word and Excel, opened a few of my documents (across the network from my Windows PC, which was also surprisingly simple, since I hadn’t actually configured any networking client of any kind on the Mini), and they came across without a character out of place.

Word and Excel compatibility aside, however (since I really expected that would be fine), the burning question in my mind was still the e-mail issue—or more specifically the groupware issue. In most corporate and professional environments, there is more to business services than just e-mail…. Calendars, shared folders, address books, etc., all have to be accounted for. My world in that area ran on an Exchange server, and the ability of the Mac to handle this was probably my biggest concern…. Sure I can do e-mail via IMAP, but what about my calendar? I knew from reading the back of an Office 2004 box that it came with this thing called “Entourage”, but wasn’t entirely certain of it’s compatibility with something like an Exchange server.

Well, fortunately for me, Microsoft had made great strides in the few months before this in improving Entourage’s compatibility with Exchange. I fired up the Entourage client on my Mac Mini, plugged in a few basic configuration values, and suddenly my whole Exchange mailbox was just “there”.... Including my calendar and my address book.

The discovery of Entourage was the last major hurdle to my acceptance of Mac OS X as a viable alternative to my years on Windows. The existence of Virtual PC was the other one, and I had been aware of that particular option for some time, but while that would be fine for less frequently used apps like Visio and Project I was not about to buy a Mac just to leave a Virtual PC session running all the time for my e-mail client.

After about two more weeks of playing with the Mac Mini, I had made my decision to go shopping for a Powerbook.

The Switch

The fact that I had only two months prior bought a new Windows laptop caused some consternation—mostly with my wife, who really didn’t see the point in going out and spending more money, but the economics of the situation eventually won out—The Windows laptop was new enough to go on eBay and still be able to recover a significant portion of the purchase price. Ditto for the Mac Mini, which I decided would not be required in my new configuration either. These would fund the Powerbook purchase, so off I went to the Apple Store (we had one by that time) in late September.

Along with the Powerbook was a purchase of Microsoft Office 2004, Virtual PC, and a multitude of other accessories. Office 2004 would form my staple set of applications, and I decided that Virtual PC would supply compatibility with any Windows applications that would otherwise be left behind (the two most notable being Visio and Project from a business productivity point of view).

In the process, however, the lure of bundled software again proved useful. The Powerbook came with a version of OmniGraffle pre-installed, and for my purposes this simply blew Visio out of the water for ease of use. So, another software package went onto the back shelf. In addition, my needs for project planning were usually far simpler than to require Microsoft Project, so the bundled OmniOutliner would also meet those basic needs (although both OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner were quickly upgraded to the Pro versions).

Suddenly, I found that Virtual PC wasn’t as necessary as I had thought. I still needed it for testing certain applications, and dealing with certain specific networking tools (working with administrative tools on Novell NetWare and Windows networks, for instance), but I would really have no need to load it up or live in it on any kind of regular basis.

In the process as well, I also fell in love with Keynote. While Word and Excel were required for compatibility with my Windows-laden colleagues, I generally didn’t do much collaborative work on presentations, so putting them together in Keynote would be just fine. If somebody wanted a copy of the presentation for reference, I could export to Powerpoint, or simply save as a PDF. I found Keynote to be far easier to use than Powerpoint, and the graphics were a lot smoother and cleaner, particularly where animations and transition effects were involved.

In addition, over the next few months I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Entourage, particularly in relation to the built-in iApps (Mail/iCal/etc), but that’s a story for another day.

The bottom line is that I very quickly became hooked, and as I discovered more and more OS X native applications that would do what I needed and wanted, my satisfaction with OS X only increased. Ultimately, I had a machine that would be the best of three different worlds… The very user-friendly, intuitive and aesthetically pleasing OS X GUI, the raw, unbridled power of Unix under the hood, and the ability to fall back to Windows for those things that still required that world.

My OS X experience has not been perfect… There are still some idiosyncrasies and stability problems sometimes, but these are far more rare than experienced in Windows. In addition, Apple’s design of OS X has done some clever things to decrease user frustration, whether intentionally or not… For example, when an application is busy or has stopped responding, the graphic rendering of the application continues to work beautifully. The window itself may not update (as the application is busy or frozen), but it can still be moved around, minimized, and resized, and does not interfere with the rest of the user’s experience. It’s a little thing, but seeing half-drawn windows of hung applications on Windows was always something that I found extremely frustrating—it gave a feel of something being broken or “not quite right” when this happened, and it was often impossible to drag another window out of the way to see what the hung app was doing last.

At the end of the day, it may not be all wine and roses, but the fact is that I find the OS X solution to be more powerful, easier to use, and overall a far more pleasant experience than struggling with Windows. Again, technology that simplifies my life, rather than complicating it further…. OS X lets me go under the hood when I want to, but doesn’t force me to on a daily basis, with the result being that I can generally get more productive work done, and have fun at the same time.

This interesting article in The Register makes the point that Apple’s current iTunes-based distribution model is “doomed to failure” as tools now exist to transfer recorded video content to the iPod.

However, this statement misses one very important point: That of the balance between simplicity and cost.

Apple has always been a forerunner of the principle of simplicity in technology. In short, this would seem to mean that they recognize that technology should do what it is designed to do in the most user-friendly and simple way possible, and that it should simplify our lives rather than complicating them with more bells and whistles.

The iPod is purchased by a lot of average consumers who are not highly technical users. In fact, some would even suggest that this is Apple’s target market. There are certainly more feature-rich digital audio players out there, yet Apple’s iPod continues to dominate the marketplace. Some can argue that the “trendiness” of the iPod contributes to this, but I don’t think the iPod would retain this trendiness if it weren’t also an incredibly intuitive and easy-to-use device. In short, if people bought iPods because they were cool, but then stopped using them because they were complicated, they would soon no longer be cool.

At the same time, the iTunes Music Store provides a simplified way of obtaining content for your iPod. In the audio world, it is not a complicated thing to purchase a CD, insert it into your computer, and import it into just about any software, and iTunes (the software) certainly makes this a simple process. However, despite this simplicity, there are still those paying iTMS $0.99 per track to download music.
Now why would people do this, when there are so many free options available? Certainly, the free options are of questionable legality at best depending upon your country of residence (I’m talking about P2P services here of course), but I don’t think that this alone precludes people from using them.

Further, there are other inexpensive methods available for getting music content, including online services like eMusic and allofmp3.com. However, despite these other methods, iTMS continues to do reasonably well.

The reality is that most iPod users are not computer geeks. Most iPod users are “joe consumer” who bought an iPod to listen to their music, and simply want to get their music onto their iPod in the simplest way possible.

Now, the average consumer usually still buys CDs, and iTunes (the software, not the store) makes this import process very easy and painless. Hence the majority of legitimate music on most iPods probably came from a purchased CD.

This approach diverges when entering the realm of video content, however. At this time, there is no reasonable way to purchase a DVD and automagically transfer it onto your iPod. There is software available that attempts to do this, but it is a time-consuming process at best, and generally not something that the average non-technical user wants to attempt. However, one might as well suggest that this alone would doom iTunes’ video content approach to failure in the same way the availability of commercial audio CDs would doom iTunes’ music content sales. After all, importing a CD into iTunes is so easy why would anybody bother to buy their music from the iTunes Music Store?

However, the article goes even further in assuming that the majority of iPod users actually have the capability in terms of hardware and knowledge to record video content from their TVs and then convert it into iPod format, and that therefore every owner of an iPod video who wants to watch a TV show on their iPod would rather do this than shell out $1.99.

If this were true, then sales of DVD box sets of TV shows should have never taken off either, since all of this content is freely available on TV, right?

Frankly, this is an unrealistic assumption even for a technical user. I’m a very experienced computer user myself, and I couldn’t even begin to be bothered with this process just to get content onto my iPod, and being in Canada, I can’t even get the iTMS video content yet, since it’s only available in the U.S. So in my case, I’d rather not even have that content on my iPod than go through the trouble of recording it and transferring it manually.

So if this is the response of somebody who actually has the knowledge and ability to do this, how much more likely is the average iPod owner to bother?

Again, the iPod won it’s market share for its simplicity and ease of use. iTMS will continue to survive for the same reason… I can either invest $35 for a season of a show I want to watch and have it on my iPod within minutes, or invest far more than $35 in time, effort, and hardware to record every episode of a season from my cable/satellite feed and encode it for my iPod, and wait several months to get a whole season.
To me, the choice is obvious.

However, somewhere along the way, we have gone from reasonably priced items that provide actual value for money into the realm of the strange, esoteric, and just plain ridiculous items that are priced up in the stratosphere. In this realm, I cannot possibly see any relationship between the selling price of such items and the actual value that they provide.

In it’s simplest form, the law of diminishing returns applies here. While expensive cars, jewelry and fur coats could be construed as status symbols for the well-to-do, and therefore have an intrinsic “value” in the very possession of them, this rule doesn’t seem to apply as uniformly to items that are actually supposed to be used on a day-to-day basis to accomplish a task.

As a first example, we have the Shure E5c Sound Isolating Earphones. These are US$499 a pair, for earbud headphones. Now, despite the growing “trendiness” of the iPod itself, I’m not one to see expensive headphones as any kind of a status symbol, so I can’t possibly imagine them being priced high as something that you would show off to your friends at parties. While most people would be impressed if you drove up to a party in a Ferrari or a BMW, people are more likely to wonder what you’ve been smoking if you walked in and announced that you had paid $500 for a set of earbuds.

Therefore, in my ever-so-humble-opinion, the price tag on these must be justified by the extremely high quality sound and fidelity of the product. Now, I don’t deny that Shure makes some very good audio equipment, and frankly I could possibly understand somebody picking up the Shure E2C or even E3C headphones, which are more in the $100-150 price range. However, I personally suspect that the majority of music listeners cannot possibly hear the difference between even those earbuds and a good quality set at half the price. I further doubt that there’s a sound quality discernible to 99% of the population between the E3C and E5C earbuds.

So I can only assume that Shure must be marketing these for that 1% of the population that can actually hear the difference, right?Not likely. Very few companies can sustain a business model based on such a small consumer base. More likely Shure is counting on the 25% of the population who consider themselves “audiophiles” and think they can hear the difference.

While I don’t dispute that there are those who can hear extremely subtle differences in fidelity, I think that today’s generation of audio technology has produced a huge swath of pretentious audiophile-wannabees who buy all of this expensive equipment just to try and convince themselves and those around them that they somehow have superior hearing, and are therefore better than the rest. After all, how likely is the average person to be able to discount what somebody else can or cannot hear.

As a result, since you can’t judge somebody’s “audiophileness” in any direct and meaningful way, you’re left only to judge their ear quality by the equipment that they buy. Thus begins a game of one-upmanship played by the audiophiles based on how much more money they can spend on “the next big thing” that will somehow prove that since they paid such insane amounts of money for a component, there must be something “special” about their particular auditory canals.

In the end, the person with the best hearing must be the person with the most expensive equipment. After all, they wouldn’t spent all that money if they couldn’t hear the difference, would they?

Well, the sad answer to that question, in a majority of cases, is “yes, they would.” The result is a huge market for “audiophile-quality” products, with price tags that continually spiral into the realm of the ridiculous.

This is essentially the Frasier and Niles Crane attitude applied to the audio world. I remember one episode of “Frasier” where Niles and Frasier were comparing Niles’ “midwife” (the term they used was “doula”, but whatever) to Frasier’s matchmaker. Frasier won the argument by stating that he had paid $10,000 for his matchmaker, at which point Niles automatically assumed that she must be that good.

Well, the same assumptions apply in the audiophile world. If I’ve paid $500 for a set of earbuds, then my hearing must really be that good.

The earbuds of course are just the tip of the iceberg. For something truly insane, one must check out the Aurant Transparent Opus MM Speaker Cables. US$30,000 for speaker cables.

The response of the average person to this is usually unprintable. Most of us wouldn’t have a difficult time deciding between making a down-payment on a house or buying speaker wires.

But of course, the audiophile’s response is something to the effect of, “Wow, for $30,000 they must be good!” (as he smugly thinks to himself how impressed all of his friends will be when he can plug in these cables and then claim that his ears are so good that these cables have made all the difference in the world to his listening experience).

Again, I’m not discounting the fact that there might be a few rare people out there that actually could hear the difference between these and a lower-priced set of speaker cables, merely that there are a larger number of people out there who just buy the expensive stuff and then pretend that they can hear a difference. However, even to those people who can hear it, I would really have to ask if that difference is worth $30,000. Even if you have that kind of money to blow, does spending $30,000 on a piece of wire really provide that kind of value?

Personally, if you’re just looking to blow $30,000 or so for the sole purpose of impressing your friends, you would do a lot better to check out Microsoft XBOX 360 Solid Gold Face Plate for a mere opening bid of US$36,000. At least gold has some intrinsic value in any form, and if you had that kind of money to invest in gold anyway, what’s flashier, a bullion certificate or a solid-gold faceplate for your XBOX?

Like most other computer geeks, I signed up for an eBay account a few years ago, and did a bunch of casual buying and selling on eBay. At the time, eBay seemed like a wonderfully utopian idea… The evolution of a good old neighbourhood flea market with the far-reaching power of the Internet… and, for a while, it certainly was.

But something has changed in the intervening few years. The ethically challenged among us have figured out that they have the potential to make fast and easy money by preying on the naive and unsuspecting.

Now, in reality, this should come as no surprise to anybody. The Internet has always been an extension of our society. A bizarre cultural petrie dish where the computer hacker and the average citizen unite. There are good and bad people in the world, and there will therefore be good and bad people on the Internet.

In much the same way that the Internet extends the reach of the ordinary citizen to interact with the global community, so too does it extend the reach in much the same way for the criminal element. The con men of yesteryear bilking a few little old ladies out of their life savings have now managed to find ways to bilk an audience of millions, using the very tools that enhance the rest of our lives.
Sure I had always heard stories of the occasional scam on eBay, but I was fully unprepared for what I encountered in a recent attempt to sell something as innocuous as an HP Laptop computer.

To me, an eBay transaction seems to be something pretty safe and routine (which it is provided due diligence is exercised), so one would expect that criminals and con men would not have much of a foothold in this environment, right?

Wrong. The eBay scammers operate on the same principle as the e-mail spammers. I remember a guy that I used to hang out with… We’d go our for a night on the town, and this guy would proposition every girl in the bar. He got more than a few drinks thrown in his face, but he never went home alone.

Just like bulk e-mail (”spam”), the eBay scammer does not need to get a hit every time. In fact, I would suspect that their success ratio is actually extremely low. However, for the effort they’re putting in, and with an audience of millions, all it takes is a small percentage of poor unsuspecting dupes to make it profitable for them.

So, on to my particular story…

I had purchased a laptop computer back in July, used it for a couple of months, and then decided to switch to a Mac. As a result, I no longer had a use for the laptop computer, and needed to finance my new Powerbook purchase. With only two months of use, and a few extras to throw in, I suspected that I should be able to sell the item for a pretty reasonable price on eBay.

So, a little over a week ago, I setup a listing on eBay. Being a relatively big-ticket item, I decided to pull out all the stops and pay extra for a highly-visible eBay listing. Also, wanting to ensure that I could sell to as wide of an audience as possible, I specified that I would ship worldwide.

My auction had been open for about three hours when the first series of “Seller Questions” started pouring in. Most wanted to pay via methods other than Paypal (Western Union, Bidpay, etc), and most wanted to ship them item to their friend/daughter/spouse in Nigeria.

The first example of one such e-mail read as follows:

Dear Seller, Am Oni Ogundeji I work and live in U.S am writing you on 

behalf of your item you placed on EBAY. Am willing to offer you US$2800 for the item 

6814688610

	
I need the laptop very fast for my Daughter who school in Nigeria and she needs the 

laptop for her Final Year project in school but due to the Nature of my Job I won’t be 

Available to receive the Laptop here in the U.S so please I want you to send the Laptop 

Directly to her in Nigeria. 
	
Please make enquiry about the shipping cost to Nigeria by [USPS Global Express EMS 3-5 

Days Delivery Service] and get back to me with the shipping cost so I can make your 

Payment to you in full including the shipping Cost.
	
I have 2 Option of Payment Method either by Western Union Bid Pay or international 

Money Gram, both are Money Order that will be issue on your name and it will be send to 

you at your contact home address for delivery.
	
Please reply me with your personal E-mail Address.
	
Best Regards
	
Oni O Ogundeji

Now, I should note that the auction had no bids at this time, and my “Buy-It-Now” price was US$1,200. If the fact that this “buyer” was offering me more than double that amount wasn’t enough of a clue, the second message that I received about twenty minutes later from a completely different user was certainly interesting…

Dear Seller,Am kerry clinton i work and leave in U.S 

am writing you on behalf of your item you placed on 

EBAY.Am willing to offer you US$1000 for the item: 

6814688610I need the laptop very fast for my Daughter 

who school in Nigeria and she needs the laptop for her 

Final Year project in school but due to the Nature of 

my Job I won't be Available to receive the Laptop here 

in the U.S,so please I want you to send the Laptop 

Directly to her in Nigeria. Please make enquiry about 

the shipping cost to Nigeria by United States Regular 

Post Office Only[AirMail Parcel Post Delivery Service] 

and get back to me with the shipping cost so I can 

make your Payment to you in full including the 

shipping cost. My Method of Payment is Western Union 

Bid Pay, which is a Money Order that will be issue on 

your name by Bid Pay and it will be send to you at 

your contact home address for delivery. Please reply 

me with your personal E-mail Address. 

Best Regards, 

clinton. 

So, at this point I can only assume that a lot of people have daughters attending school in Nigeria. They must have really good tuition or something, because what are the odds that two completely different people would contact me within an hour wanting to buy my notebook to send to their daughter in Nigeria. I guess it’s possible that Oni Ogunedeji and Kerry Clinton are a couple, but if that’s the case then they both need to work on their communication skills.

But that wasn’t to be even nearly the end of it. The next message was from somebody who wanted it shipped to a “friend” in Russia…

Hi. 

	
I would like to send this unit to my friend to Russia, Pyatigorsk 357538. Please, 

provide me a cost of shipping to this place. USPS airmail 4 - 10 days (you can check on 

usps.com) 
	
If I send money via paypal can you ship today? 
	
Tell me the total cost.

While it was within the realm of possibility that this question could have been legit, by this time I was definitely not taking any chances. Messages with an “I-Want-To-Buy-It-Now” urgency that request shipping to a foreign country are usually suspect at the best of times.

So far, these had only been inquiries sent through the “Ask-the-seller-a-question” feature on eBay. Other than cluttering up my inbox, they were relatively harmless and easily ignored. I reported them to eBay’s Security department, and life otherwise continued as per normal.

Later that morning, however, I received a notification from eBay that my auction had been closed using “Buy-It-Now” Initially hopeful that the notebook had sold, I became immediately suspicious when I looked at the “buyer”… An account that had been created the same day, had zero feedback, and a shipping address with a telephone number of (334)455-6677. To little surprise, I received the following e-mail a few minutes later:

Hello,
          Compliment of the season to yo,I am Brinda Williams from NY USA,but Presently 

in London,UK for a church seminal. I saw your product item below on ebay #6814688610 and 

i am really intrested in buying it for my Daugther as a surprise gift for her in school

(university of lagos)at Nigeria and i will handle the shipment expenses.i will send you 

my fedex account so you will not pay no money for shipping.
         I will be sending you payment via PayPal,so kindly send me 

your PAYPAL EMAIL ADDRESS so as to immedaitely make out your payment and make sure you 

get the package ready for shipment,you can ship 

the item as soon as you recieve the paypal confirmation.

Expecting your reply so as to immediately make out the payment.

Regards,

Brinda Williams

So, Brinda lives in New York, is presently in London, and also has a daughter going to University in Nigeria. Is the quality of education in Nigeria really that great that all of these people have daughters attending school there? Whatever happened to sending your kids to school in the good old U.S.A.?

Unfortunately, this little trick meant that my auction had now closed, since somebody had technically offered to buy the item. I doubted however that I would ever see any money from “her” regardless of payment method.

So, I sent off a quick message to eBay’s Trust and Safety Team…

This auction recently closed with a Buy-it-Now purchase from a very new eBay member.
Based on three other inquiries that I received on this same item, this buyer would
appear to be non-legitimate. Even though they are offering to send payment via
PayPal, I am not sure that there is any point in my going through with this
transaction since it has many of the red flags of the Nigerian scam.

Further, the eBay member in question, brwillll13 appears to have absolutely no
feedback and the account seems to have been created today.

I would like some advice on how to proceed with cancelling this particular
transaction and re-enabling my original listing, as I am not comfortable proceeding
under these circumstances but would still like to sell the item to a legitimate
buyer.

Thank you for any assistance you can provide.

Simple and to the point, I basically wanted to resume the listing that had now been closed by a fradulent buyer. About three hours later, I received the following from eBay:

Please be aware that we have recently cancelled bids for the buyer noted above due to
our inability to confirm his or her contact information and/or the failure to complete
recent transactions. The buyer’s privileges to trade on eBay have been temporarily
suspended while we investigate this matter further.

Our records indicate that this buyer recently attempted to complete a transaction with
you. Since the buyer is not currently registered on the eBay site, you may consider the
transaction null and void if you have not already shipped the item.

If you have already shipped the item, we advise you to consider taking the following
steps at this time:

1. Contact the company that was used to send payment to verify whether or not funds have
cleared.

2. Contact law enforcement in the area where the buyer lives if you find that the funds
are fraudulent. Be sure to be as specific as possible, including names, addresses, phone
numbers or any other information that you may have about the buyer. If a detective is
assigned to your case, please ask him or her to contact us so that we can assist in the
investigation.

3. Contact the shipping carrier to determine whether or not it may be possible to stop
shipment on the package.

4. Consider filing a complaint with the Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC). The IFCC
is partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National White Collar
Crime Center. The IFCC will review and evaluate complaints and refer information to the
appropriate local, state, or federal agency. Every complaint that is referred by the
IFCC is sent to one or more law enforcement or regulatory agencies that have
jurisdiction over that matter. You can file a complaint with the IFCC at:

/csg/p?www1.ifccfbi.gov/index.asp

5. If your package was shipped via USPS, you may be able to file a mail fraud complaint
at:

https://www.usps.com/postalinspectors/fraud/MailFraudComplaint.htm

6. In the event that you are not able to receive funds for this sale, you can file for a
credit of your Final Value Fees, provided it has not been 45 days or more since the
auction ended. To request a Final Value Fee credit, please follow the steps below:

1. Click the “site map” link at the top of any eBay page.
2. On the “Site Map” page, click the link “Request final value fee credit” under the
“Seller Accounts” heading in the middle column.

If you have any concerns or questions about this situation or any other eBay-related
issues you can visit our help system by clicking on “Help” on the navigation bar at the
top of any eBay web page.

Regards,

Customer Support (Trust and Safety Department)
eBay Inc.

Of course, I hadn’t shipped the item, so the bulk of that message fortunately didn’t apply to me, but it definitely confirmed that my suspicions had been correct.

Unfortunately, eBay didn’t specifically answer my question about re-opening the auction, so I simply applied for a final value fee credit and insertion fee credit and re-listed the item under a new auction the next day.

This time, however, I decided to be a little bit more careful. I restricted my shipping destinations to North America only, and specified that Buy-it-Now requires immediate payment (so if a potential buyer didn’t complete payment via an immmediate PayPal transaction the purchase would not be valid).

Of course, within hours of this auction going online, a flood of other questions came in…. More daughters in Nigeria, friends in Russia…. even a relative in Singapore. It seems that people all over the globe were offering me sums of money for a notebook computer that probably wouldn’t even work in their countries, on an auction that clearly stated that I don’t ship outside North America. I also couldn’t believe the number of people who were offering me more than I was asking for (and in some cases more than the package would have been worth brand new at retail).

Just a few of the more amusing ones…

Will accept $1300 for this item + $80 shipment cost USPS POST PACKET delivery to him
 in nigeria.I want to buy it for my friend that travel to Nigeria to enjoy is 

leave.also we like to know if the item is in good condition.are old or new is the 

item.i will be paying you with ( BIDPAY MONEY ORDER).incase you don't know about 

(BIDPAY)let me know so i can explain.i will need all this for payment from YOU.

	
FULL NAME TO PUT ON THE MONEY ORDER

CONTACT ADDRESS WHERE THE MONEY ORDER WILL BE DELIVER TOO

CITY,

STATE,

CODE,

PHONE NUMBER

VALID MAIL ADDRESS FOR COMFIRMATION OF PAYMENT..

reply me very soon..you can reach me on this number -+447031957772

Hi. 

I would like to send this unit to my friend to Russia, Pyatigorsk 357538. Please, 

provide me a cost of shipping to this place. USPS airmail 4 - 10 days (you can check 

on usps.com) 

If I send money via paypal can you ship today? 

Tell me the total cost.

What a lovely item you have out there.I love it and i want to buy it.I have read the 

item details including shipping and handling.Can i have the total costs including 

shipping fees to Nigeria with zipcode 23452,am sending it as a gift item.I am paying you 

through Western Union auction Bidpay,they basically deliver money in cash at door step 

without paying any 

commission.Pls get back to me as soon as possible

Dear Seller, I saw your advert of the Laptop you placed on eBay, 

I am here to buy it from you because i need very urgently. 

What is your Offerred prize i mean your last prize 

I want you to estimate the shipment through Regular Airmail Post Office only, Because i

only prefered this shipping company to be delivered to me in Nigeria. 

I have to make my payment through Western Union Bidpay Money Order since Paypal doesn't 

offerinternational payment. I want you to quickly end the auction so that i can proceed 

with my payment without any delay. PLS REPLY WITH YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS. 

Dear seller , 

I find your item interesting.I feel the need to negotiate with 

you on the sale of this item.Like to know the current condition of the item. Need the 

item urgently so my daughther can meet up for her final exams due soon.I have an offer 

that I hope you will grant. I am ready to pay for the item immediately with an offer of 

US$1,500.00. I will be making payment via Western Union Bid Pay(Cash Payment). Do 

provide your info: NAME ADDRESS CITY STATE CODE COUNTRY EMAIL for immediate payment: 

Your Full Name ddress City State Country Zip Code Tel Number. Emai and phone number 

alongside your response. I want you to get back to me if this offer is okay with you, 

while you also provide me the cost of the shipment through USPS or AIR MAIL POST 4-10 

DAYS EXPRESS delivery,as the package will be shipped to me here in Nigeria.. 

Thanks. 

Mrs Julian Bash. 

The auction closed at the appointed time, and the high bidder contact me fairly quickly to make “payment” and arrange for shipping…

hi

i will go and make the payment now and as soon as you get confrimation from paypal 

that the payment has been made pls ship the item to the address you will given via

canadian post express as soon as possible.

regards

So, this looked encouraging. I had a winning bidder, and a seller who indicated that they were going to pay via PayPal right away. In fact, I even received a “PayPal Confirmation” message moments later…

Dear Jesse D Hollington,

This email confirms that, Kate Sandra, have paid

seller, (jdh@kenetic.com) US $1,451.00 USD

	
using PayPal.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Payment Details 

 

 

Purchased From:Jesse D Hollington,

 

Item # Item Title Quantity Price Subtotal 

6815161436  HP PAVILION DV1000 NOTEBOOK  

1 WOW!                                     US $1,426.00 USD

Shipping & Handling via Canadian Post Express to 117XX 

{includes any seller handling fees}US   $25.00 USD
	
Shipping Insurance (Not Included)   
	
Total: US $1,451.00 USD
	
Note From Buyer: Please let me know about tracking number when

you receive tickets. Thanks 

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Buyer Id :kccstores03@cosmail.com, 

Shipping Info:  Bobo Ibrahim

Sw9/831A

Orunsolu Road Off Railway line Desalu

Ibadan

Oyostate 

23402

Nigeria
	
Address Status:  Confirmed    

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you have questions about the shipping and tracking

of this item or service, please contact

Kate Sandra  at kccstores03@cosmail.com   .

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NOTE:Incase of any problem you can contact us at paypal_acctverify@accountant.com

 

You can as well send call us or send us fax at 206-333-0194 or send 

us the shipment verification in this number
	
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Recipient will convert the funds at the applicable

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___________________________________________________

Play 100s of games for FREE! http://games.mail.com/

Of course, even aside from the obvious grammatical errors and the games advertising tag-line at the bottom, the fact that the return address and contact address was “paypal_acctverify@accountant.com” would have clued me off pretty quickly. Just to prove a point, I went over to my actual PayPal account, and to nobody’s surprise, there was nothing extra in there.

(For the technically curious, a cursory examination of the headers in this particular e-mail combined with a quick whois and DNS lookup would seem to indicate that the message did originate from the accountant.com domain, so I suspect this is an actual mailbox that somebody is using to pose as Paypal. Accountant.com is actually an additional domain of the “mail.com” service, which probably accounts for the “games.mail.com” advertising tagline).

At any rate, this was followed by another e-mail message from “Kate”…

hi

i have just made the payment and i am sure that you will have gotten

confrimation from paypal,all i want you to do now is for you to go and

ship the item now cause i ahve already amde the payment,ship the item and

give me the tracking number so that i can confrim that the payment has

been made pls make sure you give me this as soon as possible.you can call

me on my uk number below +447031957034

regards

Of course, I did no such thing as to ship the item, since I had ALL of the indications of complete fraud…. A brand new eBay account with zero feedback, a fake PayPal “receipt” and a request to ship the notebook to Nigeria. Needless to say, this was not going to happen. The whole thing was reported to eBay, of course, but in terms of the “winning” bidder, the simplest response was to file a Non-Payment notice, with the standard reason of “The buyer wants shipment to a country I don’t ship to” The dispute was closed immediately, and the winning bid effectively cancelled, with “Kate’s” account being deleted from eBay a few hours later.

A series of second-chance offers were then sent out to those who appeared to be more legitimate buyers.

So how likely is somebody to be taken in by this sort of scam? I would like to think that the general population is smarter than this, but then again having watched the guests on Jerry Springer from time to time would seem to indicate otherwise. Seriously, though, I think that anybody who is even slightly computer literate and a bit careful should see right through these scams. In my case, I’ve been involved in IT for over twenty years, and have been on the Internet since before the world-wide-web (yes, kids, there was an Internet back then). I know my way around e-mail systems and know what to look for… In fact, as an IT Consultant tracing down e-mail problems and looking for forged e-mails is part of what I do. Combine that with a healthy skepticism and I feel pretty safe on eBay. Most of this stuff is an annoyance to me rather than a real problem.

However, there are more and more people using the Internet today who are not computer literate, who are naive, and who could easily be taken in by these sort of things. I know people personally who barely touch their computer except to do business on services like eBay. These are the sorts of users who might not be so aware of what can actually happen out there. There are still those who don’t understand that e-mail can be as easily forged as a postal letter (just because something says it’s from bgates@microsoft.com doesn’t mean that it was written anywhere near Redmond, WA).

I suppose the simple solutions to avoid being taken in, if I had to make a list, would go something like the following:

• Be skeptical when doing business online. Deals that seem too good to be true almost always are.
  
• Don’t accept payments through methods other than PayPal or physical money order mailed to you and in your hand and cashed at the bank. Don’t ship anything out until you know the money is in your hands.
  
• Read your e-mails carefully. Especially pay attention to the headers and where the message is coming from. eBay has done a very smart thing lately by providing each member with an online mailbox. If it’s not in your eBay mailbox, it didn’t come through eBay, regardless of what the headers may say. Apparently PayPal will soon be adopting a similar system.
  
• Don’t list items as shipping to countries like Nigeria, Singapore, Russia, etc, unless you really are willing to ship there and are willing to put up with the aggravation of filtering through a whole bunch of non-paying bidders. Note that this won’t stop people from those countries from bidding but at least it makes it cut-and-dry to cancel their bids later.
  
• If you want to use Buy-it-Now, always require immediate payment. This ensures that your auction isn’t prematurely closed by somebody who only wants to defraud you out of your item. This was the mistake I made the first time. By requiring immediate payment, a potential immediate buyer must make payment via PayPal before the auction is closed. If they don’t complete payment, the item is not considered sold and the auction will remain open.
  
• Use Buyer Conditions on eBay to restrict who can bid on your item. You can specify things like preventing newly registered users from bidding (something I should perhaps have done), or require a certain amount of positive feedback.
  
• Look at registration dates and feedback. Based on my experience, if somebody has registered the same day they’ve bid on your item, and has zero feedback, the probability is higher that it’s a potential scam (this is only one possible red flag, however, since it’s also entirely possible that somebody just discovered eBay, and yours is the first item they want to bid on).
  
• Report anything and everything suspicious to the eBay Trust and Security department. They are your friends, and it is their job to advise you on situations like this and look after the safety and protection of their members. You might as well get some value for your insertion fees and final value fees. In addition, even if you know something is a fraud, don’t ignore it, or assume somebody else has reported it…. report it yourself. This way at least you help eBay to nail a potential scammer before somebody actually gets sucked in.
  
• And lastly… Be skeptical when doing business online. Deals that seem too good to be true almost always are.
  

There are more and more brick-and-mortar outlets popping up these days that will list stuff on eBay for you. These services tend to take a large cut of the item’s selling price (20-30% from what I’ve seen), however they are probably a good solution for those selling large-ticket items who don’t have a lot of experience with eBay or online commerce in general. Certainly the aggravation that I’ve dealt with over the past week would seem to be worth it for somebody who isn’t really online all that much.

The bottom line, however, is that people have the remember that the Internet is an extension of our society. You will find criminals and con men out on the streets of any major city, so why wouldn’t you find them online?