beecherbowers.com

Before anyone gets upset, this article doesn’t describe all computer sellers on eBay. I know there are some that are honest and occasionally just have a problem.

I recently received a call from a lady whose son had purchased a computer on eBay for her and had it shipped to her house. He lives on the other coast and never saw the computer, other than the pictures in the auction. The seller contacted him after the sale and said the case had been tipped over and the plastic on the front cracked and he had to remove the innards, and put it in another case. (hint #1 there was a problem)

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Mozilla Labs is working on a product called that allows you to run web applications (mail, etc…) as an application on your desktop with a completely separate profile from your web browser. When creating the application, you can decide how many browser features to enable on the application, such as the address bar, navigational buttons, and so forth.

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Some ISPs have been redirecting mistyped URLs to pages with advertisements on them. Usually the pages contain ads for related products, or suggestions for what they think the user may have been searching for. Unfortunately, the ads are sometimes hosted on their own servers nad their servers aren’t always secure.

This can lead to users thinking they have arrived at the site they were hoping to, but the page they are actually on might have been hijacked.  Since they don’t know, they may enter their site credentials and get their user/pass stolen by a malicious script.

read more over at Wired.com

Paypal has announced it will start preventing access to its site for those using web browsers it decides are unsafe. They plan to start warning users that are using these browsers and eventually will block access to secured portions of the site for those who haven’t switched to a different browser.

Micheal Barrett, Paypal’s Chief Information Security Officer only mentioned Microsoft’s older browsers as being unsafe, but Apple’s Safari browser doesn’t support the EV certificates which would be required, so it may be banned as well. Firefox and Opera plan to support the newer security certificates in upcoming versions.

It would be interesting if your bank decided to lock their doors and decide you could only visit their drive-through with a 2008 model armored car for your own security.