Sunday, July 27, 2003

It's more complicated than it appears

George M. Wallace (A Fool in the Forest), sourcing Tim Ruten's latest media piece in the LA Times, asks, If All Politics is Local, Why Isn't It on the Local News? My short answer: Because, after weather, sports, car chases, advertising and cross-promotions of other TV shows, there's no time left for it.

Taking turns

Stan Finley was just in Park City too. I'm amazed we missed this place when we were there.

ePayScam

I finally got eBay's fax to take the latest round of documentation requests required by no other online ebusiness provider I know of. The result, apparently, was these two emails:

Your PayPal Account has been Restored
Your PayPal Account has been Limited

So I called eBay, found that my account was, indeed, finally okay. (Which is wonderful. I can finally buy that espresso machine.) And they had no record of having sent out another account limitation notification.

Then I noticed that the email wasn't to me. It was to the address on the Cluetrain site, which gets forwarded to each of the four co-authors. Being a public address, it attracts a lot of spam.

I also noticed the email was in HTML. I have a no-HTML mail pref set at my eBay account.

The source of the email, I saw, was in Brazil.

The email instructs the user to confirm their email address, credit card, and account ATM PIN. Of course this isn't quite possible on a PayPal account — at least not in the way the email instructs.

So I'm sure the spamscammers are expecting a few recipients to fail with eBay and to instead provide the requested information in an email reply.

I'm sure none of us are that dumb, but I've come close.

At eBay's request, I forwared the mail to their fraud department.