Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

I had just finished writing up some code to implement PayPal into a billing system, when Google launched “Google Checkout”. While reading up on the implementation guide, I was wondering how long until eBay felt threatened by it. PayPal is extremely stagnant. It doesn’t handle many of the cool things Google Checkout can (PayPal cart is virtually useless).

Well, I have my answer. eBay decided to just block it. Rather lame. This will either up being settled very quickly, or end up in court.

I guess my next question “can they standardize the interfaces so programming to use a service is just a matter of a new URL?” is something I can answer myself.

eBay and banks really need implement SPF, Sender Policy Framework and DomainKeys. There I said it.

I see quite a few Phishing attacks every day. And just about all of them aren’t caught by SpamAssassin. Technically they aren’t spam, so that does make sense. But what bothers me is that this is easy mitigate for many potential victims. If eBay and banks supported SPF and DomainKeys, it would be much easier for a filter to tell if the message is legitimate or not. Check out this sample SpamAssassin header from a eBay phishing email I received:

X-Spam-Level: **
X-Spam-Status: No, score=3.0 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_50,HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_28,
	HTML_MESSAGE,HTML_MIME_NO_HTML_TAG,MIME_HEADER_CTYPE_ONLY,
	MIME_HTML_ONLY autolearn=no version=3.1.0

That’s really not much in this otherwise pretty bad email. The IP of origin isn’t even in North America (it’s Pacific Rim).

Perhaps it’s time to start a campaign to urge institutions subject to having their name used in these attacks to start using a method like SPF and DomainKeys. A mail provider could then throw out emails that don’t match. Anyone know why they still don’t implement one or both of these methods?

It seems to me they could easily take a giant step to solve the problem. I know Google’s Gmail knows about SPF, and Yahoo knows about DomainKeys. That’s two major email providers right there.

Please oh please don’t ruin it like you did PayPals. Well, the news is out, eBay is going to buy Skype. For some reason, I have this belief that eBay will either stop letting it continue development (like PayPals seems somewhat frozen in time), or just start crippling it so people use the pay service (which I won’t). Would have been great if Google bought them, which I’ve been hoping for a while.

I’d own me a Blue Angel.

How sweet it would be to buy an F/A-18A on ebay.

My favorite aircraft ever.