San Diego authorities are warning regional residents about cyberscammers who sell vehicles, horses, and other big-ticket items on eBay, Car Soup, and other sites – scammers who reportedly negotiate a deal, send victims fake cashier's checks above the actual purchase price, and ask to have the difference wired back, usually to a foreign country. And guess who gets stuck repaying the lost sum to the bank? One major problem: Being that the crimes are international in scope, local law enforcement can't do much to hunt down the scoundrels, according to sheriff's officials…
There's plenty Internet service providers could do, however, in stopping actual or allegedly racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic propaganda in cyberspace, say delegates at a conference by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. France, which is hosting the conference, says there should be more international cooperation to fight intolerance in cyberspace. But the U.S. is opposing any restrictions on freedom of speech, with assistant U.S. attorney general Dan Bryant telling the conference regulating bias-motivated speech is "fundamentally mistaken."…
E-mail is under such continuous fundamental attack in cyberspace – between viruses, worms, and spam – that individuals and businesses alike are now said to be thinking twice about whether e-mail's worth the headache. Consider: Consumers are now shying away from bulky attached documents because of fears of hacker poaching or their recipients dumping attachments before opening; some businesses are banning workers from using all but company e-mail to pump up network security; Symantec thinks an estimated 40 percent of businesses would think about dumping e-mail if the spam gets any worse; and, a few businesses, like the nonprofit Arizona Employers' Council, are pondering going back to snail mail because a lot of its clients dump e-mail out of fear of catching a virus. And not without reason, notes ECommerceTimes.com: In May, almost a thousand new viruses hit the Net running…
The Justice Department tells the Senate Commerce Committee that the bad guys can make their nefarious plans on Internet telephones without fear of being cuffed and stuffed unless Congress makes sure incumbent wiretap law applies. But Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) tells the Justice Department they'd best prove the problem even exists before imposing new regulations that might restrict Internet telephony. "You are looking for a remedy," Wyden said, "for a problem that has not been documented."…
British regulators are looking for at least one Internet service provider, Wanadoo, to make it a little more clear that some of its search results are paid advertisements. The regulators say pay-to-place listings from Yahoo-owned Overture might confuse consumers – say, someone searching for the protagonist of the Harry Potter series getting results from sites like eBay and Toys R Us before official book and film sites come up. The Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that consumers could be misled because sponsored links are not identified clearly by headline or title…
That's not even close to the kind of nasty now said to be endemic to the online personals world. For an idea of just how cutthroat online personals are getting, look to Match.com's parent, InterActiveCorp: They've started legal proceedings against six former workers who moved to upstart TrueBeginnings. The skinny: Breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, and other interference with business relations. And TrueBeginnings chief executive Herb Vest has thundered in published ads that the Match.com action equals a bid to intimidate the six. And he'll take one for his team, he said. "To get to them," he told CNET, "you must, first, come through me… we firmly believe we have not broken any rules by hiring them."…
Speaking of legal proceedings, the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights is taking Cingular, AT&T, and T-Mobile USA to court over accusations that the three wireless providers have been "locking" cell phones so customers can't use their incumbent handsets when they change their phone number to a different carrier. Cingular said they hadn't seen the lawsuits yet and couldn't comment; AT&T was unavailable for comment; and, T-Mobile said they don't comment on litigation…
ChoiceMail would like to put another kind of stranglehold on another kind of online pest: spam. And it's painfully simple to use: it's a free download in a free version, and it uses all the names in your address book to create a whitelist of those you want to hear from. Those get through automatically, unless you decide in due course that they shouldn't. And if you mail someone they, too, go on your whitelist unless you turn that feature off. If someone isn't on the whitelist, ChoiceMail says, the message gets dumped into an unknown senders folder, with those senders getting a message that they won't get through without completing a short challenge form – which isn't that challenging, since it asks for the sender's name, asks for a brief message, and types in a number on screen to stop an automated response. That sender gets four days to answer or poof! Into the junk box for automatic deletion, with the holding time set by you…
Meanwhile, not everyone wants to profit from their inventions. Like the man credited with inventing the World Wide Web in the first place. "If I had tried to demand fees," said Tim Berners-Lee, after accepting $1.2 million in cash as the winner of the first Millenium Technology Prize, "there would be no World Wide Web. There would be lots of small webs." The prize committee cited the importance of his decision never to commercialize or patent his work toward the Web and the revolutionary contribution he made to man's ability to communicate…
But there are still those looking to the Internet for help profiting from… well, we'll just let this one speak for itself: British undergraduate David Vardy decided to auction off his virginity for a beginning price of about US$15,790 – and his auction got 7,000 hits on eBay before the online auction kings yanked it. "I am always coming up with these crazy ideas," he told the Daily Express. "I just did the whole thing for fun." And, reportedly, for a small contribution to the charity Oxfam. The media studies student might have been having fun but offers from Australia, Canada, and the U.S. seemed to indicate his prospective buyers meant business.
This, after a lesbian student offered her virginity to the highest online bidder, eventually losing it to a 44-year-old man in a hotel north of London who paid about US$22,100 for the honor.
