[WTF] Credit Card Information Can Be Stolen With Electronic Pick Pocketing

What's in Store for EBay? Outlook Hazy.

News Provided by WiReD.

This is what we know about eBay's current state of affairs based on recent news: a) CEO Meg Whitman is apparently following Mitt Romney on the campaign trail; b) John Donahoe, head of eBay's marketplace division, has been fingered as a potential CEO successor, and he's complaining to anyone who will listen that the site looks like a flea market; and c) eBay users are mad as hell and they're writing to the New York Times to complain about it.

From where we're sitting, it looks pretty chaotic. eBay's CEO is out playing politics; one of the highest-ranking executives is publicly trashing the business; and customers are apparently planning a revolt. There are roughly 248 million registered users on eBay -- and while not all of them are going to be happy, the company's listings fell 3 percent during the first nine months of 2007, which indicates that a huge chunk of its customer base is taking its business elsewhere.

It's a funny thing, though: Shares of eBay are holding up fine in what has been a fairly shaky market. The stock is up 6 percent year-to-date. And while consumer sentiment seems deeply negative, investors are pretty mixed on the matter.

"I think that there's an increasingly divided view of eBay's fortunes," says Derek Brown, an analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald. "There are some, like myself, who believe the company is far from fixing its problems. And there are others who believe they are well on their way to fixing their problems."

Steve Jurvetson, venture capitalist (featured in the above photo) and managing director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson seems to fall into the latter category.

"I think the eBay for services will one day be a bigger opportunity than the eBay for physical goods . . .," Jurvetson told EPICENTER. "Skype lets them get into a really big business; it is early days still for Skype's potential. Wifi dual-mode phones are a key next step... Skype on PCs was an accident. It was always designed for mobility... And a trillion dollars of global telecom services are ripe for restructuring."

CompUSA To Close Up Shop

PC Retailer CompUSA plans to close all its stores after the holidays, part of a sale of its assets to Gordon Brothers Group, a restructuring firm. CompUSA, owned by the Mexican based firm Grupo Carso SA, has 103 stores in 68 markets. Reports said that Gordon Brothers would look to sell individual stores in certain markets and close those that it could not sell.

CompUSA was founded in 1984 and rose to national prominence under the guidance of Nathan Morton. As chairman and CEO, Morton led CompUSA from two stores and $60 million in sales as SoftWarehouse to its standing as a multibillion-dollar national retailer in less than five years. He was posthumously honored as a member of CRN's Industry Hall of Fame in 2006. He succumbed to cancer at the age of 57 in 2005.

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University 'appalled' after students dress up as shooting victims

STATE COLLEGE, Pennsylvania: Photos of two Penn State University students dressed up for Halloween as victims of this spring's Virginia Tech massacre — wearing Virginia Tech shirts covered in bullet holes and fake blood — led to a rebuke from their university this week.

"We're appalled that these individuals would display this level of insensitivity and lack of common decency by dressing up in this manner," the statement said. "The fact that one of the individuals is actually from Virginia makes it even more difficult to understand."

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Will Smith On 60 Minutes

Taylor dies after being shot at home

MIAMI -- Pro Bowl safety Sean Taylor died Tuesday after he was shot in his home by an apparent intruder, leaving the Washington Redskins in mourning for a teammate who seemed to have reordered his life since becoming a father.

The 24-year-old player died at Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he had been airlifted after the shooting early Monday, family friend Richard Sharpstein said. Sharpstein said Taylor's father informed him of the death at about 5:30 a.m.

"His father called and said he was with Christ and he cried and thanked me," said Sharpstein, Taylor's former lawyer. "It's a tremendously sad and unnecessary event. He was a wonderful, humble, talented young man, and had a huge life in front of him. Obviously God had other plans."

A string of mourners, including Taylor's father, visited the player's home and embraced outside. Authorities entered the home, but it was unclear what they were doing.

At Redskins Park in Ashburn, Va., fans began a makeshift memorial by laying flowers on a field near the front entrance. Several people paid silent respects at Taylor's parking space, a reward he received as the team's defensive player of the week in a game against Philadelphia in September.

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Survey: Chicago most caffeinated U.S. city, Tampa in 2nd

NORWALK, Conn. (UPI) -- A recent survey of the most caffeinated cities in the United States found that residents of Chicago indulge in the stimulant the most.

The HealthSaver Caffeinated Cities Survey found that in terms of overall caffeine consumption habits, Chicago edged out Tampa, Fla., for the top spot on the list, a HealthSaver release said Tuesday.

Miami meanwhile nabbed enough respondent votes to take third place on the list, while the top five most caffeinated cities were rounded off with Phoenix in fourth and Atlanta in fifth.

On the flip side of the list, San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., were tagged with the title of least caffeinated city in the United States.

The two neighboring California cities were followed on the least list by Philadelphia, New York and Detroit respectively.

Olympic gold medalist Peggy Fleming said the survey showed how prevalent caffeine has become in the U.S. culture.

"With the advent of rich, high-end coffees, soaring popularity of energy drinks and national fascination with green tea," the HealthSaver spokeswoman said, "our HealthSaver Caffeinated Cities Survey has brewed up some very interesting trends, findings and results."

MySpace Hacked!!!!!

Visiting Alicia Keys' Page And Others exposes the visitor to an exploit that installs malware unless the user is fully patched against the most recent security vulnerabilities.

By Thomas Claburn
InformationWeek
November 8, 2007 07:40 PM

Avoid Alicia Keys' Web page on MySpace. It's been hacked.

Roger Thompson, CTO at Exploit Prevention Labs, has found multiple hacked MySpace pages, including the page for Alicia Keys, the social networking site's fourth most popular music artist.

In keeping with what appears to be a new trend among security researchers, Thompson has released a video depicting the hack on YouTube. He has also posted details on his blog.

Visiting the page exposes the visitor to an exploit that installs malware unless the user is fully patched against the most recent security vulnerabilities. "They're using an exploit to install software in the background," Thompson explains in the video.

Even those with patched systems are vulnerable. The hackers have found a way to associate their malicious URL with what would normally be a non-clickable background area on the Web page. The result is that clicks outside specific clickable controls get captured and interpreted as a click on the malicious URL.

"If you click anywhere outside a given control, [the malicious URL] will be the default control that it goes to," Thompson explains. "It's a really interesting technique and it's going to catch a lot of people."

"What's not clear at this point is how they're doing it, and how widespread it is," Thompson says on his blog. "Neither Google (NSDQ: GOOG) nor MySpace seems to be indexing the critical bit of HTML. If you search for the exploit site (co8vd.cn), the only results seem to be victims, or people talking about victims."

In a conversation via instant message, Thompson said that social networking sites are increasingly become vectors of attack. "The whole point of browser stuff is that it bypasses the firewall," he explained.

A spokesperson for MySpace was not immediately available to comment on the attack.

WTF!!!!! is going on in America today ...

Like many middle-class, suburban American parents, Shannan and Joey Troiano worried about their son’s behaviour and his bad grades at high school. And like many wayward teenagers, Cory Ryder was grounded for weeks at a time, had a PlayStation confiscated and was banned from watching TV.

Less typically, this 16-year-old was plotting to murder his parents by hiring a hitman, while his mother was organising a sting operation involving a police officer posing as a contract killer. Police say that Cory offered the undercover officer his stepfather’s new pickup truck as payment for killing his parents. “Two bullets is all it takes,” he is alleged to have said.

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Some teens smoke marijuana but not tobacco

LAUSANNE, Switzerland, Nov. 6 (UPI) -- Teens using marijuana function better than those also using tobacco but have no more psycho-social problems than abstainers, a Swiss study suggested.

The study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, found 6 percent of the teens using marijuana alone were more likely to be male, play sports, live with both parents and have good grades.

Dr. J. C. Saris and colleagues at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, analyzed data on 5,263 students aged 16 to 20 years from a 2002 national survey. Of these, 455 smoked marijuana only, 1,703 smoked marijuana and tobacco and 3,105 abstained from both substances..

"The gateway theory hypothesizes that the use of legal drugs -- tobacco and alcohol -- is the previous step to cannabis consumption," the study authors said in a statement. "However, recent research also indicates that cannabis use may precede or be simultaneous to tobacco use and that, in fact, its use may reinforce cigarette smoking or lead to nicotine addiction independently of smoking status."

While teens smoking both marijuana and tobacco may have more psycho-social problems and be worthy targets for preventive intervention, the study authors advised, those who smoke marijuana only should also be monitored and counseled and their situation shouldn't be trivialized.

Full Article could be found @ UPI.Com

No Sympathy From The Phone Company

Don't look for much sympathy from AT&T if your house just burnt down in California. These newlyweds called them to cancel their service after their house was destroyed and AT&T informed them they would be responsible for the $300 receiver that was lost effective immediately.


No Sympathy From The Phone Company - Watch more free videos

Frustrated Comcast Subscriber Takes Hammer to Local Office

A 75-year-old Bristow, Va. woman has paid $345 as compensation for damages and is serving three months of probation, the result of her hammer attack on equipment in a Manassas, Va. Comcast Corp. office in August.

The consumer, Mona Shaw, said she took a hammer to the phone handsets and shoved a computer monitor off the counter after she failed to get a response by the company to her lack of phone service.

“I couldn’t think of another way to get their attention. I really couldn’t,” she said in an interview.

But Jeff Alexander, vice president, corporate communications for Comcast’s Eastern Division said there were appropriate alternatives to Shaw's attack. He labled her actions “dangerous and represhensible,” adding that luck saved the lobby employees from injury. Comcast takes good customer service, and the safety of its employees, seriously, he said.

Shaw, a retired nurse, has a heart condition and was stressed and angered after what she said was a botched upgrade to a triple-play bundle. The subscriber said everything went wrong before she packed a hammer in her purse and went in person to the local office: the installer didn't come on the appointed day, Aug. 13, but two days later; the installation left them with incoming calls only; an attempt to remedy that left them with no service at all; an in-person visit to the Manassas office resulted in a two-hour wait, only to be told the supervisor she was waiting to see had gone home.

When a complaint to the Virginia state Corporations Commission did not elicit a response from Comcast, she packed her hardware, she said. She marched past a waiting line, started hitting things with her hammer and asked repeatedly, “Have I got your attention now?” The incident ended with Shaw’s arrest; she’s now barred from entering the local cable office.

That’s fine, she said. She has DirecTV now, and she’s returned to Verizon for phone service and has added digital-subscriber line service, she said. But some part of Comcast still thinks she's a customer: before a reporter's call on Oct. 10, she got a voice mail message thanking her for being a customer and advising her they planned to come to her place Oct. 11 "as part of her service contract,” she said, chuckling.

Leprechaun in Mobile, Alabama

lmao.... too funny!

Judge calls Bay area woman danger to community

PINELLAS COUNTY (Bay News 9) -- Carol Terry has been arrested five times for driving under the influence. As Carol Terry stood before a Pinellas County judge Tuesday, the judge asked the assistant state attorney how many previous DUI convictions Terry had.

He noted the 50-year-old had four previous convictions during the past 19 years.

Yet, Terry was still asking the judge to give her a break.

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Orange County boy charged with killing brother

ORANGE COUNTY-- An Orange County boy has been charged in the death of his 8-year-old brother.

Deputies said the 13-year-old killed him when their mother was out of the house.

Authorities said the boy choked and beat his brother to death because the younger boy ate a dessert and he was worried he would be blamed.

The boy is under arrest for first-degree murder. The boys' mother told police she was visiting a cousin nearby and left him in charge of his younger siblings.

She is charged with aggravated child neglect.

Police said a neighbor told investigators that she heard four loud bangs, followed by 10 minutes of quiet and then more commotion.

The State Attorneys Office will decide if the boy will be tried as an adult. He is due in juvenile court Friday.

Cop Takes A Shot At Guy In Handcuffs

This guy was just arrested for burglary and the arresting officer decides to give him a little extra help getting into the squad car.


Cop Takes A Shot At Guy In Handcuffs - Watch more free videos

Digital 'Smiley Face' Turns 25

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon. :-) Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes - a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis - as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message.

To mark the anniversary Wednesday, Fahlman and his colleagues are starting an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication. The Smiley Award, sponsored by Yahoo Inc., carries a $500 cash prize.

Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect.

Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly.

"I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)," wrote Fahlman. "Read it sideways."

The suggestion gave computer users a way to convey humor or positive feelings with a smile - or the opposite sentiments by reversing the parenthesis to form a frown.

Carnegie Mellon said Fahlman's smileys spread from its campus to other universities, then businesses and eventually around the world as the Internet gained popularity.

Computer science and linguistics professors contacted by The Associated Press said they were unaware of who first used the symbol.

"I've never seen any hard evidence that the :-) sequence was in use before my original post, and I've never run into anyone who actually claims to have invented it before I did," Fahlman wrote on the university's Web page dedicated to the smiley face. "But it's always possible that someone else had the same idea - it's a simple and obvious idea, after all."

Variations, such as the "wink" that uses a semicolon, emerged later. And today people can hardly imagine using computer chat programs that don't translate keystrokes into colorful graphics, said Ryan Stansifer, a computer science professor at the Florida Institute of Technology.

"Now we have so much power, we don't settle for a colon-dash-paren," he said. "You want the smiley face, so all these chatting softwares have to have them."

Instant messaging programs often contain an array of faces intended to express emotions ranging from surprise to affection to embarrassment.

"It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world," Fahlman was quoted as saying in a university statement. "I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since this all started."

Amy Weinberg, a University of Maryland linguist and computer scientist, said emoticons such as the smiley were "definitely creeping into the way, both in business and academia, people communicate."

"In terms of things that language processing does, you have to take them into account," she said. "If you're doing almost anything ... and you have a sentence that says 'I love my boss' and then there's a smiley face, you better not take that seriously."

Emoticons reflect the likely original purpose of language - to enable people to express emotion, said Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford University. The emotion behind a written sentence may be hard to discern because emotion is often conveyed through tone of voice, he said.

"What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don't have the voice," Nass said.

In some ways, he added, they also give people "the ability not to think as hard about the words they're using."

Stansifer said the emoticon was part of a natural progression in communication.

"I don't think the smiley face was the beginning and the end," he said. "All people at all times take advantage of whatever means of communication they have."

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

DVD Forum approves 51GB HD DVD?

We haven't yet seen any official confirmation of the news, but it's been reported that the 51GB triple-layer single-sided HD DVD Toshiba first announced at CES has been approved by the DVD Forum. (The last we heard about this, the new format had been submitted for approval.) Of course, this might mean consumers will need new players to read 51GB HD DVDs, which could potentially damage the format more than help it; the last thing either HD DVD or Blu-ray need right now is to fork hardware compatibility with their own embattled formats, so we'll hope what we've heard about 2nd and 3rd gen HD DVD players being able to read 51GB discs via firmware upgrade is true. Also up to bat: the "twin" dual-layer DVD / HD DVD combo-disc was also approved, with one 5GB DVD layer and two 17GB HD DVD layers. We'll let you know when the DVD forum officially confirms (or denies) the news.

Google Plans to Put Video Ads Into Search Results

At CitiGroup's Technology Summit in New York this week, Google's Business Product Manager for Ads Quality Nicholas Fox said the company will be moving ahead with integration of video and image ads within sponsored search results. Does that mean you will soon be seeing TV commercials at the top of Google search results page? Maybe.

"It's a topic that's come up in a lot of internal discussions," said Fox during a Q&A session about Google's search usage and trends.

We want to do the best job of conveying information to the user. In many cases that's a text ad. In some cases it may not be a text ad. It may be an image, it may be a video, it may be something else. The risk, though, is that we don't want to show things that are garish or flashy, or other things that might cause users to become blind to the ads.

Fox elaborated by giving what he claimed was one of the best use case examples:

You could think of a local butcher. Maybe a 10-word text ad explaining that local butcher's business probably is not going to be enticing and get the user to click on the ad. But if you could have a video of the butcher explaining his business and showing all this fresh meat...then maybe the user would get much more value out of that. And the advertiser would also get more value as well.

Fresh meat, huh? Google, of course, has already made steps in this direction with universal search, blending listings from its images, news and video search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages. In the case of universal search, however, the images and video it supplies are search results, not ads. The trick for the company, as Fox notes, will be finding a way to capitalize on the information element of such ads... like those glistening tenderloin cuts... without alienating users.

"I think you might see things along those lines," Fox continued. "My expectation is that we'll do some more thinking around this area and potentially some experiments. Expect a scenario where we'll move extremely cautiously, though."

Shigella bacteria found in baby carrots

INDUSTRY, Calif. (UPI) -- A California company is recalling bags of baby carrots because they may be contaminated with the bacteria Shigella.

Los Angeles Salad Company said the recall involves packages labeled "Genuine Sweet Baby Carrots" with a sell by date up date up to and including August 16, 2007.

The carrots were sold under the Los Angeles Salad Company label in Colorado, California, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina and Florida. They were also sold under the Trader Joe's label in Arizona, California, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon and Washington with a sell by date code up to and including August 8, 2007, the company said Friday in a release.

Shigella bacteria can cause bloody diarrhea, fever, nausea and vomiting. The infection can be passed from person to person.

The recall was initiated after four people in Canada became ill from eating the same produce. The company said it is still trying to determine the cause of the contamination.

Consumers should return the recalled products to the place of purchase for a full refund.




Copyright 2007 by United Press International