Re: Fw: Your Rhizome.org contribution (fwd)

Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 13:58:37 -0500
From: Liza Sabater <[email protected]>
To: t.whid <[email protected]>, [email protected]
Subject: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: Fw: Your Rhizome.org contribution

Hi Tim,

Through Ebay. I won an auction for some software but it was all a scam.
Other people on similar auctions got completely ripped off –the
assholes ran away with more than $2K of auction money from different
people because somehow they made it so that Paypal would not accept
none of our credit cards and would force people into opening accounts
that had to be tied to brick and mortar bank accounts. It would not
shock me if this was done by people working for Paypal (not necessarily
within Paypal).


.PayPal encourages eBay sellers to set up their accounts to accept
payments "exclusively" from PayPal in order to receive certain
services from them. Perhaps this is relevant (rather someone is
using an exploit vs. employee conspiracies).

.The system also has a number of exploits visible. People who do
actual security for high-end business are a. expensive
b. aware of exactly
how holey this
'secure' online is.

.However revealing such information to customers would not do well
for online business. Particularly in the current slump.

.One day humans will learn that exploiting weaknesses for short-term
delusional gains errodes themselves + those incapable of self-
protection.

But we are not holding our breath.
Nor taking any contemporary-Boddhisattva vows.

La folie d'enfer is seemingly neverending.