Charles on… anything that comes along

Interesting review here of a new iRiver MP3 player which also shows photos.

I’ll tell you what’s interesting about the reviewer in a moment. First, some of the things he noticed:

• you can only browse files on the device via a “file explorer” - no Artists, Genres, Albums, Photos etc menu.
• if you sort the files into artist, genre etc (using a Windows open-source tool.. how weird is that phrase?) so that it does do such a menu, the boot time increases to over 60 seconds. One minute. Of your life. Waiting. For. Your MP3 player. To. Boot.
• can’t make it sync with your PC (it’s PC-only, not Mac-compatible) because it’s set up to appear on the computer as a fixed hard drive, so you’ll have to drag-and-drop files into it from whatever sad music program you’re using (iRiver’s response to his query about this was We have tens of thousands of users who are very happy to manage their music collections independently of an application and prefer to drag and drop files to their player. Uh huh. And zillions more unhappy ones, eh?
• can’t charge via USB
• only syncs via USB 1.1 ports - which run at a couple of MB per second, compared to USB 2.0’s 400-odd MB/s (with a following wind) or Firewire’s 480MB/s. Filling up the 20GB device over USB 1.1 was “one of the most pitiful experiences I’ve had on my PC. I started on Saturday morning and the device finished on Monday evening.”

We don’t need more, truly, do we? But it is a good read. And this is one of the players that does work with Napster’s subscription service, by the way.

Oh, you wondered what’s special about the reviewer?

He works for Microsoft.

(Sidenote: I’m trying out an iPod Photo at the moment. Any things you’d like me to attempt to make it do? I mean, that you would expect from it?)

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Two links just to prove that technology isn't good or bad... (11 July 2005; score: 50.42%)
• iPod arrives... and is a clunker^W^W ..maybe OK (20 October 2005; score: 48.94%)
• Why Apple isn't rushing to license Fairplay, and isn't listening to Eeyore (14 October 2004; score: 47.2%)

Ah… (checks email)… ooh, another email “from eBay”. But of course. From personal@ebay.com? Why naturally! What the hell, I thought, let’s see what they’ve done.

And there it is, even including a Habeas antispam header. Great - something more to report.

Got reading. And they’ve got the breezy style of these things just right.

It’s that time of year again! With 2005 now upon us, we have updated the eBay user agreement.

Uh-huh. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.

As a result of the update, your account will be restricted until you have followed the link below and reconfirmed your contractual agreement with eBay. We apologize for any inconvience as a result of the update, but as a large e-commerce entity we are required to receive an updated agreement at the beginning of each year.

“Beginning” in this case being March 5. Which civilisation would that be? Mayan? Aztec?

So what’s the URL? It looks rather promising, even if you uncover the true URL - in my case by clicking on Eudora’s “blah blah blah” (it’s really called that) button, which shows you the actual URLs that clickable links are sending you to.

The link text says: https://signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?UpdateAgreement

The actual URL: https://signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn&UsingSSL=1&pUserId=&co_partnerId=2&siteid=0&ru=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi4.ebay.com%2Fws%2FeBayISAPI.dll?MfcISAPICommand%3dRedirectToDomain%26DomainUrl=http%3A%2F%2F62.193.217.91%2FeBayISAPI.php&pageType=1883 .

Be very careful with this link; I’ve not obscured it at all. See what it does? It starts with the real eBay URL, a secure one, and then near the end redirects you, obscuring it with lots of encoded characters (can you guess what http%3A%2F%2F comes up as? Can ya?).

It gets worse. That URL comes up as a secure page, with the eBay logo in the browser. It appears to load the eBay page. In fact what it does is load the page at http://62.193.217.91/ - yup, go take a look. (Unless it’s been killed now.)

If you ask me, that’s serious. I’ve fired off an email to abuse@amen.fr - we’ll have to hope someone is awake there.

The result is the same, though. Phishing scam. Originating from a PC in Korea at 211.59.86.44 since you ask, pointing to one in France at 62.193.217.91 (owned by Amen.fr).

A final thought: eBay could, and should, stop this. It’s SO easy. How: (1) change the images on its website, constantly. (2) block any display of those images outside the eBay site. I do think eBay bears a lot of responsibility for not proactively tackling this.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• First thought on eBay buys Skype (12 September 2005; score: 160.69%)
• Is eBay fundamentally broken? Or is it just the users? (16 November 2004; score: 130.96%)
• Second thoughts on eBay buying Skype: it's the start of the instant messaging war (14 September 2005; score: 102.5%)