weberwithoneb

eBay Doesn't Like You

eBay is on the down slope. It is clear through their recent policy changes that they are no longer concerned with maintaining a community-friendly product, but are instead aiming for short-term profits.

1. eBay has lowered the listing prices of fixed priced auctions.

Anybody who frequents eBay on a regular basis knows that only “eBay Spammers” list items at a fixed price. The reason is simple- people that make their living on eBay sales need to make a certain amount of money per listing. This retail approach is much less communal as it removes the auction “pull” from listings. The very heart of eBay is the auctions, and by removing this feature, eBay is no different than any other marketplace.

2. Sellers can no longer leave feedback.

eBay’s auction model is based on seller and buyer legitimacy. Ask any European and they’ll tell you how bad unregulated eBay is. The one power that users have in maintaining the legitimacy of the community is feedback, the tool for rating sellers and buyers based on their adherence to the common rules and guidelines of the web site.

eBay recently ruled against buyer feedback. eBay clearly wants to attract bidders at any cost, even at the legitimacy of their own community. By driving up the price of items, eBay will make more short-term profits.

3. No regulation of shipping prices.

The most frustrating problem for eBay buyers is the open-ended shipping policy. There is absolutely no regulation of shipping costs. Sellers can charge triple the cost of S&H, which further erodes the already weathered legitimacy of the community. This misleading practice suckers the “newbies” into buying items at a much higher price, which limits the site from growing to its full potential. This policy also enables the “eBay Spammers” who list items at 99 cents and charge twenty dollars for shipping.

eBay needs to take a stand now or they will soon find themselves in the tech landfill with Yahoo Auctions and the rest of the failures.

Recording internet radio in linux

Have you ever wanted to record internet radio? Do you like a particular show that airs weekly, or do you want to record a station and bring it with you on the road?

If you are familiar with linux and you answered yes to any of the questions above, you should download my Record Radio script from here! Prerequisites are perl, mplayer and lame.

I setup a cronjob to record a weekly show. To do this, put something like this in your /etc/crontab:

min hour * * * user-name /path/to/record_radio.pl -u mms://url-of-stream/ -n /path/to/savefile/`date +\%F_\%I-\%M_\%Z`_Radio-Show-Title -l number-of-minutes-to-record

This create a timestamped mp3 of the recording! If you don’t need the timestamp, just remove the stuff between the backticks.

dpkg broken package fix

Last resort fix for broken packages in the dpkg system that fail on the invoke-rc.d stop command:
- Find the .prerm file for your program in var/lib/dpkg/info/
- Edit the line that says “invoke-rc.d [prog_name] stop || exit $?” to “/bin/true || exit $?”
- Try again. Done.

SSH Tunneling and HTTP Port Forwarding

I subscribed to the cotse.net proxy and it’s working well so far. It’s very fast for a proxy… I’m definitely impressed.

To use it (after signing up for an account) you just download an ssh client, such as PuTTY, and configure it to not only connect to cotse’s ssh server, but also to hold open an ssh tunnel from a local port on your computer to the port on theirs. You can then tell firefox or IE to use your local port as a proxy server (this is all really easy to do), so all your traffic goes through this hardcore encrypted tunnel.

If you want to hide your internet traffic, this is the way to do it.

From wikipedia:

SSH is frequently used to tunnel insecure traffic over the Internet in a secure way. For example, Windows machines can share files using the SMB protocol, which is not encrypted. If you were to mount a Windows filesystem remotely through the Internet, someone snooping on the connection could see your files.

So to mount an SMB file system securely, one can establish an SSH tunnel that routes all SMB traffic to the fileserver inside an SSH-encrypted connection. Even though the SMB traffic itself is insecure, because it travels within an encrypted connection it becomes secure.

A few articles on tunneling and port forwarding:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2001/02/23/wep.html
http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1816

Craigslist Search Utility

Click here to display my awesome craigslist RSS searching utility below!