The seller can see all the bidder information as usual; it's only other users who are denied the information. There is some good in it, to be sure: you can buy (expensive) gifts without tipping your hand, and you no longer have to feel guilty about bidding against your friends!
The trouble is, by their own admission, eBay lives and dies by community self-policing, and you CANNOT improve security in a system by reducing transparency and accountability. All you can do is fool people into believing that they are safer. The "bad guys" will continue to do exactly what they do now, which is to blast out millions of phishing attempts to email addresses that usually don't even belong to eBay users. Meanwhile, shill bidding is now as easy as creating a spare account using your neighbor's WiFi access point and keeping it around for those occasions when you feel like you could use a few extra bucks. It is completely undetectable by users, because no suspicious bidder-seller ID correlations can be spotted. If you believe eBay's automated tools are capable of the necessary degree of awareness, I have a bridge for sale in the "Public Infrastructure, Used" category, starting bid $1, no reserve. A better way to achieve their stated goal would be for eBay to develop and maintain their own best-of-breed email system, and publicly prohibit any and all involvement of standard email from eBay's operations. It should be very easy to warn people against fraudulent eBay and PayPal messages: "If it's in your email inbox, it's fake." Spoof email only works because email is a horribly-broken communications protocol that should never have been used for any commercial purposes. But hey, taking responsibility for user-to-user communications would only improve eBay's security, their users' online safety, and the company's public image. It wouldn't eliminate off-eBay transactions, which is clearly their *real* motivation in masking bidder IDs. The condescension they are showing is even more annoying than the actual policy. -- john, KE5FX -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Didier Juges Sent: Monday, January 15, 2007 4:56 PM To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Austron 2202 Well John, I need to think about that one. If you click on the high bidder, you do get quite a bit more information than with the old system. Even though the information was available, it would have been hard to put it together. With this new system, they give it in summary form, so in that respect, it is an improvement and will help seller evaluate bidders, and may also help the serious bidder to understand better what he/she is up against, even though loosing the link to what another bidder may have bought and what he paid for it is a problem. I guess maybe eBay felt that putting that much information in summary form for all to see was a little bit too much (if it had not been anonymous) and would have made many buyers uneasy. Do you know if the seller has more information about the bidders than what is available to other users, under this new system? So, there is some good and some bad, I am not sure which outweighs the other at the moment... Didier KO4BB John Miles wrote: > eBay has a zillion different servers; they aren't all updated at once for > obvious reasons. Also, their changes tend to be rolled in incrementally as > new listings appear. > > My understanding is that within a week or two, unless eBay management comes > to their senses, the list of bidders in all auctions will look like this: > http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190069406071 > > -- john, KE5FX > > _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list time-nuts@febo.com https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list time-nuts@febo.com https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts