We took a lot of flack over a post back in January that questioned the security of Apple’s Mac OS X. TechConsumers left various comments ranging from “For some reason unknown to me, no one can ever show me a situation where a user opens a e-mail and their Mac turns into a robot sending out hundreds of e-mails” to “Mac OS X *is* inherently safer. You have to be a major league Windows zombie not to know and accept that.”

Well, CanSecWest’s PWN 2 OWN contest has just shown that Mac OS X isn’t “inherently safer” and that clearly it is possible for a user to open an e-mail on a Mac and have it join a spam botnet.

more…

My top issues with eBay: Prices aren’t that competitive, service is inconsistent, time is wasted, and the shipping is a wild card. It’s no wonder then that, due to lackluster growth, eBay recently announced changes including “holding sellers to higher customer-service standards.” But I gave up on eBay years ago when I discovered Amazon has all the same stuff at around the same price but with real customer service.

Just for fun, I thought I’d revisit eBay and see what kind of deals I skipped out on by searching for the last few items I ordered on Amazon. Here’s how the process works: you search for your item and get excited when you see an amazing deal! Oh wait, that auction still has 12 hours before it’s over. So you save it to your watch list and waste more time searching for other deals.

more…

                                                    
Have you ever stopped and wondered about how PayPal makes their money? Let’s review: With PayPal Personal you can send and receive money electronically to and from other PayPal accounts for free. You can also transfer money to and from your regular bank account at no charge. Sign me up!

The other account type is PayPal Premier. With this this type of account PayPal charges a fee, $0.30 plus 2.9% of each and every dollar received. So why would anyone sign up for a PayPal Premier account when they can have a PayPal Personal account which can send and receive funds for free? This is where they have done something clever. It’s actually kind of boring, really, which is why few people have noticed the fact that since buying PayPal, eBay has nearly doubled it’s revenue for each auction that uses PayPal.

more…

div>TechConsumer News is a feature we started out of a hobby of tracking the latest happenings within the consumer related technology sphere. The goal is to provide a concise, compiled overview of the most intriguing stories from the last few days. Today’s news roundup focuses on Google. Feel free to give us feedback or send us tips.

Here’s the latest in TechConsumer [Google] news:

more…

Trent Reznor gave an interesting interview over at the Herald Sun. In it he states, “It’s a very odd time to be a musician on a major label, because there’s so much resentment towards the record industry that it’s hard to position yourself in a place with the fans where you don’t look like a greedy asshole."

He goes on to say, “I’ve have one record left that I owe a major
label, then I will never be seen in a situation like this again. If I
could do what I want right now, I would put out my next album, you
could download it from my site at as high a bit-rate as you want, pay
$4 through PayPal.”

more…

SwitchPlanet is one of the more compelling online communities I’ve seen in a
while. Members can switch movies, CDs, books, and games with each other for
free. The system is based on Switchbucs, an internal currency. You list
whatever items you have for a Switchbucs price and get credited that amount when you ship an item to someone willing to pay that price using their Switchbucs. No real money ever trades hands, just
switching with a third-party broker.

more…

                                                    
Although PayPal already offers some limited functions for mobile users, it is working on a new payment service for cellphones to be launched later this year. The idea is for participating e-commerce sites to work with PayPal in developing a version of their website for cellphones with a PayPal payment option built in. A leaked screenshot (see below) shows how it might work/look using Papa John’s Pizza as an example. So you could easily order your pizza using your cellphone without talking to anyone. Cool idea, but will it take off?

more…

Last year I wrote an article called Putting the “Pay” in PayPal, which was mostly an expression of frustration at how eBay and PayPal were being a bit heavy-handed, pushing sellers to upgrade their free PayPal Personal accounts to PayPal Premier in order to accept credit card payments for eBay purchases. I have no problem paying a fee to do this, but once you have upgraded, you must pay the same fee on all money received into that account (credit card or otherwise). Lame. That article appears to have touched a nerve, because it has received more comments that almost any other article on this site.

more…

Recently eBay announced that it is increasing purchase protection from $1000 to $2,000 for qualified transactions on eBay.com. But it will no longer offer purchase protection for non-PayPal transactions. Why? Well, eBay claims that other payment services are less safe than PayPal.

But the decision probably has more to do with the fact that the company make roughly twice the money on sellers who use PayPal. It charges sellers the usual listing fees, plus additional fees when sellers accept payment through PayPal Premier or Business accounts (and eBay is making it harder and harder to sell anything on eBay using PayPal Personal, its free account).

more…

Most of us want to be more charitable, though somehow giving to a random charity often leaves us with too many unanswered questions: Where specifically does my money really go? How much of it actually makes it to the end destination?

Enter San Francisco based non-profit Kiva.org: a peer-to-peer microfinance gateway, which combines the Nobel Peace Prize concept of microcredit with the power of the Internet to facilitate micro-lending to small business owners in developing countries. Here’s how it works:

more…