Linux PC hits shelves at Wal-Mart for $199

It probably won’t run Crysis or other state-of-the-art games, but a Linux-based PC that Wal-Mart began offering this week for $199 should get the job done for e-mail, Web browsing, and other everyday computing tasks.

The Everex TC2502 Green gPC is one of the first Linux-based desktop machines to be offered for sale by a major retailer. As such, it could become a barometer of open source software’s potential for success in the consumer market.

The gPC comes preloaded with the gOS operating system — a Linux variant — and a 1.5-GHz processor manufactured by Intel clone maker Via Technologies. The rest of the specs include an 80-Gbyte hard drive and 512 Mbytes of DDR 2 memory.

There’s no monitor included, but buyers get stereo speakers and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive.

As for software, the gPC comes with the free OpenOffice.org 2.2 productivity suite. The suite, which includes word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications, recently won backing from IBM.

Everex is a Taiwanese-based PC maker that’s looking to carve a niche for itself in the computer industry’s economy section. A version of Everex’s gPC that runs the basic edition of Microsoft’s Windows Vista is on sale at Wal-Mart for $298.

The retailer is making the gPC available at selected stores and through its Web site.

The price difference between the Linux and Windows version of the computer reflects what some in the tech industry derisively call “the Microsoft tax” — a Windows licensing fee that PC makers must pay to the Redmond, Wash., software maker for each computer sold.

It’s unlikely that Linux-based PCs will displace Windows-powered computers anytime soon. For one thing, there’s only a limited number of applications that will run on Linux.

Linux advocates argue, however, that until they become more mainstream, open source systems could fill some important niches — such as the market for cheap PCs aimed at students in low-income areas.

‘Fiendish’ Trojan pickpockets eBay users

Miscreants have unleashed a new strain of a sophisticated Trojan that targets eBay users by feeding them spoofed web pages containing fraudulent information about high-ticket purchases, The Register has learned. It has already contributed to an $8,600 loss by one eBay member.

The Trojan installs a scaled-down webserver on an infected machine that masquerades as eBay and several third-party destinations frequently used to sniff out fraudulent offerings, including Carfax.com, Autocheck.com and Escrow.com.

When a victim browses to one of these sites, the webserver creates a parallel universe of sorts, in which the victim sees counterfeit pages designed to counter fraud protection mechanisms offered by eBay and third-party sites.

“To think that somehow they got software on their system that managed to spoof all the validation sites – that’s a shit-scary story,” said Roger Thompson, a researcher at Exploit Prevention Labs who specializes in web-based attacks. “It’s fiendishly clever.”

The malware was found on the machine of one eBay Motors user who recently lost $8,650 after trying to buy a 2005 Jeep Liberty advertised for 10 days on the site. Customer representatives have refused to cover the theft because, they said, the transaction was made outside of eBay.

Shortly after making the offer, the victim received a notification in the My Messages section of her eBay account telling her she had won the auction. eBay has long cautioned users not to rely on notifications unless they appear in this official section.

The malware installed on the victim’s machine caused her browser to display a counterfeit version of just such a message. Had she used a non-infected computer to access her account, no such message would have appeared.

“There’s no reason to suspect it’s fraud until its too late,” said the Ohio-based user, who agreed to tell her story on the condition her identity was not revealed. The Register was able to verify the scam by confirming details with eBay and by reviewing screenshots, emails and files pulled from her machine.

The malware appears to be a reworking of Trojan.Bayrob, which first came to light in early March when researchers from Symantec wrote reports about it.

It arrives in an attachment to an email responding to a bid and installs a local proxy server that redirects traffic bound for eBay. The proxy, according to Symantec, spoofs sensitive pages on eBay, including online auction’s “ask a question” messaging feature. The Trojan also inflates the user feedback score of the purported buyer, according to Symantec.

In the intervening seven months, the Trojan has been updated so that, among other things, traffic bound for sites such as Carfax and nine other addresses maintained by third-party companies will also be redirected. This helps thwart victims who try to independently confirm details fed on the falsified eBay pages.

eBay spokeswoman Nichola Sharpe says the company’s security team has forwarded samples of the new strain to anti-virus companies so they can add it to the updates they send to customers.

eBay launches ‘Neighborhoods’ feature

Hoping to woo shoppers who say eBay has lost its folksy appeal, the world’s largest online auction plans to launch its own version of a social networking service Wednesday and is promising other customer-friendly features by year’s end.

The “Neighborhoods” feature encourages users to post photos, product reviews, tips and responses — creating a far more visual and interactive experience than eBay’s text-based discussion forums.

The move is one result of a broad reorganization strategy started in late 2006, when the San Jose, California-based e-commerce leader’s scorching growth rate began to slow.

Individuals listed 480 million items on eBay in the second quarter, down 6% from the first quarter and down 2% from a year earlier. The number of listings by “power sellers” who operated eBay stores was 79.1 million — unchanged from the previous quarter but down 25% from a year earlier.

Many users complain that the site’s size — it listed 559.1 million items worth $14.46 billion (euro10.3 billion) in the second quarter — can make it tough to find and purchase a specific product quickly. Users are turning to rivals such as Seattle-based Amazon.com, Salt Lake City, Utah-based Overstock.com Inc. and Chicago-based uBid Inc.

“We knew we had to change things internally because we could not innovate with the effectiveness or speed we needed,” spokesman Hani Durzy said Tuesday.

Marketplaces President John Donahoe spearheaded a “philosophical shift” this year in which engineers, product managers, quality assurance representatives and other employees were regrouped from traditional function-based “silos” into two teams — a buyer experience team and a seller experience team.

Neighborhoods — which aggregates postings from eBay blogs, guides and reviews — was the brainchild of an “engagement” subgroup of the buyer-experience team.

Among the 600 new neighborhoods is “Shoe Heads,” intended as a haven for footwear fashionistas. Others range from Beyonce to Battlestar Galactica, and still more will be formed based on popularity of search terms and community feedback.

“People who are passionate about certain brands, trends, celebrities or products have been discovering and trading with one another for years,” said Jamie Iannone, an eBay vice president in charge of buyer experience. “Neighborhoods makes this even easier.”

Later this year eBay will roll out “One Click Bid,” which should boost a buyer’s chances of winning during the final 15 minutes. EBay also plans to streamline its “My eBay” service and speed its cumbersome checkout process.

And it is beta testing features called “Snapshot View,” the e-commerce equivalent of window shopping; “Best Match,” an automatic sorting option; and “Countdown,” which features improvements in real-time auction monitoring.

Building a sense of community should keep buyers and sellers at eBay longer, experts said Tuesday.

EBay building neighborhoods is the equivalent of Nordstrom or another brick-and-mortar retailer adding a cafe and lounge.

“The idea is this will provide more ’stickiness’ so a user will come back more often, spend more time there and will more likely purchase items,” said Karsten Weide, an analyst at research firm IDC. “This should make consumers’ lives a whole lot easier.”

Viralg selling anti-piracy technology on eBay

Imagine the scenario – you’re the head of a multi-million dollar label, someone has convinced you that your business is losing money due to file-sharing. What do you do? Call in the Ghostbusters? Or do what lots of companies do and call in the likes of MediaDefender to help them. As no anti-piracy system can do anything other than make a very small impact on file-sharing, it’s a far from satisfactory solution.

Early in 2005, established anti-piracy company Viralg of Finland burst onto the P2P scene with a staggering claim: With their technology it was possible to end 99% of all file-sharing.

In 2004, Viralg listed Electronic Arts, Vivendi, Microsoft Game Studios, Sony Computer Entertainment, Atari, Nintendo, Codemasters and THQ as just some of their customers. They were among the nominees for the ICT Prize 2005 and the winner of the Venture Cup business plan competition.

The portfolio certainly made them appear impressive at the time, so when an eBay auction caught the eye today offering to sell Viralg’s technology for a cool $1,000,000, TorrentFreak became a little curious.

So what’s on offer? Looks like Viralg’s ‘intellectual property’ in the form of some patent applications:

Viralg supplies technology aimed at preventing sharing of illegal content such as music, movies, GPS maps, games and software from being shared over P2P networks such as Gnutella. Viralg technology is in widespread use by record companies in Finland (90% of customers) and in the other Scandinavian countries. Technology has generated turnover of over 500.000 US dollars. The patent applications for sale cover the necessary key technology for the only possible effective protection against illegal P2P sharing. Depending on the source illegal P2P causes damages of 4 to 12 billion US dollars to media companies per year.

So should likely buyers (unhappy MediaDefender customers perhaps?) invest in this technology?

Viralg claimed to be able to create a corrupted file but with a working hash, giving it the appearance of a genuine file. As people downloaded they got a selection of genuine and corrupt parts sent to them rendering the final file useless. Although partially effective on the FastTrack network (KaZaA [R.I.P] )years ago, Viralg’s offer of 40 hours of training to use the system still doesn’t cut it in today’s BitTorrent dominated file-sharing world.

Before Prince gets any fancy ideas about buying this for the Web Sheriff to use against The Pirate Bay, this outdated system is pretty useless against BitTorrent, which renders its ‘Patented Virtual Algorithm’, well – useless.

TorrentFreak spoke to Dr. Ir. Johan Pouwelse, researcher on P2P technology at Delft University of Technology, who explained why: “Bittorrent uses a separate hash for every 1-4 MByte. This means you can still exploit the weakness in the protocol by sending bad data. However, clients are now generally so smart that they only accept maximum 1 fake 1-4MB block from an IP address.”

Of course to corrupt lots of files, you need lots of presence on file-sharing networks (servers, accounts, the whole MediaDefender-style setup) so the $1m tag is just the tip of an enormous iceberg.

Maybe some of the sales statistics will tempt prospective buyers? The system has been running since 2003, and in that time it generated a turnover of $500,000. Potential buyers are likely to be more interested in the bottom line, especially now that the bottom has fallen out of the FastTrack network.

Anyone with a bulging bank balance needing a guarantee of being able to corrupt files on the FastTrack network (and is unaware that MediaDefender’s tools are available for free) should hurry over to the eBay auction right now, there’s not long left to go – for the auction or Viralg.

Bank failure in Second Life leads to calls for regulation

The recent collapse of Ginko Financial, a “virtual investment bank” in Second Life, has spurred calls for more oversight, transparency and accountability, especially when it comes to business practices in the metaverse.

Last week, Ginko Financial — an unregulated bank that promised investors astronomical returns (in excess of 40 percent) and was run by a faceless owner whose identity is still a mystery — announced it would no longer exist as a financial entity.

The declared insolvency meant the bank would be unable to repay approximately 200,000,000 Lindens (U.S. $750,000) to Second Life residents who had invested their money with the bank over the course of its three and a half years of existence.

“You have to remember, there’s not a lot of places to put your money in Second Life,” said Benjamin Duranske, a lawyer who publishes Virtually Blind, a blog that chronicles virtual laws and legal issues that impact worlds like Second Life. “When you have disposable income and a bank that’s promising a 60 percent return on deposits, that alluring — especially if it works for a while.”

Quickly following this news, a tidal wave of backlash took shape from thousands of angry Second Lifers in SL forums.

Yet in many ways, the undoing of Ginko and the collective loss of more than 750,000 very real U.S. dollars is only the latest event hammering home the fact that the lawlessness of the virtual land has its drawbacks. Indeed, after Linden Lab, the owner and operator of Second Life, invited the FBI to investigate casino activity, the company subsequently instituted a ban on all gambling earlier this month.

On Tuesday, Linden Lab itself issued a statement trying to clarify its stance on regulations and Second Life’s virtual economy.

“Linden Lab does not intend to recreate or subvert real-world laws in any way,” the statement says. “We caution our residents to be wary of anyone offering extremely high interest rates at no risk, either in the real world or in Second Life — if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

The response was timely, considering Second Life currently has 20 to 30 banks that operate essentially the same way Ginko did. That fact, plus the large losses associated with Ginko, has led to a growing call for even more transparency and regulation among SL residents.

Duranske is at the forefront of the movement. An intellectual property lawyer who’s taking time off from his practice to work on a book about virtual law, he was one of the first people to jump on the shady business dealings at Ginko Financial more than two months ago. Indeed, his blog has one of the most comprehensive accounts of Ginko’s downfall.

Duranske claims he’s personally talked with a few SL residents who have lost as much as $10,000 in the Ginko scheme, but estimates that the majority lost a more moderate amount–somewhere in the range of $50 to $100.

“A lot of people forget, Second Life is governed by U.S. law and the laws of California,” Duranske explained. “It just so happens that these laws haven’t been enforced.”

But that’s about to change. Duranske says because Ginko has received so much press lately, the bank, as well as others, will inevitably become an issue that Linden Lab will have to tackle. That either means self-regulation or more federal intervention.

He’s hoping it won’t come to the latter.

Robert Bloomfield, an accounting professor at Cornell University, is of the same mind. Bloomfield says the collapse of Ginko and the recent closing of casinos, among other incidents of alleged fraud, are shocks to participants in the Second Life financial sector.

That said, Bloomfield believes residents are already responding by creating a variety of oversight institutions of their own, including companies that insure against fraud and homegrown regulatory institutions like the Second Life Exchange Commission, which is modeling itself on the SEC.

“It will be very interesting to see which organizations survive (if any), and how they reduce the risk of fraud,” he said in an e-mail.

Bloomfield admits he’s getting in on the act on a personal level and has forged an ongoing agreement with two Second Life-based stock exchanges, the International Stock Exchange and the SL Capital Exchange (formerly AVIX) that will provide him with comprehensive data on trading histories for all listed firms.

He expects to publish analyses of that data in the near future and says such information could very well be another important step toward transparency.

In the end, Bloomflield says SL’s financial and business sector can teach us a lot about the nature of regulation and oversight. Even with the unfortunate case of Ginko, he still believes the intervention of real-world regulation is remote.

“I am really hoping that RL (real life) regulation does not come to SL because right now SL has the chance to sort out what type of oversight and regulation it wants,” Bloomfield said. “If the RL authorities or Linden Lab do start meddling with business affairs, it could ruin a golden opportunity for real innovation and creativity, a chance to recreate a world in a new image.”