Ok so online social networking is a fantastic idea. Great innovation of the internet but today it’s ugly side rared its head, in the form of some bollox.

I’ll tell the story in brief, some twanger, for want of a better word, decided to make a clone of my sisters bebo profile. Signed up to a bunch of groups and posted on her friends profiles, or at least the ones he/she could access. Thus trying to sully her image and making her friends think it was her posting distasteful comments etc…. (only the profile name differed slightly).

So I’ve had to call her late tonight thinkin her account had been accessed by someone else, until I relealised that it was another account completely. Apparently calling me “the worsf brother” was the best he/she could come up with. Anywho, after all was figured out, got the account banned on bebo, and fair play to the bebo abuse crowd, less than 3mins for a response and account closure. If they’d be kind enough to give me some IP address, I could work from there myself, but I doubt it. Anywho 130+ friends profiles check and messages left for those who had been commented on by the bollox.

Anywho this leads me to my point, make your profile private, well unless you’re out there for dating or whatever, just be prepared that some fuck can pretend to be you. I never bothered switching my own to private, saying that I never thought somebody would be pathetic enough to make a complete copy of a profile.

That is all.

So you’re browsing on ebay, you happen to see an ad or search for perhaps a plasma tv and the first link that comes up is a nice shiny “PHILIPS 50″ PLASMA TV 1080p HD READY” for the sum of €52, €62 including delivery. Guess what, it may just be too good to be true!

As I write this, the total number these TVs they had in stock was 330, it’s now down to 265. Guess what, these aren’t gonna be shipped, and that’s €3380 the scammer has made on these TVs, not to mention they have plenty of other high value products for the low low price of €52. They’ve got ps3′s, Nokia n95′s, wii’s, ds’s, laptops, gps, etc..

So why are people falling for this? One thing being, it’s advertised as being a Gardai auction. There are plenty of giveaways that this is fake.

• The main one being the feedback on the persons account. It’s all from people with zero feedback on theirs.
• The next giveaway is the first transactions on the account, they’re for babygrows… and a whopping €1 each transaction, from the same person too. Odd, I think so.
• Wording and spelling: , this a a great giveaway, “Genuine Gardai Auctions”, genuine on ebay means fake. “All goods fully country compatible”, I know what they mean by this, but it makes no sense the way it’s written. “Your Purcase”, maiow, spell check Isle 5.
• Another thing with the wording was, this is a Garda auction, i.e. the goods were recovered by the Criminal Assets Bureau, yet they have phrases like “reduced to clear”.

So all in all, this is a pretty easy scam to spot, yet the TVs are still selling. Only if people would just look harder rather than jumping at such a “great” deal.

I really don’t know if I feel sorry for people caught by this, I know to look at feed back, I know not to just glance over it when it’s such a great deal or rare item. But for the average Internet user, the exciting new world of online buying, holiday bookings, beboing, facefeck, “free” music, it’s very easy to be fucked over, at the same time, don’t expect something for nothing. (Maybe I’ll add ads to the site, I joke).

Personally I hope the scammers have their face kicked in, but I’m not a very nice person now am I? On a side note, I have reported the user to ebay and paypal, hopefully they’ll freeze the funds and prevent the guy getting the money.

So I was just talking with Daniel, well more at him than with, about a customer who came in asking to check email, then sat at the computer and launched Google Earth. Fair enough, each to their own (think she eventually got to her email), when an idea dawned on me, it’d be pretty cool if you could track where your email came from, maybe even follow it on it’s journey. It would have no practical uses other than amusing you once or twice, or even to see how routing works.

But thinking about this another idea pops out. How about plotting all the major hubs that are used for data transfer and see how efficient the Internet actually is. Would it be possible to map the Internet? Honestly I can see no other purpose for this other than satisfying my curiosity. It’s just an idea, maybe even an end of course project for college. We’ll see, more research is needed.

A little searching around for Internet Mapping Project, I came across some old projects, but they’re in excess of 4/5 years old. So this may be something newish and fun to do if it hasn’t already been done to death.