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Students Embarrass eBay With Firefox Add-On
An anonymous reader sends along a posting from the Grooveking blog on a group of Stanford students who got together to help promote Firefox and ended up releasing a long overdue eBay Toolbar for Firefox before Mozilla and eBay could release their jointly developed extension in Europe. Mozilla's COO said the preemptive release of the eBay Toolbar had ruffled some feathers among European eBay execs. "Besides basic search features, it removes external ads on the site and allows users to see thumbnail pictures on ALL search items, even those sellers didn't pay for. An eBay toolbar has been long overdue... eBay can't be too enthusiastic about this toolbar since it cuts directly into its main sources of revenue: ads and thumbnail fees. But eBay users get a really good deal."
Suck it, Ebay. Stop trying to hamstring your sellers. Your costs were exponentially lower when you were born, making more money doesn't entitle you to start charging more money for no real reason.
Well then they are ether going to have to change there site code or talk to the students to get those ads back or something.... EBay shame on you for not releasing you own toolbar so this didnt happen
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Just installed it and started typing in their personal information, with absolutely no idea what this plugin was doing with it?
Uh huh. Oh, now you're thinking through the security implications.
It's probably not a particularly clever piece of phishing, but the next one might be.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Does it let me "ignore" sellers by name, feedback ratio and feedback quantity so I never see their listings? If it does, I'll download it right now. There are half a dozen or so "power sellers" who flood the search terms I regularly look for with auctions I wouldn't bid on in a million years. And then there are all the 98.2% positive feedback guys who I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole (99% is my normal cutoff) and all the obviously re-registered accounts that are too slick to legitimately have only 8 feedbacks.
I'd very much like an "ignore" option.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Here's the problem. Intelligent people with decent coding knowledge created a free piece of software that sounds pretty good. Ebay appearantly doesn't want them to use it, and started raising a ruckus. But what happens when hundreds of people with programming skills start doing things like this, especially if computer programming becomes part of high school curriculum? ( http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/15/142 0238 ) One day, the flood will hit, Ebay, Microsoft, Apple, and everything else will collapse, and the Open Source Community will rejoice.
To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were capable of staying awake long enough.
Wanna know what's probably happening at eBay right now?
Hello? Dev team? When will the toolbar be ready? Really? Six weeks? I think not. Ship in 3 or you're fired. Click.
Hello? Systems D00ds / Web Devs? Put the security enhancements on hold. You have three weeks to figure out how to break the Stanford tool bar; the sooner the better. And then roll out the changes with some new eye-candy so we don't look like asses.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
That should be: "Don't like it? Don't use them, tell others not to use them, and explain why you don't like them."
I don't know why people feel that companies have to justify price increases with some rationale of higher costs for them.
Because price and cost carries information about a company. If a company charges substantially more than cost, you know that you can probably find a better deal elsewhere. If you can't, then there may be a monopoly involved.
Hmmm... There's no way to tell this toolbar that you don't live in the USA and that you'd like to use a local ebay site. So much for ebay users in Australia, India, Canada, the UK, Spain, Italy, France, Ireland, etc.
But wait, that's only about 6 users, isn't it? (Pity I'm one of them.)
On /. a lot of generalities are stated in the limited context of the internet or computers generally. In fact intrusive advertising is all over the interweb which is no different from the real world.
I am not opposed to advertising and accept that a service has to be paid for one way or another. Whether the content provider is a TV station, free newspaper or an internet service the game is pretty well the same thing. On the other hand I am becoming increasingly pissed off by advertising covering every inch of space. Buses, bus stops, bus tickets, phone booths, serviettes, gas stations, walls buildings, parking meters, toilets ... the internet ...the list is endless.
Of course the solution is in our own hands. If we don't like what eBay does we can stop going there; they will soon react if enough customers vote with their feet. I have almost stopped watching TV as the ads have become so intrusive that the programs are no longer worth watching. Heck, I have even stopped using porn sites for the same reasons!
Plugins like the one under discussion are a short term solution. In the longer term eBay will find a way of blocking them, no doubt motivating someone to try something else. The real solution lies with us, the consumers, and until we stop behaving like sheep we will have to learn to live with in your face ads.
I am perfectly happy to have eBay send ad content to my computer. I'm also perfectly happy to have my computer ignore that content. Their markup interpreted by my computer. Showing me adds never made them any money to begin with, so skipping them doesn't hurt anyone.