OT: eBay/Paypal security

Curt @ Atari Museum wrote: (Disclaimer: I used to work in the security industry) (Disclaimer2: I am not ranting against Curt, just trying to dispel some myths and paranoia before they start) If someone is willing to target you so specifically, I don't think a "manual" method of entry is going to make a difference. Setting up that level of phishing is so much work that, I am not making this up, it is easier to just visit your house with a gun and extort the cash from you. Seriously. There were stories in my industry of someone coming up with a new protection method for an ATM or something (like a way to prevent people from spying on the keypad, or requiring double-entry where the second entry had reversed number positions on the screen) and, I kid you not, it wasn't worth the mafia's effort to try to crack it -- instead, they showed up at the engineer's office with a picture of his family and asked him, "nicely", to reveal how it worked. You'd have to be some millionaire classic computer collector to attract that kind of attention. A keyfob is so much trouble to scammers and phishers that they don't even bother, they just move to the millions of others who don't use one. And the "but people steal cars locked with The Club too!" argument doesn't work here -- The Club is a placebo. Any hacksaw can get through it in 45 seconds. The keyfob has a six-digit number seeded specifically for you and changes once a minute and the period is something crazy, like 2^19337 before it repeats. Our bones will turn to dust long before the number is guessable :-) Bottom line: Don't fear the keyfob. It's a no-brainer for $6. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/