Very good John.
I am sure you have gathered by now that we are stressing on this thing. We are not saying
that Ebay shouldn't take appropriate security steps nor have we ever questioned Ebay's
right to change something midstream. As it is we and our user base are very grateful for
the first warning.
We do not want to spend all of our time at the design board playing leap frog with Ebay
because we all have projects and new ideas lined out the door.
We have offered to follow some rules of play and I have suggested that Ebay make a rule
regarding the offering of automated anything software that interacts with Ebay's system to
register with Ebay.
It would be nice to know that I do not have to spoof to get my compiled program through
and because I have registered it with Ebay the "allow" is set to yes.
There are a lot of positives to registering in that Ebay could track the programs if they
had a name to track them with.
<snip> I will make sure that my program doesn't allow rapid fire bidding, doesn't
allow more than 2 userids to be used at any one time and/or within moments of each other
(assume husband/wife with different ID's), no ISP or HOST spoofs and no more than one
instance of the program can be loaded.
If Ebay wants to see Cricket as the user_agent and my email address or the users email
address on a From: header in their logs then I would like to know that the name won't be
blocked. If Ebay's server is going to send a challenge response header to the program I
would like to know that I need to include the proper authentication headers. This is the
type of stuff I mean...
Registering doesn't mean Ebay endorses anything but rather takes appropriate action to
regulate something that could be devoloped to cause harm. A rule could be made to
specifically prohibit the use of programs that could do X and if X is done then the boot.
Without the regulation, you might just find X being advertised as a selling feature and
worse the pressure to meet or beat a selling feature from somebody not in our little
group. (Chuck and Mike)
We want Ebay safe too. If Ebay has any specific security concerns they would prefer our
programs not be capable of please let us know ASAP. My compiled Windows program is waiting
to go into beta. I believe the major feature our customers want is to be able to Snip/bid
late in an auction while they are at work, play or whatever.
Dave
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