I am very saddened today.  Yesterday eBay announced a whole boat load of changes that are just stupid.  If these take effect, I will be done selling on eBay forever.  These changes include a 67% Final Value Fee increase for items under $25, which is the majority of what I sell, possible hold for up to 21 days on payment for what eBay thinks is a “risky” transaction, and only positive feedback for buyers or none at all.

The fees are bad but that is not what gets me.  The possible 21 day hold and the feedback thing is making me quit.  I will never ship an item until I have the funds available to me, so if I did sell and eBay/PayPal holds my money … simply put, I will not ship until its released.  Then there’s the feedback rule, basically you can’t do anything to the buyer anymore.  They can, and will, extort you anyway they wish.  Sad thing is, we have no way anymore to tell other sellers of these cases.

I hope I can find a good alternative to selling my stuff, maybe Amazon.com?

As you probably know if you have taken the time to read through my blog, I do a lot with eBay and PayPal. The other week I found out about the PayPal Security Key from Security Now (A TWIT Podcast). Once you get one of these and activate it on PayPal or eBay (or both), it will append a 6-digit number to the end of your password. Cool thing is, this 6-digit code changes every thirty seconds!

Click here to see a picture

How about phishing sites. Lets say you accidentally fall for one of these. If you do, no problem. Hurry over to PayPal or eBay and login and the code will change (theirs will no longer be valid). I would change my password if this happens though also. Even if you don’t do that though, the phisher has 30 seconds to get to paypal and login. This is a slight security risk though, as anyone could automate this process with a bot. I’m sure PayPal and eBay though monitor people who try to login many times with different login information.

Those are just two great advantages to it.

So how does it work? Well, I can tell you how I think it works…

The device has an internal clock and runs a special algorithm (unique to your key) based on the current time. When you activate it, buy giving paypal/ebay your SN for the device, they associate the correct algorithm to your account so they know what the current 6-digit code should be whenever you to try to login.

To fix the problem of the device losing/gaining time (as all computers do) their system learns your offset (how much time your device is off) when you login. They can take your code and say, hmm…he normally takes 5 seconds to give us his code, took 7 seconds this time, lets log that…hmm took seven seconds this time also…I think his device has gained two seconds, log it.

That’s my take at it, I’m sure someone could give us a much better explanation. Either way, I do know this. 6 digits = 1 in a million chances of someone who knows your password to get your key right at any given point. Well, almost. Really they have a 1 in 999970 chance (as if you think about it, 30 codes are valid at any given point in time.

So do you want one? Just tell PayPal. It only costs $5 (which covers the shipping costs). They are basically giving them away, you just pay shipping. Visit this link to get yours: http://paypal.com/securitykey/

They ship them USPS First Class from CA. Took 8 days from the day I ordered mine to get it. They say 6-10 days I believe. My suggestion, get it. Even if you do get it, you do not have to use it.

Oh, and as for the battery. Although the battery can not be changed, PayPal says it will last 3-5 years. When you need a new one, they will replace it at no cost to you.

Wow, it seems like the last time I had a day off was a year ago. After working six days in a row I now have two days off in a row. In fact, this is the first time since I started working at Taco Bell, over three months ago, that I have got more than one day off in a row. This upcoming week is going to be filled with stuff.

Tomorrow (or later today) I am expecting three things in the mail.

1) A check for over $600
2) A movie I bought from eBay
3) Headlights I bought from eBay

The check is the remainder of my financial aid money for school that was not spent on book, tuition, and other stuff for college. The movie is actually my dads, but I bought it for him. Aint I nice?

Now to the headlights. The other week I got a new car. The new car is a 1995 Dodge/Plymoth Neon. I had to buy headlights, which are actually the headlamps not lights, because the ones on the car are so fogged over what appears to be burn marks that they distort all the light.

I have $20 bulbs on each side and can not even see the road 100 feet ahead of me. Hopefully these new headlamps, that I paid almost $73 for, will fix that.

Two other exciting things happen later this week.

On October 6th my site will turn 1 year old. That’s right, this site has now been online for a year (as of the 6th). On October 6th, 2005 this site first went on line under the new domain www.jeremyjefferson.com. My personal site before this was at www.jeremy.jwjkp.com. On October 6th I will be posting some very interesting stats about how this site has grown over the last year.

On October 8th it will be my birthday. I turn 20 on the 8th and will no longer be a teenager.

That’s all for this post. God bless you all.

-Jeremy Jefferson.

I bought my mom a Bible Case today off of ebay for Mother’s Day and I also bought me a game that I bought my playstation a long time ago for but could never find the game. Hey, looks like I might play video games again for a while.

Click here to view the Bible Case listing

Click here to view the video game

***Both open in new window****

Well, the money from the book I sold on eBay is now in. I have already put $20 of gas, which isn’t much, in my car and I now -could- start my job hunt outside of internet applications. Walgreens has failed to call me yet, which is the only place I have applied so far.

I have a few good places in mind and will be applying sometime later this week.

Well, anyways… We’ll see how that goes.

Also, I may be moving my sites over to a new server sometime within the next month. So if you try to access my site and it appears to be down, that’s probably why. I will, however, probably give some notice to this. This all depends on if I get a job though. I plan on getting a dedicated server instead of shared hosting which I currently have.

This will allow me to do a lot more stuff and run application on the server. I will also be able to add more features to JJPOP (the email service I’m working on), which may be delayed by this move.

-Jeremy Jefferson