The role of IT in pandemic planning is largely delivering remote access to your systems & maintaining communications with staff and customers. Throughout this issue of the Netforce Guide we focus on the different technologies which deliver your staff access to your network when they are at home, on the move, or working from a remote location, whilst maintaining the security and integrity of the network.

Test, test & test again
Many companies will rely on employees working from home in the event of a flu outbreak. However, their remote access systems may not be ready for so many employees using them at the same time. Experts recommend a trial run, where you allow a significant number of your staff to work from home for a day and then see how well your systems and applications function. You may need to buy more ports, licenses or cards for your remote access systems.

High Availability
Make sure you have multiple access mechanisms and methods of access to connect to head office data. This could be as simple as being able to offer teleworkers SSL as well as IPSec VPN clients. Make sure key employees have broadband access from home as well as mobile broadband access. Mobile 3G data access is a good solution in a worst case scenario, since people may not be working from home. They may be leaving the area for health or safety reasons, and they may need to take their laptops with them. 3G network access as well as traditional DSL or cable access is another high availability, load balancing tactic.

How are you shaping up? Share the story in the comments.

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Four in 10 of the 233 respondents surveyed at the recent AusCERT conference said they were blocking the popular internet telephone service, while a third blocked Facebook and Hotmail.

Hosted audio conferencing was also blocked by 13 percent of those surveyed.

[...] Nearly half said they provided workers with an internal instant messaging tool, half provided collaboration tools such as Microsoft Sharepoint, and more than a quarter had their own blogging software.

“Organisations are keen to keep the elements of [popular social networking] tools that have business use in their internal environments,” said Integ chief Ian Poole.

It no doubt sounds good to the people who run big IT departments because email is the same, whether you use Hotmail or Eudora or Outlook to get it. But the elements of social networking tools that they can keep are the ones that don’t matter.

What matters with those tools is not the interface but the networks that they are connected to and, because most of the tools don’t talk to each other, by definition, any tool that is banned removes all its users from the conversation.

People in a given enterprise can talk to each other in many ways, including at the water cooler, but its the conversations with people outside the organisation such as topic experts or clients that are making the difference to conencted organisations.

How does your organisation deal with these tools? Does it have a policy, how well is it implemented? What are the effects of the way you do this stuff?

Comments open as usual.

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By asking a huge number of people to pay attention to something for a short period and bring their expertise and experience to bear on it, the idea is that people will notice the things that they know most about and be able to focus on just that part of the issue long enough to make a worthwhile contribution without unduly interrupting their other work.

By spreading the task over a very large number of people, the chances of the work being biased by one perspective alone is also reduced. And when it comes to keeping an eye on Government, we need need all the eyes we can get.
Which is why the Sunlight Foundation has launched Transparency Corps, a Web service that enables citizens to help create greater government transparency by performing small, discrete tasks to analyze and enhance the usefulness of government data. Sunlight’s Transparency Corps aggregates simple actions… that require human intelligence, but not specialized political knowledge.

“Inspired by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Sunlight created Transparency Corps as a new way for people to volunteer to make government transparency a reality,” said Ellen Miller, executive director and co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation. “Now, when people ask ‘how can I help?’ Sunlight and future partners can provide micro-tasks that when aggregated, help solve research and data analysis problems when computers alone cannot properly scrutinize government information.”

[...] In the future, other organizations can collaborate with Sunlight to use the Transparency Corps service to distribute public research projects. Additionally, Sunlight encourages other organizations to use the open source code that powers Transparency Corps to create their own services for aggregating volunteer actions.

Currently the Transparency Corps is scrutinising requests from American politicians for “earmarks” special funding for local programmes that very often are political payoffs rather than worthwhile uses of public money – what sued to be called “pork barrel” politics.

Continuing with our earmark data drive, here is a smaller batch of earmark requests, by Rep. Jackie Speier for FY 2010. You’ll be shown the PDFs that Rep. Speier posted, and asked to pluck the most interesting pieces out of them, and then enter them into our form.

When you’re done, you can click the “I’d Like Another Task” button to do more. Do as many as you like – you’ll earn points every time! By helping us, you’ll be contributing to our growing earmark database.

I’m especially interested in the role of social capital being generated by the work, as those of us who work with volunteers know, a pat on the back and a thank you are great rewards, wjhen its done in public that benefit can be multiplied greatly.

I’ll be interested to see how they enable ttheir contributors to share that social capital.

When you talk about the work you are doing on your website or in emails, do you mention those who have volunteered? Is it by name or just ageneral thanks, and do you have a way for your supporters to associate their online presence with your organisation?

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Microsoft has taken the rare step of warning about a serious computer security vulnerability it hasn’t fixed yet.

The vulnerability disclosed yesterday affects Internet Explorer users whose computers run the Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 operating software.

It can allow hackers to remotely take control of victims’ machines. The victims don’t need to do anything to get infected except visit a website that’s been hacked.

Security experts say criminals have been attacking the vulnerability for nearly a week. Thousands of sites have been hacked to serve up malicious software that exploits the vulnerability. People are drawn to these sites by clicking a link in spam email.

The so-called “zero day” vulnerability disclosed by Microsoft affects a part of its software used to play video.

The problem arises from the way the software interacts with Internet Explorer, which opens a hole for hackers to tunnel into.

Microsoft urged vulnerable users to disable the problematic part of its software, which can be done from Microsoft’s support website, while the company works on a “patch” – or software fix – for the problem.

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Out of that meeting came a series of themes and issues that needed further discussion. Because of the number of people who wanted to attend but couldn’t (because they either lived in Auckland or just simply couldn’t make it) I said we’d have another discussion soon.

The forum will be held at:
Freemans Bay Community Hall
Function room
52 Hepburn Street, Freemans Bay
6pm – 8pm
Wednesday 8 July

The objective is to canvas the wider issues around copyright, including discussion of what’s been occurring overseas, in France, the UK and Sweden. Lessons to be learnt and ideas for how to develop a wide-ranging copyright policy that embraces the digital age, protecting rights holders, not disadvantaging ISPs going about their business, promoting access to information and building public interest around why copyright is important.

Background (Clare Curran’s blog at Red Alert)

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For most sites the process is pretty bad, demanding that you click a link for the registration form, complete the form, then click “submit” ( a term that I find insulting at best) then wait for an email with a link that I need to click to get back to the site so I can, at last, comment on the story. By whicgh time I’ve probably forgotten what I wanted to say.

Which is where Seeking Alpha absolutely shines.

If you want to comment on a story you click the “comment” button. The site notices that you are not logged in and invites you either to do so, or to register with a name, email address and password and click the registration button.

At that point I get the comment form to fill in and add my comment to the page but it is greyed out and I get a notice saying “check your email to publish this comment.

Sure enough, I find this email,

Just click this link to publish your comment and confirm your registration:

Publish Comment

This process confirms that your email address is correct and you want to register. If you did not write a comment, please accept our apologies and ignore this message.

I click the link to confirm and the comment is published.

THAT is the right way to do it.

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Which is why this looks interesting.  Yoono

Yoono is a sidebar for your browser that allows you to connect to all your social networks and instant messaging services in one place – no more logging on to multiple services.

It tracks postings from all of those you follow on Twitter and has tabs for direct messages and for checking just the most recent post from each of those you are following which keeps them from being lost in the information stream.

You can also post directly from the sidebar to any of the logged in accounts.

There are two main tabs on the application, the second is a discovery tool that uses real time web searches to bring up links to material related to the web page you are viewing at the time and creates links under any of the text in the web page for which it has found related material.

The Discovery widget recommends websites, videos, images, products and more – all related to the site you are viewing.

There’s also a Share with friends button that will share links, images, and video from the page you are viewing with your social networks.

As well you can drag and drop links, images and video from the page you are viewing into your IM conversations.

Its a useful idea and it will be interesting to see how it work out in practise.

I know there are a couple of tweaks they will need to make fairly quickly and that is to connect to Skype through it and to enable us to login to all our social networking accounts simultaneously.

Many of us have business accounts and personal accounts on any given service and, while we want to keep them distinct online, we WILL want to connect to them all in one place for sure.

But getting them all in one place is a good start.

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Link popularity is essentially based on the number of incoming links to a specific web site or web page; the more the number of incoming links, the higher the link popularity.

[...] Along with giving more importance to the number of links a web page has, search engines also pay close attention to link patterns. So it is not only the number of links pointing to your web page that determines your position inside the SERPs, but also the quality of those very links.

The quality of a link is determined by two factors:

a) authority of the web page linking to you and

b) the link anchor text.

[...] A qualified analysis should also factor in link context and link quality, which are critical elements of how search engines, such as Google, make use of links to determine who appears higher or lower inside search engine result pages.

Robin has gathered and reviewed a group of tools and web services that allow you to measure your web site link popularity using these criteria:

* Search engine references: Search engines utilized to count all incoming links.

* Comparative analysis: Comparative reporting against one or more sites.

* Email Reporting: Link popularity report sent to your inbox.

* Domain exclusion: Exclusion of incoming links from your own domain.

* PageRank Check: Google ranking check for your site.

Do you think about where your traffic comes from and who links to you, or does in not matter as long as someone is finding your material? Do you acticvely seek links, promote cross linking amonf related organisations or just hope for the best.

Or are you like some news organisations and jealous of your content to the point where you don’t want other people to get some of the value you produce by quoting and linking to you? Tell us the tale in comments please.

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Philip Walker said a culture of sending emails “where the content was not likely to offend and was banter between colleagues” existed at his Safe Air workplace in Blenheim.

The Employment Relations Authority (ERA) found in Mr Walker’s favour, awarding him $1000 for “a loss of dignity and injury to his feelings’ and ordering Safe Air to reinstate him.

Mr Walker, a purchasing officer at the Air New Zealand subsidiary, was sacked in February after sending 425 non-work-related emails to colleagues and family members between March and September last year.

Safe Air said 26 of these were “emails of concern” containing explicit depictions of lewdness, nudity and/or sex acts.

The ERA found he was among a group that had contributed to a “widespread inappropriate use of emails” but it was likely Mr Walker did this because he was “not clear about the standards expected”.

[...] In her conclusion, ERA member Helen Doyle said she was not satisfied that Mr Walker clearly understood Safe Air’s email policies.

When he became aware in September that Safe Air was investigating email use, he stopped sending inappropriate emails.

“In the circumstances of this case where there was widespread inappropriate use of emails, a fair and reasonable employer would accept that Mr Walker was less likely to have comprehended the seriousness and inappropriateness of the nature of the emails,” Ms Doyle said.

[...] Netsafe executive director Martin Cocker said sackings over the misuse of email or the internet were common.

He said companies had to have effective internet and email technology policies that were explained clearly and understood by staff.

“One of the main defences we see is people saying, ‘I didn’t understand what it meant’ … It looks like this was the case here.”

If you don’t already have one, Netsafe has a template Staff Cybersafety Use Agreement that you can use, or check yours against.

Like all such agreements however, its not the document that matters, its the implementation and monitoring. While your staff may have signed the agreement, do they understand what it means in daily use? How do you check that and what are your processes for monitoring and enforcement?

Netsafe is an excellent organisation that has plenty of resources and training kits available.

What’s your experience in this area? Comments please.

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Astralian banks are the latest to feel the heat. Angry bank customers hit web instead of tellers

Angry bank customers have found a new place to deposit their anger.

They are hitting the worldwide web instead of their bank branch and are venting online about sloppy service and interest rate rises.

A new Nielsen Online study in Australia reveals social networking sites such as Twitter are booming with people publicly expressing their displeasure.

The study measured consumer-generated media, or “buzz”, around the big four banks and found online discussion spiked following specific incidents related to banks.

[...] Nielsen Online director of analytics Mark Higginson told AAP the statistics showed people who were getting no satisfaction from traditional methods were going online to seek sympathy, support and a little revenge on the banks.Because so many people were online, it was an easy way for them to ask each other about their banks’ performance.

“It’s not necessarily that people are going online specifically to talk about it, but it’s people who are already online. When the topic comes up, it’s like a match to tinder wood,” Mr Higginson said.

What the report doesn’t mention is that people are much more willing to take action based on their communities of interest (friendship “networks”) than they would be on simply seeing a story in the newspaper or on TV. The facts are not in dispute here, what is different with online protests is that people who are individually angry about something are able to discover others, sometimes many others.

This is how grassroots actions get started these days and these tools are available to all of us. How have you made use of them?

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Computer security firms are warning users to be vigilant about spam messages capitalizing [on] the sudden death of U.S. pop star Michael Jackson.

[...] Security firm Sophos on Friday reported that about eight hours after Jackson’s death, its experts witnessed the first wave of spam messages taking advantage of the breaking news in the subject line and body of the email.

In these messages, the spammers claimed that they have vital information about the death of Michael Jackson to share and asked for a reply.

Experts said the spammers can easily harvest recipients’ contact information via a free live email address if users reply to the spam message.

[...] In addition, security experts at Sophos discovered that cybercriminals were taking advantage of the passing of U.S. actress Farrah Fawcett, a 1970s TV icon who also died on Thursday, to spread fake anti-virus software.

Bad news offers opportunity to spread malicious software, noted Guilherme Venere, an expert at security firm McAfee.

“Every time a disaster happens or news about some celebrity reaches the media, malware writers try to take advantage of it. The most common attack vector is email,” he wrote in a posting on the company’s blog.

Venere said users should be wary of spam emails offering links to “news” or “pictures” of deceased celebrities, which most of the time will lead to Web sites touting pharmacy products and even result in the installment of malware on the computers.

My system scan yesterday turned up about 20 trojans and malware applications, all of them attached to emails and I’d bet your system shows something similar. Death may be, as some cynics noted about Elvis, “a good career move” but there’s a reason we practise good hygiene when handling the dead and that applies to our computers.

Have a safe day on the net.

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1. Have a valid business reason such as being a distributed organisation where key people need access to the accounts
2. Make sure the accountant and auditor are not actively opposed (I work with one organisation that had to change its accountant when they decided to go online)
3. Broadband for users is pretty well mandatory
4. Do you want or need the latest version at all times?
5. Support servies can have immediate access to your service to fix any problems
6. Better backup than any of us does on our own account.
7. Do the numbers, online services will eventually (within a couple of years, cost you more than buying a standalone software)

Have you shifted to online accounting services? How did you make that decision? What is your experience? Was it worthwhile? Comments please.

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We’ve previously covered a number of Facebook scams, most designed to steal your Facebook login details to spam your friends. Today another such scam popped up: the Mashable (Mashable) team currently has multiple mails from “Junfunrun [dot] com” and “Bulitre [dot] com” (don’t visit those domains).

We’re not yet sure whether this is a fresh attack designed to steal login details, or whether it’s spam being sent from previously compromised accounts.

Either way, the message is simple: if you get a link to one of these domains from a Facebook friend today, don’t click it. The scam is easy to spot because the automatically generated subject lines are in the format “Hi {RAND}”.

You should also check that your Facebook account is not sending these mails. Mashable has the instructions, here

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The Australian Government announced a Web 2.0 taskforce today to investigate new approaches in openness and transparency when it comes to the online world

The taskforce of 15 people, chaired by CEO of Lateral Economics Dr Nicholas Gruen, will investigate ways the government can open up their computer databases to allow citizens access to government information more easily.

Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Lindsay Tanner, said … Governments cannot control the online world.

“We…have to accept that when we open ourselves up to public discussion through blogs, chat rooms (and) online forums we won’t always like what we hear,” he said. “We have to accept that there are challenges involved in participating in those processes for government.”

“Who speaks on behalf of the government? What restraints, if any, are there on what they say? What resources are contributed to those processes? [These] are all questions that we want the taskforce to advise on.”

As well as providing advice, the taskforce will fund initiatives that attempt to show that the Government is serious about achieving its objectives.

Tanner added that the Government will attempt to establish a pro-disclosure culture around non-sensitive public sector information and maximise the extent to which government utilises the views, knowledge and resources of the general community.

It will be an even bigger success if they can define as non-sensitive information such as who won the contract for X and how much they are being paid. But I’d give good odds it wont go that far.

Someone else who looks hard at these issues is Gerry McGovern who is always worth reading when it comes to website stuff. His take on the Apple/ Microsoft distinction? Apple makes better products, but Microsoft does better partnership and openness.

Where are you on the spectrum, and how do you feel about the proposition that in an online world there is nobody in control? Comments open as usual.

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And when you are trying to create an online community, are you aiming for bulk numbers or supporting the crucial 1% of super users?

An experiment at Verizon Communications … suggests that company-sponsored online communities for customer service, if handled adeptly, hold considerable promise. via Unboxed – Verizon’s Experiment in Volunteer Customer Service

Mark Studness, director of e-commerce at Verizon, is a software engineer by training and an avid consumer electronics tinkerer whose home projects have included installing high-end audiovisual systems. In those projects, he has often visited Web sites where users offer one another tips and answer questions. Verizon, Mr. Studness determined, needed to find a smart way to try to tap into that potential resource for customer service.

In talking to people and surveying the research on voluntary online communities, Verizon concluded that super-users would be crucial to success.

[...] Natalie L. Petouhoff, an analyst at Forrester Research, said that online user groups conform to what she calls the 1-9-90 rule. About 1 percent of those in the community, she explained, are super-users who supply most of the best answers and commentary. An additional 9 percent are “responders” who mainly reply and rate Web posts, she said, and the other 90 percent are “readers” who primarily peruse and search the Web site for useful information.

“The 90 percent will come,” Ms. Petouhoff said, “if you have the 1 percent.”

Verizon explored the alternative of building the Web site and managing the forums itself, but it decided to call on outside expertise. … Verizon chose Lithium Technologies, and its chief executive and co-founder, Lyle Fong.

[...] The mentality of super-users in online customer-service communities is similar to that of devout gamers, according to Mr. Fong. Lithium’s customer service sites for companies, for example, offer elaborate rating systems for contributors, with ranks, badges and “kudos counts.”

“That alone is addictive,” Mr. Fong said. “They are revered by their peers.”

[...] Venture capitalist Peter Fenton says that many of the most popular consumer Web sites and services, from Wikipedia to Twitter, are animated by a relatively small percentage of avid users.

[...] At Verizon, Mr. Studness says he is pleased with the experiment so far. He calls the company-sponsored customer-service site “a very productive tool,” partly because it absorbs many thousands of questions that would otherwise be expensive calls to a Verizon call center.

But the online forums, he added, also provide customer ideas for improvements in hardware and software for the company’s fiber optic service, as well as a large, growing and searchable knowledge base online.

“One answer can help thousands,” he said.

Corporate communications is an area that has been locked down for a long time as organisations try hard to “control the message”, but in tougher economic times, and in an open information environment, that strategy is pretty well dead. There are people out there who have more client experience of your organisation than you do, if they are also well disposed to help, why would you not enlist them to support others who need your services and offer them social capital in return?

The online tools are easily available as forums, discussions groups, blogs, how many of them are working for you? How do they meet your client support objectives?

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When Guesses Go Horribly Wrong
Comparing our two case studies, the guessing camp from the text-size example had by far the worst performance. A person who based a design decision on these guesses would be wrong 3/4 of the time. In the bank example, they’d be wrong only 1/2 the time.

So, why the miserable discussion-group guesses? The answer lies in the following two statements:

* “In this day and age…”
* “It’s not 1995…”

Sadly, too many Web designers refuse to believe in the durability of usability findings. Thinking that “things that were difficult in the past must surely be easy now” has led many websites to their doom.

When we actually study real users, we see how slowly they learn about technology and how little their ability to use fancy websites has improved. And, most important, we see how little users care about learning fancy Web techniques. People just want to get in, get their stuff done, and get out. They don’t want to learn.

Guesses go wrong because many designers desperately want to believe in the potential of advanced design. They simply can’t fathom how little most people know about their pet technologies.

(Yes, in recent testing, we did find a few small advances in users’ skills, but it’s slow progress; you’d better believe that simplicity will continue to win the day for decades to come.)

For those of us who have been using, and in some cases making a living from, these tools for a decade or more, the hardest thing to realise is that the vast majority of the world is not like us.

Ask many organisations what their website is for and you will get something like, “so people can find out about our organisation and what we do”.

Wrong.

Sadly, most people don’t care one iota about your organisation and they almost certainly wont “want to find out more about it” until the day they need it. Then they don’t want to know about it either, they just want help to do something that is suddenly important to them. What’s more they are under stress, they are possibly angry or afraid and their ability to learn is severely restricted.

A significant part of the problem is that too many of us see our websites as some kind of media channel, like brochures, adverts etc. If we thought of them as tools to get stuff done and fiocused on what those tasks might be for the people we serve, website might be a lot sinpler for users.

How about your site? Is it a tool for doing something, or a way to “present your organisation to the world”? How’s it working out? Comments open.

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Given each year by Global Libraries, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Access to Learning Award recognizes the innovative efforts of public libraries or similar organizations outside the United States to connect people to information through free access to computers and the Internet.

The award is for non-American libraries only so you will be up against some of the most innovative people in the world who do astonishing things with almost nothing. How do you measure up?

Is it worth a million dollars to try?

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That’s where comes in with a new program called YouTube’s Video Volunteers.

The mission of YouTube’s Video Volunteers platform is to connect nonprofit organizations with skilled video makers who can help them broadcast their causes through video, reaching new audiences online and driving action around issues and projects that matter to them. The Video Volunteers page shows video-related volunteer opportunities that have been posted to allforgood.org (which includes listings from Idealist.org and VolunteerMatch). As a result, a YouTuber eager to help out might find a listing like this (”Afro Diaspora Music Video Website” in New York City) or this (”Promotional Video for the GO-Science Challenger Learning Center” in Greenville, NC).

While this is principally for Americans at the behest of Barack Obama, there is no reason the rest of us can’t get in on the act.

If you have an account at idealist.org (about the most international of the feeder organisations) from now on, when you post a volunteer opportunity make sure to use the words Video Volunteer in your posting. That way, it will show up in the AllforGood feed – and as a result, on the YouTube Video Volunteers page.

And if you try it out let me know how it goes.

Meanwhile, how do you create video material now? Or is it in the too hard basket? Comments open as usual.

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The events of the last 10 days in Iran are a perfect example of how this new media thing works and the issues that arise from mass journalism, especially those of credibility and merging of duplicate reports.

One of the best thinkers on the future of journalism and the media is Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine who offers this take on Adding value in the new news ecosystem

… the essential truth in Iran is that no one has a Tehran bureau (or if they do, it has been rendered useless by government diktat). So we have no choice but to replace that bureau with the people, with witnesses empowered to share what they see.

[...] The live blog is print’s equivalent of live TV; it is the way to cover a story such as this: process journalism over product journalism.

But clearly, in that coverage of and by the people, we are experiencing severe filter failure, to use Clay Shirky’s term. … There’s no way to tell who’s who, who’s there, who’s telling the truth, who’s not.

Note the repeated word: Who. The greatest value a news organization can add to this new news ecosystem is to identify, curate, vet, and train people. Ideally, that needs to happen before the big story breaks. But it can even be done outside the country, as I saw CNN do this morning, talking with a Columbia University student from Iran, who knew who was real and was there from her network of family and friends. Of course, even if you know the people you’re listening to, it’s impossible to know whether everything they say is true unless you can verify it yourself. But that’s the point: You can’t.

So you need to have the best head start you can have. The larger the network of people a news organization can organize, the better shape it will be in when news breaks, the better it can filter the reports that come – whether from people in that network or in the larger network of people those people know. The more people in the network, the more who can go to the scene of news or research closer to it – the more you can ask for help.

Global Voices is an example of this infrastructure: someone who knows someone who knows someone, each able to judge what the next in the chain is saying.

I’ve also been arguing that for journalists, saying what you don’t know is becoming as important as saying what you know. That is all the more critical as misinformation and rumor can spread at the speed of information online. So I imagine a news organization creating a kind of anti-wiki – a dynamic, collaborative Snopes: a list of what we don’t know so we can see what is unconfirmed and so these things can be confirmed – so journalists can add journalism.

This network is even more important given the regrettable propensity for the official and politically connected media and the governments they serve to be a primary source of misinformation. If Iranians had listened only to their government they would have had Ahmadinejad installed for a second term. Perhaps they learned from Americans, Brits and Aussies who listened to their governments on the subject of Iraq.

The issues of trust and credibility affects us all and as advocates for particular causes, many NFP’s are subject to distortion and misreporting by the traditional media channels. The time may come when your networks of affiliated organisations and your collective membership may be the most reliable channel for getting the facts into the mainstream.

What is your organisation doing to build and maintain those channels and asses their reliability? Have you tried? How did it work out? Stories please in the comments.

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I expected selling my computer on eBay to be easy.

Attempt 1: I listed it. Within hours, someone bought it — from a hacked account, as eBay notified me, cancelling the sale.

Attempt 2: I listed it again. Within hours, someone bought it, and asked me to send it to her via FedEx overnight. The buyer sent payment via PayPal immediately, and then — near as I could tell — immediately opened a dispute with PayPal so that the funds were put on hold. And then she sent me an e-mail saying “I paid you, now send me the computer.” But PayPal was faster than she expected, I think. At the same time, I received an e-mail from PayPal saying that I might have received a payment that the account holder did not authorize, and that I shouldn’t ship the item until the investigation is complete.

I’m willing to make Attempt 3, if just to see what kind of scam happens this time. But I still want to sell the computer, and I am pissed off at what is essentially a denial-of-service attack. The facts from this listing are accurate; does anyone want it? List price is over $3K. Send me e-mail.

I had a similar problem in selling a coffee maker on TradeMe recently, although that wasn’t an attempt at fraud so much as someone who spends his life trying to annoy other users by constantly bidding up prices then never collecting the item, even after making multiple appointments to do so.

Interestingly, his onsite reputation is in the toilet but apparently all I can do is add him to my blacklist so that if he tries to bid again he will fail. The problem is that there are so many people who have never been stung by this guy that he will always have new targets and there is no point banning him from the site because he will just set up a new account and everyone will have to start all over again, at least at the moment we can know who he is.

“Caveat vendor” needs adding to “caveat emptor” and always check the reputation of the buyer before opening discussions.

Have you had any difficult transaction on TradeMe or eBay or any other online trading service? The Comments counsellor is open for your grief.

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