Well this is a bit spooky and for once I think facebook is pushing the personalisation just a smidgen (or a fucking mile) too far.
I just opened facebook and at the top of the screen is the “What’s on your mind” box – but smack in the middle of it is a promo for a game that is currently playing.
With great amusement I noted that Digitalpoint have upgraded their forum and turned on the social networking side of vBulletin and I had a swag of “friend requests” waiting for me.
It reminded me of an incident this week when I recieved a Facebook friend request from someone who was instrumental in an accusation of professional misconduct directed toward me last year. After the guys at Computer Forensics had done their job they they had also shown who was in the wrong.
Now why, oh why, would this chap suddenly want to be “my friend”. We don’t talk, meet face to face or have business dealings? I can think of only two reasons.
This is a hot topic at DigitalPoint right now as there is a bot working it’s way down the memberslist and doing bruteforce or dictionary attacks on the logins. Because the forum uses vBulletin it only gets 5 shots before there’s a lockout and it has to move onto the next member and then remember to return later. But it’s keen and has been running for a couple of days now. Reports indicate that it’s tried some other forums too.
Why?
People who do business online frequently have their earnings held by pseudo-banks such as PayPal and e-gold. A problem then arises when the same people need their money out of these pseudo-banks or transferred between them.
The most common way to do it appears to be to find someone who is happy to trade. So A puts money into B‘s PayPal account and B puts money into A‘s e-gold account.
There’s a stack of people out there buying up expired domains and selling them on, or using them to build sites related to their core business (which is sometimes buying expired domains).
I’ve noticed that there are some dos and don’ts associated with this: