posted on February 26, 2001 03:01:34 PM new
There is an interesting security hole in EBays new Anti-fee-avoidance scheme. (They call it anti spam)
As you know, when an auction closes you can only get the user name of the non-winning bidders, not the email addresses.
However, when you request someone's feedback, you can enter their email address instead of their Ebay user name. When the feedback shows up, it shows their EBay user name. You don't even have to be logged on or give your username to do this.
So...
Essentially this allows you to find a username given an email address. But not the other way around. Steeling an idea from the old War Games movie. Remember the "war games" dialer that the kid made. He programmed his computer to dial every possible phone number and record if a computer responded.
One could program a 'bot' to try every possible email address and record the resulting Ebay user name. This could then be posted on the internet as a searchable file so that users could do the reverse and find the Email address if they have the user name.
posted on February 26, 2001 04:30:53 PM new
Why don't you just do a USER INFO REQUEST and call them?? 1800collect
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The more PEOPLE I meet.........
