It probably won’t run Crysis or other state-of-the-art games, but a Linux-based PC that Wal-Mart began offering this week for $199 should get the job done for e-mail, Web browsing, and other everyday computing tasks.
The Everex TC2502 Green gPC is one of the first Linux-based desktop machines to be offered for sale by a major retailer. As such, it could become a barometer of open source software’s potential for success in the consumer market.
The gPC comes preloaded with the gOS operating system — a Linux variant — and a 1.5-GHz processor manufactured by Intel clone maker Via Technologies. The rest of the specs include an 80-Gbyte hard drive and 512 Mbytes of DDR 2 memory.
There’s no monitor included, but buyers get stereo speakers and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive.
As for software, the gPC comes with the free OpenOffice.org 2.2 productivity suite. The suite, which includes word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications, recently won backing from IBM.
Everex is a Taiwanese-based PC maker that’s looking to carve a niche for itself in the computer industry’s economy section. A version of Everex’s gPC that runs the basic edition of Microsoft’s Windows Vista is on sale at Wal-Mart for $298.
The retailer is making the gPC available at selected stores and through its Web site.
The price difference between the Linux and Windows version of the computer reflects what some in the tech industry derisively call “the Microsoft tax” — a Windows licensing fee that PC makers must pay to the Redmond, Wash., software maker for each computer sold.
It’s unlikely that Linux-based PCs will displace Windows-powered computers anytime soon. For one thing, there’s only a limited number of applications that will run on Linux.
Linux advocates argue, however, that until they become more mainstream, open source systems could fill some important niches — such as the market for cheap PCs aimed at students in low-income areas.
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Miscreants have unleashed a new strain of a sophisticated Trojan that targets eBay users by feeding them spoofed web pages containing fraudulent information about high-ticket purchases, The Register has learned. It has already contributed to an $8,600 loss by one eBay member.
The Trojan installs a scaled-down webserver on an infected machine that masquerades as eBay and several third-party destinations frequently used to sniff out fraudulent offerings, including Carfax.com, Autocheck.com and Escrow.com.
When a victim browses to one of these sites, the webserver creates a parallel universe of sorts, in which the victim sees counterfeit pages designed to counter fraud protection mechanisms offered by eBay and third-party sites.
“To think that somehow they got software on their system that managed to spoof all the validation sites – that’s a shit-scary story,” said Roger Thompson, a researcher at Exploit Prevention Labs who specializes in web-based attacks. “It’s fiendishly clever.”
The malware was found on the machine of one eBay Motors user who recently lost $8,650 after trying to buy a 2005 Jeep Liberty advertised for 10 days on the site. Customer representatives have refused to cover the theft because, they said, the transaction was made outside of eBay.
Shortly after making the offer, the victim received a notification in the My Messages section of her eBay account telling her she had won the auction. eBay has long cautioned users not to rely on notifications unless they appear in this official section.
The malware installed on the victim’s machine caused her browser to display a counterfeit version of just such a message. Had she used a non-infected computer to access her account, no such message would have appeared.
“There’s no reason to suspect it’s fraud until its too late,” said the Ohio-based user, who agreed to tell her story on the condition her identity was not revealed. The Register was able to verify the scam by confirming details with eBay and by reviewing screenshots, emails and files pulled from her machine.
The malware appears to be a reworking of Trojan.Bayrob, which first came to light in early March when researchers from Symantec wrote reports about it.
It arrives in an attachment to an email responding to a bid and installs a local proxy server that redirects traffic bound for eBay. The proxy, according to Symantec, spoofs sensitive pages on eBay, including online auction’s “ask a question” messaging feature. The Trojan also inflates the user feedback score of the purported buyer, according to Symantec.
In the intervening seven months, the Trojan has been updated so that, among other things, traffic bound for sites such as Carfax and nine other addresses maintained by third-party companies will also be redirected. This helps thwart victims who try to independently confirm details fed on the falsified eBay pages.
eBay spokeswoman Nichola Sharpe says the company’s security team has forwarded samples of the new strain to anti-virus companies so they can add it to the updates they send to customers.
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Hoping to woo shoppers who say eBay has lost its folksy appeal, the world’s largest online auction plans to launch its own version of a social networking service Wednesday and is promising other customer-friendly features by year’s end.
The “Neighborhoods” feature encourages users to post photos, product reviews, tips and responses — creating a far more visual and interactive experience than eBay’s text-based discussion forums.
The move is one result of a broad reorganization strategy started in late 2006, when the San Jose, California-based e-commerce leader’s scorching growth rate began to slow.
Individuals listed 480 million items on eBay in the second quarter, down 6% from the first quarter and down 2% from a year earlier. The number of listings by “power sellers” who operated eBay stores was 79.1 million — unchanged from the previous quarter but down 25% from a year earlier.
Many users complain that the site’s size — it listed 559.1 million items worth $14.46 billion (euro10.3 billion) in the second quarter — can make it tough to find and purchase a specific product quickly. Users are turning to rivals such as Seattle-based Amazon.com, Salt Lake City, Utah-based Overstock.com Inc. and Chicago-based uBid Inc.
“We knew we had to change things internally because we could not innovate with the effectiveness or speed we needed,” spokesman Hani Durzy said Tuesday.
Marketplaces President John Donahoe spearheaded a “philosophical shift” this year in which engineers, product managers, quality assurance representatives and other employees were regrouped from traditional function-based “silos” into two teams — a buyer experience team and a seller experience team.
Neighborhoods — which aggregates postings from eBay blogs, guides and reviews — was the brainchild of an “engagement” subgroup of the buyer-experience team.
Among the 600 new neighborhoods is “Shoe Heads,” intended as a haven for footwear fashionistas. Others range from Beyonce to Battlestar Galactica, and still more will be formed based on popularity of search terms and community feedback.
“People who are passionate about certain brands, trends, celebrities or products have been discovering and trading with one another for years,” said Jamie Iannone, an eBay vice president in charge of buyer experience. “Neighborhoods makes this even easier.”
Later this year eBay will roll out “One Click Bid,” which should boost a buyer’s chances of winning during the final 15 minutes. EBay also plans to streamline its “My eBay” service and speed its cumbersome checkout process.
And it is beta testing features called “Snapshot View,” the e-commerce equivalent of window shopping; “Best Match,” an automatic sorting option; and “Countdown,” which features improvements in real-time auction monitoring.
Building a sense of community should keep buyers and sellers at eBay longer, experts said Tuesday.
EBay building neighborhoods is the equivalent of Nordstrom or another brick-and-mortar retailer adding a cafe and lounge.
“The idea is this will provide more ‘stickiness’ so a user will come back more often, spend more time there and will more likely purchase items,” said Karsten Weide, an analyst at research firm IDC. “This should make consumers’ lives a whole lot easier.”
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