ebay toolbar - is it becoming crapware ? ...

[RJK]

Has anyone got the "heads-up" on what happens when I click on my ebay
toolbar, to go to the ebay.co.uk,

When I clicked on it tonight there seemed to be some attempt to redirect me
to
www.rover.ebay.....lotsofgobbledygookhttp://www.ebay.co.uk\Moregobbledygook
..... and I got an IE7 "Page cannot be displayed" ..MVP hosts file
....perhaps ?

or, if you like show me ebay "within" another page, sort of thing. I did a
quick Google on it and got the impression that www.rover.ebay.co.uk is an
affiliate of ebay.
It seems that one cannot click on the "ebay" in the ebay toolbar to get
straight to ebay any more, i.e. you have to type it in yourself or add it to
Favourites ?

(bearing in mind that one is encouraged to install it because of the
"security" benefits i.e. it is supposed to alert you if you are directed to
spoofed ebay web-sites).

TIA

regards, Richard

 

[RJK]

NOTE: The following unrelated newsgroup was omitted in my reply:
microsoft.public.security.virus

rover is eBay's advertising server host. So check if you have it listed
in your MVP hosts file. I don't use the hosts file to block "bad" sites
because the hostname must be specified, and any site can change the name
of their host or even make it accept any hostname. For DoubleClick
alone, the MVP hosts file have over 50 entries just because there are so
many of them used by DoubleClick, and more are to follow.

I didn't see a "[*.]rover.*" entry in the MVPS hosts file that I looked
at. So maybe some other software you have is blocking that host. You
didn't provide the complete URL. It might be that it has some
substring, like /ads/, that gets blocked by an ad-block program or
ad-block feature within a program. IE7Pro, for example amongst MANY,
has a preset list of URL substrings on which to block to get rid of ads.

I wouldn't rely on any anti-phish toolbar or filter to accuracy announce
that I visited such a site. Those spoof sites disappear in under 4
hours so the phish lists are always too old. They used to stick around
2 to 4 days but with all the reporting going on that has been severely
reduced. Sounds good that they disappear but the phishers already know
their spoof site is short-lived and already have a pool of others to
utilize. Once they spew their spam, they have just a few hours for it
to survive along with any site referenced within it. For every phish
site that I've ever run across, heard about, or checked in the various
phish lists below, the sites are already dead. Sometimes I've managed
to see a report and visited that site within an hour of that report and
the site is gone (because the report is often not immediate to when the
spam attack started that tried to lure users to their new phish site).

http://www.phishtank.com/
http://www.antiphishing.org/
http://www.millersmiles.co.uk/

It's a good bet that it is something on your end doing the blocking to
eBay's rover host.

Thanks for your response.

I don't have any trouble using ebay so long as I type ebay's address
straight into IE7's URL slot. For a long time, because I'm naturally lazy,
I could just click on the ebay icon on the ebay toolbar. Tonight, ...ahem,
....last night, when I did that, IE7's status bar was coughing up a long URL
with http://www.rover.ebay* ...not sure if the www was in there, ...some
script of some sort I think, and further along - www.ebay.co.uk. ...can't
ever remember noticing that before now. Am not seeing anything like that
no.

anyhooo, I uninstalled ebay Toolbar, ...agreed - false sense of security !
....but every little helps.

regards, Richard