[Air-l] e-commerce and fake trust

[Frank Thomas]

Hi,
The New York Times today runs two stories about the treatments of fakes 
by eBay
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/technology/29ebay.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/technology/29ebayside.html

It seems that the reputation system can easily be managed in favour of 
sellers of fakes. So, creating reputation by a technology is not as easy 
as eBay pretends. A real surprise.
I guess the reputation systems lacks a  certain dose of social control 
based on actors that are outside the systems, and are nor immediate 
benefactors, as market organiser, seller, and buyer are.
Creating fake reputation can easily be extended to stolen goods. I 
recently looked for a copy of a SPSS stats package and saw a SPSS 
version 13  with a perpetual ! licence, for below 100$.  The seller only 
had excellent reviews. People get really inventive when they try to fraud.

F. Thomas

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..........................................
Dr. Frank Thomas
FTR Internet Research
93110 Rosny-sous-Bois
France



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