DALLAS - A window owned by a man who says it was part of Lee Harvey Oswald’s sniper perch in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is up for auction on eBay.

Caruth Byrd, whose father owned the Texas School Book Depository building in 1963, has set a starting price of $100,000 for what he describes as “perhaps the most famous window ever offered up for sale in the world.”

SAN FRANCISCO - Executives at eBay Inc. are touting security as their top priority in 2007 after an internal survey showed that online scammers may be denting the company’s reputation.

The San Jose-based online auction company began a program last year to safeguard members’ identities by concealing their user names on expensive listings.

That measure could make it harder for con artists to contact losing bidders and goad them into “second chance offers,” where customers wire cash to the scammers’ accounts.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16686937/

The bikini worn by Norfolk jungle queen Myleene Klass has fetched £7,000 in a charity auction on eBay.

The cash raised by the sale of the skimpy, white two-piece will now go to help families caught up in the Farepak savings failure.

There were 105 bids during the auction and over the course of the bidding 16, 473 people logged onto the auction website to check on the bikini’s progress.

Google is offering merchants free use of its online payment service as it squares off against eBay’s market-leading PayPal.

The Internet search giant introduced Google Checkout in June, with sweeteners such as free ad credits for merchants. In November, it began offering rebates to consumers, $10 off $30 purchases. PayPal quickly matched the offer.

On Wednesday, Google ratchets up the pressure by dropping merchant fees through 2007.

“I’m thrilled,” says Lanny Morton, whose Sportscloseouts.com uses both Google Checkout and PayPal. “The online business is really competitive, and every little percentage helps.”

Merchants pay a variety of fees to use the services. PayPal charges 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction on sales up to $3,000 a month. Google’s fee is 2 percent of the sale plus 20 cents, less if the merchant is a Google advertiser.

PARENTS desperate to get a Nintendo Wii for their kids this Christmas can buy one on eBay - but it’ll cost at least THREE times as much.

Within hours of the video games console being launched in the UK more than 1,200 were on the website.

Canny traders, who pre-ordered months ago for the retail price of £179, were selling this year’s Christmas must-have for more than £500 last night. And eBay spokesman Richard Ambrose said: “We expect trading to be fast and furious in the coming weeks.

“We can expect a large volume of Wii sales as high street stocks run low and parents are under pressure try to find the must-have for under the tree.”

Although Jim Cramer loves eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) and thinks all the bad press and bad feelings are already priced into the stock, the company has had a disastrous 2006 in regards to its stock performance. The numbers don’t lie — and there are some who are picking up positions in the world’s largest online auction website for *if* the company’s fortunes turn around. Never say “when”, though — only “if.”

Hey - eBay has no debt and continues to do solid business, although there are laundry lists of things that the auction giant fails at — like customer communication, bad customer service, increasing fees and about a million other things. Still, from a purely financial standpoint, the company is in great shape. Any company with eBay’s scale that has little to no debt should be considered pretty darn decent. But, how decent?

Bob Clayton took six pages of notes because he wants to get started. Ellen Gillun and Heath Smith picked up a few tips that will enhance the work they’ve already done.

All three, and a couple dozen more, will be more savvy post office customers and eBay auctioneers thanks to the couple of hours they spent Wednesday with Dan Lesperance and Darrow Scruggs, members of the U.S. Postal Service’s Business Development Team.

At least 250 million people are registered users of the online auction site eBay, Lesperance said. And many more are about to be.

If you are an eBay user, I’m sure that fraudulent actions on the mega auction service have often crossed your mind. Hopefully in the near future that won’t be an issue thanks to a new software developed at Carnegie Mellon called NetProbe. The data mining software could detect trends in artificial feedback, and identify those users to potential buyers.

“We want to help people detect potential fraud before the fraud occurs,” said research associate Duen Horng Chau, who developed NetProbe with professor Christos Faloutsos, undergraduate student Samuel Wang and graduate student Shashank Pandit.

The first recording by The Velvet Underground has sold for $155,406 US on eBay, earning a sizeable profit for the Montreal man who bought it at a flea market for 75 cents.

Bidding reached a fever pitch when the 12-inch acetate album was put on the online auction site on Nov. 28. The first bids hit $20,000 US and climbed until the final bid — the equivalent of $179,876 Cdn — on Friday night.

The buyer is still a mystery, identified by the eBay name: “mechadaddy.”

The new owner will not be able to re-release the music, which is protected by copyright.

Yahoo! is the world’s largest email services provider and handles 200 million accounts, but it said on Monday that only “a very small fraction” had been infected.

The worm has been dubbed Yamanner and landed in Yahoo! mailboxes bearing the subject line “New Graphic Site”. Once opened, the message infects the computer and spreads to other users listed in Yahoo! users’ email address books, security companies said.

The email containing the virus need only be opened - in contrast to most worms that are hidden in attachments and require users to take an additional step - to release the virus, according to computer security company Symantec.

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It’s a simple enough prospect when you have a second-hand silver Ford Galaxy Ghia automatic you want to offload, so where better to get rid of it than on eBay? Well Ebay was a great idea until the emails started! Here’s the plan - set up auction, post nice pictures, include full details and wait for the bids to roll in.

Or rather, wait for the emails to roll in. Hundreds of ‘em, as every muppet and wag in the land jumps on the “bait the vendor” bandwagon.

Reading this on Ebay kept me in stitches !!!
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The Supreme Court sided with eBay in a patent fight Monday, ordering a lower court to reconsider whether the Web giant should have been barred from using contested technology.

Justices, in an unanimous opinion, said that judges have flexibility to consider several factors before they impose court orders barring continued use of a technology after juries find a patent violation.

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Any reader who has ever tried to pick up a woman in Chicago may already be aware of the techniques which are absolutely guaranteed to result in abject failure - or worse.

For those of you yet to make a pitch to Illinois’ fairer sex, these no-nos include: sliming all over your intended victim; blatantly grabbing her breasts; throwing your hot sweaty oversized weight around near her; and shaking your big fat ass in her face.

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US anti-piracy group the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) filed lawsuits yesterday against three suspected pirates who use eBay to sell copies of anti-virus software. The cases were filed at the District Court, Central District of California.

The three accused were selling copies of Symantec and McAfee products between October and November 2005.

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That’s Bizarre: A furious husband took revenge on his cheating ex by selling racy images of her on eBay. The man offered bidders 200 saucy snaps of 24-year-old Linsey at £4.99 each.
He even wrote on the internet auction site: “She was playing away with my so-called best friend and now it is payback time.”A day later, all the shots had been sold.A spokesman for eBay said: “We saw no reason to take the listing off.”