ePassports are no good for 6-12 year olds

Last weeks ePassports seminar out at the Reserve Bank's Note Printing works in outer Melbourne was very interesting, if only because of the revelation that
our new electronic passports are going to be less than perfect.
They'll have a scanned picture of us on their chip, which will be checked by
an automated face recognition scanner at the airport.
(I assume how it will work will be that the machine will compare the face of the passport holder with the scan stored in the passport chip).
Trouble is, the faces of kids aged between 6 and 12 change quite a lot as they grow.
So, as the senior official from the Department of Foreign Affairs freely admitted, these ePassports are likely to be pretty useless and the customs or immigration officials will have to fall back on the traditional checks.
Of course, the whole question of identity fraud remains very serious and I want to make it very clear that I'm not questioning the need for ePassports.
After all, there are sites on the web like fakeguruid.com advertising Australian drivers licenses made to order.

eBay confirms email I received was fake, watch out for email from eactahshx@orc.ru

It was a fake, phoney, bogus and bad. At first I thought someone had make a mistake when typing in an email address, and typed in mine.
It clearly wasn't me because I've never sold anything on eBay.
It was a complaint email. It appeared to be from someone claiming that I'd taken their money but not delivered what I'd promised.
It asked me to click on the message icon and explainwise I'd be reported to the police.
But then I looked a bit closer and realised that the 'from' in the email address didn't look right.
It said "From: Ebay and gave the email address of the sender as .
Now call me old-fashioned by an email address from a russian domain looks a little bit suspicious. So I forwarded the email to abuse@eBay.co.uk.
I've now got a reply confirming that it was't sent from eBay. In other words, it was a phishing attack, trying to trick me into giving up my eBay userID and password.
So beware of whoever is . They're scam artists, conmen and frauds. Don't be bluffed and click on the message icon in his email.

eCommerce Report - number one in online payments

Australia's most popular payments gateway is eCommerce Report.
If you don't agree then I challenge to you to disprove prove it.
You'll probably find that you can't disprove it, for the same reasons that the claim
can't be proved either.
There simply isn't any independent source of evidence.
Thats why I'm preparing a special research report on Australia's online payments
gateways.
I'm already making people unhappy doing it because I've published a teaser on
the report in the latest issue of my newsletter. The story questions the claim
by Sydney based Internet business, NetRegistry, that it is Australia's number one payments gateway.
Their web-site used to feature a nice graphic element proclaiming their market leadership.
But it seems to have disappeared.
I wonder whether that has got anything to do with my investigations?

Visa to release on-line index down under

It mightn't be an age-old mystery, but the question of just how much business is done on-line is at least a hardy perennial.
Certainly the release of the on-line retailing sales data in the US in recent times has helped confirm that on-line
is only a niche market in most areas, such as grocery and the like. On-line retail sales are about 2% of all retail sales
according to the US Bureau of Census.
But then again the official definitions leave out many of the market segments where on-line business, i.e. ecommerce,'has really
taken off. Ticketing, for example, and not just for airline travel. Ticketing for entertainment is now big business online and not yet
captured in the official data.
Still, that may be about to all change very soon with Visa sources telling your blogger that they are soon to begin publishing
an on-line index. Visa is, of course, in a very good position to publish an index of business activity on the web because credit-cards are still
the main way people pay for things on-line.
Indeed earlier this year Visa issued some stats for ecommerce both globally and down-under. For down-under at least Visa found
that there were some 4.35 million ecommerce transactions a month.
Head to the Visa down-under web-site, click on media and choose archived press releases for March April or May this year.
( I forget which month it is precisely).
www.visa.com.au

Lets meet the Latrobe uni ecommerce people

Stewart Carter and Dr Fei Liu in the lecture theatre at Latrobe University.

Last Friday I had the good fortune to visit Latrobe university and give a guest lecture to mainly post-graduate students studying ecommerce in the department of computer science and computer engineering.
I talked about on-line payment systems and, as usual, found a lot of the students were very interested in credit-card fraud online.
That was partly because most of them had had some experience with on-line shopping. And in at least one case a student had had a bad experience.
I figure that all just underlines how significant the whole topic of payment systems are with on-line shopping.
Anyway, I'd like to express my gratitude to Dr Fei Liu, senior lecturer in the Department, for her invitation.
Dr Liu teaches the subject Electronic Commerce Systems CSE42ECS and it was great to meet with her and her grad students afterwards to hear about their various research interests and projects.
I'll be publishing something about them on my eCommerce Network site, but in the meantime I figured I'd use this blog experiment with posting pictures to my blog. And specificially, a [icture of me with Dr Liu in the lecture theatre.
For more info on the Latrobe ecommerce subject head to the departmental web-site at http://www.cs.latrobe.edu.au