OT ebay/pp - a new checkout session - then fails

OT anyone else getting a msg saying "You are being directed to a new checkout session" - (why?) and then that session usually fails with a red box at top of screen saying to contact support blah blah. Sometimes a 2nd attempt will work. Been using ebpp for years - never had this before. Another "improvement" I suppose.

Reply to
dave
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Also try a different browser. Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

I had problems with the checkout failing a few weeks ago, didn't get the 'new checkout session' message though. I was using Win8/IE11 and nothing that I knew about had changed. I fixed it by changing the browser emulation (right click on the browser, select 'inspect element' then scroll down to the bottom of the monitor/phone symbol on the left of the window that appears at the bottom of the screen and change the emulation.) In my case it was defaulting to IE 5, after a couple of weeks it sorted itself out.

Reply to
Peter Johnson

Sounds like you have been phished...

formatting link

Install, update, scan and have it fix what it finds.

Reboot, and the change your ebay and paypal passwords assuming you can still get into them....

Reply to
John Rumm

Is your currency set to default to US Dollars in your paypal account? I ha d some transactions which didn't bounce properly through to paypal, and not iced that it was trying to take USD instead of ££ (prompted to look int o this when using ebay to generate pre-printed postage labels - RoyalMail d idn't want Dollars it seemed).

Reply to
larkim

You usually get that AFTER you have paid for an item and then hit the back button in the browser and try and pay again!

Reply to
alan

You got it! Somehow the currency default was changed to USD! I suppose I must have done that - somehow! Have reset to UKP and that fixed it. Thanks

Reply to
dave

Ah! Batman to the rescue! (of Robin, aka your AV). :-)

Reply to
Johny B Good

In article , Arfa Daily scribeth thus

Could you tell us a bit more about that please, as I thought that M/warebytes was the dogs doo dahs for that sort of thing?...

Reply to
tony sayer

Well its good, but not perfect - especially if its a very new or not widely reported cling on.

Reply to
John Rumm

I've been using SpyBot S&D for the past decade or so with a free AV as its sidekick. I'm currently using Avast Free and the free on-demand antimalware scanner by Malwarebytes as a 'sanity check' of Avast and 'second string to my bow'.

In the beginning, SpyBot's sidekick was AVG Free until it got bloated out of all proportion to any usefulness with version 8. I regard SpyBot and 'A Free AV' as taking a dual pronged approach to security, a sort of "Dynamic Duo of Protection" where, to carry on the analogy, SpyBot is 'Batman' and the free AV is 'Robin'.

When AVG Free got bloated up, it was analogous to Robin swapping out his 30Lb utility belt for a 200Lb one. I'd previously used Avast Free when it had a rather idiotic GUI in order to remove the stration C worm which had broken AVG Free. When I reinstalled AVG free it then prompltly removed a couple more trojans that Avast had missed so it was a no brainer to stick with AVG until it got bloated up.

The only other alternative free AV that was left to try was Avira. This was suitably lightweight but did pop up a rather annoying hard sell with scare tactics window styled not unlike all those fake AV trojans every time it updated its virus signature database.

It had proved so annoying to more knowledgable hackers that one of them posted a 'recipe' of registry edits and file permission settings that killed the annoyance stone dead so Avira got what they deserved for their hard sell, a total loss of an upselling opportunity.

I persisted with Avira until they shat over their win2k users and made the installer reject win2k completely. At that point I discovered that the Avast team had finally done the right thing and sacked the sick Goth who'd created the dark and cryptic 'looks like a media player' GUI and replaced him or her with someone who actually had a clue. Avast's GUI actually became the best of all the AV interfaces around, and best of all, was a very effective product, probably better than AVG Free in its heyday.

It's, sadly, only the latest version that went the way of avira in refusing to install on a win2k box a few months back. In mitigation the latest win2k compatable version is still recieving virus signature updates. I hope to be beyond the reach of win32 malware threats before even that support ends sometime over the next 12 months.

SpyBot is damn good but, like everything else, it can't be 100% proof against zero day threats. It's just that it deals with the so called 'lesser threats' often completely ignored by AV security suites known as adware and spyware PUPs which on their own aren't an immediate threat but do lay you wide open to the risk of being hit by a 'drive by download' exploit. SpyBot in effect, closes the flood of internet borne threats down to a mere trickle considerably reducing what's left for the AV to deal with.

I don't consider the need to manually check for updates on a weekly basis as a downside. On the contrary, it helps avoid the user gaining a false sense of security that a completely automated 'fit and forget' solution tends to lull the user into. Being reminded on a weekly basis about keeping ahead of the bad guys is "A Good Thing" imo.

The big problem with an all in one solution that claims to do what SpyBot was specifically designed for alongside of active AV protection is that your one size fits all solution (McAfee, Norton et al) are at a very high risk of being neutered by any 'classy' malware.

Using a completely seperate product like SpyBot reduces the risk of having all of your antimalware protection removed in a single stroke and the use of MBAM free as an independant on-demand scanner further contributes to reducing the risk of a comprehensive destruction of all your security measures.

Anyone who puts their (misplaced) faith in any one security suite is living in a fools paradise imho. The free AV products are just about worth their price for all the protection that they and their 50 odd paid for competitiors can offer. You might as well hang onto your money and install SpyBot S&D alongside of a lightweight Free AV. You can hardly do better, protectionwise, by throwing money at an all in one security suite.

Reply to
Johny B Good

Thanks for that has indeed found a few odd things M/Bytes missed;!...

Reply to
tony sayer

That's spot on Rod and very well explained. I do pretty much the same. Sorry to post an AOL type response but I feel obliged to support those with a clue in their efforts to dispell the myths held dear by the less clueful.

Reply to
Johny B Good

had some transactions which didn't bounce properly through to paypal, and noticed that it was trying to take USD instead of ?? (promp ted to look into this when using ebay to generate pre-printed postage label s - RoyalMail didn't want Dollars it seemed).

Glad to be of service!

Reply to
larkim

The fact that fragmentation will have an affect (of some sort) isn't in dispute. It's more to do with the amount of the performance hit due to this problem.

He's tried his best to start with the same base line but he says nothing about the size of the disk volume, whether it's a smallish partition on the outer fastest tracks or whether it's that abomination of a single huge partition on a 500GB 'monster'.

The last time I booted from an actual HDD partition was just over four years ago (apart from a 2 or 3 month test about a year or so back). The OS is win2kSP4 (just over 1 GB's worth with the dotnet crap installed) with a few hundred MB's worth of MS apps in the C:/Program files folder installed onto an 8GB (1st) primary bootable partition on a 1TB HDD. The rest of the disk was taken up with an extended dos partition with a 20GB logical disk volume in the next fastest portion of the disk for 'standard sized' apps, leaving the remaining 900GB for a data volume.

I rapidly came to the conclusion that frequent defragmentation was a very over-rated passtime on this system set up (tightly coralled system files on the fastest 8GB of a 931GB 7200 rpm drive whose fragmentation inducing activities couldn't "poisen" the other two disk volumes). A similar coralling effect applied to the 2nd 20GB apps volume.

I used to take pleasure in showing some of my customers how swiftly a 'badly fragmented looking" drive C could be completey defragged in no more than a 2 or 3 minute run. Even when I left it alone for several months, I couldn't say I saw any benefit between 'badly fragmented' or freshly defragmented. This 'Indifference' to the effects of fragmentation upon system performance was entirely expected and rather gratifying to see.

In any case, defragmention jobs would take minimal time on the disk volumes where it mattered - even the odd defrag run on the third 900GB data volume was beneficially shortened by the lack of system file churn induced fragmentation 'poisening' that is normal to the classic OEM Single huge partition "All your eggs in one basket(case)" singular drive C configuration.

Agreed! The large data storage volume is what it is. With largish media files, say a 1GB MPG, the impact of it being broken into 20 or

30 fragments will have very little effect even when processing it with a video editor.

Since a large backup job on a 1TB or larger disk volume is measured in hours rather than minutes, the effect of defragmentation is only of academic interest. What's more relevant is the innevitable drop in transfer rate when the backup has to deal with a few thousand small files perhaps only representing 2 or 3 percent's worth of the total data. The affects of fragmentaion then pales into insignificance under these conditions.

That's true enough. I'm rather suspicious of his claim that NTFS _doesn't_ use a fragementaion avoidance algorithm whe writing file data to the disk volume. That surely wouldn't have been overlooked by the MS developers.

It's such a "No Brainer" strategy to include in _any_ type of FS. I'm convinced the FAT based FSes use such an algorithm (BICBW) mainly on account when I developed my "FAT8" styled FS to use with those Philips data cassette deck drives with C60 sized tapes, about 30 years ago, I made damn sure to minimise fragmentation by having it look for fragmented chunks of free space that exactly matched the data block count requirements to the file being saved.

I didn't let it mindlessly write the data out to the first availble block and subsequent blocks. The algorithm was designed to avoid needlessly cluttering up larger contiguous runs of free space data blocks on the tape in order to save them 'for better use' by larger files.

It's very true that fragmentation on a tape storage system has a serious performance impact which you ignore at your peril if you wish to get the best out of such a storage system. Perhaps I'm giving Microsoft far too much credit in the design of _their_ FAT based FSes as Joe Kinsella seems to imply in regard of the "Superior" NTFS.

Being a proprietry FS, the only people outside of MS likely to know will be the *nix developers charged with 'reverse engineering' FAT and NTFS compatabilty into the various *nix distros.

Is Joe Kinsella correct in his assertion that, effectively, the Microsoft implementation of the writing algorithms used by their NTFS is as "Dumb as a box of frogs"?

Reply to
Johny B Good

Ah! The gift (from the major OEM giant partitioning schemes) that just keeps on giving (to all those third party defragmentation utility software houses). :-)

You should have qualified that last statement by adding "intelligently partitioned" somewhere in there (hint: between the words 'seeking' and 'drives'). :-)

Of course, modern SSDs used to replace such partition spaces on large HDDs have largely rendered the question of using defragmentation to boost general system performance rather irrelavent. That's not to totally decry its use on the larger HDD partitions overnight a few times a year (or perhaps as often as weekly if whatever you're doing generates very high levels of fragmentation activity).

Reply to
Johny B Good

I'd say he is probably right..

The joy of Linux of course is that I have ceased to care about fragmentation.

Disk performance is the sort of geeky area that linux writers love to tune.

And its now so automatic that yu are more likely to make it worse than better by playing with its algos.

I had assumed that Windows had aso done this. It seems not,.

De fragging? In the 21st century? surely some mistake..

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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