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I briefly used a PayPal security key, but it was a frustrating experience, simply because I kept leaving the key at home. PayPal’s integration with eBay is not good, which is surprising as eBay owns PayPal.

When I decided to stop using the key, I was able to cancel the PayPal key online in a matter of minutes. It took a 15 minute live chat with an eBay rep to remove the PayPal security key from my eBay account. Perhaps that was a security step by eBay. However the frontline system for canceling the key on eBay’s site did not work properly.

The worst part of the PayPal key: I had to pay US$5 to get one in the first place. If PayPal really wanted business users to have multifactor keys, the first key would be free of charge.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• OpenID
• 11 May 2008: JanRain launches CallVerifID multifactor phone service for OpenID
• 10 May 2008: Why use OpenID?
• 30 April 2008: Updating WP-OpenID to support ID Selector
• 21 March 2007: About ecommerce part 3: The broadband connection
• 15 March 2007: About ecommerce part 1: Maximizing ROI

From the Honolulu Star-Bulletin comes the worst identity theft story I’ve read in a while. Marine Cpl. Daniel Alfieri has been charged in circuit court with multiple counts of credit card fraud and identity theft. According to the report, Alfieri “personally knows the four male and one female Marine [involved] and had previously deployed with them to Iraq”.

When the FAA allowed airline pilots to carry guns, supporters claimed that armed pilots could be trusted. After all, pilots are responsible for flying multimillion dollar jets filled with people, right?

As Peter Biddle (via BoingBoing) points out, this logic is flawed because trust is not transitive. An airline pilot can have thousands of hours logged in the cockpit. Pilots receive only one week of training with their .40 caliber semiautomatic H&K USP sidearms. The two skills do not reinforce or relate to each other in any way. In fact, pilots may need several hundred hours experience with a weapon to develop safety skills that are as reliable as their flying skills.

So when a USAirways pilot blows a hole through his cockpit while trying to stow his handgun before landing his plane, as this AP story describes, no one should be surprised:

The pistol discharged shortly before noon Saturday aboard Flight 1536 from Denver to Charlotte, as the Airbus A319 was at about 8,000 feet and about 10 minutes from landing.

Here are some examples I just made up on my own. feel free to add your own as a comment!

• No sensible person would trust an astronaut to perform heart surgery, unless that astronaut were also an experience heart surgeon.
• Stunt performers may be brave, but that doesn’t make them great parents.
• Professors may be masters in their field, but that doesn’t mean they can use a computer. I still hear about professors who cannot answer their own e-mail!

In this post on his blog, Kevin Kelly discusses how the Internet is a massive copying machine. This is a major reason that digital rights management (DRM) does not protect business models very well.

The music and movie industries have focused on protecting content and managing copying, instead of building and offering value that is difficult or hard to copy. U2’s manager recently attacked ISPs, search engines and other companies for aiding and abetting music and video file sharing on the Internet. (CBC).

Kelly, on the other hand, proposes a network economy where sharing and abundance are key success factors that every content publisher must satisfy. He also identifies 8 key success factors that spur customers to buy instead of copy.

It’s difficult to copy reputation and trust, but it’s rather easy to offer or measure these attributes. Just look at eBay.

Reputation and trust are relevant in education. Jason Schultz published links to several YouTube videos of students demonstrating how to cheat in school. BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow discussed his own experiences with cheating when he linked to Schultz’s post.

Schools offer interpretation, which is another form of value that is difficult to copy. Grading, evaluation, advising are good examples of content that is very difficult to copy. These also have elements of personalization, which help increase their value.

Patronage is another factor. Some users want to pay for content, even if it can be downloaded free of charge.  Physical forms that cannot be downloaded through the Internet can also make content more valuable – cover art and booklets are examples in the music industry.

Convenience is also an important value generator. Immediate access to content may be more important to some users than eventually finding free access through peer-to-peer networks or file sharing. Metadata, XML and web services are some of the tools that small and independent publishers use to sell their content.

Blogs are also part of the value system that is created as multiple value chains link together from end to end. BoingBoing is a good example – that blog has several editors who promote their solo media projects through the web site. I discovered Kelly’s article on a BoingBoing post, as a matter of fact.

Tech: Techdirt discusses one journalist’s poor opinion of Wikipedia. Al Fasoldt of the Syracuse Post-Standard excoriated wikis in a column, and later claimed the site is dangerous. Well, yes, you should take any information source with a bit of skepticism. Bias is always present in any information. Al says so himself: “The best thing about the Web is also the worst thing: Information is all over the place. You need to be careful about trusting what you read.” I agree with those statements. Caveat lector. But Al doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and, so far, refuses to change his opinion.