That moment when you set an slarm for an early-morning auction...

and you snooze it out of habit, missing the auction, which goes for less than half of what you can sell the coin for.

 

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You know it's early when you misspell "alarm" in your title...

 

Use a sniping service. Just set it and forget it.

Chris

 

I guess it was a very early SLARM....

 

Will have to look into it...

 

This. Just set the maximum you would bid and forget it. Watch eBay auctions and see how many bids occur in the last 3-8 seconds of the auction. I'd wager they are all snipes.

 

When I was using Bidnapper, I'd bid on 50+ auctions per week. I won about 85% of these auctions, and my bid was usually placed with less than 3 seconds left. If someone were trying to watch the auction to physically place a higher bid, it would be too late. 5-8 seconds can give them time to react, but by the time a bid is entered with 3 seconds or less left, time runs out while eBay is electronically processing the bid.

Chris

 

I didnt even know there was such a thing as a sniping service. That explains why ive lost so many with a few seconds left. Im kinda irritated now.

 

Anecdote of an equally-disheartening recent auction incident in my own life: I watched a set of 3 Lincolns on Ebay for 8 days until I had the money to make the purchase. When I went to bed at 11PM the night before the money would be there, the coins were still up. I arose at 4AM, 5 hours later, to buy them and they were gone.

 

The big downside to these services is you have to give them your eBay credentials. There are a few programs that run locally on your machine that, while they could maliciously leak your eBay credentials, seem potentially more secure to me. I would not use a remote service for this. I've also sniped many auctions manually with less than 3 seconds to go.

 

I use and swear by a sniping program. The program I use resides on my computer and has a counterpart app on my phone so I can update add or delete any of my snipes while I am not at home. Every time I have come across an item I have to have that is running in an auction, I set it and forget it. I have won quite a few of them.

 

Back when I was sniping heavily, I learned that doing it successfully by myself was sheer luck in the presence of sniping programs. So I switched to the program, and just went on a regular password change/monitoring regimen so that any information compromise would be unlikely to have an effect.

People compromise business information not for them to personally exploit - two far different skillsets - but to sell that information to the people who do exploit it. There's a period of downtime there where a regular password change system easily defeats the exploit.

If you watch this stuff as closely as I do, you eventually realize that these exploits rarely translate into actual financial damage. If they did, the businesses being harmed would have long since forced the necessary changes to prevent them, especially when you understand that the "changes" amount solely to beefing up your IT section and being far more proactive about updating software and rewriting your own code to leverage the latest security and compatibility features. It's all a question of which choice costs you the least....

 

Freak'n slarms! I 've missed a couple auctions due to sleep. Ya, I SHOULD have placed a max bid and not worried about it but for whatever reason I didn't do that and I missed out.

 

Put your alarm clock on the other side of the room. Fixed.

 

My alarm clock is in my dorm room. I'm at home for the weekend. It normally is on the other side of the room. I only had my iPad under my pillow.

I erroneously thought I'd remember what the alarm was for.

 

You snooze, you lose!

 

What is the difference between eBays' built in automatic bid/maximum bid versus a sniping program?

 

The main difference is that people can poke at your max bid until they win, whereas when sniping, you don't reveal information about your max bid until the last second (literally).

 

All true, but defense in depth is the name of the game when it comes to infosec. I would actually advise anybody who has the basic programming skills necessary to do so to write their own sniper program, or at least download one that is open source and build it themselves.