Buyer's Index lists and searches over 10K mail order suppliers. . Cybermall.com covers selected premium malls, regional malls, specialty malls, and independent stores. . Visa Shopping Guide by Yahoo! is another guide to just about any category. . For PCs, software, and related items, check out Computer Shopper.com at . [Robin Nobles , BESTWEB, 20Nov98. net-hap.]

The eBay auction house is now listing more than 100K items/week, with more than 50K bids/hour. They run a cluster of more than 40 networked servers. [Bill McCurdy , rec.collecting.stamps.discuss, 29Nov98. Bill Park.]

Public Eye is a sort of Better Business Bureau for online shopping sites. Visit for company reports, or look for the Public Eye logo on certified sites. [Robin Nobles , BESTWEB, 20Nov98. net-hap.]

eWallet is a new advertising-supported service that makes it easier to order merchandise online. You download eWallet free from , enter your credit card billing and shipping info (kept on your own PC), and you're ready to just "swipe" or drag-and-drop your card at participating sites instead of having to type your name and card info each time. The data is sent encrypted, of course, so you have to supply a PIN. eWallet also offers a search function connected to leading portals and merchants. The program currently requires Windows 95 or 98. [Chris Gioia , net-hap, 25Nov98.]

Remember Firefly, the much-hyped MIT Media Lab spinoff that used clustering to identify books and movies you'd probably like? It was bought by Microsoft last April, for its privacy technology. Firefly-style clustering and personalization will soon be essential. People can't buy if they're swamped with irrelevant ads -- or even irrelevant news reports.

Sam Spade is a free anti-spam program that includes ping, nslookup, whois, IP block whois, dig, traceroute, finger, SMTP VRFY, web browser, keep-alive, DNS zone transfer, SMTP relay check, Usenet cancel check, website download, website search, and email header analysis. . For info on how to complain, see Phil Agre's article at . [Curt Davis , websitedaily, 14Nov98. net-hap.]

Web Poison is an interesting escalation of the war against spammers. It's a CGI script that generates pages of bogus email addresses plus recursive links back to itself. Any address harvester that ignores standard robot.txt privacy directives can thus be fed an infinite stream of bogus email addresses. Other Web spiders and users will not be affected. . [Bill Park , 18Nov98.]