Free Software For Selling Photography Online
iStockphoto
iStockphoto.com Security And The Latest Physhing Attack
Mar 9th
I guess most of you already saw this message when logged in to iStockphoto:
kkthompson
March 3, 2009 20:10
This afternoon a phishing attack was conducted in the forums and through sitemail. This attack created a fake istockphoto.com login screen, prompted the user for a username & password, saved them to a malicious server, then redirected the user back to the iStockphoto main page
March 3, 2009 20:10
This afternoon a phishing attack was conducted in the forums and through sitemail. This attack created a fake istockphoto.com login screen, prompted the user for a username & password, saved them to a malicious server, then redirected the user back to the iStockphoto main page
The iStock forums post by the same author says:
It’s an interesting statement, where the first part is correct, while the second part is very confusing. No financial information to breach, oh yeah, really?
Just a week ago Dreamstime complained in this thread that “we had cases when contributors had their accounts accessed, password changed, payment requested”. Now the iStockphoto guys are brave enough to say us they have “no financial information to breach”?
We all know that iStockphoto, like any other stock photo agency has on file your PayPal / MoneyBookers accounts. They also collect funds that have to be transferred to contributors monthly. Should not this stuff be considered as a valuable financial information stored by iStock? And if it is not enough, add here you personal profile details like your home address, phones and your picture ID. And even your images portfolio is in danger since it can be first completely downloaded and stolen and then, just for fun, completely removed from the agency by a hacker who looks for an entertainment on the hacked site.
What happened to iStock on March 3 is not funny at all. And it is a much more serious issue than just a few hours of iStock down time, even if iStockphoto prefers to present it this way. The site stores financial information and digital goods that can be stolen, so their “no financial info stored” statement is very far from the reality.
Keyphrases handling by various stock photo agencies
Mar 8th
So here is the trick that Terry pointed me out a few months ago and Jorgen confirmed the same issue for some more agencies:
IPTC keyphrases interpreting differs between various stock agencies.
It means that if you index your image with a keyphrase like blue water, it will be retrieved OK from IPTC data on e.g. iStockphoto, but will become two keywords blue and water on e.g. Shutterstock. If you will try another trick by doble-qouting your keyphrase (note that PSM is a rare applications which allows you doing that without any problem) and your original keyphrase becomes to be “blue water”, Shutterstock will show it correctly as a blue water keyphrase, but iStockphoto will not show it at all (BTW, why is that iStockphoto.com?)
Uploading stock photos to iStockphoto.com and maximum number of IPTC keywords
Jun 5th
The automated keywords suggestion mechanism implemented in ProStockMaster brings you tens of relevant keywords matching your stock photo or an illustration. You can enter keywords in virtually any language and our microstock software will save them all with the image, in an IPTC section of the file. Thus your stock images will always carry IPTC metadata and can become searchable by IPTC-reading software like ProStockMaster or Adobe CS family.
Probably the fastest and the easiest way to add keywords and metadata to stock photos and raster illustrations, multilingual
Some stock agencies, like iStockphoto.com restrict maximum number of keywords a stock photo can contain. (Anyone can tell me why they do it? I have absolutely no idea. I can not find any logic why they limit maximum amount of keywords. In my understanding, the more keywords an image has, the better it will be found in the searches – what’s wrong with that? However, it seems that iStockPhoto has a different point of view)
Current keywords limit defined by iStockphoto stands for 50 keywords. ProStockMaster does not limit the maximum number of IPTC keywords in a stock image, but it do counts how many keywords the photograph got. And once it is more than 50, the keywords counter become red.
Recent problem with iStockPhoto.com uploads fixed in v1.2.1
Feb 2nd
UPDATE: iStockPhoto uploads are fixed, Fotolia staistics is tuned. All these in the latest release 1.2.1
Either upgrade http://www.prostockmaster.com/upgrade.htm or download http://www.prostockmaster.com/download.php to get the all latest fixes and changes.
- David
Recently I was informed about a problem with iStockPhoto uploads. I am going to issues the fix in the next 24h – please stay tuned. If you have any question / suggestion please email me at support(at)prostockmaster(dot)com
And thanks to Martin who pointed me out to that problem!
Mac package update
Sep 23rd
The Mac packaging is updated!
Now Mac version is packaged with native Mac bundler and finally ProStockMaster on Mac is delivered and installed like any other native Mac application.
I like Mac look & feel: http://www.prostockmaster.com/images/mac_main_screen.jpg – really cool Mac-native GUI.
Finally: Payment, price and the unlimited version
Aug 29th
I just finished today testing of all the payment stuff. The payment processor is going to be PayPal and the product price will be EURO 39. / $49.
All the payments are processed on PayPal site and at the end the payer receives software activation code generated by ProStockMaster site. I hope you guys will excuse me if I will not accept GBP and AUD at least at this phase. PayPal also accepts credit cards, so it should handle 99% of payment options this way.
I am also adding an affiliate program, so anyone who want to promote ProStockMaster will get 25% sales commission on any sale of the software to his/her referred buyer.
At the moment I need 2-3 more days to add “lock/unlock” functionality to the software, so a person who has downloaded ProStockMaster can pay, get his activation code and enter it in the app without a need to re-download the software. I think at the end of this week all this stuff will be ready.
Security issues
Jul 5th
I have been asked multiple times a question like:
> Is it secure to enter my site’ user name and password into your application?
It’s a good question. Since you login to an Internet stock photo site with your user name and password, ProStockMaster shall know these parameters in order to login and properly upload images to your account on selected site. This is the only way the application can securely access your personal account on that site and upload images there.
If you are familiar with any FTP client, like Smart FTP or cuteFTP, it is exactly the same process.
The client asks for your credentials and then uploads your files on your behalf to some FTP site. ProStockMaster follows this approach and uses your credentials for proper login into a stock site and upload your work to your personal account. There is no other use for your credentials.
ProStockMaster hides and encrypts your sensitive information storing it locally, thus providing reasonable (however, not an “unbreakable”) level of security for your personal data. This level of security is comparable with the level of security you would expect to get from a typical FTP client or from your favorite web browser.
