Etsy has quickly become the eBay for artistic makers. The company calls itself “the world’s handmade marketplace”, and that’s exactly what it is. Sales on the site up until November 2011 reached $467.8 million. That makes the site a massive opportunity to start your own business with things you make yourself.

With all of the talk lately about what a Twitter follower is worth, I’m sure that Etsy shop owners would love to know the value of their budding online business.

This app, called the “Etsy Shop Value Calculator” has created a rudimentary algorithm that takes all of the known information about your Etsy shop into account and spits out a dollar value. While it’s not meant to be an official of your store, it’s something that could give you an idea of where you stand against some of your competition.

How do you stack up?

By using Etsy’s publicly available API, the site calculates the value of your store based on factors that include your sales, sales to views ratio, favorites of your items, and value of your current inventory. The app was created by Etsy seller Yenbo, so you know it was built with knowledge of the community and platform.

By simply entering your Etsy username, your value is calculated and your store stats are shown. While the curiosity about how much your shop is worth will probably lead you to using the app, all of the stats are surely helpful as you’re trying to become a top seller.

The site is also a fun way to discover new Etsy sellers, as it ranks the top valuable shops, as well as the ones with the most sales. You can click through directly to the store and start buying. Etsy makes it simple to start selling the things you make by hand, and this app can give you the insight into what others are doing and how to spark more sales in your own store.

While the value it generates might seem arbitrary, it’s definitely a good place to start.

➤ Etsy Shop Value Calculator

With the Holiday season arriving fast, it’s time to step back and think about others who are less fortunate. With all of the commerce happening online, it’s a perfect time for big companies to start Social Good campaigns to get gifts to those who can’t afford them. Social commerce site eBay has teamed up with Toys for Tots for the “Give-A-Toy Store” campaign.

Toys for Tots has been in operation since 1947, and is one of the most popular organizations to donate to around the Holidays.

With the tap of a button on your mobile device, you can give a gift to someone who deserves it.

Cheief Marketing Officer of eBay North America, Richelle Parham, had this to say about the “Give-A-Toy Store” initiative:

This holiday season, we’re giving people an innovative way to window shop for good that will benefit Toys for Tots. We’re leveraging our mobile technology to power The Give-A-Toy Store, which offers a differentiated, interactive experience for shoppers who wish to give using their smartphone.

You can donate anything from $2 to $25 for popular toys via eBay’s mobile app.

This isn’t just a mobile experience, as there is a physical Give-A-Toy store in New York City at 35th Street and Broadway near Herald Square, in addition to a location at 117 Post Street in San Francisco. You can even scan custom QR codes to automate the donation of your toy of choice. The QR codes cause the toys to animate, bringing you a feel-good experience when making a donation.

Here’s a video from the company, explaining the initiative:

If you’re not in NYC or SF, you can simply go to eBay’s “Give-A-Toy” website and donate there.

On Facebook, eBay is allowing its fans to customize toys, and $1 will be donated to Toys for Tots for every toy customization, up to $50,000.

Download the eBay mobile app today, visit the website, or visit one of the stores physically to make your donation. You could turn a child’s Holiday into an amazing experience, just by doing some Social Good online with eBay.

➤ “Give-A-Toy Store”

We all have extra things to either throw out, donate to Goodwill, or give away to a friend. An extra tennis racket, that scuba gear you thought you’d use. Some of it is junk, but some of it might be worth selling. Right now, you can place these items on Craigslist to make a few bucks for yourself.

KarmaGoat would rather you sell things on its site, and have the money go to a charitable cause.

KarmaGoat is half Craigslist, half Ebay, and all for Social Good, the founders tell me.

The company was founded by CEO, Jonathan Lehmann. KarmaGoat has already raised thousands of dollars for over 19 non-profits, we’re told. The first thing that stuck out to me was its name, so I dug around the site to find the explanation. Apparently, one of the missions of the site and its causes is to give a goat to villages who need them in third world countries.

The site is easy to navigate, and the only option to sign up is with your Facebook account. This is a trend we’re watching carefully. We used to be shown many options including Twitter and Google accounts, but we’re seeing more and more of Facebook only web apps.

Selling

If you’re a seller, you just add your item and set the price, and then pick the charity you’d like to benefit. There are over 900 organizations you can pick from, and that number is growing since KarmaGoat lets its community add causes as well. 15 percent of the profits go back to KarmaGoat as a transaction fee, and the rest goes to your chosen charity.

Buying

The shopping you’ll be doing is focused on people close to you, which is more of a Craigslist model. There are no shipping models. Once you see an item you like, you simply click “Meet and Buy”. You are then prompted for your credit card information, but aren’t charged yet, and are given a special private password. Once you meet the seller and the item is to your liking, you give them the password.

That sounds like a lot of extra steps, but the KarmaGoat founders want to make sure the transaction goes through to benefit the original charity that the seller picked, and not have it be done with cash like Craigslist is, which is impossible to track.

Any money to charity is a great thing. It will be interesting to see if people will use a site like KarmaGoat to buy items close to them. I’d be more interested in using the site if I could have items shipped to me, without having to work it out with the seller directly. No shipping options built in really limits the buying experience for me.

The concept of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks finally entered the mainstream public consciousness this month after assaults on the websites of Visa, MasterCard and PayPal made front page news.

Whilst these particular incidents were extremely high profile, a host of other DDoS attacks dating back to 1999 have littered the path leading up to Operation Avenge Assange.

The beginnings of DDoS attacks

The first notable use of a DDoS attack downed a University of Minnesota computer for over two days, but only a year later in 2000, sights were set higher when Amazon, CNN, eBay and Yahoo were all hit within the space of 24 hours, either slowing the sites down significantly or taking them altogether offline. Estimated losses to Amazon and Yahoo added up to approximately $1.1m.

Between 2001 and 2005, use of DDoS attacks silently grew with a few prominent attacks, most notably on Register.com and once more on eBay, for which a single man was prosecuted for causing damage of “at least $5000” over a year. The early botnets stemmed from to Trin00 and Tribe Flood Network, two of the earliest DDoS programs.

The seedier elements of DDoS attacks showed around this time as the technique began to be used by organised criminals to blackmail and extort money from small businesses by threat of cyber-attack. The growing commonness of these crimes coincided with the formation of the UK’s National Hi-Tech Crime Unit. Though they were tasked with finding the hackers at the root, the situation was ultimately resolved by improved servers leaving cyber-criminals unable to overwhelm the strengthened servers.

Despite the gradually improving ability to handle denial-of-service attacks, DDoS incidents persisted with increasing scale in the second half of the decade.

As early as 2006, DDoS tools became a staple of a hacker’s arsenal, but assaults were still typically created and coordinated by individuals rather than en masse. One highlighted case in the UK involved a teenager sending a former employer five million emails to take their servers down. The hacker was acquitted in the trial that ensued, but the judgement revealed flaws in the 1990 Police and Justice Bill, consequently amended to ban any and all denial of service attack.

An instrument of war

Whilst the UK seemed to be gaining some stability regarding DDoS attacks, 2007 brought diplomatic consequences to online warfare in Estonia as national websites suffered from Russian attacks. Initial tensions broke out when the proposed movement of a Soviet war monument from the Estonian capital turned into riots from the ethnic Russian population. This then spilled over into cyberspace as the websites of several government offices and cities were taken down or defaced by Russian activists. The event led many European officials to evaluate the protocols in such attacks as there was no precedent in the magnitude exhibited.

Not soon after, Russia was once again linked to DDoS attacks in the build up to their five-day war with Georgia. Reports at the time indicated that several Georgian, Azerbaijani and Russian sites were driven offline with claims tying particular attacks to Russian intelligence and the Russian Business Network, a criminal gang alleged to have also been a part of the cyber attacks on Estonia. The intensity of attacks in 2008 dwarfed those against Estonia as DDoS use escalated for that point onwards.

The disputed Iranian election of July 2009 saw street protests reflected online when many pro-Ahmadinejad websites were brought down by mass DIY denial of service tools. Rather than using automated botnets, PHP scripts were utilised in crowd-sourced assaults on the government. The two DDoS incidents with Russia and the Iranian election revealed that hacking, particularly using denial of service tools, had shifted from personal gain or targetted abuse, to politically motivated statements and attacks.

This was taken to extremes last year when Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and YouTube all suffered downtime when a Georgian blogger under the name ‘Cyxymu’ was individually targetted. The blogger was a vocal critic of the 2008 South Ossetia War between Russia and Georgia, and claimed that the KGB perpetrated the attack to silence him. Though the political aspect of hacktivism played a prominent role in the events that unfolded, the increasingly worrying concern was the weakness of major sites under DDoS attacks.

Grassroots payback

Despite preventative measures existing since the turn of the millennium, many of the victim
websites were inadequately protected against DDoS attacks, something made glaringly obvious in the last half of this year as Anonymous began their crusade against copyright with Operation: Payback.

The group’s attacks were initially mounted as a response to the MPAA contracted firm, Aiplex
Software, who used DDoS attacks to take down The Pirate Bay in September. Retaliation by Anonymous was swift and organised as the first week brought down time to Aiplex, the MPAA, RIAA, British Phonographic Industry and ACS:Law, the law firm notorious for aggressively targeting file-sharers. The more significant outcome of the attacks on Aiplex and ACS was the leak of sensitive private data that has since spread through torrents.

The actions of Anonymous as activists (particularly against Scientology) are well documented, but the focus delivered in the proceeding months outweighed previous organised cyber and real world protests. October saw DDoS attacks occur almost daily on the likes of Hustler.com, Ministry of Sound, the UK Intellectual Property Office, the US Copyright Office and Gene Simmons’ websites, the latter a result of taking a copyright-aggressive stance in a statement.

The profile of targets hit by Operation: Payback began to drop approaching November and a failed high-publicity series of attacks on Guy Fawkes Night seemed to evaporate the momentum built over the previous two months. The quietus of the attacks apparently culminated with the US and UK Pirate Parties asking for a DDoS ceasefire in late November, less than two weeks before WikiLeaks would suffer their own attacks in an attempt supposedly by a US patriot to halt the leak of the US Embassy Cables.

WikiLeaks

The early murmurings of Operation Avenge Assange began as WikiLeaks went viral and the
Swedish Pirate Party’s website was hit by DDoS attacks. John Perry Barlow, author of ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ and founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), tweeted on the first day of attacks: “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.”

Since then, attacks have been launched from both sides at sensationalist targets like MasterCard and PayPal, as well as some indirectly affiliated ones including Borgstrom and Bodström, the lawyers representing the women Assange allegedly assaulted, and PandaLabs, serial trackers of Anonymous’ attacks.

The key element shared by all the targets of DDoS attacks in the last week has been an inability to cope with a decade-old threat. However, this is not to do with a lack of preparation. The Anon Ops website was taken down suddenly despite having upgraded to what PandaLabs describe as a ‘bullet-proof server’ designed to resist botnet attacks.

The fact is that the sheer number of hacktivists on each side has overwhelmed servers, leaving the online war in a very open state. Although the EFF has condemned the attacks on both sides, the 1000s that have resorted to such tactics reveal it as an effective, if legally dubious, outlet for protest.

DDoS attacks may have started out as a way to shut down servers for fun, annoyance or gain, but key
events of the last decade have allowed the tool to transcend mere hacking, causing it to become simultaneously a form of protest and a weapon of war. The failure of Anonymous to take down Amazon (by either lack of support or strength of server) shows that the future of DDoS attacks lies only with the “hacktivists” themselves.