I agree with those advocating NOT buying anything online...at least for the time being...and especially paying by credit card.

I have had 2 separate bad experiences, which could have been worse, but thankfully weren't.

The first involved buying some blank CD labels in bulk from a place in California, and paid for it online via the supposed ''secure server'' thingy. Order gets processed and I receive the labels within a week. 3 months go by, and suddenly out of the blue, UPS shows up at my door, with 5 more shipments of labels....which I never ordered...I contact the credit card company and sure as hell these shysters in CA put through another order 5 times, and since they had my credit card info, billed it to me. I contacted the company in California, and screamed at them, and threatened to contact the police, FBI, etc....just ranting at them (because if people are convinced you are a total lunatic and highly unstable you're more likely to get your way (--so much for honey vs. vinegar) at least that's been my experience...and in the end, they refunded the entire amount charged, and, told me to keep the labels...hehehehehe.....so I've got 5000 blank CD labels sitting here, enough to last me the rest of my life.

Second bad experience was buying some CDs online through CD Universe 6 months ago and like an idiot I figured the California thing was an isolated flukey experience..so I paid once again via credit card. A month and a half ago, I read in the news that this site got hacked, and the hacker was blackmailing the owners of the site for 6 figures in exchange for not publishing all the credit card info online...and to let the owners know he was serious, he published 20 or 30 thousand of them..The moment I read this on CNN's website, I immediately cancelled the card, and ordered a new one. Two weeks later CD Universe informs me through a mass emailing about the hack, and the security breach..Very timely of them. In any event, this morning, I receive an email from them telling me they've since plugged the hole and have hired 2 private internet security firms to keep things ship shape, and they offer me 10 bucks off of any CD purchase. Yeah right. When is hell freezing over?

Until some much better encryption comes along, or all e-commerce is conducted through private un-hackable networks with links to but operating independently of the internet, I won't be buying anything else on line.

You're playing Russian Roulette giving out credit card info online, no matter how secure you think a website is. Hackers are clever, intelligent, and resourceful and will figure out a way to ''drop their shields''.