They intentionally named their site that way to capitalize on Google search result traffic. If you read their articles, you realize they can barely put together two English sentences with proper grammar and structure. Furthermore, most of their articles are stolen from other sites. I've seen journalists from Motherboard, The Register, and Bleeping Computer accuse them of blatantly copying articles, and when I checked out the articles, they were right. I have zero problems with this. Couldn't have happened to a bunch of bigger assholes.
Cutting a business off from the financial system seems like a fairly harsh punishment for plagiarism, especially when there are other routes for a remedy. We may never know if that was the reason, though, so it's hard to measure whether justice was done or not.
I suspect that one of the sites they plagiarized which accept PP donations/subscriptions asked PP to take them off or risk the large news company switching to another payment processor.
Well, there's plagiarism and then there's impersonating a well-known (admittedly in niche circles) brand to make money. I think they made a good call here.
So, rather than using our existing copyright / trademark system to handle cases of brand impersonation or stealing content, we're just going to rely on payment processor companies to punish people? That sounds like a really bad idea.
Why should a payment processor be able to make such legal decisions? That's what the courts are for. The current trend of cutting services for political reasons is problematic at best, particularly when there's arguably a monopoly.
There needs to be more transparency, and a clear and fair system for arbitration and dispute resolution. Better still, one that's consistent across all digital services so people know what to expect when signing up without wading through a novel's worth of user agreements.
We have discrimination laws don't we? Are banks allowed to refuse service for any reason whatsoever?
We're talking about people's livelihood here. If transactions don't violate any laws, payment processors should not be permitted to refuse service. When they do refuse service, there should be transparency in reporting.
This name confusion seems intentional and makes me default to unsympathetic, even though I suspect PayPal’s issue is not related to a name confusion root cause.
Even though the website seems to have a history of plagiarism I don't think they named the website after HN. By going through their about us section it looks like they started the website in 2010 as a cybersecurity and hacking news platform. The Hacker News is kind of a no-brainer name for this kind of website. Also THN seems to be an Indian website. I think HN was not at all popular outside the Silicon Valley in 2010. So no reason for them to name the website after HN that had an extremely small and passionate userbase. There is a good chance that they may not have even known about HN when they started THN. The name defintely has confused a lot of people though. Even Elon Musk seems to be following THN over HN in Twitter :)
Hacker News is about hacking too, in the original sense of the word. It's a gathering place for people to indulge in curiosity with fellow curious people.
A few months ago I was making a news ticker with headlines sourced from hnrss. I had used 'security' as a keyword and posts with score above 100.
I was looking for other sources that provide security news and stumbled upon this one too.
What I saw was all posts looked quite similar to the rss filter from hnrss, except all articles were re-written in a slightly different way.
It was all just redundant news from the hnrss feed and other popular security bloggers.
Do you have proof, or do you just happen to feel this way without actually knowing any background story? If you make such an accusation you should state your reasons, preferably observable facts. Both "hacker" and "news" are generic terms after all.
In addition, even if they did mimic the name, I would not see a problem. It's very descriptive, unlike a completely made-up word that someone spent a lot of effort on to establish as a brand.
I think that's not a great comparison. Hacker News is still essentially a niche site known to people who care about a specific set of fields relevant to startups. If you asked a random person on the street they probably wouldn't know about Y Combinator, much less Hacker News.
I'm not sure how to measure the actual level of recognition of a brand name, but I feel that Hacker News falls into the second or third tier of whatever that ranking is, whereas names like Facebook or Google form the top tier. That, combined with the relatively generic name, make me inclined to believe without further evidence that it's a coincidence - especially given the fact that the site is actually about news related to hacking, or hacker news.
A closer comparison I can think of is if I saw a watch company called "The International Watch Company". The real IWC is a luxury watch company, but the brand and its full name aren't known to many people. In that case too, my opinion is that the name is generic enough for it to feel like an honest coincidence.
In the "The International Watch Company" case, I'd expect a trademark search prior to naming the company. In the "The Hacker News" case, I'd expect at least a Google search to check for confusing/conflicting names in the same space.
In either of the above cases, a Google search turns up the conflicting name as the #1 organic hit, precluding my judgment of an honest coincidence, but I understand your position.
> This site, with the name "Hacker News", was already popular
You mean, with the name "ycombinator", right? I remember accessing this site a few times in the (distant) past and was a little confused as to what it was and what it was "selling" (based on the actual frontpage).
I'd check out https://ycombinator.com/ and assumed the news subdomain was a forum or some '1337' thing.
I say this as a slashdotter, digger, redditor (and others) - all of whom have and always had brand naming. I'd say that over the last couple of years, HN has crossed a bridge into the mass market. Before then... it was niche.
And it redirects there today, so you’d have to buy it back from Facebook for an exorbitant sum of money to do anything with it, then promptly get sued.
Completely relying on any third party is a bad idea. We should consider the risks when we signup to any service. Around this month we have seen multiple companies banning accounts without giving valid reasons MailChimp, Patreon, Slack(They had a reason but they didn't notify the users earlier, however they appologized later)
Well everyone who wants to accept payments on the internet ultimately relies on VisaMasterCard. They will shut you off and get other payment processors to shut you off like happened to SubscribeStar when they set up as a Patreon competitor.
Why does it bottom out in these credit card companies? Is it just prohibitively hard to set up a competitor because you need some critical mass of banks to sign on? Or because people want to pay with credit card and cc companies will prohibit transactions to a fledgling competitor?
Ultimately the ones who issue the credit are the banks. Banks have a lot of rules to follow set by the government. They are the ones who created visa and mc. PayPal, stripe all these other services ultimately rely on them. You can do BTC, but there is risk there to with trasaction costs and changing exchange rate.
These banks want to reduce thier risks as much as possible. CC laws in America provide a lot of protection for the consumer.
It's not about 'rules' and not even so much mitigating risk - it's just basic cartel/oligarchy practices.
They do it because they think it's good for them, and/or they can.
It sometimes only takes one person, doing what they think is right, for whatever reason, for a lot of this stuff to happen.
Edit: we like to think that large systems are intelligent. Sometimes they are, if there are thoughtful rules and processes. More often than not - there aren't. CEOs lean on M&A teams to buy companies for a lot of money on a hunch. Because they 'liked' someone, or something, even when the research shows otherwise. When situations are politicized especially outside the scope of clear operational guidelines ... it can just be 'one person'.
Example: the CEO or someone else could send a half-sentence email 'do this' (i.e. shut down a customer) and it will get done. Maybe there was process, maybe not. Maybe it's politics, risk aversion. Maybe it's not corporate risk aversion but individual risk aversion, i.e. a VP not wanting to create a fuss. Maybe there's an outside body putting pressure on Visa/MC and someone inside doesn't want to put up a fuss. Maybe it's favours for favours. Maybe it's avoiding the ire of the Feds. Maybe there's a specious court order that Visa/MC thinks is spurious, but they don't want to bother arguing it. Maybe a a key customer or two are complaining. Maybe the PR lead is putting up a scare, indicating that there's going to be some major press about it soon and they need to get ahead of this. Maybe the VP Legal is protecting themselves. Or is being risk averse.
Even when it's complicated, it's often not complicated in a nice, rational way.
In my experience with large organization, it's really the reduction of personalities, self-interest, risk avoidance, sycophantism, 'following orders' etc.. There's rarely an overall coherent, thoughtful dynamic to these kinds of things.
There's a whole lot of conspiracy speculation in there, especially the idea of "SPLC's anti-conservative purge".
Simply put, being associated with hard-right political figures is seen as problematic by Mastercard, Patreon, Paypal etc., and they are trying to minimize their risk, because they don't want to lose business. They have to do this, due to their obligations to shareholders, boards of directors and advertisers, who are all very concerned about public opinion's influence on their bottom line.
If you want to get to the heart of this "voluntary censorship", you have to either improve the public image of hard-right figures, so they're no longer seen as problematic, or break the reputation/bottom line relationship, or outright change the way businesses are run and held accountable, which would probably mean changing some fundamental things about capitalism.
Unless you want to abolish capitalism outright, I would suggest lessening the grip of corporations on payment services, and introduce a federal bank and federal payment service for the people. After all, isn't the ability to make and receive payment a public good on the level of water and electricity? Make it for everyone, equally.
Or... they could just not do anything. They're payment processors and moving legal funds is their purpose. Nobody knows they underpin a lot of these payments and being invisible infrastructure is their advantage.
Getting involved makes everything worse as now a larger population knows what's happening. It's a perfect example of the Streisand effect.
SPLC Apologizes, Pays Settlement to Islamic Reformer It Wrongly Labeled ‘Anti-Muslim Extremist’
The Southern Poverty Law Center has reached a settlement with liberal Islamic reformer Maajid Nawaz and his organization, the Quilliam Foundation, for wrongly including them on its now-defunct list of “anti-Muslim extremists.”
The SPLC announced Monday that it has agreed to pay Nawaz and Quilliam $3.375 million “to fund their work to fight anti-Muslim bigotry and extremism.” The settlement was the result of a lawsuit Nawaz filed in April over his inclusion on the SPLC’s “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.”
Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson has been added to the Southern Poverty Law Center‘s (SPLC) list of anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender extremists.
Gunmen have twice targeted conservatives specifically cited by the SPLC for hate: Republican Rep. Steve Scalise, who was shot June 14 by a fan of the SPLC Facebook page, and the Family Research Council, whose security guard was wounded in 2012 by a man who said he found the FRC on the SPLC’s list of “anti-gay groups.”
As far as conservative organizations are concerned, being labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center isn’t just annoying — it’s dangerous.
Scary stuff. That's the real reason to use and encourage Crypto: to avoid political censorhip and control. Its a shame it was co-opted by mining and speculation.
Had bitcoin not been sold as a way to get rich, it's likely that most people would have still never heard of it.
It's unfortunate that most people misunderstand what Bitcoin is because they can only think of it in terms of legacy financial instruments (ie, treat it like a stock).
However, there's no doubt that many people who are in it for the technology and liberty got to know about it because someone else made money and started bragging.
This is something I've understood for awhile; I agree with you in all but timing. I think the original idealism behind crypto-currency started to die when the first providers and vendors started accepting bitcoin for services or products.
Those first few folks made a decision, either consciously or subconciously, and it was based on how much 1btc is worth. Ideologically, it's worth 1btc. So either they accept that, or they themselves begin to shape the exchange rate to other currencies.
The beginning of the end was probably well before that; it started with whoever the first person to exchange btc for other currencies was.
It _is_ a pyramid scheme, in which the originators and some early adopters all of the BitCoin. 0.1% of bitcoin owners have over 50% of all BitCoin. 1% of owners have over 90%. That's 2017 data. If adoption grows, the fractions of owners will essentially drop by another factor of 10.
These people's coin cannot be devalued by inflation - only by dumping Bitcoin. So encouraging adoption is encouraging buying into the pyramid scheme and enabling these people to use their ill-gotten gains to take people's stuff.
Basically killed the project. It's still sortof moving, but a shell of what it once was.
PayPal's size allows them to dictate terms like "We'll screw you worse than a bank but you can't sue us like a bank", and nobody's been able to take them down yet.
They've screwed countless group buys by locking the organizers account and freezing funds after "detecting" unusual spending (ie receiving money from a bunch of other users in a short period of time). Same thing happened to a friend organizing a group gift for another mutual fiend. Unethically, PayPal kept receiving funds to the account after they froze it.
They simply froze the donated funds and kept them in limbo while forcing the operater of SA to jump through ridiculous hoops in order to unfreeze the money.
Don't use Paypal for any sort of fundraiser. Ideally never use Paypal for anything, ever.
Paypal is practically the only commonly accepted online payment method that doesn't require me to have a credit card. The reason people use Paypal today is that they offer a service without much competition to people who want to pay, so if you want to get paid you're leaving money on the table if you don't accept Paypal.
This does of course depend on where your customer base is. Credit cards are universal in the US, not so much internationally.
people only use paypal because vendors accept paypal.
you wouldn't have a paypal account otherwise.
and outside of the usa, most bank systems have ways to forward money based on other records. I've implemented a few in south American countries where by accepting CC from one operator you also get an optional printable invoice (boleto) that can be paid on the bank (online or not) and it transfer same day to your account.
> people only use paypal because vendors accept paypal.
> you wouldn't have a paypal account otherwise.
Sure, if I couldn't use it to pay for anything, I wouldn't have a Paypal account. I don't use Paypal to send money to friends or anything like that, just for (international) online payments.
> and outside of the usa, most bank systems have ways to forward money based on other records.
Sure, but those aren't generally accepted online, internationally.
For example, the vast majority of online payments in the Netherlands are done through iDEAL, but that only works for Dutch banks. Some (generally large) stores support it, but most don't.
In the UK we mostly use debit cards these days, although the term ‘credit card’ seems to generally include debit cards. I haven’t had a credit card for almost a decade. Everytime an online store says credit cards only, it’s taken my debit card.
Which seems odd to me. Credit cards offer the advantages of points/cashback and more importantly the Consumer Credit Act, such that the card issuer is jointly liable for the goods. I only use my debit card to withdraw cash as the protections and incentives with my credit cards are much better.
The UK has more consumer protection laws in general, so the need for the card issuer to provide protection is not as necessary.
Credit cards have some perks, but they also have interest rates which debit cards do not. Many people would rather avoid getting into debt at all, because it can be very easy to go just over budget and end up paying more than you wanted, or getting locked in a debt spiral where you can't afford to pay off the growing interest.
You are correct but from my experience when I was visiting UK in 2008 you get charged with extra fee it was ~2% if you want to use the credit card or it was no extra fee if debit, so I was advised not to use credit card.
Now I don't know if it was only specific places like aldi/tesco since I've only been there few weeks, and only to those places. Also cashbacks are not a thing even in 2018 in eastern europe at least, you can get miles, loyalty points, but not cashback.
exogeny said... The percentage of links to your blog that you post in your comments is extremely high and extremely notable. Make of that what you will.
HN uses rel=nofollow links so he's not posting links as part of some SEO plan. Cursory review of his previous comments shows he links to other sites more often than his own. It makes sense someone would often post links to their own blog though - if they're interested in a topic, they're likely to both comment on and blog about it.
Beats users linking to one of the near-web-monopoly sites like twitter or facebook constantly!
I'm shocked you're essentially chastising someone for having their own domain and publishing articles on it they then link to. If anything we should be encouraging this behavior.
That's not really a practical way to acquire bitcoin since there is very little economic activity in the cryptocurrency world besides trading various cryptocurrencies. I know this first-hand since the e-commerce startup I work for brings in roughly 300k USD in sales monthly, with bitcoin sales never having exceeded $80.00 USD worth of value and often none at all.
this third party is not linked to where you want to send them. anybody can get BTC from fiat conversion and send it wherever they want without censorship. That's what we are talking about right?
Good, old fashioned, non-electronic money orders and cashier's checks, perhaps? Granted, you're still relying on a bank but I can't imagine any bank refusing them for a person without refusing all that person's business entirely.
> Completely relying on any third party is a bad idea. We should consider the risks when we signup to any service.
I agree somewhat but I will note my different viewpoint: completely relying on only one third party is bad. Its usually smarter at least in the case of payments to accept more than one method of payment other than just PayPal.
I know theres even third parties that will accept PayPal on your behalf. Now how that might or might not shield your paypal from being banned I am not certain. One I remember is 2checkout but I havent looked at them in years, so I am not sure if they still work with PayPal.
Are there no other options? I get that it's difficult if you want international payments, but surely for inter-American payments enough other options are available? (Genuinely curious)
This is a fraud website which has mercilessly ripped off content from other sites and published as its own. Also it has published a ton of proprietary information from time to time. Good riddance!
Do you have any citations for these claims? Not calling you a liar or anything - I'm just not at all familiar with the site in question, and it seems like it'd be important evidence if we want to fairly judge paypal's behavior here.
If you don't believe that, than take my word. I'm an infosec reporter and had countless articles end up on that site. News sites often report on the same topics all the time, but there's a difference between running a story on the same topic and copying the text and replacing some verbs and nouns with a synonym, and then switching sentence order to pass it as your own. Every reporter has his own way of structuring a story. It's pretty obvious for us when someone steals an article, based on how you present information points and which information points from a —let's say 50-page academic paper— you decide to present. Many times, information I obtained during private email or phone conversations would also end up on their site. When I confronted the "CEO" (aka site owner) he said he found that information using Google (obvious lie) and replied with insults. They kinda stopped copying my articles after I called them out a few more times on Twitter, but I don't believe for a second they're now doing actual news reporting.
I have other reporter friends who'd tell you similar stories and interactions with their staff. At one point someone tried to organize a campaign where all reporters would call out The Hacker News and Security Affairs (another site engaging in plagiarism) on Twitter, and urge security researchers to stop sharing links to their sites, but that didn't materialize because some of the bigger names in infosec journalism didn't wanna participate. In hindsight, it was kinda silly (childish would be a better word), but this only shows how many news sites TheHackerNews has angered in the past few years. They're absolutely despised by most infosec news reporters and I know at least two people who are now opening a beer in celebration.
Perhaps they are, but then they should be sued out of existence or left alone if what they do isn't ilegal. That is far preferable to a world where giant, unaccountable corporations act like police, judge and executioner.
Maybe they are getting sued or under investigation and PayPal dedicated to kick them because they got subpoena to testify or similar.
And these scary letters from gov will sometime clearly state what SaaS provider needs to answer when person ask "why I'm banned". Sometimes, the court or investigator will explicitly ask not to ban user and they can ban user only after investigation is finished (or grand jury makes decision if it is something more complex).
They also reportedly shutdown Subscribe Star recently, when people started to use it instead of Patreon, in the wake of the Patreon banning of some prominent You Tuber. This isn't working. The free market doesn't seem to work well in the tech world, where we have all powerfull monopolies controlling what we say, what we know and what we buy. We need new laws.
> They also reportedly shutdown Subscribe Star recently, when people started to use it instead of Patreon, in the wake of the Patreon banning of some prominent You Tuber. This isn't working. The free market doesn't seem to work well in the tech world, where we have all powerfull monopolies controlling what we say, what we know and what we buy. We need new laws.
This is not what a "free market" means. Paypal is not remotely a monopoly, nor is Patreon.
However, sites could accept IBAN transfers, Diner’s Club, Bank drafts, Amex, Discover, JCB, Apple Pay (Apple Pay Cash)... People could even use Transferwise.
The are a lot of ways to not have to accept MC or Visa.
Even six years ago when I was shopping around to buy some Bitcoins it was already impossible to use Transferwise and most banks had blocked transfers to known cryptocurrency exchanges. When the financial industry wants something ostracised they are quick to move in the same direction.
Do you also consider Google and Bing on the same footing?[0] No, right?. But in anycase, fair enough, the technical correct one is duopoly—the problem just is, it doesn't make it any better.
Oligopoly. Discover card and American Express are both mostly accepted (I say mostly because some companies don't accept American Express due to their charge back policies).
And yes, it makes it so much better. True monopolies can slack so hard and yet still rake in boatloads of cash because their customers have no other option. Google cannot sit around on their search engine or other companies will steal all their customers. Just look at how duck duck go is growing in popularity.
Sometimes people say "monopoly" when they mean "cartel". Are you arguing that these companies do not have substantial market power compared to more competitive markets or are you just trying to distract from the discussion with an argument over definitions? Do we see Mastercard and Visa competing on price (e.g. interchange rates)?
Having 4 main companies (mastercard, visa, discover, and american express) doesn't make you a monopoly or cartel.
Obviously, they do have more market power than purely competitive environments but they do compete a lot on rewards which cut into the profitability of those interchange rates. I cannot find any source to measure the interchange fees - rewards profitability but I did find one that shows most of their profits don't come from those but instead interest rates [0] and I'd bet they don't make so much after the rewards (I get minimum 1% cash back on my cards and sometimes up to 5%).
isoskeles> Why quote the entire comment you’re replying to?
Not the person of whom you're asking, but I sometimes quote substantial parts of text to which I'm replying for three basic reasons.
The first is that in a large thread if can sometimes be difficult to find the original. In that case it's useful to have the comment there, not least because if you want to see the original you have the exact text to search for.
The second is that in some other forums it's the usual behaviour, and when it's a habit, and regarded as a "Good Thing"(tm) in other forums, that behaviour can carry over. I find it a natural thing to do, and sometimes have to think twice to stop myself from doing it.
And thirdly, in the past I've seen replies that genuinely don't seem to make sense, only to discover subsequently that the original text was edited. I fully appreciate that on HN the unethical editing of text to make replies look stupid is not "A Thing"(tm) but it does make the habit a useful one.
Can you expand on this line of reasoning a bit? Specifically, what's stopping a competitor from eating Paypal's lunch right now? They have a majority market share now, but disruption still seems a possibility. Often it seems would-be disruptors get bought by the goliaths, but that's on the owners of the disruptors making their company purchasable such as through accepting investor money.
On the flip side, if we did get new laws, why would the goliaths not use their country-size budgets to lobby for the laws to just ensconce them as the government-approved monopoly (maybe not directly, but for example by throwing up legislative barriers to entry against would-be competitors)?
>Specifically, what's stopping a competitor from eating Paypal's lunch right now?
There's already regulations (or industry rules) regarding money laundering, credit card processing, credit card charge backs, international money transfers, etc, etc. That alone creates a decent barrier to entry.
Then there's other issues such as merchants lying, customers lying, refunds, stolen accounts, etc. PayPal closes accounts (and so on) as a consequence of trying to deal with all these issues.
I'd posit that PayPal does not suck because it's PayPal but because of the product itself and anyone who tried to fully replicate it would run into the same issues (and thus suck just as much).
Gee, if it’s that easy to find a new payment processor when Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Stripe and four others all drop you on the same day SubscribeStar should have a new payment processor by now. They don’t. It’s been three weeks. No member of the payment processing cartel will touch you if MasterVisa won’t because then they’ll get you cut off.
Specifically, what's stopping a competitor
from eating Paypal's lunch right now?
Perhaps being a payment processor is actually difficult, and Paypal is doing a tolerably good job?
I only hear people bitching about their paypal account being locked once or twice a year, whereas I assume paypal deal with hundreds of attempts at credit card fraud, chargebacks, complaints about ebay goods and suchlike every day.
Oh, they deal with it. But always on terms favorible to them. I sold off inventory to my old CoLo and they froze all my funds for 6 months until lawyers got called, and somehow their fraud investigation magically vanished. They are no better than mafia.
Paypal relies heavily on mastercard and visa to process payments, if these companies refuse to play ball with a competitor (which I would say is incredibly likely given the cosy relationship these companies have) then what chance does a competitor have? Merely being usable is in Visa and master card's hands, let alone eating into any marketshare
Others comments have addressed the difficulties with creating a PayPal alternative. New laws would be vulnerable to corruption, yes, of course, but that is not a new problem and there are mechanisms to fight it. As things stand now we are fast and sleeply sliding back to the Rober Baron times as more and more of our lives are gated by a handfull of players.
I don't know if we need new laws. We need more competitors, for sure.
Jordan Peterson (if you know him) has partnered to solve the problem of PayPal and Patreon deplatforming people, and is starting a competing service that doesn't depend on traditional payment circuits.
No one knows much about how it will work, but it might prove to be a good alternative to avoid being at the mercy of these companies.
For some reason, perhaps that they traffic in information, which is cheaply duplicated, perhaps because of network effects, tech businesses seem more prone to generate giant, seemingly invincible monopolies. Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Paypal, Youtube. Most people wouldn't be able to name a competitor to any of these, let alone use it. I do not know if competition, as is possible today, can work.
Sure, but Patreon is for a small group of people. Meaning, the mass audience goes there because a small group of creators told them that's how they can support them.
If that small group of creators finds a better alternative, and tells their audience to support them at the alternative rather than Patreon, they will go there.
SubscribeStar was enjoying a good amount of success as a Patreon alternative once a few users who got banned move to it, (but then PayPal cut SubscribeStar off).
If the payment processors are really who is behind the Patreon/SubscribeStar debacle, which certainly seems to be the case, then short of bitcoin, which is a horrible solution, how can a Patreon competitor do any better?
PayPal is a disgrace. Years ago they blocked my account and freezed my money until I sent them a copy of my passport, my birth certificate, and a proof of address. But sending them wasn't enough, as this dragged on for months and months with no feedback from them. Eventually (after over a year) they cleared my account, but just a month later it was frozen again, and they asked for the exact same documents yet again. By that time I had made sure I had no money in the account, so I didn't even bother contacting them again.
This was many years ago, and I have almost successfully avoided them since. However, a few months back I had to buy something from Ebay, and I could only pay through PayPal. I now live in a different country, and I have learned that I needed to create a brand new account, you can't change the country of the old account (not that i wanted to use that old account anyway). I made a new account, paid that Ebay guy, and got my merchandise. A month later (after I had already received my merchandise and having not used PayPal after that) I got an e-mail from PayPal asking me yet again for a copy of my passport, my birth certificate, and a proof of address.
This applies to most centralized external services, but especially those that handle money. If your application or business relies 100% on one of these services that could be shut down or have your account suspended or removed, make sure to have a backup plan in place to switch it over to a self hosted option or another offering from another company.
Business? I'm a private individual buying stuff on Ebay. The only time I received money on PayPal was from friends who paid back small loans, like taxi trips or restaurant bills.
As far as I know, The Hacker News is just bunch of copied articles (i.e., blog spam) - but copying and plagiarism is so prevalent and pervasive on these news sites. Nothing new here.
However, they did add "donate" pay button on their website which means that PayPal might be on the hook if somebody donates to The Hacker News but article is written by somebody else. Just speculating.
Even assuming you are 100% correct, it is interesting that this violation is not decided by the legal system but by a secret court inside PayPal. They will not even tell you the offense you are guilty of.
Secret court? They're a private company, they're entirely free to choose who they do business with for whatever reason (barring a few protected classes that would fall foul of anti-discrimination law, of course).
I wrote this article on Hacker Noon 18 months ago or so, nothing has changed. The only good thing was the article going viral, which spawned a new golden level of PayPal customer service - they also had to disable account deletion for 48h, which was nice to know.
I've moved away entirely to Stripe and other services and it's been bliss.
In other words, they claim a common law trademark on it [1], but they have not registered it with the USPTO. This means they probably have some trademark protection, at least in some states, but not nearly as much as if they had a registered mark. For example, they might be able to get an injunction against a similar user in some states, but probably not damages or attorney fees. With a registered mark, they would be able to go for damages and attorney fees.
[1] See reply to you from 'disconnected' for link to claim.
I dont think there needs to be a trademark to not want to cause confusion. The majority of people in our field know that this is hacker news, sometimes they talk about it to someone who doesn't know. That new person finds "the hacker news" and thinks that their coworker is a 1337 hax0r.
Often, the bans are just because they implemented Federal rules in the most stupid way possible.
For example, the US has something called the "Office of Foreign Assets Control" (OFAC). It's a list of names that companies like PayPal are supposed to prevent from being sent payments.
Paypal chose to implement it with super dumb string matching in ANY field. So, for example, if you put the words "Castro", "Cuba" or "JAMES KANG" into ANY field (even a MEMO field)...your payment gets stopped and your account frozen until you send them the DOB for "Cuba", even though it was just in a memo field.
Is there any viable alternative to PayPal for a EU-based micro-business wanting to accept CC payments from North American customers?
I run a legally operating one-man business providing electronic services to customers (mostly other businesses) in EU, US and Canada. The EU customers pay me with bank transfers like civilized human beings, but Americans and Canadians always insist on PayPal because, apparently, North American banking system charges an arm and a leg for international bank transfers, so they'd rather pay with CC.
I didn't mind having to provide PayPal with scans of a bunch of sensitive documents. What I do mind is pretending my PayPal balance is not real money but virtual tokens with little legal protection and the possibility of being arbitrarily frozen for an undisclosed reason. That, and their horrendous fees (including currency conversions based on rates they pull out of the ass) for which they don't even provide anything resembling a legal invoice (a screenshot of an HTML table won't cut with my IRS).
Someone, for the love of God, tell me there's an alternative a teeny-tiny business like mine could use.
All this talk of monopoly in this sector of finance makes me wonder how you'd start a service in this space.
And it made me realize I have no idea how it works.
I swipe (or insert w/ chip) at a POS... which then beamz the transaction to VISA? So do you need to get a partnership with all of the POS vendors? Is that open or closed?
Of course, that presupposes that someone has your card. VISA doesn't make cards, they just get banks to issue cards using their network (why don't banks do this on their own?). So now I also need a partnership with at least one large bank to have a decent enough exposure to get those partnerships with those POS vendors?
The challenges sound largely political, in making those initial connections with the right company. Which doesn't make them easy, but it elevates a deceptively simple technical problem to a hard one, I think.
There is a lot more to it than that, there is merchant acquiring (merchant relationship with a payment services provider that gives merchants the credentials and equipment to accept payments), there are sometimes aggregators that transactions then funnel into. Next the transactions hit a network which acts as the router between acquirers and issuers (more on this later). The network can also act as a default stand in when the issuing bank is not reachable. From here the transaction goes into the issuing bank which runs a host of fraud and risk rules to answer the questions: 1. Should I authorize this? <- this is bank's prerogative and mostly deals with financial risk and 2. Can I authorize this? <- this is regulatory in nature and can be very binary and very binding. Its the the second question that also comes with binding regulations in some jurisdictions that prevent all parties along this chain from disclosing the reasons for declining, withholding funds or delay processing to affected parties. Even more interestingly, PayPal operates at most of these tiers almost entirely independently (PayPal API as the acquirer, PayPal as the aggregator, PayPal as the network of network AND of-course PayPal as the issuer with PayPal credit. Obviously not all transactions go through all tiers in case PayPal (a credit card transaction goes to card network and card issuer in the back for example) but Pay upon invoice, Bank transfers and PayPal credit (bill me later) are all examples of PayPal extending credit to buyer. Payments are quite fascinating, you are correct that a lot of issues are political but don't underestimate the complexity of the ecosystem, especially in global context. And I have not even gotten into bad faith actors and the war between good and bad guys yet.
I write about it on my company blog for internal developers, perhaps I can get our legal folks to go over it and I can publish some of it. There is a lot of tribal knowledge for sure but on my journey from issuers to merchants to networks, I keep finding consistent themes. Perhaps it is time to put this all down on paper.
Of all the legit PayPal outrage stories this one doesn’t seem outrage-worthy. Looks like a bad blog spam account trying to capitalize on this community’s name. Good for PayPal and for everyone really? What am I missing?
No rhyme or reason given, the other times Paypal have withheld funds from or barred others for less legitimate reasons, most recently substar. For me big tech actively sabotaging the careers and income of folks with whom they, often arbitrarily find problematic is a big problem, particularly given how reliant people are on the web for these purposes and the increasing lack of competition
Every chance I get, I tell people not to use PayPal. They have done this repeatedly, and the people who are affected have absolutely no recourse unless they happen to own a popular newspaper. PayPal has been shamed into doing the right thing, and that seems to be the only recourse. From reports I've heard, their internal system doesn't exist, and they aren't a bank, so there is no legal recourse either.
I wouldn't use ebay if I couldn't use paypal. I don't want to use my CC for any online xacts if I don't need to. I'd rather use paypal to protect myself or just shop at a site I trust (e.g. Amazon).
People who receive monies via PP need to protect themselves by assuming PP could freeze their account at any time. That means keeping the minimum amount of $$ possible under PP's control. I know there are regs to that but you need to protect yourself.
Some of the banks and some 3rd party companies are now offering a system to digitally generate "one-time" use card numbers that are automatically destroyed after a successful transaction.
I've seen virtual CC numbers for one time use here in the USA but not sure if they're still available. It's still a hassle to setup, configure, use, etc, which is its fall down. Simplicity is PP's strength, IMO, which is why it's got staying power.
They're definitely still available, there are even companies offering card generation API as a service (google Marqeta). I agree with you on simplicity, but one clear advantage to the temporary card approach is that it's automatically revoked without you having to take further action, whereas paypal still offers merchants the ability to automatically bill you on a recurring basis.
Regardless of weather the `THN` name is confusing or not and regardless of the speculations, does paypal need to give a reason for termination? Are they legally obligated? Is it something they should do for the sake of customers?
Should one get mad at `THN` because there name overlaps HN and they supposedly are `real hack` or should we be mad at paypal because it's overreaching it's powers?
I honestly don't have a problem with PayPal dropping a customer. Even though I hate PayPal, if they don't want to do business with somebody they shouldn't have to. But holding their money for 180 days, that is suspiciously like theft
When PayPal bans a site it's always for breaking their TOS. Sometimes the specific parts of that TOS are bullshit, but most of the time it turns out that it was a pretty flagrant violation of those terms.
I don't feel sorry for anyone who still uses PayPal to collect money for a use that has been specifically banned in their TOS, and anything that even starts to encroach on illegal matters falls into that. Information about how to break into computer systems (hacking) definitely falls into that and they should have known they were on shaky ground.
That is quite simply wrong. I have been on the receiving end of this problem, and there is zero transparency about the reasons behind banning, zero warning or recourse, and of course the good old 180 day locking of funds which can kill any e-commerce platform that runs on anything other than absurdly high margins.
The company in question moved to Stripe where it operates to this day.
PayPal is just a very large, shady as fuck company. Im hoping cryptocurrency matures to a point where they are not needed.
Well they discover a thing: regulation may slow down things, but protect. A bank can't lock you out without facing trial, an internet company, far less regulated can.
Now think many time because we generally do no see banks as something "good" especially these days. If such days arrive it means that we are really in a dangerous situation.
I hope we have more democratization of payment processing. I don't have an opinion of this instance either way, but the fact that a few companies dominate the payment universe is troubling.
> Instead of giving a valid reason, company says "specific reasons for such a decision is proprietary & it is not released since that could impair PayPal's ability to do business in a safe and secure manner"
I've been trying to close my PayPal account for the last week and will keep trying, but so far have not been able to. I've had this account since 2000. I want to close it because of the treatment of SubscribeStar and others. I've never watched a video by Sargon of Akkad. But even if it was Adolph of Hitler I'd be concerned about this behavior by Patreon. For PayPal to back them up by dropping a competitor is enough for me to want to reciprocate.
First, PayPal required me to individually cancel most of the vendors I've paid via PayPal in the last decade or so, and made it difficult to discover how to do that. But I finally figured it out and cancelled them all. If they weren't being mulish about this it seems like it would be easy for them to do the same as part of the process of closing the account.
Now that I've done this I still can't cancel via their web site. I get the message "Before you close your account -- Sorry, there's a problem. If you keep seeing this, please contact customer service." There is no email address on their contact page. Their pop-up chat app on the contact page freezes immediately and is unusable. I'll call them if I have to, but I shouldn't have to. The issues closing the account are by themselves enough to make me want to close it.
When I do manage to close the account I'm hoping that they ask me for a reason, at which point I plan to tell them "specific reasons for such a decision is proprietary & it is not released since that could impair my ability to do business in a safe and secure manner."
I'm with you. The problem is, PayPal weren't the only payment processors to bail on Substar, if we want to purchase online which popular/accessible processors are not engaging in similar? Genuine question