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This person is clearly misinformed, so I'll address these one by one.

but with no buyer protection,

Wrong On many listings, Paypal (an eBay company) offers up to $500 of buyer protection. They even display a protection logo on the search results page so the listings with coverage are easily identifiable. More info here.

no seller authentication,

Wrong eBay does have a voluntary seller authentication program. It is up to the buyer to decide if they want to purchase from a non-verified seller. More info here.

and no desire to participate in seller-buyer conflicts,

Wrong eBay does work with dispute mediation providers. Their preferred provider is Square Trade.

no return policy,

Wrong Although eBay doesn't have a specific policy relating to returns, they do provide a space for sellers to state their return policy. Also, returns may be covered by the buyer protection policy, depending on the reason.

I've seen Theora be streamed with Icecast (check out the last Ogg Traffic), I've seen decent quality Theora video at 80kbps (320x240@30 even), and I've seen how well it works in an Ogg container, vs Quicktime/AVI which (unlike Ogg) were not designed for streaming.

But don't take my word for it, try it out for yourself! That's one of the reasons the Alpha releases are available to the general public. See what it can do, and prehaps, drop us a donation through Paypal or Affero to help the Theora hackers spend more time hacking.

A few chargebacks maybe, but I got nailed by a fraudulent transaction on PayPal and they didn't seem to care at all. There argument is that they are a payment medium and as such they don't have responsiblity over what happens! Absolutely ridiculous - I think they should have similar regulation to a bank or a credit card service, as they certainly provide a similar service. My problem was to do with the fact that UK PayPal users had (have?) no real protection from fraud (especially from their absurb Seller Protection Program - it's anything but!).

Please feel free to read what happened and also the email transcript between PayPal and myself - some interesting reading!

Any advice gratefully received!

Actually, if you follow their Seller Protection Policy, they will eat the chargeback.

NOTE (a little caveat): If it's over $250, don't use USPS. You need online signature tracking, which is a pain, but it _is_ documented in the policy. If you want someone to cover the chargebacks for you, you should at least read the policy.

For merchants with a Merchant Account, guess what? When there is a chargeback, they take the money out too. Plus, you have to wait 2 weeks to a month to get it in the first place. People can do the same sort of crap you mentiion to almost any online merchant.

In my expert opion on this matter there is

****to read the rest of this comment deposit 35 cents into my paypal account.

I use PayPal constantly, so I can't very well whine, but I do wish my contribution to Wiki hadn't been diluted by those fees. Almost $29k in US contributions, but almost $1.3k in PayPal fees!

Another problem. Those fees come up to just short of 4.5%. The PayPal fee structure says that at the worst, they should be skimming 2.9% plus 30c per transaction. Does this mean that many/most of Wiki's contributions are in small amounts?

30c is 6% of a $5 donation, but 3% of a $10 donation. I think the lesson is, if you're going to donate, the bigger the better -- unless you like subsidizing my use of PayPal's BillPay!

Should PayPal consider giving registered non-profits a break? Or is this admin overhead unavoidable with charitable causes?

Since the site is slashdotted... it's sort of hard to donate money to them without a link

--
Questions?
Call 1-888-633-3446

I'm really surprised PayPal hasn't done this considering the problem they're having with spoofed mail.

In fact, it makes me wonder if they had a reason to decide against it.

I am not sure how many of you are aware of numerous reports of paypal.com being a somewhat questionable company. While I have not had them cause me any trouble personally, I thought it worth mentioning. It seems some people have had paypal.com hold up in excess of $5000.00, to either get it back in a year, or not at all. If you read the forums, you get a real good idea about how horrible they really are, with ex-employees telling some very interesting stories. If any of this is true, I would hate to see SourceForge caught in the middle of something that could hurt them or its users.

I am not sure how many of you are aware of numerous reports of paypal.com being a somewhat questionable company. While I have not had them cause me any trouble personally, I thought it worth mentioning. It seems some people have had paypal.com hold up in excess of $5000.00, to either get it back in a year, or not at all. If you read the forums, you get a real good idea about how horrible they really are, with ex-employees telling some very interesting stories. If any of this is true, I would hate to see SourceForge caught in the middle of something that could hurt them or its users.

It seems that SourceForge is actually using PayPal to handle the donations.

PayPal is available in 38 countries which is not few, but far from being ubiquitos.

In order to this business model be really successful there should be an international micropayment system which could be used easily by anyone on Earth.

So what is the motivation for stringing Mr. Simpson up? Taxes or 'terrorism' (aka being a squeaky wheel)? Maybe it was taxes, but I notice that the BBC uses the phrase:

New Zealand officials have said they cannot comment for reasons of "secrecy".

An interesting turn of phrase for an agency which has a reputation for accuracy. Normally tax details are protected for reasons of confidentiality, and 'national security' (aka lots of things) is protected for reasons of secrecy. So is the BBC saying 'national security' (aka war on terror) is behind things? Either way, surrounding "secrecy" with quotes seems to be a form of 'nudge-nudge-wink-wink'.

</tinfoil hat>

So what are the implications for other geeks?

Apart from his taxes, Mr. Simpson appears to have done no wrong. Indeed, reading his discussion forum, he appears to have bent over backwards to do nothing underhanded, break no laws and keep everyone (including government) informed of what he is doing. Given the media coverage of the project, it would be difficult to claim Mr. Simpson was hiding his actions.

I would compare Mr. Simpson to crypto researchers, P2P software authors and security researchers. Why? Because his work has both 'black hat'and 'white hat' uses, lends itself admirably to beng a political football and demonstrates glaring weaknesses in existing systems. If Mr. Simpson goes down without a fight, will it encourage governments to move against the other areas mentioned above?

*If* Mr. Simpson is going down due to his missile work, and not for taxes, shouldn't the geek community chip in and help him? (He has a paypal account, under the name 'paypal@aardvark.co.nz', to offset the costs of a news site he runs. There is also a 'make a donation' link to PayPal from the news site.) I would think he would be at least as deserving as the college students who have attracted public funding for their court cases over downloading copyrighted music.

No, I'm not affiliated with Mr. Simpson. I also don't pretent that Mr Simpson is some sort of an angel. It's just that the facts seem so damned hard to find in this case. Here are a few possible scenarios:

• Mr. Simpson is being screwed in the name of the 'war on terror' for pointing out how vunerable we are to unmanned vehicles.
• Mr. Simpson didn't pay his taxes and that is all there is to it.
• Mr. Simpson could see a tax bill coming and started a the cruise missile project in an attempt to make himself untouchable

Yeah, but PayPal makes it publicly known that they are quick to turn over personal info to agencies, even without a search warrant... not to mention companies that "help them with marketing to banks.

I'd like to point out that the work that Pamela Jones & Co. at GROKLAW is clearly of some real use to IBM in this case. another poster has already mentioned that IBM has specifically cited a transcription GROKLAW produced in their recent filing.

I would also like to remind others that there's a little paypal donation button on the front page of GROKLAW, as mauryisland pointed out elsewhere.

click that button. give her a holiday bonus, just enough to make it hurt you a tiny little bit. and let's see just how robust PayPal's servers are.

We only need 9.5 million to buy it now. I'll collect for everyone. Hurry up, 1 million people send me $9.50 :)

I'm taking a similar approach to employment independence. For only a few dollars a month, you could help me sit on the couch every day.

Thank God you all are not math majors or even business majors... Hopefully you're not working stiffs in those areas either.

One would deduce that the last post in this thread is the most correct, although you could expound upon that.

Gift Cert $50
Markup $15
cost of Cert $50

Pre-sale profit (Gross)= $15 per cert.

But there are additional costs of doing business that may NOT be accounted for:

DIRECT COGS (Cost of good sold)
Less ebay Listing Fee (variable) approx 4% listing fees
Less Paypal transaction fee 2.2-2.9%+ paypal fees
Less your cost of doing business (variable)
- electricity of the computer you use
- expense of equipment (scanner, computer, software...)
- ISP connection charge...

Less possible labor expenses (if you had to pay someone to do this)

INDIRECT COGS
Less lost opportunity cost (what you could have made doing something else)

and finally less your opportunity cost of Capital (what you could have made putting your $ in a bank/CD/money market, if your $ wasn't tied up waiting for an ebay bid to happen) calculating Weighted Cost of Capital and/or Opportunity cost

So perhaps the actual transaction resemble something like this on a monthly basis:

Gross Profit ($15 x 4 certs) = $60
Less direct costs of goods sold (guessing 10% of sales price $5 x 4 items) = $20
Less indirect cost of goods sold (guessing 5% of sales price $5 x 4 items) = $10

Leave you with roughly $30/ month in Earnings Before the real issues ....

Your Time... at $???
(What you should pay someone to do this crap)
Assumne what you will, but I wouldn't bother with anything less than $20 / hour and this will take someone at least 10 minutes to do manually.

Calculate that per hour, unless your Bill Gates who earns $4,000 per minute

Then you compare that to opportunity cost of capital and....

Geese.

No wonder why Apple hasn't tried this.

>
>Why Gen-Xers do it better
>Cheznathalie.com
>

Anyone with a paypal account can already order itunes! Just use your Free Debit card. In fact, if you run your debit card as a credit card transaction, you will get 1.5% cash back. Which means we can actually get songs for .98 cents right now.

Anyone with a paypal account can already order itunes! Just use your Free Debit card. In fact, if you run your debit card as a credit card transaction, you will get 1.5% cash back. Which means we can actually get songs for .98 cents right now.

Here's a link that doesn't require a login to view. Reading up on it, it looks like you may be only able to use at online stores that are in the Paypal shops section of the site. Not sure though off-hand.

You are correct with the debit card that they will not fund a debit card transaction with anything but your existing PayPal balance, meaning you'd have to transfer money in, wait for three business days 'til it shows up, and then use the debit card.

Instead of getting the debit card (which I have and do find useful), for this purpose I would recommend using the PayPal debit bar, which just gives you a virtual MasterCard number you can use online. The requirements to get it are:
- Have a Domestic PayPal account
- Be Verified (have added and confirmed a bank account)
- Have added a credit card where the monthly statement is sent to a physical street address (not a P.O. Box)
- Have a positive balance in their PayPal account
- Have a PayPal account in good standing (as determined by the Account Review Department)

In other words, (a) you don't have to wait for the card to be delivered, (b) you don't have to have a Premier or Business account, and (c) you don't have to have had the account for 60 days.

In answer to whomever said the card was issued by Bank One, you might be thinking of the PayPal credit card, which is actually issued by Providian. It's just your average sponsored credit card, like the Disney Visa or the Amazon.com Visa. Just a standard Bank One credit card with a PayPal logo that PayPal markets for them and PayPal gets a cut of the commission. You don't even need to be a PayPal user to get it. The debit card, by contrast, is actually issued by PayPal themselves.

Why should you need this "service"? Paypal already offers a virtual debit card service (see here, requires paypal login) where their system will generate a mastercard number and expiration date which you can use to buy items against your paypal balance from any online store that takes credit cards...

I'm very, very proud of myself. Thanks to my pioneering security work, a man is exonerated. From the MSNBC article, and I quote:

During his trial, prosecutors argued McDanel intentionally caused damage to Tornado's computer server by overloading it with too many messages and impaired the system's security by exposing its vulnerability to the public. A judge found him guilty of unauthorized access and sentenced him to 16 months in federal prison.

McDanel served his sentence and appealed last August. His lawyer, Seth Finklestein, argued that McDanel was protected under the First Amendment and that McDanel did not intentionally impair the system by reporting its security flaws.

If you'd like me to take more "pro bona" cases like this one, please donate to me using PayPal. Thanks again!

Though DigiCash is gone, PayPal certainly could serve as an example of the concept that's been pretty well "exposed to the elements" for some time now--I'd think there'd be even more incentive to hacking financial transactions than votes.

Nice concept.

Webcaster Alliance paypal link
There is a Paypal donate icon on the WA home page.

There seems to be a little confusion about some issues. Tornado filed a civil suit and lost. The hole was an HTTP REFERER problem. This was disclosed to the public by an exempoyee publicly while Bret McDanel was working at Tornado. Because this document was public, and HTTP REFERER is not specific to Tornado Tornado lost their civil suit. The NDA was not violated. Nothing secret that was learned while he was there was revealed. After Tornado lost the civil suit *then* the case went criminal. Bret McDanel is currently attempting to sue Tornado (who is now xmsg.com - right after the trial Tornado folded and xmsg.com, with the same people at the same physical office, doing the same service, started up), Kevin Torf, Craig Wasko, Ryan Kim, and Sam Balooch for perjury. Additionally he is filing suit against the FBI whom he has proof they lied as well (Agent Peterson and Agent Watkins) to supress evidence, lie about the evidence they have, etc. His lawyer was suppoosed to bring this up in trial, but the government is good about making sure that people dont have money for trial so he got a public defender who refused to put up any defense (and that is part of his appeal). The brief even mentions some of the lies that were said. A donation for expenses related to this case can be made via paypal to Donate to bret@mcdanel.com (that email address is currently not working, but should be up soon, paypal to that address will work). Anything that can be given is greatly appreciated. If you do not have a paypal account, just creating one gives you $5 and the legal fund $5 if you use this link There is a website that is going to be put up soon with the transcripts, system logs, etc that show that the system was never impaired until after they took it down and started deleting the emails (the criminal act of deleting emails was the only thing that caused any load issues on the system). The amount of logs and all are quite large so it will take some time to get everything up. Just the attachments that are part of the appeal are 3 inches thick, the whole amount of discovery (evidence) was many many thousand pages (and not all of it was printed out).

There seems to be a little confusion about some issues. Tornado filed a civil suit and lost. The hole was an HTTP REFERER problem. This was disclosed to the public by an exempoyee publicly while Bret McDanel was working at Tornado. Because this document was public, and HTTP REFERER is not specific to Tornado Tornado lost their civil suit. The NDA was not violated. Nothing secret that was learned while he was there was revealed. After Tornado lost the civil suit *then* the case went criminal. Bret McDanel is currently attempting to sue Tornado (who is now xmsg.com - right after the trial Tornado folded and xmsg.com, with the same people at the same physical office, doing the same service, started up), Kevin Torf, Craig Wasko, Ryan Kim, and Sam Balooch for perjury. Additionally he is filing suit against the FBI whom he has proof they lied as well (Agent Peterson and Agent Watkins) to supress evidence, lie about the evidence they have, etc. His lawyer was suppoosed to bring this up in trial, but the government is good about making sure that people dont have money for trial so he got a public defender who refused to put up any defense (and that is part of his appeal). The brief even mentions some of the lies that were said. A donation for expenses related to this case can be made via paypal to Donate to bret@mcdanel.com (that email address is currently not working, but should be up soon, paypal to that address will work). Anything that can be given is greatly appreciated. If you do not have a paypal account, just creating one gives you $5 and the legal fund $5 if you use this link There is a website that is going to be put up soon with the transcripts, system logs, etc that show that the system was never impaired until after they took it down and started deleting the emails (the criminal act of deleting emails was the only thing that caused any load issues on the system). The amount of logs and all are quite large so it will take some time to get everything up. Just the attachments that are part of the appeal are 3 inches thick, the whole amount of discovery (evidence) was many many thousand pages (and not all of it was printed out).

Dear lord, reading these replies. 'It dispenses a disposable credit card for you.' Morons.

He's trying to sell it to banks. Ergo, the routing can take many shapes -an easy solution will be a virtual credit card number granted by that bank. Other solutions may well work on existing systems, but something using Visa and MasterCard networks is the most likely option (since they're not slow as hell like wire transfers.)

As to why this is necessary? Because not everyone has a credit card. Because not everyone has even a bank account. Because everyone doesn't have internet access and don't want to buy stuff online using the library computers. And because PayPal is the only other option.

'It can be used in money laundering', 'you can fund terrorists with it!'

At least it doesn't take all your money, rape your family, pillage your domestic animals and burn your house while it's doing it.

Check out Paypal's Fees for Recieving Payments for Businesses. You pay 2.9% plus a 30 cent transaction fee. Meaning that selling a 25 cent webcomic will cost you about 31 cents. Paypal is good for a lot of things, but it's not a micropayment service.

(As a side note, if you need another reason to support BitPass, they're powered entirely by open source software. I like that.)

PayPal has 10 Million members that you can send your money too, while BitPass currently only has three.

Well, Paypal once had only 3 members, too.

But you've got a point. It doesn't matter how sweet the implementation of a micropayment service is if there aren't many people using it. So I'm building a BitPass User Group website to facilitate adoption of it. Interested parties can check out my journal for details.

Those comments were made last winter, so those of you (like me) feeling a sense of Deja Vu - there's a reason.

According to PayPal's privacy policy, your banking info and everything else is safe unless the request is backed by a warrant or court order. It is interesting to note that they do reserve the right to give some of your info to your victims if they find that you've committed a fraud.

Here's the (IMO) relevent passages from the section outlining exceptions to the rule that they don't share your info:

"We disclose information that we in good faith believe is appropriate to cooperate in investigations of fraud or other illegal activity, or to conduct investigations of violations of our User Agreement. Specifically, this means that if we conduct a fraud investigation and conclude that one side has engaged in deceptive practices, we can give that person or entity's contact information (but not bank account or credit card information) to victims who request it.
We disclose information in response to a subpoena, warrant, court order, levy, attachment, order of a court-appointed receiver or other comparable legal process, including subpoenas from private parties in a civil action. "

I'm not trying to troll... I just want to make sure he did something worthy.

Jesse Jordan wrote a search engine, registered a cool domain name, then used the site to clearly document his fight. To top it all off, he cut off donations when he made back the $12k, and implores us to send our donations to...

The other guy, Daniel Peng. His website is just a single page -- tiny by comparison. But he comes highly recommended, by Slashdot and the afore-mentioned Jordan.

Other than that, can y'all remind me why I should support Peng?

By the way, I'd ask Paypal folks to please contribute more than a buck. Paypal fees (30c + 2.9%) will turn your $1 contribution into a 67c contribution, but he'll get about $4.55 if you give $5.

If they do any of the things you mention you are free to file a lawsuit against them Actually - you aren't. go look at their T&C - you are prohibited from filing suit anywhere but in their home county in california, and further they can instead opt for arbitration; if you don't use their policy, you pre-agree they can recover all their lawyers costs directly from you (and guess where they would take that money from??)
Plus of course their T&C actually *say* they can and will do those things - the T&C are here if you want to go take a look - so odds are good they have already beaten that ground with their default arbitrators, so taking their choice would be an automatic lose; you can of course instead switch to a "Mutually agreed" arbitator, but the clock will be ticking all the time you are trying to agree one....

It seems Jesse has recovered much of his life savings through donations. He has a paypal link on his site (unfortunately I can't give the link to you--it uses post). If you want to donate, go here, sign in/register, and send money to jordaj@rpi.edu

One of the other college students sued by the RIAA, Daniel Peng, also has a paypal donation page.

sadly, he won't get 12000 /.'ers.
especially with no direct link to donations.
as copied from google's cache of chewplastic.com,
which is back online.

think about it this way, people:
it could have been nearly any of us.
i've donated $30 and i hope others can feel as generous.

Here's a paypal link

(And before anyone asks, that link does actually send the money to him.)

I just had the BEST idea! It works like this:

1) You send me $129 via PayPal. In return, I'll send you a Linux distro made only of GNOME HIG compliant apps, so everything is very consistant, and I'll throw in a copy of CrossOver and WineX so you can run ALL the commercial software, including Office, IE and games, that your heart desires. I'll call it MinusLinuxOS X 10. It will be locked down so you can't change anything, for reasons explained below.

2) You send me $129 every year, and in return you get a CD with 129 new features, one for every dollar you send! Just stick in the CD and it'll update itself for you, complete with all the new software.

3) Profit!

See how easy this is? All you have to do is send me money, and I'll give you an OS that you can't ugprade yourself so you'll never have dependancy hell (we only upgrade it for you when we feel like it), a bunch of apps chosen for consistancy (sure, there won't be as many as if you used all the software out there, but hey, MacOS doesn't have many apps either) and a shiny box with the CD in.

You don't have to worry about things being getting out of date quickly, because you'll always be about a year behind the cutting edge - but hey, just for you, I'll keep it all under NDAs and threaten people who leak info about what's new with lawsuits so you need never know! Just ignore the rumour sites, they know nothing.

You know, you and me, we'd make a great partnership. My email address is mike@theoretic.com, so off you go, send me the cash and you'll be a happy man ;)

PayPal is also X.com. Once upon a time, X.com was a person-to-person payment service like PayPal, but they merged back in 2000. Yeah, it does seem a little suspicious at first, but it seems it is legit (as legit as PayPal is anyway).

It's a good point that he runs the site with no advertising revenue. Of course, aside from buying the book, there's ways you can help him to keep doing that: personal check, PayPal, Amazon, or Kagi.

Me? I prefer street whores, at least they are honest about the way they earn their money.

My understanding is that the appeal here is for a system with no minimum fee. The business can bill them straight away when they get a loaded token, helping cash flow, and the money is always deducted from the buyer's account. Presumably the buyer's account must have either be in credit or there is a minimum pull from the buyers card ($10) so as to minimise the charges incurred by peppercoin.

I don't see this as anything revolutionary though. The idea of running an online account with aggregated payments has been done before. The key is getting acceptance from a public that knows how credit cards work. It would be quite possible for someone like PayPal to implement an aggregated scheme for micropayments and take the peppercoin business away.

My own article was rejected that raised significant issues not even mentioned here, and this one article nearly off the front page, but just for the record, let me raise the following:

1. The number of disclosed credit cards in this case may be closer to 8 million.

2. If your credit card was compromised, it was the fault of the store for keeping the CC info forever in what amounts to a filing cabinet in a publicly-accessable area -- unless you are a technical person, who should have known better. Not all services have millions of credit card numbers just laying around like this -- only extremely incompetent ones, such as PayPal, who insist on storing your credit card information forever, even if you close the account. This is the only way you build up millions of credit card numbers in a weakly-protected database. Because of the logistics in this case, how many bits of key they use encoding it is typically irrelevant, because the order origination process, controlled by the web pages, has o be able to decrypt it. Why did you allow it to be held there by the merchant? It is sheer stupidity.

3. This is why brick and mortar stores seem more secure. They do not keep your credit card number in a filing cabinet in the show room in case you forget to bring your wallet. PayPal does, making it vulnerable to any burglar or employee with a little knowledge years later who compromises the database, which is not hard to do if it has to be available for automatic remembering of CC numbers during ordering.

4. As customers, we have a right to know which of the major incompetent CC processors, such as PayPal was compromised this time, so we can use it better as an example to ordinary users why not to deal with a company that would forever hold your CC info hostage to the Microsoft Security oxymoron.

My own article was rejected that raised significant issues not even mentioned here, and this one article nearly off the front page, but just for the record, let me raise the following:

1. The number of disclosed credit cards in this case may be closer to 8 million.

2. If your credit card was compromised, it was the fault of the store for keeping the CC info forever in what amounts to a filing cabinet in a publicly-accessable area -- unless you are a technical person, who should have known better. Not all services have millions of credit card numbers just laying around like this -- only extremely incompetent ones, such as PayPal, who insist on storing your credit card information forever, even if you close the account. This is the only way you build up millions of credit card numbers in a weakly-protected database. Because of the logistics in this case, how many bits of key they use encoding it is typically irrelevant, because the order origination process, controlled by the web pages, has o be able to decrypt it. Why did you allow it to be held there by the merchant? It is sheer stupidity.

3. This is why brick and mortar stores seem more secure. They do not keep your credit card number in a filing cabinet in the show room in case you forget to bring your wallet. PayPal does, making it vulnerable to any burglar or employee with a little knowledge years later who compromises the database, which is not hard to do if it has to be available for automatic remembering of CC numbers during ordering.

4. As customers, we have a right to know which of the major incompetent CC processors, such as PayPal was compromised this time, so we can use it better as an example to ordinary users why not to deal with a company that would forever hold your CC info hostage to the Microsoft Security oxymoron.

There's also this PayPal scam.

I understand a lot of people have been victimized by it.

He has another fund here. When I lived in an apartment, my renters insurance was $9/month.

Why did you take out the PayPal link at the end? Especially in an article about the content cartel dinosaurs. Here it is again:

PayBITS: Is this is an important article on an important topic?
Adam will donate all of this article's PayBITS proceeds to the EFF!
<https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=ace%40tidb its.com>
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>

If you liked this article, go ahead and send the guy a few bucks. You accomplish TWO goals with you donation: 1) you prove that voluntary payments work, and 2) you make a donation to the EFF (you know, the one you've been meaning to make for a long time now).

I sent him a few bucks already.

It's actually against PP's TOS to charge extra for a PP transaction as well (and it was this way even before Ebay bought them):

You agree that you will not impose a surcharge or any other fee for accepting PayPal as payment.

The PayPal Agreement is 373 paragraphs, 19,127 words, 119,761 characters.

Except it is. Paypal's own page herestates that they keep your money in a bank that is FDIC insured, and that any losses are covered via pass-through regulation. If that bank is looted while your funds are there via Paypal, you still get your money back up to the regulation $100,000.

I don't think that you deserved the abusive flamebait moderation that you received, but I still disagree with you strongly.

I disagree that Paypal has not promoted itself as a secure option. Note this interview, linked on the front page of Paypal. Then surf on over to this page in which Paypal states that "The security of your information, transactions, and money is the core of our business and our top priority at PayPal." Looks to me like they are in fact promoting their business as something other than what it is. In my mind, that's unethical at best and fraud at worst.

So, I don't think everyone knows that Paypal has such poor security. You and I know that, because we make an effort to stay informed about such issues. But you sure wouldn't know that reading their site. And when I've mentioned PayPal's record to many of my less sophisticated Ebay using friends, they have in general been totally suprised and shocked to hear the evidence against Paypal.

I have NEVER suggested that Paypal should eat the costs of all consumer fraud, though you seem to think that's what I'm suggesting. I AM NOT. I agree that there is always some degree of risk in an online transaction, and that's not Paypal's fault. But just as people should take responsibility for the security of their own money, Paypal needs to take responsibility for what they have been doing. Instead, they try to hide behind a cloak of facelessness and claiming that they are exempt from the rules that apply to all other similar businesses.

This is by no means an issue of the government beating up on poor little Paypal and taking their right to run their business as they see fit. This is an issue of Paypal stealing from customers and aiding and abetting in fraud by others by refusing to even turn over evidence against those who perpetrate it.

I don't think that you deserved the abusive flamebait moderation that you received, but I still disagree with you strongly.

I disagree that Paypal has not promoted itself as a secure option. Note this interview, linked on the front page of Paypal. Then surf on over to this page in which Paypal states that "The security of your information, transactions, and money is the core of our business and our top priority at PayPal." Looks to me like they are in fact promoting their business as something other than what it is. In my mind, that's unethical at best and fraud at worst.

So, I don't think everyone knows that Paypal has such poor security. You and I know that, because we make an effort to stay informed about such issues. But you sure wouldn't know that reading their site. And when I've mentioned PayPal's record to many of my less sophisticated Ebay using friends, they have in general been totally suprised and shocked to hear the evidence against Paypal.

I have NEVER suggested that Paypal should eat the costs of all consumer fraud, though you seem to think that's what I'm suggesting. I AM NOT. I agree that there is always some degree of risk in an online transaction, and that's not Paypal's fault. But just as people should take responsibility for the security of their own money, Paypal needs to take responsibility for what they have been doing. Instead, they try to hide behind a cloak of facelessness and claiming that they are exempt from the rules that apply to all other similar businesses.

This is by no means an issue of the government beating up on poor little Paypal and taking their right to run their business as they see fit. This is an issue of Paypal stealing from customers and aiding and abetting in fraud by others by refusing to even turn over evidence against those who perpetrate it.