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Paypal Deals Blow To Freenet
hankaholic writes "I was checking into the latest progress of the Freenet project when I noticed a disturbing note on their homepage: 'Paypal has frozen the account we use to accept donations over the web, they refuse to give any reason other than "use of an anonymous proxy" [...] all of the projects subscriptions have been canceled which is a significant setback. Other means of accepting donations, including E-Gold, are still active.' Paypal is sending them a check for their remaining balance. The news update on the Freenet homepage also includes contact information for some people at Paypal."
Paypal is certainly a shady company. To find out why, go to www.paypalsucks.org
of screwing over companies. Personally I don't trust the company at all. http://consumeraffairs.com/online/paypal_02.html is the consumer reports complaints page on the many problems paypal has given "customers". Caveat Paypal!
It's not just Freenet, methinks. Paypal has long been the subjects of complaints because it is trigger happy with freezing accounts -- they tend to freeze accounts at the first complaint from any buyer, even if the complaint is totally unjustified.
From the Freenet page
If you are concerned about whether your account might be at risk due to your political opinions you may wish to speak to their PR contact Hani Durzy at (408) 376 7458. If you are an investor and you would like to see what other political opinions Paypal doesn't like, you may want to speak to their Investor contact Tracey Ford at (408) 376 7205.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
PayPal has grown increasingly hostile towards anyone accepting payments via their service if they do anything "out of the ordinary". Not long ago, I heard about a woman complaining because her PayPal account was suspended after she accepted donations to help keep her "size acceptance" web site going. (PayPal seemed to be afraid it was pornography-related in some way, since you had a female collecting money from her personal web site.) In reality, she was trying to boost the self-esteem of overweight women and let them know about events where they could meet guys interested in larger women.
They're also scared of anyone or any business that doesn't provide full disclosure of their whereabouts (complete address, phone/contact numbers, and so on). To put it in perspective though, don't forget they're just one of the arms of eBay nowdays - so their primary interest is simply being a facilitator for their own auction buyers and sellers to complete transactions. If you even so much as look vaguely like you do things in a similar way to eBay auction scammers, you'll get cut off in an instant.
http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/subst/fx/home.htm l/103-2120026-1757409
ok thx bye!
Paypal has been known to do stupid stuff like this in the past. Sites like http://www.paypalsucks.com and http://www.trashcity.org/ARTICLES/PAYPAL.HTM tell horror stories of accounts being frozen for unknown reasons leaving hundreds and thousands of dollars locked out. They have also been known to give the runaround to people trying to get their money back.
This website was established because of paypal doing this kind of crap.
here is a previous story on paypal NY lawsuit
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
I've never dealt with Paypal, but some of the stories over at PaypalWarning.com are pretty scary. Apparently Paypal has a habit of freezing accounts with almost no reason given, then sitting on the accounts which have hundreds of dollars tied up in them. Some of the stories also explain that it is nearly impossible to clear up the problem promptly, and that the best way to get your account unfrozen is to say you're going to complain to the Better Business Bureau or your local district attorney. Of course most of the stories I read were from two or three years ago. Maybe they've changed.
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
PayPal was recently fined $10 MILLION for violating the US Patriot Act.
It's not a company I do business with.
Paypal does have a habit of scamming its customers. Attrition.org has a good article about one person's experience here.
You run that same risk if you take credit cards thru a merchant account.
Hacked?! Oh, please. You're one of an innumerable number of fools who responded to a "please verify your account" email or a "security update" email that asked you to enter your eBay or PayPal userid and password.
If you'd have a brain to begin with, none of this would have happened to you.
You can find tons of pirate anime on ebay and half.com. They refuse to crack down on it. But the MPAA and the RIAA want ebay to crack down on something that isn't even illegal, and *BAM*, freenet's account get shuts down. The whole situation is really quite ridiculous. As a consumer, I don't want to buy pirate stuff, so I'm basically forced to avoid the online used market because 98% of it is pirate. There's now way to tell when you buy something whether it will be pirate or not. And if it turns out to be pirate, ebay won't crack down on the seller, and won't refund the buyer's money. This happened to a friend of mine. He bought some anime VCDs on ebay. They turned out to just be CDRs (which are specifically banned in ebay's terms of service). Ebay refused to do anything about it.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
I run a mid-sized jewelry shop on the web and have been using paypal for over a year. I actualy switched from using MerchantServices because of the constant headache with fraud and chargebacks. As much as people hate to hear it, PayPal is on the side of the merchant not the customer and in 9 cases out of 10 (at least for me) the customer is the one trying to screw me over. Before I get flamed, I would like to say that I am in no way trying to deffend their actions in this case, however I have learned that their verification techniques are always based on some specific activity.
Maybe they're being assholes because they think freenet might land them another "patriot" act violation? Don't see how it would, but the whole 'anonymous' thing might be catching their eye...
Whatever they are thinking, I'm probably going to be closing my PP account out soon...
And profit? Are you out of your fucking mind? Toad makes the equivalent of US$1500/month. He could earn more working at McDonald's. Twice within the last six months, the project has had to send out pleas for donations just to afford to pay him that much... And now PayPal, in its infinite wisdom, has gone and screwed the project out of - at the very least - the time it's going to take to find a new method of accepting donations.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Hacked?! Oh, please. You're one of an innumerable number of fools who responded to a "please verify your account" email or a "security update" email that asked you to enter your eBay or PayPal userid and password.
Arguably, scammers are getting very clever at their email attacks. They'll send you an email with a link like this: http://www.ebay.com/cgi-bin/verify.dll?Acct=1234
At first glance, it LOOKS legit. And when you click on the link, it takes you to a page that LOOKS like the real thing. Many even have links to the real site. The only way to know that it's fake is to look in the URL bar, and keep your head straight about them asking for passwords and credit cards.
The sad part is that companies seems to be doing very little to prosecute these scammers. I've received emails for both eBay and Citibank. Both times I've gotten no response on my fraud report.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/03/31/1610218.shtml ?tid=98
what about simply getting a merchant account?
surely it would be worth it with a 50,000 member site, even if the individual sales were only relatively small amounts.
i used to accept credit cards inhouse for a subscription type online business and at the time i introduced that i only had about 25 customers.
after the initial setup costs (which were reasonable anyway), a merchant account offered a far better deal than that offered by people like paypal and this way you are in control.
and re; passwords etc; the point is you process inhouse, so all they are entering is their credit card details. there are no new passwords etc to remember. personally, i prefer that method of online sale any day to something like paypal.
i would talk to your bank, it may not be as expensive as you think.
Freenet is going to get their $550 and can no longer use Paypal.
Anything beyond that is "Paypal said/Freenet said"
We may not understand exactly what happened. The nature of the closing leads me to speculate that someone was trying to access the freenet Paypal account repeatedly by browsing through an anonymizing proxy server. See Anonymity and Paypal (and other online businesses) from the Anonymity 4 Proxy Support Pages to get an idea what might happen when you try to access paypal from an anonymous proxy. I'll quote: "So if paypal finds out that you are using a proxy to fool their logon system into allowing you in, you are quite likely to find your paypal account closed. If I'm not mistaken, they clearly state in the user agreement that you can't connect from an anonymous proxy."
The Anonymity 4 support tech is correct. On paypal.com in the User agreement, Under "Closing Accounts and Limiting Account Access" paragraph 2 - "Any of the following events may lead to your account being limited: " "item xvii (Use of an anonymizing proxy;)"
This is not censorship news, it appears more like carelessness on the part of someone at Freenet.
Have you Meta Moderated t
When they say the account is frozen, they are talking about your bank account (as well as your paypal account). Search the internet for paypal horror stories or pay a visit to paypalsucks.org. If they freeze your account, and it's your only bank account, guess what? You are absolutely fucked! There is no way for you to get money out of your bank account until paypal unfreezes it. Got rent? Mortgage? Car payment? Too bad. Looks like you're going to be late on those.
:)
Now anyone who's smart, doesn't keep all their money in one account. I have 95% of my money is a savings account, which no one can touch except for me, at the bank window itself. Anyone who's really smart and uses paypal often enough, would open a seperate account specifically for paypal. Now they would have to do what you mention, withdraw everytime you get money in it. So you transfer from paypal to your paypal bank account, then do an online bank transfer from that account to either your "real" account or your savings account. If they freeze your bank account specifically opened for paypal, oh well, no biggie. Fuck 'em and start using a new service
Joseph?
"One person's experience" does not constitute a habit. I have used Paypal for years -- since its inception -- transferred tens of thousands of dollars with it and never had a serious problem, and only a handful of minor ones (most during the first couple years). Talk about YMMV. It all comes down to how much you trust Paypal...my money's never there for more than a week. Nor should it be...they make no claim to be a bank, so why use them as one?
It's more likely that they shut down freenet because they were using an anonymous email address. I'm sure you can see where an anonymous email address could be a bad thing for a company that wants to make its money transfers secure and trackable. Paypal recently placed a hold on my account for my use of fake DNS information on my domain unlogged.org (the whole idea of which was to create a form of private computing by not logging anything). I removed the account, verified my other email addresses, and everything was flowing again within the week.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I worked for one of these companies, in the department that dealt with these issues. Here's the problem:
1. Customer gets scammed by such a link.
2. We fix it (or do our best), then tell customer: we will NEVER send you an email containing links back to our site. We will certainly NEVER send an email soliciting your username and password, or providing a link that solicits your username and password.
3. Customer contacts us again, a week later... scammed by the same link.
4. "But I swear it was legit! It had your logo on it!" says customer.
5. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The same customers getting "hacked" over and over and over and over and over again because no matter how many times you explained to them that we would NEVER send out any emails containing a link, they would click the damn link anyway.
Obvious flamebait, but I suggest people read the mailing list archives (e.g. http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.freenet.devel) and decide for themselves. Toad is *not* egotistical, works well with other volunteer coders, and has achieved a lot of good work relative to the pittance he's paid.
Paypal does suck sometimes, and they do have many examples of using dubious business practices. So what? Big deal. I don't think they lost any money, did they? Why doesn't Freenet just publicize that they can accept money through NetworkForGood.org? From their website:
You can donate to their 501c3 organization here, I believe.
I posted the above...I had cookies blocked so Slashdot dropped my login info when I posted.
While on this topic...
Three good alternatives are:
e-gold
http://www.e-gold.com/
merchant account
http://www.authorize.net/
(url above is a gateway service - works with many banks; has a listing)
Western Union
http://www.westernunion.com/
Ron Bennett
PayPal, you are free to consider me a "lost customer" at this point. I will take my business elsewhere.
Easier said than done, they like to consider you a customer for life. I loged on once and found that they wanted me to agree to a new user agreement which I found objectionable. Well when you call them up they transfer you to different agents who all say they can't close your account unless you accept the agreement. Very Kafkaesque, consider yourself lucky and wise if you never accepted the $10 sign-up bonus. Now I have to change my regular bank so that they don't have any current information and another security breach there can't haunt me.
Since I am a non-US merchant, my PayPal account is verified via credit card. Welp, 2 months ago I got an email about "unusual account detail access", and the account was on hold, by PayPal admin.
Here's the kicker: I asked that the acocunt be shut and all account details deleted. They could not do that and needed to investigate.
Since that time, many transaction appeared on my car for Online Casinos etc Presumabely by the person that hacked the PayPal account..
It ended with cancelling my card with my bank and claiming back all the transactions I hadnt made.
Lesson: Unlike many online merchants that (supposedly) delete your CC details after each transaction, PayPal dont, and have your number and details.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Paypal does have a habit of scamming its customers
WRONG, the freenet site say that paypal promised them to send a check - however, if you read those stories about paypal scamming you will say that paypal has a nice record of unkept promises.
Then maybe I should chip in with my experience too? I had my account disabled after I'd requested to have my name on file changed (as I legally had my name changed, and wanted my PayPal account to reflect that fact). They refused to change the name, even after I'd provided the various forms of documentation. Then once I told them to just forget I even asked (I was getting fed up with them - I have better things to do with my time, thank you very much), they disabled the account.
After quite some time of getting no response, I finally got told that to reactivate it, I needed to send in various documentation. Again. Same deal. Same stuff that I'd already faxed them a couple of weeks earlier (and I don't like faxing internationally). Alright, so I play along, give them their stupid papers. After another substantial wait, I get told they refuse to reactivate my account due to the fact that I have multiple accounts and that's against their policy, and that I'll need to close all of them except one. WTF? At this point I was getting seriously pissed off. Needless to say, I don't have multiple accounts. If I did I wouldn't be concerned about this particular one. And how in the blue f*ck am I supposed to close an account when I can't even log onto it?!
After another round of seriously narky emails, they reactivated it, but I've never used it since. I keep it for emergency use only, but as long as I have a choice, they're not getting my business any more.
Western Union's service has always made itself above board and auditable. They'll collect personal info when the government demands it, or when the money-sender feels like demanding it so that the receiver has to verify that they are the person the money is intended for.
They've got no way to revoke the transaction if it's fraudlent. That's your problem to figure out... they're just about getting the money from point A to point B.
That I think is PayPal's biggest problem... they're oriented to the buyer's advantage at the expense of the seller. However, that sender-side revocation capability esentially requires a credit check to even be possible, which means demanding the social security number upfront from everybody in a way Western Union never has to.
Western Union never cares how good you are at future payments of debt... they've got the cash in hand before they'll do their thing.
Not if you use MBNA'a "ShopSafe" credit card service. Please note that I have no vested interest in MBNA whatsoever, except as a happy customer. If you have a regular MBNA credit card, what MBNA does is provide software you can install on your computer that automatically connects up to their credit card "NetAccess" service (you have to log in with name and password each time) and lets you generate "disposable" credit card numbers as needed (much like Spamex.com does with their disposable email address service that I also use :-).
I generate a new credit card number for each and every Internet transaction, and the MBNA ShopSafe software lets me set the maximum amount that can be debited to each disposable credit card number as well as the expiration date (up to one year in the future). The way I handle PayPal is to generate a disposable credit card number with an expiration date of one year and a reasonable credit limit (say $500 for example, or whatever you want). If I were to ever want to rescind my credit card information from PayPal, I do not even have to contact PayPal at all - I just start up the ShopSafe software and tell it to delete the particular disposable credit card number that I provided to PayPal so that no further charges can be charged to that account number. I'm very surprised that as far as I know, MBNA is the only one who provides this type of service, so they have no competition in this area.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
US Bank not only didn't notify me, but they refused to give me an exact payoff amount. I have the copies & receipts for 4 certified letters still at home. I even talked to a manager that said even if I did pay off the money that was allegedly owed, they would NOT remove me from ChexSystems. It was their policy. Ugh.
I threatened them with legal action and 4 months before the 5yrs was up, I was mysteriously removed from ChexSystems. It royally sucked.. the whole ordeal.
Well, legally, folks with piercings aren't a protected class. Minorities and members of religious groups are.
Don't ask me why, that's how the law works.
Well, legally, folks with piercings aren't a protected class. Off the top of my head (and it's been a while), race, ethnicity, gender, religion, maybe country of origin, and a few more are, but that's about it. Folks can discriminate against you all they want, as long as they aren't doing so because you're in a protected class.
Don't ask me why, that's how the law works.
Even that's not enough against some possible threats and against some that are already in the wild.
Several browser vulnerabilities make URL spoofing devastating. You can put the wrong address in the address bar of most IE versions by combining a user@malicioushost format with an embedded %01%00 in the URL. You can theoretically write scripts for other browsers that cover the URL bar with an arbitrary graphic.
Let me plug a couple of sites. Antiphishing.org has hot news and tips about these scams. My own security advice for Aunt Tillie blog suggests treating email like a phone call. Don't give out your password/credit card number/launch codes unless you're the one who placed the call/started the transaction. Just the standard consumer advice about phone scams, in other words. Slashdotters, of course, should read the HTML source to find out how the latest technical tricks work :-)
Neither is Western Union. The difference is, if Western Union has your money for three weeks, you don't get any of their interest on it. It's not like PayPal doesn't have a big warning that says "Your money is not insured. If you keep it in here, there's a chance we might lose it." It does have such a warning...or did, when I signed up for the money market. I can't imagine it went away!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
If you want to accept credit card payments, get a real merchant account. It's not hard. Or sign up with a donation processing service, like Click and Pledge.
Banks are regulated. Paypal isn't.
meh
Warning: PayPal, the unregulated global banking monopoly, will steal your money whenever it deems opportune, and keep it as long as it deems appropriate to its purposes, perhaps forever. It will not be accountable for the theft. It happened to me, and I'm still not sure why I got my money back, suddenly and without warning, more than a year after the 6 months its spokesdroid emailed me that it would. They are the enemy, and they must be destroyed.
--
make install -not war
Did you read anything about what happened? The Freenet project did not use an anonymizing proxy to access Paypal, ever. It appears that Paypal decided that since Freenet itself is something vaguely related to an anonymizing proxy, that they wouldn't let the project have an account. This has nothing to do with how the Freenet project used Paypal, and everything to do with the politics of what Freenet is.
I once was going to donate a small sum to a favorite project. I went through all the registration process, giving credit card information and all, only to find that I was an European and they didn't trust those with the service. But they kept my unusable account and still spams me with "information" sometimes.
Number one distinction between PayPal and a bank - there's no independent regulator to whom I can (could) go when PayPal starts demanding that I give up my own privacy in order to get access to my money!
I too did exactly that. While in theory I support their attempts to provide a completely uncencored service, in practice any political etc. content is swamped to the point of non-existance by the paedophiles.
It seems to me it doesn't have to be that way. The blurb for freenet goes on and on about it being complete freedom of information or nothing. That's rubbish, it'd be hard true, but if filters to prevent paedophile images etc were built into the system at core then it would gain a lot more acceptance than it has. At the present it's too easy for freenet to be painted as purely as a distribution network for kiddie pr0n - which is unfortunatly true - and the uncencored political benefits are lost as collateral damage.
To see CP on Freenet, you still have to search for it actively (of course, if one clicks on 'pedo&hitler', one might assume what the content is going to be).
And that you can't decide what is in your store or not is paramount to the anonymising purpose of Freenet.
And if you "didn't find anything else" I'm left wondering where you looked. I've found a lot of stuff that wasn't CP, in fact, the vast majority isn't, contrary to what FUD-people claim. Granted, I'm on the unstable build, but as far as I have noticed, the stable build does not differ much.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Now, having said that, I'd like to hear Pay Pal's side of the story first...
Yeah, and I'd like to know how you're going to get it out of them.
PayPal's side of the story is basically that they reserve the right to do whatever the fuck they like, and their decisions are final, cannot be appealed, and will never be explained, or even necessarily revealed.
Indeed, and the word of importance is 'supporting'. No one on Freenet is supporting it.
Certainly, things like digital photography, email, encryption, proxies, yes, the internet itself makes it more easy for pedo's to make or distribute CP.
One would be hardpressed to say they 'support' it in the strict sense, however, and when using the broad sense, it would basically mean (when following the same reasoning) that you should abolish all of the above technologies.
And now for the actual content/FUD: when you start the node, you get the Fproxy page. There, you have 5 activelinks, which exist of indexsites. Indexsites represent the total amount of what can be found on the network, much as google/yahoo/altavista with the www (though they use also a searchengine, which isn't possible on Freenet yet).
Those indexsites give a big list of all links, which, I repeat, is in a vast majority NOT about CP. Furthermore, they are shown in a random fashion (depending on the section) between all the other links. Therefor, it can not be called 'prominently displayed'.
Furthermore, there already has been done some research of the content of Freenet by external parties, and they came to the conclusion that CP made out 4% of the total amount of content. Hardly a 'major use', thus, even by a far stretch.
This is what I mean with the typical FUD. Yes, CP can be found on Freenet. It probably can be found on the regular net too. And yes, it can be seen as a drawback, as I have said myself on my Flog. But I dislike the disproportionate reaction of some hysterical 'save the children' people. Fact is, the percentage of CP is minute, and the more people would insert other content in it, the lesser that percentage would become in comparison.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I'm Dutch, not Brittish, but seeing how you are talking about EU rules that should make little difference.
Your average creditcard company is an Electronic Money Institute, but difinitely isn't a bank, and you can only get a card from them when you link it to an account on a 'real' bank.
Neither will this make Paypal a bank, it will amke them more comparable to a card company with regards to their liabilities and such.
And yes, they are trying to be like a bank, however, without officially becomming a bank (so far) and really, much of what they have been doing would not be possible when registering as a bank.
(for example, they would simply not be allowed to charge different fees for non domestic transfers according to EU rules, somethign that makes that I can transfer money free of any fees to any place within the EU nowadays when using my bank for example)
For that matter, try getting an accoutn with Paypal without having a bank account at a regular bank.
Orbiscom are an Irish company that have pioneered single use credit card numbers, and provide the technology to MBNA and Citi among others. As another poster mentioned, AIB has been providing this service for a number of years now and it's invaluable (although I don't see them promoting it much any more). It works through an application that sits in your tray; you just call it up when you want to pay, enter your username/password, set a limit, and it gives you your single use number. I think they were one of the first banks to provide it; the application is called an 'O-Card' and is as much Orbiscom branded as AIB.
Apparently AMex has stopped offering the service; this article also points out the problem of using such a number to purchase travel if the original credit card is needed to pick up the tickets.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but the other two providers posters have mentioned, Cahoot and Discover, also use Orbiscom, along with (to quote from their website) "Discover, MBNA, Citibank, ABN-AMRO, Abbey National, Credit Lyonnais, Swedbank, Citi EU and Nippon Shinpan".
Here's a list of their clients for anyone who is interested.
I'd recommend a 5xx error instead. 4xx suggests that the visitor has done something bad, which isn't the case. "503 Service Unavailable" may do the trick.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
I'm sorry.. no
your bank cannot just freeze your accounts and leave it up to an arbitrary internal process to un-freeze it, giving no particular reason for the frozen account. Paypal does this.
Banks are forced by LAW to implement strict anti-money-laundering policies.. banks are held criminally liable for accepting money if they don't know the origin. Bank TELLERS are held liable if they don't report suspicious activity.
The thing is, if your bank freezes your account, there are clear avenues of resolution. They can't just sit on it and not give you your money, citing weird rule after weird rule.
I haven't had any problems changing anything that I could myself via their web interface. However, the one time when I needed a human being to assist me, I was sorely let down.
If I was to hazard a guess, it might be related to the fact that I'm not a US resident. You didn't mention if you were?
As for emails being taken in the wrong tone; well, the first few were as polite as the next persons. Towards the end I'll happily admit I wasn't being particularly generous with the benefit of the doubt. My point however, is that it should never have gotten to that point. Whoever they've got answering emails obviously has no customer service training what so ever (at least not any of the ones I dealt with during that incident). For starters, half the time they didn't _listen_ to what I was saying, and were sending back canned responses completely inappropriate to the question asked. The other half of the time they appeared to be simply incompetent.
e-gold would NOT be useful to Osama (they take orders from courts, unlike actual gold bars/coins) and I doubt Osama's word anyway. It IS interesting that he refers to gold as a currency (it is) denominated by weight, but that doesn't mean he's willing to use a traceable book-entry system to contract for murder.
Freenet doesn't do murder -- they do free speech, and I've given them e-gold myself. Sorry I'm so late to the discussion, but if anyone wants to try e-gold just contact me with an account number and I'll click you some, which you can then -- if you like -- click to the Freenet project. You're correct that this was all political, but I think it's safe to say that e-gold isn't nearly as political as eBay/PayPal seem to be. Thanks.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-