Slashdot Mirror
PayPal Accuses Google of Poaching Mobile Payment Trade Secrets, Personnel
jhernik writes with a selection from eWeek Europe's short story on a snag facing Google's new mobile payment system: "PayPal, eBay's payment service, has sued Google over its new Google Wallet service, accusing the search engine of poaching trade secrets for use in its mobile payment service. The suit, filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court just hours after Google unveiled its Wallet payments sheme, alleges that two key executives who created the near-field communication (NFC) service used company secrets about mobile payments to fashion its own service."
Why don't you submit it yourself then if you wanted it on /. immediately ? Slashdot is almost entirely user submissions. I don't care how long ago this was, I just like the snarky and often insightful or informative comments.
which is totally what she said
Prior Art... Cellphone-based mobile payment options have been available in Japan, India, even Kenya for years... some of these services have been available since before PayPal existed. And if that isn't enough of a prior art for a portable mobile payment system using an electronic network, I have an Interac card and a Visa I'd like to show them... the Interac network has existed since before the Internet (as it is today) existed, ditto Visa's electronic transaction network.
It is basic electronic security... beyond that, all you need is a unique user ID and a way to bill that user ID back to the customer. Giving somebody a unique account number isn't exactly a trade secret: banks have been doing that for as long as banks have existed. Putting a password/PIN on that isn't exactly a trade secret: that's been done in computer science for almost as long as computers have existed. How is any of what they're doing a trade secret?
Take note that they are not suing over NFC itself. After reading the blurb my first reaction was "they should of freaking patented it". This seems to be about business info instead.
Per Engadget, this is Paypal upset that their go-to guy who was negotiating with Google for a deal that would probably have been involved in the Wallet backend jumped ship to Google and helped launch Wallet instead. If the allegations are true, Osama Bedier was working both sides-- while pretending to work for Paypal to negotiate a business deal with Google, he was talking to Google about a potentially lucrative job.
(If Paypal are also suing over patents, they're insane-- NFC payments have been available for quite a while now. If there's anything they should learn from Oracle v. Google, it's that you don't want to dump a bunch of extra charges on the bench of an already overworked judge.)
Checks are far, far too costly.
There's nothing stopping someone from sending you a bad check. What happens if you cash it? Your bank charges you a bounced-check fee, not them, YOU. (And yes, their bank changes them a fee too.)
Why do you think just about every retail place has stopped accepting checks now? They're inherently a bad system, and the cost of dealing with a bad check is too high.
When you're selling old shit on Ebay or Craigslist or whatever, a $30 bad-check charge will eat up your profits for several items, not just that one. It just isn't worth it.
On top of that, it's too slow. It takes several days for stuff to arrive in the mail, but you also don't know how prompt the buyer is in paying for his shit; some of them sit on it for days before paying. Then you have to wait 10 days for the check to clear before you can send their stuff. Meanwhile, they're bitching because it's taking 3 weeks for them to get their item. And what if something goes wrong? What if the buyer didn't pay at all? This is very, very common on Ebay for some reason: I'd guess that fully 5% of buyers never pay for their items. This number isn't pulled out of my ass, it's what happened to me when I sold all my old Transformers on Ebay a few months ago. With Paypal-only payments, you file an unpaid item dispute, and if payment doesn't show up on Paypal in 1 day, then you re-list and void the old transaction. With checks and the USPS, you have to wait a week or two.
Sending a check would be fine if the vast majority (like 99.99%) of buyers were honest, but they're not.
Non-competes are illegal in CA, so that can't be the basis of their suit (or at least not a good one).
People stop bothering to submit stuff when editors consistently ignore good submissions in favour of some boring/irrelevant/incorrect piece of shit or consistently turn informative summaries into some biased, uninformative, condescending bits of dribble.
When I opened this article, it said this is a scam site.
I personally use checks for quite nearly 100% of my purchases, and I suppose I'm "lucky" to live in an area where 100% of retailers take them. Or, if you forget, an IOU, even on a napkin.
The dishonesty issues are better dealt with by mechanisms like, say, jail. All you people who make sure schools can't teach morality -- it's on you @@sholes. Not my fault you've moved society from "don't do wrong" to "don't get caught". Use the wire fraud system when someone writes you a bad one. It would only take a few more doing this to make even the more ignorant criminals wake up.
I like having the records of what I spend -- it's helped me stay rich once I got there by seeing where the money goes. Yeah, you can do that other ways, but the bank is a nice paper pusher and cheaper than one I'd hire.
Ever heard of a business account, you know, like you have to have if you're a legit business, rather than a freeloader avoiding taxes and regulations? They clear checks right now, and I mean right now -- and I get a phone call immediately if a deposited check doesn't fly. Maybe you're just too dumb to bank-shop and get a good one?
And yeah, I'm a luddite -- a weird thing for an ex dev and current physicist. I've had all the other payment options, and 100% of them have been hacked more than once, till I just gave up on them. But at the small town bank, if something goes wrong, I can just offer to take my business across the street. And, so far, 100% of the time -- if I even feel the need to say that -- it's enough and "nothing ever happened, please have a nice day and keep your business with us".
Like paper ballots, it's a lot harder to cheat this system, you're not being very smart to call for ditching it. So you got hosed. Karma -- or sloth. Takes one or the other.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Or they reject dozens of submissions linking to an authoritative source in favour of some bullshit regurgitation from some blog with thousands of ad spots on it.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".