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Under US Pressure, PayPal Stops Working With Mega
New submitter seoras sends news that PayPal is now refusing to handle payments for Mega, Kim Dotcom's cloud storage service. A report (PDF) issued in September of last year claimed Mega and other "cyberlocker" sites made a great deal of illicit money off piracy. Mega disputes this, of course, and says the report caused U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy to pressure credit card companies to stop working with Mega. Those companies then pressured PayPal to stop as well. The hosting company claims, "MEGA provided extensive statistics and other evidence showing that MEGA’s business is legitimate and legally compliant. After discussions that appeared to satisfy PayPal’s queries, MEGA authorised PayPal to share that material with Visa and MasterCard. Eventually PayPal made a non-negotiable decision to immediately terminate services to MEGA."
MEGA should start to use bitcoin, it could use a bit of fresh publicity.
that the banks are not to big to fail, and should have been allowed to. There is no reason what so ever that any government should get involved in peoples personal financial decisions. while kim dotcom might not be the best person in the world, there is no reason for this continued harassment
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
You kinda left that out...
Now we're going to need lobbyists to represent our banking interests to the corrupt bankers.
What pressure? Mega is doing nothing wrong, by PayPal's admission.
Their excuse is "Well, they use encryption." What, and Paypal *doesn't* use encryption? If it didn't, that would be one hell of a reason to drop PayPal immediately.
Fuck off with that shit. Admit it, your CEOs were paid off or otherwise coerced by certain government agencies, and has absolutely nothing to do with law or morals.
This type of activity is quickly becoming a judicial system of sorts. If you do not play by our rules we will destroy you.
The "because piracy" claim is just a facade, Mega fully encrypts everything and the US doesn't like that.
Its time to take a serious look at paypal. Even under US law this is anti competitive on the grounds that they still supply other similar businesses and not Mega.
Of course the law seams to be less important to the US lately so I am not surprised that they would ok this illegal action.
Time to bring legal action against paypal on the international stage, and if they claim there are only held to US law then that's fine let them be held to that set of laws and bar them from any international business as they do not respect the laws in the countries they deal with.
In light of what has been revealed about the NSA, it is always very suspicious to me when a seemingly powerful person or company caves in to pressure so easily. Powerful people & companies have much to lose and public images to protect, so blackmail would probably be a very effective tactic to use against them.
Our own government makes a mockery of the justice system it was sworn to uphold and yet nothing is ever done. For example the IRS claims to have lost thousands of emails due to server crashes and everyone knows it's bullshit, but still no one is prosecuted or punished in any meaningful way. Judges suddenly make rulings completely contrary to their previous positions. Every US company is so eager to climb into bed with the government.
Fuck it, call me paranoid. I think you've got to be willfully blind not to be somewhat paranoid these days.
i havent used them in probably 6 years now. I was selling diecast cars and someones order got held up at the border (canadian) so it arrived late. he put in a complain with paypal who took my money and added fees. once the die cast car arrived and he submitted the note to get it fixed on my side they did, but they still wanted their fees. and they would not cancel them eventhough I had done nothing wrong
so today I still "owe" paypal about 10-15 bucks, that they will never get out of me. they are a horrible company
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
why do banks get to pick and choose who to do business with?
Well first of all, they shouldn't be required to do business with someone who repeatedly commits fraud...
However what is happening here is not the choice of the business. It's the government saying "we can make life very unpleasant for you in terms of audits etc. unless you cease doing business with this list of people". The government has been going after many adult businesses in the same way for a while now, google Operation Chokepoint
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Because I moved all my stuff from dropbox to mega, a few minutes ago.
The feds have been putting pressure on banks to stop taking accounts for businesses they do not approve of. So far, they've gone after accounts of the porn industry and gun stores. I fully expect them to target tobacco stores in the near future. They do this by suggesting to the bank that they would find it necessary to conduct thorough and repeated audits if the banks work with "less than desirable" businesses.
-- Will program for bandwidth
that is what the U.S government is.
And just accept payments in something like Bitcoin. Oh come on, you can spare a little out of your Mt. Pedo account for the pirated content you crave.
It is ever so slightly possible, that Paypal is sounding the alarm, here. Here's the key phrase...
"...but PayPal has advised that MEGA's 'unique encryption model' presents an insurmountable difficulty,"
It looks like Paypal fought to keep MEGA as a customer. But "somebody" put the screws to them, and forced them to break contract with MEGA.
That's no small thing. Corporate contracts are a bit more "customer friendly", and simply dumping a corporate customer isn't quite as easy as it is to dump people like you and me. MEGA could take Paypal to court with a valid argument over breaking that contract.
What are they going to say? What would be their excuse? "We don't like encryption."??? No judge would buy that.
Based on what we're seeing, Paypal's previous history aside, it sounds rather like Paypal got served a National Security Letter telling them to dump MEGA.
[End Of Line]
I recognised PayPal as a scam from the outset. Never used them, never will.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
So, apparently Mega was singled out as dangerous because they have end-to-end encryption whereas other [B.S.] cloud storage providers like Dropbox don't. And so apparently this encryption enables "dangerous and illegal" activities online that the government can't monitor/prosecute.
But so I ask, how is this different than online backup service providers like Mozy and CrashPlan that allow client-side encryption and end-to-end encryption??!?!? Or even Amazon S3 for that matter?!
And if this is a harbinger of things to come and any end-to-end encrypted cloud service is going to be financially harassed into bankruptcy, what does that mean for data backup!? Because, personally, I would never consider any cloud storage service without encryption as a viable backup option.
Well, what that means is it's back to harddrives if you don't want to lose your data.. since any cloud service that doesn't toe the line will be bullied into bankrupcy.. and your data lost with it. I'm going to back up all my Mega backups.. and that's all I've used it for, is backups..
People use Google Docs to share pirated files too. What is the difference?
Everyone wanting to comment on this decision should read the TorrentFreak article - https://torrentfreak.com/under... - as it seems to have the most information. Many typical sites and blogspam make it act as though PayPal did this through its own volition, when it is really the case of the US Gov't and financial services (banks, payment processors) who put pressure on PayPal - in this case, the US Gov't is acting as the enforcer for the Entertainment industry (MPAA/RIAA etc.) , further evidence of governments being little more than tools for wealthy private interests. . This is much the same thing that happened to donations to WikiLeaks and a large amount of other advocacy and privacy related groups; despicable though it is. Its a horrid, unjust practice that shows yet that many governments, and the corporate and financial cartels that pull their puppet strings, are completely in opposition to the public good.
That said, I think it is an interesting quandary that MEGA's encryption seems to be the focal point here; I'm not sure this is the issue. After all, there are other services that are not on the end of this rebuke that offer "zero knowledge" encryption, where the user's keys are not held by the "cloud" business. For instance, SpiderOak - isn't its encryption protocol very similar to MEGAs? Both services are cloud storage providers that are homed in US and/or Five Eyes nations (so it isn't like they're being targeted for being in a non-compliant jurisdiction like Switzerland, the Seychelles, Hong Kong etc.), have client-side exclusive encryption/decryption purportedly, so any encrypted files server side should in theory not be accessible, while neither of them are completely Free Software, both offer some open source (it seems that SpiderOak has been more transparent than MEGA from my inspection). ? If anyone knows of detailed technical reasons why one would be more secure/private than the other, I'd be interested to know, but they both seem to have similar status.
So why go after MEGA and leave SpiderOak alone? I think the reason here is purely political, not encryption related. For instance, if you look at the document that prompted this, it is regarding "evil, evil piracy cyber-locker" services. You won't see Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft, Box, or SpiderOak listed. Why? because these are the "good guys", made for individual back up and syncing. Sure, they may have some sharing features, affiliates, and may or may not offer anonymity/guest services but this isn't their focus. On the other hand there are the "sleasy file locker types", RapidShare, FileGator, Netload, and hundreds of others...including Kim Dotcom's now defunct MegaUpload - one of the largest of its type during its reign. These services are, rightly and wrongly depending on particular services, characterized as for facilitating piracy and having monetization strategies that are often sleazy, such as pay-per-download/upload, reselling of premium accounts, click through, spam, and even porn and malware ad networks set up as gateways. This is probably the crux of the issue.
As the Torrent Freak article notes, MEGA is listed next to a bunch of these file-locker services. This is likely not because of its encryption or other technical features, but because of its name/marketing/history of" Mega Upload" that came before, regardless of how different the current MEGA site may be. This is even more likely because the one who comprised the report that caused the gov't to act - "Digital Citizens Alliance and Netnames" - are already heavily biased towards anything that in their eyes, enables piracy and/or any of the other behaviors online that threaten the hegemony of their masters. Thus, those "legit" appearing "cloud sites" are the good guys, where the "evil piracy producing file lockers" are the bad guys, and because of MEGA's links, no matter how tenuous, they've been improperly dropped into the second category.
But so I ask, how is this different than online backup service providers like Mozy and CrashPlan that allow client-side encryption and end-to-end encryption??!?!? Or even Amazon S3 for that matter?!
Or taken alternately we can hypothesize that these service providers are different in some way. This would lead us to wonder what is different about these providers that causes the government to leave them alone? That's where things start getting interesting.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
I claim my First Amendment rights include the right to speak in unbreakable code. And as far as anyone else is concerned, it may just be pure gibberish. It's up to me to decide what it means. I could even do this verbally, by reciting words that are translated to other words using a one-time pad. And if spending money is considered protected speech, speaking in unbreakable code must be as well. There's nothing in the First Amendment that says the speech has to be intelligible, by the Government or anyone else.
Or taken alternately we can hypothesize that these service providers are different in some way. This would lead us to wonder what is different about these providers that causes the government to leave them alone? That's where things start getting interesting.
ahh sh*t.
you just made my ball sac suck up a little bit into my abdomen.
how the f**k are we supposed to have any privacy/security these days?!
the damn tin hats were right!
I think Mega was singled out as dangerous because they tried to put Kim Dotcom in jail, and so far, he isn't in jail.
If you want to use something like Dropbox and don't want anybody to know what you've got, encrypt it yourself.
A cloud service account is a backup, in the sense of a copy that won't go away for the same reasons your primary copy does, but no backup solution is perfect.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes