Slashdot Mirror
PayPal Dumped Cloud Company After It Refused To Monitor Customers' Files (fortune.com)
German Dropbox rival Seafile claims PayPal dropped it as a customer after it refused to comply with the payment services company's demand to spy on its users' data. In a blog post, the company informed its customers that they can no longer pay for the service using PayPal -- the only payment method that Seafile currently relies on. CEO Silja Jackson told Fortune, "We're looking into alternative payment services, but currently we're running a cloud service and not getting paid." Founded in 2009, Seafile has over 250,000 users, many in universities. The service offers an open-source file-synchronization system that organizations can install on their own servers -- for a fee, if they want enterprise features -- and last October the firm decided to also start offering a paid version that's hosted on Seafile's German servers, for individuals and small businesses.
EUDP laws in Germany prohibit any activity such as that running out of datacenters hosting German citizen information. If the company is legit, there was no way it could comply with PayPal under those restrictions imposed by the EUDP.
Why was this voted "informative"? This comment is meant sarcastic, if you only read the article.
Seafile offers software that allows you to operate a private service akin to Dropbox. They are open source, so they have source packages as well as precompiled versions of their server and client for download. Their business model consists of offering a version of their software with additional features that costs money. They also offer paid support.
The German company by a similar name (Seafile GmbH in Germany vs. Seafile Ltd. out of China) started offering space on Seafile servers operated by themselves last year.
Spying on their users is not only impractical, since the client offers encryption, but also illegal in Germany, where the servers are located.
Like Dopbox, Google Drive and similar services, Seafile offers file sharing via a web link, of course, which makes illegal file sharing possible, but also pretty dumb, since German law has legal options to force Seafile to divulge the identity (only paying customers, remember?) of someone providing a link to a file on the server space they rented, if the file contents are illegal in some way.
So why the "Informative" tag on something so entirely misleading?
The original poster, quite obviously, expressed personal disapproval of the activity. Whether the activity is, in fact, illegal (and in which country), does not matter — whether it is wrong, is what's important.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
By that logic, pointing out, that welcoming refugees from countries with a comparably flagrant disregard for women's rights may not be smart, is Ok too.
And yet, Donald Trump, who suggested a freeze of such immigrations, was widely denounced as just that — a racist everywhere, Slashdot included... But bashing the entire China is Ok?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.