Sounds like someone is buying too many 'shiny' Apple products.
Not at all. They are buying windows PCs from approved suppliers. Getting approved requires an almighty mass of paperwork that would crush any normal company. The only companies that will deal with the UK government are experts at government bureaucracy first and IT suppliers second. They know that once they have made it onto the approved list they have very little competition so can charge well over the odds.
A 120 day hold can mean paypal keeps everything. A lot of people will forget about small amounts over that length of time. I'll bet the number of people that die in that period is significant enough to have paypal's income a boost. I believe they back to back multiple 120 day periods when they feel like it.
The terms and conditions say that can block an account for 120 days if they so much as suspect any kind of dodgyness.
9.2 You are not required to carry a balance in your Account to keep the Account open. However we may request you to deposit funds into your Account to cover any potential reversal by us or to repay a negative balance.
Note 'potential reversal', not 'reversal'. In my experience they 'request' by trying to take the funds out of linked accounts. Yes I've seen it, no I'm not making it up. However this was in the UK not Australia.
Most of Anon/Lulzsec are whiney kids and would rather be jerking off to pron on the internet than playing bitch in a prison block. Those who aren't deterred are just plain stupid.
You can't be sure they are 'whiney kids' or any other demographic. As far as I can tell Anonymous is a mix of all sorts of people.
Are they encouraging us to do so because they just don't like them, or are they're encouraging us because they're going to do something nasty and if we have money in Paypal we might lose it?
If you have money in Paypal you could lose it any second. Not because of LulzSec, but because Paypal have a long history of locking accounts and keeping all the money.
Its possible to close a paypal account? If you thought it was hard to delete your facebook acct, try paypal for a real challenge.
You can't really 'close' paypal accounts but you can mittigate the damage they can do.
Filter and store all mail from them incase you need it later. Document every transaction you had though them just incase you need it later. Close every bank account and credit card you ever told them abount. Close or never use your ebay account.
The easy way is to never deal with paypal. I wish I took the easy way.
Although I agree with your post almost in it's entirety, this should be changed to Paypal has never *reported* being hacked in 10+ years
Most companies will only report a breach if it's not possible to avoid public knowledge of it.
Banks ( not that I'm saying paypal is a bank here ) won't report any security breach unless they legally have to. They don't want to scare customers away. Paypal should be expected to behave the same.
That, or they tried and failed to hack it and they think if they can get a bunch of people to leave it's the next best thing.
The thing is all the people who are still using it now are either are forced into it because there isn't a decent alternative or are too stubborn to accept that paypal isn't trustworthy.
How will account closure hurt me in any way? I do not maintain a balance there. All I'd need to do is open another PayPal account and everything will be fine again. I suppose it matters if you're a high-volume seller, but for people just using it to buy stuff poor PayPal customer service is not an issue.
Even if you clean the entire balance of your account out after each transaction they can and do still revoke payments to you for very flimsy reasons leaving your account in debt. They did this to me when someone claimed I never sent them an item even though I had proof of delivery. Once your account is in debt they go though every bank account and credit card you have ever told them about to extract this money. Should this fail they will send debt collectors. Actually I found the debt collectors quite reasonable after I gave them proof that what paypal reported to them was untrue.
Besides you really think they will let you open another account from the same IP? Attached to the same ebay account? With the same bank details? They will wait until that has some money in it then block that too.
You got lucky with paypal so far. Don't expect that to carry on forever.
I've used email tarpits in the past for slimeballs that just won't stop emailing me. It's always funny to see their mail connections strong out to 10 minutes or so per connection only to get dropped and them to attempt redelivery in a few seconds.
Boycotting Paypal would be nice, but for a lot of people, it's impossible. Would you tell people to boycott the banks by closing their accounts and keeping all their money in cash under their mattress? That's basically what you're saying when you advise people to boycott Paypal, because like it or not, it's basically a monopoly in many online-payment venues.
It's a bad comparison. You can always change your bank should they do anything you don't like. I've done it and it's a pretty painless procedure where I live. You should let your bank know they can't do whatever they please every so often so they don't get complacent.
You can't change to another paypal and they abuse their customers because they know it.
Why would anyone listen to lulzsec? They've been very clear they have no agenda, and are in it for the lulz.
They have no moral or ideological stance, and no ground to stand on. Why would anybody take their boycott recommendations seriously?
Boycotting paypal is the right thing to do. Not because some internet people told you too but because they have screwed over a large number of people, organizations, and charities in the past. If you use paypal it's only a matter of time until someone says you ripped them off them then they will 'investigate' which really means taking all money in your account and keeping it. Lots of totally innocent people have been ripped off this way.
I really love the ergonomic excellence of this one...
"Yo. dudes, as a stopgap until you get get some sort of 3D gesture-based 'cyber-space' interface up and running, go find 6 or 8 of the l33t3st looking network monitoring programs, then run them all on a big screen at the front of the room, far enough away from all the operators that nobody can read any of the text without intense eyestrain..."
This is an overfunded government department. That huge video screen exists to look high tech, make managers feel good and justify their huge budget for next year.
If they had any sense they would buy two normal widescreens per desk and spend the savings on employing someone who can fix those nagios errors on the bottom right.
On this note, does Wine run SCADA? Perhaps the wisest choice is to get rid of the problem, windoze, altogether.
I understand people use winders to play games. I don't understand why anybody would use it to do any serious work. 3rd party malware is just the peak of the iceberg of problems with windows.
I totally agree that windows has no place controlling SCADA systems or any serious industrial application. However if that's the rubbish that Siemens give customers the customers can either re-write it at a huge cost in time and money or learn to live with it. Living with this either means it isn't on any network at all or it's filtered so heavily you only allow the SCADA control traffic though and nothing else. And break every other way to get data to and from these machines just to be sure, stuxnet did spead by USB sticks among other ways.
seems to me it might be cheaper to replace everything.
Without filtering network traffic you can't be sure stuxnet 2 won't mess things up again.
You need to start with clean windows machines and filter all network traffic to and from them. Anything else just isn't good enough for critical applications.
I'm sure whatever hole in the wall you live in has been helped by the US in some way in the past.....so shut your piehole.
You really think the whole world wants ongoing US interference in the internal affairs of every country? Don't you remember Saddam being 'Our kind of guy' one year and enemy number 1 next year? He didn't change, the US marketing of him changed.
While there may be a number of valid arguments to be made about why the label "land of the free" should not apply to the US.... but doing our part (even if it is through laws) to prevent the rise of a fascist regime does not, to me, constitute one of them.
PS... nice way to ruin a decent post with trolling.
Rule 0: Freedom means people are free not to do what you tell them.
Technically you can use FreeBSD. Legally it has to be OpenBSD. All encryption in OpenBSD has been developed outside the US so US export regulations don't apply. In my setup pf is used as a filtering bridge only. It doesn't even have an IP address of its own.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like someone is buying too many 'shiny' Apple products.
Although I like a mac as a computer, they are ridiculously expensive...
...but £3,000 plus for a desktop is madness, even if it was apple!
500 UKP computer.
2450 UKP extra costs incurred by dealing with the UK government's self-serving bureaucracy.
50 UKP delivery.
Sounds like someone is buying too many 'shiny' Apple products.
Not at all. They are buying windows PCs from approved suppliers. Getting approved requires an almighty mass of paperwork that would crush any normal company. The only companies that will deal with the UK government are experts at government bureaucracy first and IT suppliers second. They know that once they have made it onto the approved list they have very little competition so can charge well over the odds.
Funny as goatse links are they are getting a bit old.
Can we go back to rickrolling? That's fun for all the family.
Do not speak like that about the overlord! You shall be smited by the low, low prices yet surprisingly good quality of the Aldi!
ALDI does look like a cheap dump but you are right about some of the stuff. They have some very cheap good quality things.
shred -z -n 0 /dev/$disk
or
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/$disk bs=$((1024 * 1024))
Less fun than thermite but you get to reuse the disk.
A 120 day hold can mean paypal keeps everything. A lot of people will forget about small amounts over that length of time. I'll bet the number of people that die in that period is significant enough to have paypal's income a boost. I believe they back to back multiple 120 day periods when they feel like it.
The terms and conditions say that can block an account for 120 days if they so much as suspect any kind of dodgyness.
9.2 You are not required to carry a balance in your Account to keep the Account open. However we may request you to deposit funds into your Account to cover any potential reversal by us or to repay a negative balance.
Note 'potential reversal', not 'reversal'. In my experience they 'request' by trying to take the funds out of linked accounts. Yes I've seen it, no I'm not making it up. However this was in the UK not Australia.
Most of Anon/Lulzsec are whiney kids and would rather be jerking off to pron on the internet than playing bitch in a prison block. Those who aren't deterred are just plain stupid.
You can't be sure they are 'whiney kids' or any other demographic. As far as I can tell Anonymous is a mix of all sorts of people.
Lulzsec is a total mystery.
Are they encouraging us to do so because they just don't like them, or are they're encouraging us because they're going to do something nasty and if we have money in Paypal we might lose it?
If you have money in Paypal you could lose it any second. Not because of LulzSec, but because Paypal have a long history of locking accounts and keeping all the money.
Its possible to close a paypal account? If you thought it was hard to delete your facebook acct, try paypal for a real challenge.
You can't really 'close' paypal accounts but you can mittigate the damage they can do.
Filter and store all mail from them incase you need it later. Document every transaction you had though them just incase you need it later. Close every bank account and credit card you ever told them abount. Close or never use your ebay account.
The easy way is to never deal with paypal. I wish I took the easy way.
You got lucky with paypal so far, that's all.
Lots of people don't have a problem until the day they do and paypal keeps everything. All it takes is one invalid complaint.
Wrong. They can take money from your credit card and bank account whenever they invent some reason to. And they do invent reasons to frequently.
Didn't you read the terms and conditions?
Paypal has never been hacked in 10+ years
Although I agree with your post almost in it's entirety, this should be changed to Paypal has never *reported* being hacked in 10+ years
Most companies will only report a breach if it's not possible to avoid public knowledge of it.
Banks ( not that I'm saying paypal is a bank here ) won't report any security breach unless they legally have to. They don't want to scare customers away. Paypal should be expected to behave the same.
That, or they tried and failed to hack it and they think if they can get a bunch of people to leave it's the next best thing.
The thing is all the people who are still using it now are either are forced into it because there isn't a decent alternative or are too stubborn to accept that paypal isn't trustworthy.
How will account closure hurt me in any way? I do not maintain a balance there. All I'd need to do is open another PayPal account and everything will be fine again. I suppose it matters if you're a high-volume seller, but for people just using it to buy stuff poor PayPal customer service is not an issue.
Even if you clean the entire balance of your account out after each transaction they can and do still revoke payments to you for very flimsy reasons leaving your account in debt. They did this to me when someone claimed I never sent them an item even though I had proof of delivery. Once your account is in debt they go though every bank account and credit card you have ever told them about to extract this money. Should this fail they will send debt collectors. Actually I found the debt collectors quite reasonable after I gave them proof that what paypal reported to them was untrue.
Besides you really think they will let you open another account from the same IP? Attached to the same ebay account? With the same bank details? They will wait until that has some money in it then block that too.
You got lucky with paypal so far. Don't expect that to carry on forever.
Neat, I'll remember that.
I've used email tarpits in the past for slimeballs that just won't stop emailing me. It's always funny to see their mail connections strong out to 10 minutes or so per connection only to get dropped and them to attempt redelivery in a few seconds.
Boycotting Paypal would be nice, but for a lot of people, it's impossible. Would you tell people to boycott the banks by closing their accounts and keeping all their money in cash under their mattress? That's basically what you're saying when you advise people to boycott Paypal, because like it or not, it's basically a monopoly in many online-payment venues.
It's a bad comparison. You can always change your bank should they do anything you don't like. I've done it and it's a pretty painless procedure where I live. You should let your bank know they can't do whatever they please every so often so they don't get complacent.
You can't change to another paypal and they abuse their customers because they know it.
Paypal sucks, I've been boycotting them for some time. Lulzsec also sucks. I might open a paypal account after seeing this.
Stupid people always do the opposite of what they are told just to prove they have some supposed independence and free will.
You really want to deal with a company that you know will rip you off just to prove some stupid point?
Why would anyone listen to lulzsec? They've been very clear they have no agenda, and are in it for the lulz.
They have no moral or ideological stance, and no ground to stand on. Why would anybody take their boycott recommendations seriously?
Boycotting paypal is the right thing to do. Not because some internet people told you too but because they have screwed over a large number of people, organizations, and charities in the past. If you use paypal it's only a matter of time until someone says you ripped them off them then they will 'investigate' which really means taking all money in your account and keeping it. Lots of totally innocent people have been ripped off this way.
I really love the ergonomic excellence of this one...
"Yo. dudes, as a stopgap until you get get some sort of 3D gesture-based 'cyber-space' interface up and running, go find 6 or 8 of the l33t3st looking network monitoring programs, then run them all on a big screen at the front of the room, far enough away from all the operators that nobody can read any of the text without intense eyestrain..."
This is an overfunded government department. That huge video screen exists to look high tech, make managers feel good and justify their huge budget for next year.
If they had any sense they would buy two normal widescreens per desk and spend the savings on employing someone who can fix those nagios errors on the bottom right.
On this note, does Wine run SCADA? Perhaps the wisest choice is to get rid of the problem, windoze, altogether.
I understand people use winders to play games. I don't understand why anybody would use it to do any serious work. 3rd party malware is just the peak of the iceberg of problems with windows.
I totally agree that windows has no place controlling SCADA systems or any serious industrial application. However if that's the rubbish that Siemens give customers the customers can either re-write it at a huge cost in time and money or learn to live with it. Living with this either means it isn't on any network at all or it's filtered so heavily you only allow the SCADA control traffic though and nothing else. And break every other way to get data to and from these machines just to be sure, stuxnet did spead by USB sticks among other ways.
seems to me it might be cheaper to replace everything.
Without filtering network traffic you can't be sure stuxnet 2 won't mess things up again.
You need to start with clean windows machines and filter all network traffic to and from them. Anything else just isn't good enough for critical applications.
I'm sure whatever hole in the wall you live in has been helped by the US in some way in the past.....so shut your piehole.
You really think the whole world wants ongoing US interference in the internal affairs of every country? Don't you remember Saddam being 'Our kind of guy' one year and enemy number 1 next year? He didn't change, the US marketing of him changed.
While there may be a number of valid arguments to be made about why the label "land of the free" should not apply to the US.... but doing our part (even if it is through laws) to prevent the rise of a fascist regime does not, to me, constitute one of them.
PS... nice way to ruin a decent post with trolling.
Rule 0: Freedom means people are free not to do what you tell them.
Technically you can use FreeBSD. Legally it has to be OpenBSD. All encryption in OpenBSD has been developed outside the US so US export regulations don't apply. In my setup pf is used as a filtering bridge only. It doesn't even have an IP address of its own.