I would certainly be happy to see the market move away from this
nasty rebate trend.
In addition to all the subtle technicalities that have already
been mentioned that cause many people to never get their rebates,
there is another part of the scam that most people don't seem to
notice.
Often, you must forfeit your right to return an item in
order to get the rebate. Most merchants allow you to return
merchandise within 14 to 30 days for a full refund as long
as it is intact in the original packaging. Look close at the
rebate deadlines. I find that most of them are so short that you
must mail in the rebate within just a few days or maybe
a week or two of the purchase date. However, they require
cutting out the original UPC code from the box or packaging to
send in with it. Of course, once you have done that, you either
will not have the option of returning the item for a refund or,
at best, will be charged a 15% or 20% re-stocking fee.
If the rebate does not give you more than 30 days from the
purchase date to send it in, then you know it is a deliberate
scam.
Also, I lived in Colorado Springs for 6 months.
The lines were all underground there in our area.
We had no power outages or flickers the whole time
we were there, even though we had lots of
lightening storms. We never even used a UPS for
our computers. We would be lucky to get by for
more than a day or two down here in OKC without
a UPS.
Hah! I'll try not to get going to far off topic, but I had
to add to this:-). I'm in OKC also. I constantly see them
take months and years to complete similar road construction
jobs that I saw completed in days to weeks when I lived in
Colorado. Just about everybody I know thinks the city
managers/planners here are morons. One friend of mine said
that, years ago, her dad, who was in construction, completed
a section of road himself because the city tore up the road
in front of his business and then would never come out to
finish the job. The road being blocked off was about to run
him out of business.
So far as the power lines. One of the problems in Oklahoma
City is that they were to stupid to run ground lines along
the top. This is why just about every damn 20 mile away
lightening strike makes the power flicker and it goes clear
out so often during rain storms. When I lived in Colorado,
they did have ground lines at the top of the poles and our
power rarely ever went out or flickered. The only time
I remember it going out for several hours in Boulder (over
about a 5 year span) was when a heavy snow storm broke tree
limbs off and brought some lines down.
Here in OKC, they have known about the problem for many
years and have not corrected it. Hell, they hardly ever
will even come out and trim the trees in the neighborhood
that keep shorting the lines and making our power go out.
Even without lightening, from 06/22/2005 to 11/28/2005 over
a span of 5 months, our power went out 9 times ranging from
45 minutes to 3 hours, all in good weather except for
a couple of moderately windy days. And that does not count
all the flickers.
I am sure they would never consider any additional up front
expense such as putting in underground lines. Hell, they
are even to cheap to put sidewalks in this city and the
roads are all so narrow that there is never even any
shoulder to ride a bicycle. It is a totally different world
than Boulder and Denver.
I'm considering paying for a 'premium' domain name...
I highly recommend that you never purchase domains offered for sale for
anything more than the price of registration. When you do, it promotes and
rewards cyber squatting.
Cyber squatters offer no value added service by registering domains and then
charging large amounts of money for them. It is a dirty business and they
are just industry leaches.
Read how this
domain was stolen after over 5 years of ownership by cyber squatters.
If people did not reward them, they would not have profitable motivation for
this behavior.
Telnet on BSD has had encryption for at lease ever since we
started using it. I remember Linux did not a few years ago
when we first changed to BSD but it appears that the recent
Linux systems running on our ISP and on Sourceforge are now
running the BSD telnet with encryption. ssh is still better
because you can use dual public/private rsa/dsa keys and
login without having to type a password, but as long as you
are not telneting to/from a toy system that has no regard
for security and does not support encryption, telnet is not
so bad. We still use it a lot on our LAN. We are running
all NetBSD and FreeBSD.
my thinking is that its probably not such a
trivial thing for banks to setup a nationwide
system with individualized blacklists.
There would not be anything very difficult about
it. Just a simple data file that has the company
names, or other identifying information about the
company, to blacklist or white list. You could
do simple string compares to the the information
from the incoming request. You could set
transaction limits with simple less than /
greater than comparisons. It's grade school
programming. The web interface for the user to
configure their filters can be just simple forms
and a simple CGI script that stores the data in a
text file or any other simple data file format.
It is beginning level programming. I am sure the
banks want us to think it's a big deal though.
anyways, I know some banks specifically allow
you to block access by acct number if thats
what you want to do.
Are you in the US? I have had accounts at quite
a few banks in two different states and I have
never seen one yet that has any kind of access
control list. I'm not sure what account number
you are referring to. I generally have not known
any bank account numbers for companies such as
Paypal that I have given access to bank accounts.
I don't know which account numbers are provided
by the merchant as part of the electronic
transaction protocol or if it is possible to get
such account numbers. I was thinking more along
the lines of controlling access by merchant name.
Does your CC company do the same thing when you
tell them to cancel/reverse charges?
No. I have not encountered any fees for
reversing a credit card charge. In that case,
the merchant is usually charged the fees. If you
are going to authorize any kind of ongoing draft
from a bank account, doing it through something
like a Visa debit card is currently the only way
I know of that gives you any kind of control.
However, when dealing with Paypal for example, I
did not have that option. I had to link the bank
account to their service in order to transfer
money from the Paypal account to my bank
account. Their terms of service then gave them
permission to pull money out of the bank account
at their discretion.
All excellent advice and rules I have already been living
by. Except I always advocate boycotting companies such as
Paypal when you know they are screwing so many people.
Don't keep rewarding them with your business until they
straighten out their act. However..
Make sure your bank(s) have firm instructions not to
transfer money out to PayPal w/out your say so. Or at
least tell them what will and what won't be normal
account behavior.
This one never does any good. The banks refuse to set up
any kind of access control lists to control merchants
access to your account. See my other postings on this blog
for more discussion about this. They apparently enjoy
ripping everybody off for $30 for each stop payment
request. From this standpoint, they are thieves conspiring
with companies such as Paypal to create situations to
siphon more money from you. Once the money has been
transfered you cannot even do a stop payment.
I say this because people need to realize how serious the
problem is and start calling banks and politicians to put
pressure on them to address the real problem.
WE NEED ACCESS CONTROL LISTS ON OUR BANK ACCOUNTS!
It is such a simple thing to implement.
Without it, anybody with a merchant account and your bank
account number can take money out of your account. If you
disagree, it is a civil dispute and you have to come up
with the time and resources to fight them and hope you can
get them to put it back in.
Charging you $30 to stop a payment is absolutely ludicrous.
They are no better than a thug robbing you at gun point in
an alley. Let's see.. it takes probably 30-60 seconds to
make an entry in the computer to flag a payment as stopped
(basically a simple access control list for that one
transaction). At $30 dollars, they are charging about
$1,800/hr to $3,600/hr for that $8-$10/hr employee to enter
your stop payment.
the two days refers to you losing your ATM card
& pincode.. the 'access device"
No, it is not limited to that. "the access
device" is any means in which to access your
account to electronically transfer funds. Here
is part of the definition from section 205.2
Definitions from the
Electronic Funds Transfers regulations.
(a)(1) Access device means a card, code, or
other means of access to a consumer's account,
or any combination thereof, that may be used by
the consumer to initiate electronic fund
transfers.
(2) An access device becomes an accepted access
device when the consumer:
(i) Requests and receives, or signs, or uses
(or authorizes another to use) the access
device to transfer money between accounts or to
obtain money, property, or services;
[way2trivial wrote]
This is wrong see Electronic Funds Act
http://www.fdic.gov/regulations/laws/rules/6500-31 00.html#6500205.3 [fdic.gov]
When I spoke with my bank (Norwest at the time)
about the unauthorized drafts from my account
that I mentioned in my other posting, they said
there was nothing they could do about the drafts
that had already taken place. I could pay $30
for a stop payment on the next draft attempt but
there was nothing stopping them from turning
right around and doing it again. Once you agree,
online or in writing, to allow anybody to take
funds from your account there is nothing you can
do to control them but close the bank account.
In the Electronic Funds Act (EFA) you provided
the link to, I don't see any recourse for damages
for the consumer for unauthorized transactions.
Also note this quote from it:
(2) Timely notice not given. If the consumer
fails to notify the financial institution
within two business days after learning of the
loss or theft of the access device, the
consumer's liability shall not exceed the
lesser of $500 or the sum of:...
So, if I interpret this correctly, if they think
there is evidence that you could have known about
an unauthorized transfer more than two days
before you reported it, you are still liable for
up to $500, even though the unauthorized transfer
is criminal theft.
Now, if you are a Paypal customer, you have
pre-authorized them to draft your account at
their discretion, so if they empty your account
it is a dispute between you and them. And, so
far as I can tell from their agreement, you have
also agreed to forfeit your right to take them to
court, unless they agree to it, and to use a
third part arbitrator of their choosing.
Now, if you can find wording in the EFA that
clearly says you can reverse a draft from your
bank account that has already taken place, please
point out the exact wording. That would mean the
banks have been lying to my face.
I have been saying for years that all these
problems would be solved if the idiotic banking
system would just setup access control lists
where you can control who can draft your account,
how often, and for how much, either over the phone
or online. Such simple software could probably
be written in just a few days.
[way2trivial wrote]
can I call my bank, or visit it- to discuss the matter? yes
You can, but it will not do any good. Unlike a
credit card, there is no way to reverse a draft
from your bank account. Also, banks, at least in
America, have absolutely no security. They are to
stupid to even provide any kind of simple access
control list so that you can white list and/or
black list merchants from arbitrarily pulling any
amount of money they choose out of your account.
Anybody with a merchant account and your account
number can pull money out of your account and
there is no law against it. It is a civil suit if
you disagree. If it is somebody like Paypal and
they decide to empty your account... well just
read the horror stories. That is why we also
closed the checking account that was linked to the
Paypal account rather than only closing the Paypal
account.
Just try to stop an automatic draft that you have
authorized to see what I am talking about. Every
company I have ever given my bank account number
to, to do automatic drafts for any kind of
recurring payment, always start the drafts
immediately. However, when I tell them to stop
the drafts, it is funny that they always continue
drafting the account for several months before
they stop. The last time I tried an automatic
draft with a company, they double billed me the
first two months so I said, that's it, stop the
drafts. They drafted the account again the
following month. The bank would not put any kind
of block on the account. I would have to pay a
$30 stop payment for each one. I withdrew all
cash out of the account on the spot and closed the
account. I did get refunded from the company
after another month or two, luckily, that time.
In Paypals case, if they empty your bank account,
it appears you are agreeing to forefit your right
to even sue them in court if it is under $10,000.
Here is an extract from the agreement.
For any Claim (excluding Claims for injunctive or
other equitable relief) where the total amount of
the award sought is less than $10,000.00 USD, you
or PayPal may elect to resolve the dispute through
binding arbitration conducted by telephone,
on-line, and/or based solely upon written
submissions where no in-person appearance is
required. In such cases, the arbitration shall be
administered by the American Arbitration
Association or JAMS, in accordance with their
applicable rules, or any other established ADR
provider mutually agreed upon by the parties. Any
judgment on the award rendered by the arbitrator
may be entered in any court having jurisdiction
thereof.
Notice, "you OR Paypal may elect...". Notice,
Paypal must agree to the arbitration method. If
they know they are in the wrong, do you think they
are going to choose methods that are in their
favor? Perhaps through third parties they have
behind the scenes agreements with that you will
never find out about? Anybody who would trust
them not to would have to be crazy with all the
thousands of complaints.
[Jondaley wrote]
I would never use Paypal unless I had a
separate bank account for them to use, and that
doesn't have any overdraft allowance, etc. So,
even if Paypal wants to try to suck money out,
there isn't anything for them to get.
Absolutely. That gives you at least some
protection. However, they can still freeze funds
in your Paypal account, as many of the horror
stories indicate stopping all further
transaction. In the case of an eBay seller, this
can damage or destroy your reputation and
business.
Even if you are not in a situation like that where
you are vulnerable to such problems, I always
promote not doing business with a company that is
screwing people as a matter of principle. Don't
reward them with your business. When a company is
dirty, and/or does not give a damn about customer
satisfaction, people need to boycott them and quit
doing business with them just because it is
convenient at the time.
Most of the people who are uncomfortable with
Paypal are the ones who Think whining about it
makes them seem experienced or intelligent.
Excuse the bluntness, but that is pure bull crap!
Take a look at the thousands of horror stories in
the Paypal Wall of Shame on
http://paypalwarning.com/.
I would say that class actions lawsuits and thousands
of horror stories are very legitimate reasons to be
"uncomfortable" with dealing with a company. Unless
you are an idiot.
As it says on the paypalwarning.com site:
Can PayPal hold my money with no explanation? The answer is YES.
Can PayPal freeze my account for no reason? The answer is YES.
Can PayPal take money out of my account without my knowledge?
The answer is YES.
We used to use Paypal to sell on eBay but after
finding it impossible to to update our credit
card and having no phone number to resolve
problems, we started searching the net to see
what kind of other problems people were having.
When we found the Wall of Shame, we closed
the account and closed the bank account it was
linked to before we became one of the victims.
I wish more people would boycott companies that
treat people so dirty and quit rewarding them
just because it appears to be convenient today.
I would say that the best price/features combination should win.
I fully agree.
Personally, I find the package offered by eNom to be very
comprehensive, their suppot quite good and the price cheap -
as long as you buy through a reseller and not directly from
eNom (e.g., $8.88/year from namecheap.com).
I looked at namecheap.com and it looked pretty interesting.
However, I had two bad first impressions about them.
First, they are running their site on Microsoft Windows. That
gives me questions about the intelligence of the company and
security of your domain registrations. It is likely to have
about as much security that Hotbot, running on MS Windows, did
when they had thousands (or was it millions) of their email
accounts compromised. We don't really want every virus that
comes along to wipe out our domain resolution service. That
essentially brings our site down, even if our web servers are
running Unix and are not directly affected (unless we run all our
own name servers and do not use any URL redirection provided by
the registrar). We always use Unix based services for all
Internet services. We generally prefer BSD based ones.
Second, I click on their contact link and see no phone number.
Just email. I found this to be common with the really low priced
registrars. The ones we have tried have always costed us a lot
more in lost time and headache in the long run. As I mentioned on
my other reply, I have found most registrars do not stand up to
the service they promise. If you do not get adequate resolution
to a problem via email (which has been the case about 70-80% of
the time with us), having no phone number to call just leaves you
out in the cold.
I also checked eNom.com. They are also running on Microsoft
Windows. They, at least, have contact phone numbers but they are
not toll free. From my experiences with other registrars,
especially Network Solutions, leaving us on hold for 45 minutes
to reach a human, that is also a deterrent. Notice that InetAddresses.net
has a link to a toll free phone number for 24 hour technical
support right on the front page.
First step is to transfer them all to a lower
priced registrar: Reason for this is easy,
registrars are now a commodity and the lowest
price wins. I use godaddy for everything and
have found their customer service to be pretty
good.
I register everything in my customers names
except for the technical contact and then I turn
on the AutoRenew option for each one. Godaddy
then sends me a few notices as a reminder before
actually renewing them. I never worry about
losing them.
Not just the lowest price, but the best
price/performance/service ratio should win. I don't have
experience with Godaddy, but am speaking from experience
over the last 10 years of dealing with horrible service from
domain registrars, with Network Solutions/VeriSign being the
worst. There are a lot of registrars out there that appear
cheaper at first but are not at all in the long run.
See
http://inetaddresses.net/about_us.html.
If you have customers who are choosing their own
registrar (as they should) then transferring all
the domains to one registrar is not an option.
First of all, any good registrar will notify their
customers well in advance of domains expiring. If
your customers are not getting notified, you
should highly recommend they change registrars.
If you really want to provide a monitoring
service, then the script idea to monitor the whois
database suggested by j-turkey is probably the
best.
I never allow my ISP's to register my domains for
me because most of them end up using Network
Solutions, which turns out to be a nightmare.
Read this
story about how they conspired to steel a
domain.
After years of getting bad/slow/inadequate service
from variouis registrars I have tried, this is the
best service for the price I have found.
There are also links on the inetaddresses.net site
to the story mentioned above plus other good
information about registering domains and what to
watch out for.
There is a difference between being a sysadmin and a programmer.
For one, a sysadmin does not have to care about understand how
to translate an end users business requirements into extendable
and robust code.
If you have lots of experience as a dentist, does that make you
a good doctor?
Of course not, but that's not the point. To use your scenario,
If somebody has all the qualifications of a doctor, does the fact
that they have been a dentist before make them a bad doctor? If
you think so, then that is an example of the narrow mind set I
mentioned that some companies have - that a person cannot learn
and become good at more than one field.
Would you hire a dentist when what you want is a doctor and
they are available?
No, not if they are not qualified as a doctor. But the point is
that sys-admin experience can be, and usually is, a major asset
to a programmer. To use your scenario again - If I had been shot
in the jaw and needed a surgeon to reconstruct my jaw and teeth,
then, if I had the choice, I would choose a doctor/surgeon who
also has had all the training and experience of a dentist.
If everybody believed that nobody can learn more than one field,
then once you expand your skills to a different field you could
never get a job in any skilled field again because every company
would think that since you have experience in another field you
could not possibly be skilled enough in the field you are seeking
the job in.
It sounds like your skills and background are similar to mine. As
long as you can show programming experience and skill, whether it is
professionally or open software contributions, it is not too hard.
However, some companies can be pretty limited in their mind set. A few
years ago when I was moving from a sys-admin job to a development job
NCAR in Boulder would not even interview me because they thought I had
too much sys-admin experience to be a good programmer. they were
apparently so limited in their thinking that they did not believe
a person could know both fields.
One of my favorite kinds of jobs are the ones that are a cross between
sys-admin and development. They require skill in all areas. Higher
level sys-admin positions I have been in required a lot of perl, shell
script, and even some C programming along with systems/network
administration because they have involved developing disaster recovery
systems, and writing lots of automation programs, to automate
sys-admin, publishing of web pages, etc.
I have seen programmers so handicapped in their skills that they have
to call the sys-admin for help just to set permissions on their files.
Any company that is worth working for should consider sys-admin skill
a plus. So keep looking and don't become discouraged if you encounter
closed minded companies. You will be much happier in the long run
being choosy about the type of job you accept.
It sounds like your skills and background are similar to mine. As
long as you can show programming experience and skill, whether it is
professionally or open software contributions, it is not too hard.
However, some companies can be pretty limited in their mind set. A few
years ago when I was moving from a sys-admin job to a development job
NCAR in Boulder would not even interview me because they thought I had
too much sys-admin experience to be a good programmer. they were
apparently so limited in their thinking that they did not believe
a person could know both fields.
One of my favorite kinds of jobs are the ones that are a cross between
sys-admin and development. They require skill in all areas. Higher
level sys-admin positions I have been in required a lot of perl, shell
script, and even some C programming along with systems/network
administration because they have involved developing disaster recovery
systems, and writing lots of automation programs, to automate
sys-admin, publishing of web pages, etc.
I have seen programmers so handicapped in their skills that they have
to call the sys-admin for help just to set permissions on their files.
Any company that is worth working for should consider sys-admin skill
a plus. So keep looking and don't become discouraged if you encounter
closed minded companies. You will be much happier in the long run
being choosy about the type of job you accept.
I see a lot of sarcastic narrow minded responses to your posting,
which are examples of exactly the way the telco's want us to think.
That it is impossible. When it was 25 - 35 cents/minute 20 years ago
(equivalent to at least 50 - 75 cents/minute by todays economy) and
the telco's were laughing all the way to the bank with their
government granted monopoly (ie. the 1934 telecom act), they had most
people I encountered believing that the technology was such a miracle
that it was a real bargain.
What you are proposing is far from impossible. The biggest
technological barrier is the current lack of low latency routing
hardware and protocols because you will be potentially routing your
packets through a lot of hops before connecting to your destination or
into a backbone. For example, if we had a wireless 1 mile grid of
point to point nodes across the continental US, to achieve 100 ms
routing times it would require that packets be resent from each hop
within 33 micro-seconds of their reception based on 3000 hops. This
would require that the packet be able to be re-sent at the same time
as it is being received, just a few bytes apart (just enough for a
routing header or maybe even an IP header). This is very possible to
do but I have not yet seen any products quite that innovative. Don't
count on the telco's designing them:-). Such a grid could easily be
done on an ad-hoc basis by the public installing repeaters/routers on
their private properties. Golly gee, the ham radio community managed
to pull their resources and launch their own satellites!
The large backbone providers will likely stay around, especially for
over seas connections. Groups of people can combine resources for the
expenses of connecting into the existing backbones, bringing the cost
down to very little per person. In fact it can become nearly free as
the wireless grid covers more and more territory because the bandwidth
consumption of the backbone will drop.
The primary political/social reason it would not work is this:
Because of the 62 years of the communist 1934 telecommunications act
that restricted public wireless communications and propaganda from the
telecoms about how expensive and impossible it is, the public is like
the elephant that used to have a chain around it's leg. Once the act
was finally overturned during the Clinton administration, the public
is now like the same elephant only tied by a string that has been
conditioned that it cannot break free.
Bu has served us well over the last several years. It is a filesystem to filesystem backup tool that we normally use to backup to an NFS server over the network, and it can back up to multi-volume CDRW's. Although, the CDRW dump feature is not finished for Linux yet, the rest of the features work on both Linux and FreeBSD. It is designed for immediate backups of individual files or directories throughout the work day as well as full or incremental backups via cron. It is very configurable, light weight, has include and exclude lists, nice log files, good documentation, and is free under the GNU public license.
Slashdot Mirror
I would certainly be happy to see the market move away from this nasty rebate trend.
In addition to all the subtle technicalities that have already been mentioned that cause many people to never get their rebates, there is another part of the scam that most people don't seem to notice.
Often, you must forfeit your right to return an item in order to get the rebate. Most merchants allow you to return merchandise within 14 to 30 days for a full refund as long as it is intact in the original packaging. Look close at the rebate deadlines. I find that most of them are so short that you must mail in the rebate within just a few days or maybe a week or two of the purchase date. However, they require cutting out the original UPC code from the box or packaging to send in with it. Of course, once you have done that, you either will not have the option of returning the item for a refund or, at best, will be charged a 15% or 20% re-stocking fee.
If the rebate does not give you more than 30 days from the purchase date to send it in, then you know it is a deliberate scam.
Also, I lived in Colorado Springs for 6 months. The lines were all underground there in our area. We had no power outages or flickers the whole time we were there, even though we had lots of lightening storms. We never even used a UPS for our computers. We would be lucky to get by for more than a day or two down here in OKC without a UPS.
Hah! I'll try not to get going to far off topic, but I had to add to this :-). I'm in OKC also. I constantly see them
take months and years to complete similar road construction
jobs that I saw completed in days to weeks when I lived in
Colorado. Just about everybody I know thinks the city
managers/planners here are morons. One friend of mine said
that, years ago, her dad, who was in construction, completed
a section of road himself because the city tore up the road
in front of his business and then would never come out to
finish the job. The road being blocked off was about to run
him out of business.
So far as the power lines. One of the problems in Oklahoma City is that they were to stupid to run ground lines along the top. This is why just about every damn 20 mile away lightening strike makes the power flicker and it goes clear out so often during rain storms. When I lived in Colorado, they did have ground lines at the top of the poles and our power rarely ever went out or flickered. The only time I remember it going out for several hours in Boulder (over about a 5 year span) was when a heavy snow storm broke tree limbs off and brought some lines down.
Here in OKC, they have known about the problem for many years and have not corrected it. Hell, they hardly ever will even come out and trim the trees in the neighborhood that keep shorting the lines and making our power go out. Even without lightening, from 06/22/2005 to 11/28/2005 over a span of 5 months, our power went out 9 times ranging from 45 minutes to 3 hours, all in good weather except for a couple of moderately windy days. And that does not count all the flickers.
I am sure they would never consider any additional up front expense such as putting in underground lines. Hell, they are even to cheap to put sidewalks in this city and the roads are all so narrow that there is never even any shoulder to ride a bicycle. It is a totally different world than Boulder and Denver.
Cyber squatters offer no value added service by registering domains and then charging large amounts of money for them. It is a dirty business and they are just industry leaches.
Read how this domain was stolen after over 5 years of ownership by cyber squatters. If people did not reward them, they would not have profitable motivation for this behavior.
Telnet on BSD has had encryption for at lease ever since we started using it. I remember Linux did not a few years ago when we first changed to BSD but it appears that the recent Linux systems running on our ISP and on Sourceforge are now running the BSD telnet with encryption. ssh is still better because you can use dual public/private rsa/dsa keys and login without having to type a password, but as long as you are not telneting to/from a toy system that has no regard for security and does not support encryption, telnet is not so bad. We still use it a lot on our LAN. We are running all NetBSD and FreeBSD.
There would not be anything very difficult about it. Just a simple data file that has the company names, or other identifying information about the company, to blacklist or white list. You could do simple string compares to the the information from the incoming request. You could set transaction limits with simple less than / greater than comparisons. It's grade school programming. The web interface for the user to configure their filters can be just simple forms and a simple CGI script that stores the data in a text file or any other simple data file format. It is beginning level programming. I am sure the banks want us to think it's a big deal though.
Are you in the US? I have had accounts at quite a few banks in two different states and I have never seen one yet that has any kind of access control list. I'm not sure what account number you are referring to. I generally have not known any bank account numbers for companies such as Paypal that I have given access to bank accounts. I don't know which account numbers are provided by the merchant as part of the electronic transaction protocol or if it is possible to get such account numbers. I was thinking more along the lines of controlling access by merchant name.
No. I have not encountered any fees for reversing a credit card charge. In that case, the merchant is usually charged the fees. If you are going to authorize any kind of ongoing draft from a bank account, doing it through something like a Visa debit card is currently the only way I know of that gives you any kind of control.
However, when dealing with Paypal for example, I did not have that option. I had to link the bank account to their service in order to transfer money from the Paypal account to my bank account. Their terms of service then gave them permission to pull money out of the bank account at their discretion.
This one never does any good. The banks refuse to set up any kind of access control lists to control merchants access to your account. See my other postings on this blog for more discussion about this. They apparently enjoy ripping everybody off for $30 for each stop payment request. From this standpoint, they are thieves conspiring with companies such as Paypal to create situations to siphon more money from you. Once the money has been transfered you cannot even do a stop payment.
I say this because people need to realize how serious the problem is and start calling banks and politicians to put pressure on them to address the real problem.
WE NEED ACCESS CONTROL LISTS ON OUR BANK ACCOUNTS!
It is such a simple thing to implement.
Without it, anybody with a merchant account and your bank account number can take money out of your account. If you disagree, it is a civil dispute and you have to come up with the time and resources to fight them and hope you can get them to put it back in.
Charging you $30 to stop a payment is absolutely ludicrous. They are no better than a thug robbing you at gun point in an alley. Let's see.. it takes probably 30-60 seconds to make an entry in the computer to flag a payment as stopped (basically a simple access control list for that one transaction). At $30 dollars, they are charging about $1,800/hr to $3,600/hr for that $8-$10/hr employee to enter your stop payment.
No, it is not limited to that. "the access device" is any means in which to access your account to electronically transfer funds. Here is part of the definition from section 205.2 Definitions from the Electronic Funds Transfers regulations.
When I spoke with my bank (Norwest at the time) about the unauthorized drafts from my account that I mentioned in my other posting, they said there was nothing they could do about the drafts that had already taken place. I could pay $30 for a stop payment on the next draft attempt but there was nothing stopping them from turning right around and doing it again. Once you agree, online or in writing, to allow anybody to take funds from your account there is nothing you can do to control them but close the bank account.
In the Electronic Funds Act (EFA) you provided the link to, I don't see any recourse for damages for the consumer for unauthorized transactions. Also note this quote from it:
So, if I interpret this correctly, if they think there is evidence that you could have known about an unauthorized transfer more than two days before you reported it, you are still liable for up to $500, even though the unauthorized transfer is criminal theft.
Now, if you are a Paypal customer, you have pre-authorized them to draft your account at their discretion, so if they empty your account it is a dispute between you and them. And, so far as I can tell from their agreement, you have also agreed to forfeit your right to take them to court, unless they agree to it, and to use a third part arbitrator of their choosing. Now, if you can find wording in the EFA that clearly says you can reverse a draft from your bank account that has already taken place, please point out the exact wording. That would mean the banks have been lying to my face.
I have been saying for years that all these problems would be solved if the idiotic banking system would just setup access control lists where you can control who can draft your account, how often, and for how much, either over the phone or online. Such simple software could probably be written in just a few days.
You can, but it will not do any good. Unlike a credit card, there is no way to reverse a draft from your bank account. Also, banks, at least in America, have absolutely no security. They are to stupid to even provide any kind of simple access control list so that you can white list and/or black list merchants from arbitrarily pulling any amount of money they choose out of your account. Anybody with a merchant account and your account number can pull money out of your account and there is no law against it. It is a civil suit if you disagree. If it is somebody like Paypal and they decide to empty your account
Just try to stop an automatic draft that you have authorized to see what I am talking about. Every company I have ever given my bank account number to, to do automatic drafts for any kind of recurring payment, always start the drafts immediately. However, when I tell them to stop the drafts, it is funny that they always continue drafting the account for several months before they stop. The last time I tried an automatic draft with a company, they double billed me the first two months so I said, that's it, stop the drafts. They drafted the account again the following month. The bank would not put any kind of block on the account. I would have to pay a $30 stop payment for each one. I withdrew all cash out of the account on the spot and closed the account. I did get refunded from the company after another month or two, luckily, that time.
In Paypals case, if they empty your bank account, it appears you are agreeing to forefit your right to even sue them in court if it is under $10,000. Here is an extract from the agreement.
Notice, "you OR Paypal may elect...". Notice, Paypal must agree to the arbitration method. If they know they are in the wrong, do you think they are going to choose methods that are in their favor? Perhaps through third parties they have behind the scenes agreements with that you will never find out about? Anybody who would trust them not to would have to be crazy with all the thousands of complaints.
Absolutely. That gives you at least some protection. However, they can still freeze funds in your Paypal account, as many of the horror stories indicate stopping all further transaction. In the case of an eBay seller, this can damage or destroy your reputation and business.
Even if you are not in a situation like that where you are vulnerable to such problems, I always promote not doing business with a company that is screwing people as a matter of principle. Don't reward them with your business. When a company is dirty, and/or does not give a damn about customer satisfaction, people need to boycott them and quit doing business with them just because it is convenient at the time.
Excuse the bluntness, but that is pure bull crap! Take a look at the thousands of horror stories in the Paypal Wall of Shame on http://paypalwarning.com/.
I would say that class actions lawsuits and thousands of horror stories are very legitimate reasons to be "uncomfortable" with dealing with a company. Unless you are an idiot.
As it says on the paypalwarning.com site:
Can PayPal hold my money with no explanation? The answer is YES.
Can PayPal freeze my account for no reason? The answer is YES.
Can PayPal take money out of my account without my knowledge?
The answer is YES.
We used to use Paypal to sell on eBay but after finding it impossible to to update our credit card and having no phone number to resolve problems, we started searching the net to see what kind of other problems people were having. When we found the Wall of Shame, we closed the account and closed the bank account it was linked to before we became one of the victims.
I wish more people would boycott companies that treat people so dirty and quit rewarding them just because it appears to be convenient today.
I looked at namecheap.com and it looked pretty interesting. However, I had two bad first impressions about them.
First, they are running their site on Microsoft Windows. That gives me questions about the intelligence of the company and security of your domain registrations. It is likely to have about as much security that Hotbot, running on MS Windows, did when they had thousands (or was it millions) of their email accounts compromised. We don't really want every virus that comes along to wipe out our domain resolution service. That essentially brings our site down, even if our web servers are running Unix and are not directly affected (unless we run all our own name servers and do not use any URL redirection provided by the registrar). We always use Unix based services for all Internet services. We generally prefer BSD based ones.
Second, I click on their contact link and see no phone number. Just email. I found this to be common with the really low priced registrars. The ones we have tried have always costed us a lot more in lost time and headache in the long run. As I mentioned on my other reply, I have found most registrars do not stand up to the service they promise. If you do not get adequate resolution to a problem via email (which has been the case about 70-80% of the time with us), having no phone number to call just leaves you out in the cold.
I also checked eNom.com. They are also running on Microsoft Windows. They, at least, have contact phone numbers but they are not toll free. From my experiences with other registrars, especially Network Solutions, leaving us on hold for 45 minutes to reach a human, that is also a deterrent. Notice that InetAddresses.net has a link to a toll free phone number for 24 hour technical support right on the front page.
Not just the lowest price, but the best price/performance/service ratio should win. I don't have experience with Godaddy, but am speaking from experience over the last 10 years of dealing with horrible service from domain registrars, with Network Solutions/VeriSign being the worst. There are a lot of registrars out there that appear cheaper at first but are not at all in the long run. See http://inetaddresses.net/about_us.html.
If you have customers who are choosing their own registrar (as they should) then transferring all the domains to one registrar is not an option.
First of all, any good registrar will notify their customers well in advance of domains expiring. If your customers are not getting notified, you should highly recommend they change registrars. If you really want to provide a monitoring service, then the script idea to monitor the whois database suggested by j-turkey is probably the best.
I never allow my ISP's to register my domains for me because most of them end up using Network Solutions, which turns out to be a nightmare. Read this story about how they conspired to steel a domain.
After years of getting bad/slow/inadequate service from variouis registrars I have tried, this is the best service for the price I have found.
http://inetaddresses.net
There are also links on the inetaddresses.net site to the story mentioned above plus other good information about registering domains and what to watch out for.
Of course not, but that's not the point. To use your scenario, If somebody has all the qualifications of a doctor, does the fact that they have been a dentist before make them a bad doctor? If you think so, then that is an example of the narrow mind set I mentioned that some companies have - that a person cannot learn and become good at more than one field.
No, not if they are not qualified as a doctor. But the point is that sys-admin experience can be, and usually is, a major asset to a programmer. To use your scenario again - If I had been shot in the jaw and needed a surgeon to reconstruct my jaw and teeth, then, if I had the choice, I would choose a doctor/surgeon who also has had all the training and experience of a dentist.
If everybody believed that nobody can learn more than one field, then once you expand your skills to a different field you could never get a job in any skilled field again because every company would think that since you have experience in another field you could not possibly be skilled enough in the field you are seeking the job in.It sounds like your skills and background are similar to mine. As long as you can show programming experience and skill, whether it is professionally or open software contributions, it is not too hard. However, some companies can be pretty limited in their mind set. A few years ago when I was moving from a sys-admin job to a development job NCAR in Boulder would not even interview me because they thought I had too much sys-admin experience to be a good programmer. they were apparently so limited in their thinking that they did not believe a person could know both fields.
One of my favorite kinds of jobs are the ones that are a cross between sys-admin and development. They require skill in all areas. Higher level sys-admin positions I have been in required a lot of perl, shell script, and even some C programming along with systems/network administration because they have involved developing disaster recovery systems, and writing lots of automation programs, to automate sys-admin, publishing of web pages, etc.
I have seen programmers so handicapped in their skills that they have to call the sys-admin for help just to set permissions on their files. Any company that is worth working for should consider sys-admin skill a plus. So keep looking and don't become discouraged if you encounter closed minded companies. You will be much happier in the long run being choosy about the type of job you accept.
It sounds like your skills and background are similar to mine. As long as you can show programming experience and skill, whether it is professionally or open software contributions, it is not too hard. However, some companies can be pretty limited in their mind set. A few years ago when I was moving from a sys-admin job to a development job NCAR in Boulder would not even interview me because they thought I had too much sys-admin experience to be a good programmer. they were apparently so limited in their thinking that they did not believe a person could know both fields.
One of my favorite kinds of jobs are the ones that are a cross between sys-admin and development. They require skill in all areas. Higher level sys-admin positions I have been in required a lot of perl, shell script, and even some C programming along with systems/network administration because they have involved developing disaster recovery systems, and writing lots of automation programs, to automate sys-admin, publishing of web pages, etc.
I have seen programmers so handicapped in their skills that they have to call the sys-admin for help just to set permissions on their files. Any company that is worth working for should consider sys-admin skill a plus. So keep looking and don't become discouraged if you encounter closed minded companies. You will be much happier in the long run being choosy about the type of job you accept.
I see a lot of sarcastic narrow minded responses to your posting, which are examples of exactly the way the telco's want us to think. That it is impossible. When it was 25 - 35 cents/minute 20 years ago (equivalent to at least 50 - 75 cents/minute by todays economy) and the telco's were laughing all the way to the bank with their government granted monopoly (ie. the 1934 telecom act), they had most people I encountered believing that the technology was such a miracle that it was a real bargain.
What you are proposing is far from impossible. The biggest technological barrier is the current lack of low latency routing hardware and protocols because you will be potentially routing your packets through a lot of hops before connecting to your destination or into a backbone. For example, if we had a wireless 1 mile grid of point to point nodes across the continental US, to achieve 100 ms routing times it would require that packets be resent from each hop within 33 micro-seconds of their reception based on 3000 hops. This would require that the packet be able to be re-sent at the same time as it is being received, just a few bytes apart (just enough for a routing header or maybe even an IP header). This is very possible to do but I have not yet seen any products quite that innovative. Don't count on the telco's designing them :-). Such a grid could easily be
done on an ad-hoc basis by the public installing repeaters/routers on
their private properties. Golly gee, the ham radio community managed
to pull their resources and launch their own satellites!
The large backbone providers will likely stay around, especially for over seas connections. Groups of people can combine resources for the expenses of connecting into the existing backbones, bringing the cost down to very little per person. In fact it can become nearly free as the wireless grid covers more and more territory because the bandwidth consumption of the backbone will drop.
The primary political/social reason it would not work is this:Because of the 62 years of the communist 1934 telecommunications act that restricted public wireless communications and propaganda from the telecoms about how expensive and impossible it is, the public is like the elephant that used to have a chain around it's leg. Once the act was finally overturned during the Clinton administration, the public is now like the same elephant only tied by a string that has been conditioned that it cannot break free.
If anybody is offended this, may the string fit.
Sorry, It looks like I forgot to post the home page for bu.
The bu home page is at
http://www.hightek.org/bu
Bu has served us well over the last several years. It is a
filesystem to filesystem backup tool that we normally use to
backup to an NFS server over the network, and it can back up
to multi-volume CDRW's. Although, the CDRW dump feature is
not finished for Linux yet, the rest of the features work on
both Linux and FreeBSD. It is designed for immediate
backups of individual files or directories throughout the
work day as well as full or incremental backups via cron.
It is very configurable, light weight, has include and
exclude lists, nice log files, good documentation, and is
free under the GNU public license.