"The point I am making is that PayPal have a moral responsibility to disclose to people starting an account if the account is likely to become suspended, it's obvious that an account with "relief fund" in the name is going to be stuffed full of cash in a relatively short timeframe, it's also obvious that you should ask for the same documentation at the establishment of the account that you are going to require to withdraw money from it."
When you open a PayPal account, you fill out a form on a webpage. No one looks at the name to figure out what it's used for. PayPal provides the option of providing additional information before you start doing business. PayPal is very laissez faire when it comes to their customers though until an issue crops up though.
PayPal essentially has two types of accounts -- personal and business. When you create either type of account, you aren't required to provide any significant amount of documentation. This is mainly because PayPal assumes (rightly so) that lots of people will create accounts for 'business' and not everyone is actually going to seriously do business. Once the account is created, on the main overview page there is typically a link that says 'Recommended Steps for Merchants'. The price for not going through these steps is that you might run into problems later when PayPal wants to know a little bit more about who is receiving thousands of dollars.
180 days is the maximum period in which a chargeback may occur. PayPal reasonably concludes that if none of your customers has tried to take the money back in that time period than it should be safe to forward those funds to you.
They do actually have to comply with anti money laundering laws and they are required to attempt to prevent their 'Money Transmitter' service from being used to aide and abet criminal activity.
To make things clear, the types of accounts that is:
A) New accounts
B) Unable to provide documents
C) Receiving many funds from many separate individuals
Even if the person who set up the account requested the wrong type, PayPal should have either not set the account up in that way without the proper documentation, or outline the ramifications of not being able to produce said documentation when the money is withdrawn. I think it's obvious that they didn't do either of those things from the reaction of the site, and the "ho-hum should've known better" reaction of a lot of users here.
I say this as a former PayPal employee, so here goes....
1. The issue of lack of documentation would not have been an issue with setting up the account per se. PayPal will typically be very happy to let you do this and not be concerned about anything.
2. Sudden amounts of high volume transactions in (i) new accounts or (ii) accounts that previously had insignificant transactions volumes are one of the most common patterns for actual attempted fraud. Any account that meets these criteria will immediately get flagged and the funds will be held, period. Part of this is related to making sure that PayPal doesn't lose money on the deal and part of this is in order to comply with anti money laundering laws. Asking for PayPal to tell you this up front would be like asking the police to tell you that if you run around with a gun and generally behave like you're going to shoot someone that they will arrest you.
Now, once PayPal is given good cause to think that you might be up to something fishy, they will then ask you to demonstrate that you are not up to something fishy. This is where the documentation comes in. They are significantly less concerned on this point if you don't behave in a fashion that makes them feel like you're up to no good.
I work for a Crown corporation here in Canada (something halfway between a legal monopoly and a government ministry), and I would _love_ if Those Above would make edicts like this. Frankly, my direct superiors are _not_ capable of making good decisions. And they're the ones purchasing the software. No word of a joke, but just recently my boss signed a cheque for some $600,000 to license some software that was terribly buggy and unreliable. It was a trivial piece of code, too - it could have been developed in-house by one of our talented programmers for about $15k. And we'd have had the source and a pool of people who were already quite familiar with it. The rollout for the software that was actually bought will take six months and cost another $140,000. The in-house solution could be rolled out in two or three months (and that's including development time) for a similar cost. Why did my boss decide this? Fucked if I know. His reasoning is gibberish. All the vendors were taking him out to really nice retreats, so I bet no matter what we'd have gone with an out-sourced solution (nobody in-house is going to drop $8k to send him to a spa^Wworkshop for a weekend), but I don't think this guy chose the worst vendor 'cause they spent the most money, I think they were just able to swindle him the best.
While I agree that spending ridiculous amounts of money on a closed-source solution from some random company is a bad idea (having dealt with much the same behavior in government), I would have to say that rolling their own product internally is probably a bad idea too. One of the age old problems that the Canadian government has with IT is just that, with the result being some half-assed solution that only works (poorly) in the sandbox that they have created. Rolling your own product should be a last resort -- at worst case, they should take something pre-existing and enhance it to cover their needs.
There are also relative degrees of this, however.
The logic that SCO appears to be following is that once infringement commences, it cannot cease, despite any efforts to the contrary. While past acts cannot be revoked and legal responsability remains, they are making it impossible to prevent future infringement.
To follow similar logic, say you're photocopying a book, and the book's author tells you to stop -- if you do, then the author can't acrue more damages past that point. SCO would prefer to believe the contrary, it appears.
Re:He does raise some good points, then again...
on
The Next Path for Joy
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· Score: 1
This problem is NOT fixed to any programming language. ANY large project will have problems with maintanance unless it is held together with a good project management package.
The largeness/complexity of a project can be mitigated to a large extent by using tools that are designed to perform the tasks at hand requiring less verbose expression (eg: using RAD tools such as Glade) to develop user interfaces instead of writing C code for them by hand. So, in that sense, the tools make a big difference.
C does have its uses, developing huge applications is not one of the ones that it is well suited to, however.
Slashdot Mirror
"The point I am making is that PayPal have a moral responsibility to disclose to people starting an account if the account is likely to become suspended, it's obvious that an account with "relief fund" in the name is going to be stuffed full of cash in a relatively short timeframe, it's also obvious that you should ask for the same documentation at the establishment of the account that you are going to require to withdraw money from it."
When you open a PayPal account, you fill out a form on a webpage. No one looks at the name to figure out what it's used for. PayPal provides the option of providing additional information before you start doing business. PayPal is very laissez faire when it comes to their customers though until an issue crops up though.
PayPal essentially has two types of accounts -- personal and business. When you create either type of account, you aren't required to provide any significant amount of documentation. This is mainly because PayPal assumes (rightly so) that lots of people will create accounts for 'business' and not everyone is actually going to seriously do business. Once the account is created, on the main overview page there is typically a link that says 'Recommended Steps for Merchants'. The price for not going through these steps is that you might run into problems later when PayPal wants to know a little bit more about who is receiving thousands of dollars.
180 days is the maximum period in which a chargeback may occur. PayPal reasonably concludes that if none of your customers has tried to take the money back in that time period than it should be safe to forward those funds to you.
They do actually have to comply with anti money laundering laws and they are required to attempt to prevent their 'Money Transmitter' service from being used to aide and abet criminal activity.
A) New accounts
B) Unable to provide documents
C) Receiving many funds from many separate individuals
Even if the person who set up the account requested the wrong type, PayPal should have either not set the account up in that way without the proper documentation, or outline the ramifications of not being able to produce said documentation when the money is withdrawn. I think it's obvious that they didn't do either of those things from the reaction of the site, and the "ho-hum should've known better" reaction of a lot of users here.
I say this as a former PayPal employee, so here goes....
1. The issue of lack of documentation would not have been an issue with setting up the account per se. PayPal will typically be very happy to let you do this and not be concerned about anything.
2. Sudden amounts of high volume transactions in (i) new accounts or (ii) accounts that previously had insignificant transactions volumes are one of the most common patterns for actual attempted fraud. Any account that meets these criteria will immediately get flagged and the funds will be held, period. Part of this is related to making sure that PayPal doesn't lose money on the deal and part of this is in order to comply with anti money laundering laws. Asking for PayPal to tell you this up front would be like asking the police to tell you that if you run around with a gun and generally behave like you're going to shoot someone that they will arrest you.
Now, once PayPal is given good cause to think that you might be up to something fishy, they will then ask you to demonstrate that you are not up to something fishy. This is where the documentation comes in. They are significantly less concerned on this point if you don't behave in a fashion that makes them feel like you're up to no good.
While I agree that spending ridiculous amounts of money on a closed-source solution from some random company is a bad idea (having dealt with much the same behavior in government), I would have to say that rolling their own product internally is probably a bad idea too. One of the age old problems that the Canadian government has with IT is just that, with the result being some half-assed solution that only works (poorly) in the sandbox that they have created. Rolling your own product should be a last resort -- at worst case, they should take something pre-existing and enhance it to cover their needs.
There are also relative degrees of this, however. The logic that SCO appears to be following is that once infringement commences, it cannot cease, despite any efforts to the contrary. While past acts cannot be revoked and legal responsability remains, they are making it impossible to prevent future infringement. To follow similar logic, say you're photocopying a book, and the book's author tells you to stop -- if you do, then the author can't acrue more damages past that point. SCO would prefer to believe the contrary, it appears.
This problem is NOT fixed to any programming language. ANY large project will have problems with maintanance unless it is held together with a good project management package.
The largeness/complexity of a project can be mitigated to a large extent by using tools that are designed to perform the tasks at hand requiring less verbose expression (eg: using RAD tools such as Glade) to develop user interfaces instead of writing C code for them by hand. So, in that sense, the tools make a big difference.
C does have its uses, developing huge applications is not one of the ones that it is well suited to, however.