If you believe in this, I’d like to enroll you to help me out. I’d like you to keep accepting PayPal for payments, and now that you have a direct channel with me, give me feedback so I can get it directly from the outside.For a while, it seemed like every other day that a Paypal crisis went viral — a sign of a terrible company, right? Yeah. Well, maybe the new CEO, David Marcus, is different.
If the entire moon was made of heroin, it would still be unprofitable.SpaceX Employee Steve Davis • At the libertarian Atlas Summit, discussing the main problem his company, like all other rocket companies, faces — cosmically high transportation costs. SpaceX, run by Paypal and Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk, is attempting to create cost-effective rockets that can be used on more than one flight. The company is already the first private rocket company to ferry cargo the the International Space Station, and seeks to make mankind “multi-planetary.” The most important question: Can I pay for my rocket through Paypal, or will you force us to use Square, Elon? source (via • follow)
» Trayvon’s lawyer wants his bond revoked: A few weeks back, when George Zimmerman was having lawyer trouble, he put up a Web site asking publicly for donations, complete with a PayPal link. People donated in the hundreds of dollars to Zimmerman’s legal fund. According to his lawyer, Mark O’Mara, Zimmerman didn’t inform him of the donations until this week, and they’re now under his authority. That said, Zimmerman will most assuredly need the funds — O’Mara’s normal rate is $400 per hour, and he’s already worked 100 hours on the case. Do the math on that one, guys. This morning, the judge in the case asked to learn more information on how this happened, while the lawyers for Trayvon’s family say that during the bond hearing, Zimmerman and his lawyer acted as though “that they did not have any money.” Lots of drama here.
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» Bad policy, lazy practice? An eBay seller named Erica recently complained, in a letter to Regretsy, that her attempted sale of an antique violin ended with the violin smashed to pieces, apparently at the direct instruction of PayPal. The buyer had disputed the violin’s label, which Erica claims is common and matters little in the world of violins, and that it was ”examined and authenticated” before being sold. That aside, PayPal declared the violin “counterfeit” and instructed the buyer to destroy it to receive his money back, which the buyer did. Meaning Erica came away with nothing: “…my main goal in writing to you is to prevent PayPal from ordering the destruction of violins and other antiquities that they know nothing about. It is beyond me why PayPal simply didn’t have the violin returned to me.”
It does look like some of these guys (hackers) were just fools. The PayPal attack in particular. It looks like these bozos must have just said ‘Cool, an attack on PayPal. You can use my machine.’ I think it makes it a lot less likely that that people will join the next digital lynch mob.Former Homeland Security official Stewart Baker • Discussing the nature of the 14 people arrested yesterday in connection with a wide-scale attack on PayPal and other services late last year — a form of retribution, reportedly coordinated by Anonymous for PayPal taking away Wikileaks’ main source of funding. A couple other folks were arrested, too, in a series of raids that represent the largest law-enforcement response to the spate of large-scale hackings that have cropped up since late last year. But if Baker is right, they may not have gotten anyone of note — but a bunch of dudes who fed into the mob mentality. source (via • follow)
We have an acceptable use policy and their job is make sure that our customers are protected, making sure that we comply with regulations around the world and making sure that we protect our brand.PayPal’s VP of Platform Osama Bedier • Explaining why his company chose to block Wikileaks. Simply put, they read the State Department’s letter to Wikileaks saying what they were doing was illegal, they decided to block the site on those grounds. Bedier also noted that he isn’t fazed by threats of an Anonymous DDoS attack: “One of the signs that you’re a successful payments company is that hackers start to target you,” he saild. “This case isn’t anything different.” This topic was unpopular with the European conference he was talking to, BTW. It’s also important to note that a letter from the State Department is not a legal decision. source (via • follow)
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Someone was gonna call them out for this at some point, and it might as well be WePay, a competitor which focuses on setting up group payments (rather than PayPal’s person-to-person payments). They put this giant block of ice outside of a PayPal developer conference in San Francisco earlier today. Publicity stunt? Sure. But PayPal has only been freezing accounts without cause for years, and what a way to call them out on it. source
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