If you dominate a market, a serious ethical duty devolves upon you to do right by your customers, but Paypal, Visa, and MC, on which donation-supported non-profit orgs like Wikileaks almost entirely depend, have utterly failed to fulfill that duty; in fact they didn't even try. Their actions, arbitrary or spineless, have almost completely choked off funding for Wikileaks. I never imagined ending up saying this, but I'm impressed and grateful that there exists an international, anonymous horde able to begin the process of making companies like this at least minimally answerable for their actions, which no one else seems capable or desirous of doing.
Paypal.com appears to be unavailable
31–40 of 128 posts
Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable
#32[deleted]
Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable
#33To be perfectly honest, the actions of the 'anonymous' are pretty disgusting and it's bullying. A company provides a useful service to the majority of the on-line world and, just because they do something to protect themselves and their identity (there's a lot of people who dislike wikileaks) then this 'collective' decide to disrupt the whole company. Bullying was pathetic in high school and is so much worse in the '…
You don't think that Paypal is also a bully as well? Closing people's accounts (not just Wikileaks) when they see fit, having no real recourse to try and get your money once that's happened etc. Paypal have a reputation for being a bunch of thieves. I can't say I feel bad for them. I've never been burned by them, I'm just going from the amount of people here that post a regular "Paypal froze my account" story.
I'm not saying they aren't but when has the tactic against a bully being to bully them? Regardless of what you think about Paypal themselves, there are an awful lot of people that rely on the service they provide that can now no longer use that service due to the tactics of Anonymous.
Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable
#34Paypal is notorious to freeze accounts as they like, and bully people around. They can do this because they know they are big. Now they are starting to force their own political agendas on the world population as well. I've quit my account with them because I want this world to be a better place to live in, than being controlled by a bully who harass people.
Great. How do I close account with Anon, because I don't want them to infringe on my ability to make payments?
All you have to do is combine your request with an image of a headless suit or Guy Fawkes mask and upload it to /b/ every hour or so. Anonymous will get right on it.
Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable
#35I suspect we are going to see two major changes over the next few weeks as a direct result of the "cyber-attacks" going on recently. 1. Financial services will re-evaluate the risks of this kind of attack vs. the cost of assigning more resources to guard against it. 2. Governments will finally start taking IT security seriously. The latter is the more interesting, because while banks are generally reasonably clued up…
Governments take IT security very seriously, I don't see where you've seen they don't. The problem is that you just can't secure a whole infrastructure overnight and that security is very hard.
He doesn't mean governments' IT security (which is so-so overall), but the Internet as a whole.
And he's right the stuff that will come out of it probably will not be very encouraging.
Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable
#36I suspect we are going to see two major changes over the next few weeks as a direct result of the "cyber-attacks" going on recently. 1. Financial services will re-evaluate the risks of this kind of attack vs. the cost of assigning more resources to guard against it. 2. Governments will finally start taking IT security seriously. The latter is the more interesting, because while banks are generally reasonably clued up…
Governments take IT security very seriously, I don't see where you've seen they don't. The problem is that you just can't secure a whole infrastructure overnight and that security is very hard.
I would like to clarify on this issue a bit.
1. Declaratively the governments are indeed taking IT security seriously. Thus many guidelines, laws and other formal documents regarding IT security have been accepted. Unfortunately many of these are internally inconsistent or in conflict with others. The net result is that in the name of "security" the governmental IT systems are unnecessarily complicated and expensive.
2. In practice - prescribed security measures are mostly not enforced due to many reasons (eg.: The measures are so strict and rigid that enforcing them would prohibit various legitimate users from actually doing their work; The people in charge of implementation and administration of these systems are plain incompetent and/or disinterested).
3. Securing everything that is currently deemed necessary to the extent prescribed by relevant law will turn out to be prohibitively expensive due to various logistic problems (who will implement necessary auditing systems for legacy systems that nobody udnerstands and there are no funds to replace, where will you store all the auditing information, where will you get competent engineers that actually understand the infrastructure and are willing to work proactively to secure them - for a laughable wage?,...).
So - as a matter of fact - I have to state that governments don't really take IT security seriously. They don't understand the issues and they don't even care. They care for scapegoats and thats it.
Disclaimer: Most of my work is on government related IT projects/systems.
Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable
#37I wonder if Amazon is next?
Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable
#38What I like most, is that all people click on the link although it says "It's unavailable". Wondering if this has an additional effect on the availability.
Perhaps that's the reason why it's unavailable. ;)
Maybe that's the DDOS in action .. post news to as many high traffic news sites as possible (/., reddit, hn, etc) that paypal is down with a direct link to paypal in the title and bingo.
Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable
#39Shutting down the Visa and Mastercard probably didn't change too much, but this for sure will. Think of how much eBay is dependent on PayPal for purchases. This should be an interesting outcome! Even if people don't feel it's morally right, I'm still very impressed by the current "cyber wars" going on. Either way, I don't lose anything. I guess I'm just one of those people that likes to watch the world burn...
You're lucky you don't depend on Paypal for your income like hundreds of thousands of eBayers and people with few other choices (e.g. non US sellers). On the other hand, this will all blow over within days.
Re: Paypal.com appears to be unavailable
#40Payments API is still working.