Life as a Second Class Citizen of the Web • Hacker News Board

Re: Life as a Second Class Citizen of the Web

#101

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 12:16 PM UTC

Hoff wrote: post #84

BoppreH wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works well for normal people. And these options can be configured from the "under the hood" preferences tab.

Normal? With languages? Normal is an ATM that doesn't know to look on my card or at my account data for my language. At my own bank. Ok, so maybe prompt for that and set that once. But then prompting me every single time I use that same card in the bank's own ATMs? Duh. Normal is an IP-based language selection that fails for non-native speakers, or for regions where the populations where there are multiple languages.…

The complexities in designing fully language agnostic software are non-trivial and easily underestimated.

I once had an offer from a large hardware manufacturer to bundle some software with a hardware device they made, the deal fell through when I realized the cost of making the software work in all the languages they supported and providing tech support in all those languages would have to be born by us. There simply was no way we could afford it.

Another problem is that there is no really good guide (there certainly wasn't at the time, but even today this is sorely lacking) on how to make your software truly multi-lingual in a way that leaves absolutely no loose ends.

Even frameworks that are supposedly multi-lingual typically have lots of shortcomings and only work well in the language of the original developers, and maybe one or two others.

Try throwing right-to-left fonts at them, the installer is available in only one language (even if the software is multi-lingual), fonts will be missing and so on.

Re: Life as a Second Class Citizen of the Web

#102

Post by seunosewa » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 12:28 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #56

microarchitect wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said 'internet population', not population. Do you realise that 70% of the country is below the poverty line? It seems like I'm missing something, so I have a question for those who upvoted this comment. Do you all seriously think that the OP should set up an "african paypal" just because the real paypal is broken for him?

An African paypal that is open to those countries that were locked out due to excessive fraud would have an even harder time to stay alive than paypal already has. After all their fraudulent:legit ratio would be a lot worse than paypals'.

I believe we can crack it, but regulations are a worry.

Re: Life as a Second Class Citizen of the Web

#103

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 12:32 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #91

quanticle wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try explaining that perspective to your spouse after you lose money in a 419 scam. "But honey, I didn't know that this Nigerian was a con-artist. I had to give him a chance!"

You know, this is exactly the same reasoning (prejudice on the basis of generalizing a correlation between a behaviour and a shared attribute) as exhibited by racists. In the same way as it is not fair to discriminate against black people on the basis of a higher relative proportion of criminal convictions, it is similarly not fair to discriminate on the basis of someone being a Nigerian in Nigeria on the basis of 41…

> That's not to say it may not be effective, on average, in limiting losses. But effectiveness is something distinct from fairness.

As long as businesses will be required to eat the losses caused by attempts to be 'fair' I predict this situation will continue.

Re: Life as a Second Class Citizen of the Web

#104

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 12:33 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #57

markessien wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not doing a statistical determination. There is no algorithm behind it that indicates when a country is safe to do business with. They have just switched off Nigeria. There is no appeal. There is no review.

Are you disputing the claim that P(scam | from nigeria) >> P(scam | not from nigeria)? Keep in mind, a scam rate of even 1% would put Paypal Nigeria way into the red. Obviously, a "which country to do business in" decision is not done by algorithm. That doesn't mean Paypal isn't using objective metrics to make that decision.

And for those charges not covered with paypal protection (for whatever that is worth) either a merchant or a foreign buyer would be at a loss.

Re: Life as a Second Class Citizen of the Web

#105

Post by kazey » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 3:18 AM UTC

I believe if anybody feels Nigerians deserve a chance, they should start an online payment insurance company, to cover for the risk exposure :), so the likes of paypal etc can buy the insurance and everybody is happy.

You can then develop an API (that does the verifications and flags orders)etc for merchants to use together with the payment gateways to be covered by the policy.