DigitalOcean: Introducing Our London Region • Hacker News Board

Re: DigitalOcean: Introducing Our London Region

#61

Post by fendale » Tue, Jul 15, 2014, 7:23 PM UTC

gabemart wrote: post #55

bryanlarsen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression was that the banks made a lot more money from the spread than they did from the commission, so I kind of find that surprising. In Canada it's easy to find commission-free cards. The spread is a hidden fee though, so the banks have hiked that up several times.

The commission-free withdrawals abroad were offered at the wholesale VISA rate. Nationwide didn't take any vig. Their "Select credit card" still offers EUR and USD purchases with no surcharge and no vig.

I'm pretty sure the Halifax card I mentioned gives the Visa wholesale rate too. I generally get same rate as quoted on FX sites anytime I've checked it.

Re: DigitalOcean: Introducing Our London Region

#62

Post by anthonys » Wed, Jul 16, 2014, 12:55 AM UTC

raiyu wrote: post #32

benbristow wrote: post #31

"We will need you to send us a high quality scan of a government ID or passport in order to verify your account. Please send the picture, or a link of the picture, to:" No thanks.

Unfortunately we deal with a large amount of abusive and fraudulent signups which leads to a bunch of abuse on the network such as mining, port scanning, and flooding. We do everything we can to filter out abuse automatically and then determine whether or not a customer is legitimate outside of that but unfortunately that information isn't always available or conclusive. We'd love to hear suggestion on how we can imp…

If capturing an ID is important, I'd suggest a solution like jumio.com which when integrated, is pretty seamless.

Re: DigitalOcean: Introducing Our London Region

#63

Post by deftnerd » Wed, Jul 16, 2014, 6:08 AM UTC

raiyu wrote: post #60

toomuchtodo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does a prepaid card name verification occur during an auth? Also, does Digital Ocean disallow prepaid cards from being used to pay for service? Their pricing/billing page indicates they'll accept these cards if the payment is made through Paypal, which will shield them from payment fraud, but not if the card is prepaid but the users actions on the instance are malicious. https://www.digitalocean.com/help/pricing-and-…

Here you see the complexity of the process in that anything that is added or used can be circumvented, including IDs and so forth. In regards to pre-paid and debit cards we saw a very high incidence of abuse related to those cards specifically so we've had to put certain restrictions on them as well. We're going to look for other layered approaches that can be created programmatically to increase the authenticity of…

I've founded a startup that might be able to provide some help in this space. It's basically a mix of being an OpenID Connect provider that does authenticity checks on any information that users provide and makes the results of those verifications available to third-party-sites, all while protecting the actual information itself.

The first market we were planning on targeting was for Bitcoin related services that require KYC verification, but we also are planning on targeting any other services that need to know that their users are not bots and that if they ban a user they stay banned.

We just got some Series A funding and we're doing a crowdfunding from people who want to operate their own Identity Registrar. We should be launching our basic services in a month, and the franchise partners that are planning to participate will be able to do so in about two months.

If your problem can wait until summer is over, we'll be able to have a solution that would be free so anyone with a BlockAuth account can log in with a standards-compliant OpenID login form and you can be assured that they've been verified as being a real and unique person and all of the details they've submitted have been put under a microscope.

Re: DigitalOcean: Introducing Our London Region

#64

Post by mtmail » Thu, Jul 17, 2014, 3:06 AM UTC

vdaniuk wrote: post #43

raiyu wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately we deal with a large amount of abusive and fraudulent signups which leads to a bunch of abuse on the network such as mining, port scanning, and flooding. We do everything we can to filter out abuse automatically and then determine whether or not a customer is legitimate outside of that but unfortunately that information isn't always available or conclusive. We'd love to hear suggestion on how we can imp…

I am a current DigitalOcean client and I was recommending DO to my friends and professional contacts. New policy of requiring scanned documents is unacceptable in the environment of pervasive nation-state level monitoring and destruction of privacy. If this is a permanent change, I won't recommend DO any longer. The solution is extremely simple: accept bitcoins for payments and/or fair use verification for free tiers…

Same here. DigitalOcean can't verify if a document is real (vs photoshopped) so the requirement might as well be sending a letter head. I'm glad I got access to all levels of VMs early by asking nice (for legitimate adhoc large data processing that required lots of RAM).