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PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

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Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#91

Post by twayback »

EvilTerran wrote: post #33
twayback wrote: post #18

This is a fraud website which has mercilessly ripped off content from other sites and published as its own. Also it has published a ton of proprietary information from time to time. Good riddance!

Do you have any citations for these claims? Not calling you a liar or anything - I'm just not at all familiar with the site in question, and it seems like it'd be important evidence if we want to fairly judge paypal's behavior here.

Here is one: http://attrition.org/errata/plagiarism/thehackernews/ search for others

Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#93

Post by twayback »

febin wrote: post #20

Paypal has done this multiple times, here are some incidents. https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/My-Account/Permanent-BAN... https://medium.com/@puntofisso/paypal-closed-my-account-with... https://www.elliott.org/blog/banned-from-palpal-account-limi... https://www.success.grownupgeek.com/index.php/2008/04/05/pay... Completely relying on any third party is a bad idea. We should consider the risks when we signup to an…

This site was banned probably due to copyright violations: http://attrition.org/errata/plagiarism/thehackernews/

Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#94

Post by hirundo »

outoftheabyss wrote: post #83
hirundo wrote: post #60

From the follow-up tweet: > Instead of giving a valid reason, company says "specific reasons for such a decision is proprietary & it is not released since that could impair PayPal's ability to do business in a safe and secure manner" I've been trying to close my PayPal account for the last week and will keep trying, but so far have not been able to. I've had this account since 2000. I want to close it because of the…

I'm with you. The problem is, PayPal weren't the only payment processors to bail on Substar, if we want to purchase online which popular/accessible processors are not engaging in similar? Genuine question

I'd like an answer to that too. If one emerges I'm inclined to support it. Hopefully there are enough people like us to make that profitable.

Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#95

Post by ColinWright »

isoskeles wrote: post #85
qeternity wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They also reportedly shutdown Subscribe Star recently, when people started to use it instead of Patreon, in the wake of the Patreon banning of some prominent You Tuber. This isn't working. The free market doesn't seem to work well in the tech world, where we have all powerfull monopolies controlling what we say, what we know and what we buy. We need new laws. This is not what a "free market" means. Paypal is not re…

Why quote the entire comment you’re replying to?

isoskeles> Why quote the entire comment you’re replying to?

Not the person of whom you're asking, but I sometimes quote substantial parts of text to which I'm replying for three basic reasons.

The first is that in a large thread if can sometimes be difficult to find the original. In that case it's useful to have the comment there, not least because if you want to see the original you have the exact text to search for.

The second is that in some other forums it's the usual behaviour, and when it's a habit, and regarded as a "Good Thing"(tm) in other forums, that behaviour can carry over. I find it a natural thing to do, and sometimes have to think twice to stop myself from doing it.

And thirdly, in the past I've seen replies that genuinely don't seem to make sense, only to discover subsequently that the original text was edited. I fully appreciate that on HN the unethical editing of text to make replies look stupid is not "A Thing"(tm) but it does make the habit a useful one.

Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#96

Post by campuscodi »

EvilTerran wrote: post #33
twayback wrote: post #18

This is a fraud website which has mercilessly ripped off content from other sites and published as its own. Also it has published a ton of proprietary information from time to time. Good riddance!

Do you have any citations for these claims? Not calling you a liar or anything - I'm just not at all familiar with the site in question, and it seems like it'd be important evidence if we want to fairly judge paypal's behavior here.

http://attrition.org/errata/plagiarism/thehackernews/

If you don't believe that, than take my word. I'm an infosec reporter and had countless articles end up on that site. News sites often report on the same topics all the time, but there's a difference between running a story on the same topic and copying the text and replacing some verbs and nouns with a synonym, and then switching sentence order to pass it as your own. Every reporter has his own way of structuring a story. It's pretty obvious for us when someone steals an article, based on how you present information points and which information points from a —let's say 50-page academic paper— you decide to present. Many times, information I obtained during private email or phone conversations would also end up on their site. When I confronted the "CEO" (aka site owner) he said he found that information using Google (obvious lie) and replied with insults. They kinda stopped copying my articles after I called them out a few more times on Twitter, but I don't believe for a second they're now doing actual news reporting.

I have other reporter friends who'd tell you similar stories and interactions with their staff. At one point someone tried to organize a campaign where all reporters would call out The Hacker News and Security Affairs (another site engaging in plagiarism) on Twitter, and urge security researchers to stop sharing links to their sites, but that didn't materialize because some of the bigger names in infosec journalism didn't wanna participate. In hindsight, it was kinda silly (childish would be a better word), but this only shows how many news sites TheHackerNews has angered in the past few years. They're absolutely despised by most infosec news reporters and I know at least two people who are now opening a beer in celebration.

Recently, the site started declining on its own. Reporting has been awful, with tons of inaccuracies that now I don't even bother checking it in RSS feeds: https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/902600568262107136

Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#97

Post by justtopost »

michaelt wrote: post #69
indigochill wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on this line of reasoning a bit? Specifically, what's stopping a competitor from eating Paypal's lunch right now? They have a majority market share now, but disruption still seems a possibility. Often it seems would-be disruptors get bought by the goliaths, but that's on the owners of the disruptors making their company purchasable such as through accepting investor money. On the flip side, if we did g…

Specifically, what's stopping a competitor from eating Paypal's lunch right now? Perhaps being a payment processor is actually difficult, and Paypal is doing a tolerably good job? I only hear people bitching about their paypal account being locked once or twice a year, whereas I assume paypal deal with hundreds of attempts at credit card fraud, chargebacks, complaints about ebay goods and suchlike every day.

Oh, they deal with it. But always on terms favorible to them. I sold off inventory to my old CoLo and they froze all my funds for 6 months until lawyers got called, and somehow their fraud investigation magically vanished. They are no better than mafia.

Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#98

Post by TomVDB »

vishnu_ks wrote: post #64
sokoloff wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This name confusion seems intentional and makes me default to unsympathetic, even though I suspect PayPal’s issue is not related to a name confusion root cause.

Even though the website seems to have a history of plagiarism I don't think they named the website after HN. By going through their about us section it looks like they started the website in 2010 as a cybersecurity and hacking news platform. The Hacker News is kind of a no-brainer name for this kind of website. Also THN seems to be an Indian website. I think HN was not at all popular outside the Silicon Valley in 201…

The name clash is less problematic than the alleged history of plagiarism.

Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#99

Post by ddingus »

softwaredoug wrote: post #79
exogeny wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The percentage of links to your blog that you post in your comments is extremely high and extremely notable. Make of that what you will.

I don’t have a problem to people linking to their blogs as long as it’s relevant and helpful to the conversation.

I do not either. The alternatives are:

Do not make us aware

Copy paste, and someone will likely say [citation needed]

Paraphrase

Etc...

Where relevancy is high, links make sense.

Re: PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days

#100

Post by gomox »

wccrawford wrote: post #53
itchyjunk wrote: post #32

Regardless of weather the `THN` name is confusing or not and regardless of the speculations, does paypal need to give a reason for termination? Are they legally obligated? Is it something they should do for the sake of customers? Should one get mad at `THN` because there name overlaps HN and they supposedly are `real hack` or should we be mad at paypal because it's overreaching it's powers?

When PayPal bans a site it's always for breaking their TOS. Sometimes the specific parts of that TOS are bullshit, but most of the time it turns out that it was a pretty flagrant violation of those terms. I don't feel sorry for anyone who still uses PayPal to collect money for a use that has been specifically banned in their TOS, and anything that even starts to encroach on illegal matters falls into that. Informatio…

That is quite simply wrong. I have been on the receiving end of this problem, and there is zero transparency about the reasons behind banning, zero warning or recourse, and of course the good old 180 day locking of funds which can kill any e-commerce platform that runs on anything other than absurdly high margins.

The company in question moved to Stripe where it operates to this day.

PayPal is just a very large, shady as fuck company. Im hoping cryptocurrency matures to a point where they are not needed.

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