PayPal Restores Seafile's Account after File-Monitoring Row | Hacker News Reader

PayPal Restores Seafile's Account after File-Monitoring Row

fortune.com

136 pointsTimWolla82 comments

I still don't understand how anyone does business with Paypal. Their abuses and shitty business practices like this just continue, and will only continue to get more abhorrent. This is yet another tissue paper apology issued after the fact it's already cost someone business, and only offered after it made more bad press for Paypal.

There are alternatives now. You don't have to keep doing business with these colossal assholes.

Many people who won't give you their credit card number will pay you via PayPal, because PayPal is perceived to have more consumer protection. (They maintain that perception by having a massive bias towards consumers at the expense of merchants.) Some people who don't have credit cards use PayPal.

I do it, because I feel paypal is safer than totallynotgonnagiveyourcardtochina.randomsite.com

That may not actually be safer, but it feels like it. Though, I would be OK using most of the alternative payment services in this case.

Paypal follows the sane system of having the payer tell them who and how much to pay, instead of CC's process where the seller tells them "it's cool, the buyer totally wanted me to have $X" and the payment processor simply complies.

/rant

(Yes, 3-D secure exists, but as a user it's impossible to verify that the site is actually using it before handing over the CC info)

Well, Paypal gives the impression to buyers that they're the ones telling Paypal how much to pay anyway. If I recall correctly the amount displayed on the Paypal payment page is for information only and the API leaves it up to the seller how much to actually charge, and in some cases this may change (for example, because the site can't calculate shipping fees until Paypal gives them the buyer's address).

Agreed; this and actual cryptographic signatures should be a requirement to process any payment.

I'd like that for a bill pay system, too. Right now, I have to choose between systems with direct bank account access that can debit any amount, or systems that require manual entry of amounts. I'd like to see a standard where the source of a bill sends an invoice to my bank, and I then direct the bank to pay it (either via direct authorization, or by setting parameters like "automatically pay if less than $X").

What pains me is that the committee that created the new SEPA Direct Debit standard had the choice (the two processes were used in different EU countries) and they chose the dumb one!

We actually had a sane direct debit system here in Portugal, in which the invoice would come with a code that you could input into your bank's site or ATM, therefore authorizing future debits from that company. It was safe, it could be easily revoked, and we lost it to implement SEPA's crappy version.

3-D secure trains people to be phished.

And it shifts liability to the customer: given a "3-D Secure" authorization, the credit card company presumes an authorized transaction and makes it much harder to claim fraud.

I'm a college student, and I don't have a credit card. I do all my online spending via PayPal, which I top up from my bank account.

> They maintain that perception by having a massive bias towards consumers at the expense of merchants.

So you mean they maintain that "perception" by actually doing it. Their business practices are shitty, and they treat merchants terribly, but it's true that as a consumer, it's really easy (maybe too easy) refund and cancel payments with it.

I said "perceived" not because PayPal doesn't protect consumers, but because credit cards do just as well.

Hate them. They've burned charitable events, humanitarian fundraisers. It'll take a while for their momentum to die down, but I pray they disappear eventually.

> I still don't understand how anyone does business with Paypal.

I run a business which takes PayPal and there's one reason we take PayPal: Everyone has it and everyone expects it.

I'm speaking solely from annecdata here, but in my experience at least, if you don't have PayPal, you're probably giving up a huge potential amount of revenue even if you take CCs via another means.

PayPal makes buyers feel very much in control, if you're doing recurring payments, there's a cancel button, it's easy to challenge a seller and win and they take so many different methods including CCs, bank accounts, "instant bank transfer" (where they'll do bank transfer but fall back to CC, allowing your transaction to go through instantly which many people love). As a buyer, PayPal is very good. If you don't compromise and meet your buyers, selling is a lot harder. Unless someone can make buyers move, there's not much recourse a seller can take.

^ Same, and that's the exact reason. I don't trust them at all though, as soon as I get payment for any work performed it's out preferably via debit card or EFT if it's over the limit. PayPal balance is never over $20 if I can help it.

Necessary evil.

As a buyer, I consider credit cards the greater of the two evils. Because I don't use credit, I can't get credit large enough for the purchases I wish to make above my debit limit, and so I continue to not use credit. So I use Paypal because they offer bank transfers with a limit higher than my debit card, and don't require me to buy into the ridiculous credit game we've got going on.

From my point of view, regardless of my disdain for Paypal as an organization, if you don't accept them and I'm buying something worth more than a thousand dollars, I have no way to give you my money. It's remarkably difficult to pay for large transactions with cash without using Paypal.

Direct bank transfers and a debit card with a high/no limit are other options. I have both. Of course, that doesn't mean you have either easily available to you.

> It's remarkably difficult to pay for large transactions with cash without using Paypal.

When I've done that in the past, I called the bank to have my debit payment limit raised for a short time. It took about 10 minutes, but I don't make >$1000 purchases in cash often enough for it to really matter. Given the rarity, I'd rather make the call than use Paypal.

Prior to like Amazon Payments showing up, PayPal was one of the few things I'd be willing to use to deal business with small web stores that I don't trust. And I still don't see Amazon Payments really commonly.

What are some common alternatives?

Stripe, supposedly. Unfortunately they are much more strict when it comes to the bussineses they serve so not everyone has the luxury to use them

Tangential question - do Stripe and others choose to exclude certain businesses because the rate of chargebacks + fraud goes up or is it just a general "we don't want to be associated with drugs/porn/guns" sort of thing?

Difficult to say. I'm operating a small business[1] in the forex/stocks field with zero chargebacks and a pristine rep. It wasn't even obviously prohibited since you can't do actual trades there. Stripe shut down my account anyway after about two months and only said that they are forced to reject us because of some agreements with the banks.

[1] https://formationseeker.com

There are alternatives now.

As a seller I use PayPal because they offer two features I haven't been able to find anywhere else: 1) easy drop-in code to add a button to take payments on your site (I'm not a developer) and 2) instant access to cash. Amazon payments offers #1 but I haven't seen anyone else that offers the combo of #1 and #2. Until someone else does, or PayPal decides to screw us (which is a possibility I acknowledge and for which I have a contingency plan), we're still going to use them.

As a consumer I like PayPal because I am deciding to send someone money rather than them pulling it from a credit card I give them. This means I'll do business with suppliers I don't know without worrying about what they might do with my credit card details.

Are ever concerned about them taking your money and not sending you the item? If they're in a foreign country, or have skipped town, what's your recourse?

That's always a risk however I pay but I can get my money back by filing a dispute with PayPal and not have to worry about where my credit card number has ended up.

Let me guess "We are sorry that you went public with our unlawful request"?

The request wasn't unlawful - it might not be legally required, but it's fine for any business to impose almost any requirement on any other business before doing business with them.

It violated EU privacy law if my understanding is correct.

You are forgetting the legal concept of good faith.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_faith_(law)

Making unlawful requests to your customers and otherwise threaten denial of services can be problematic.

"We're sorry you made us apologize over this."

http://www.golem.de/news/sperrung-paypal-entschuldigt-sich-b...

The original for everyone capable at reading German.

Man sagt "capable of reading" und nicht "capable at reading."

Tut mir leid, wenn das unhöfflich ist, aber ich gehe davon aus, wir alle besser schreiben wollen. :)

"Capable of" means "can", and sounds a bit patronizing in this context. "Capable at" means "is good at", and sounds okay.

As a native English speaker, there is zero patronizing connotation. Whereas "capable at" is never used, so it just looks like a typo.

"Capable at" is sometimes used, and is correct; it's just significantly more unusual than "capable of". COCA (the Corpus of Contemporary American [English]) lists 32 results for "capable at", such as:

> I don't think she's capable at this point of doing what's needed (spurious)

> Goldenrod was most capable at locating specimens in the black intervals

> a very cool band that's, you know, extremely capable at what they do

> a helping agency capable at reaching out at low cost and high impact (not spurious, but this one feels unnatural to me -- I'd prefer of here)

Anyway, 32 hits for "capable at", of which 17 are spurious and 15 are genuine; 14710 hits for "capable of" (I didn't bother to sample those, but the rate of spurious hits will be significantly lower).

I believe StavrosK is correct that "capable of reading German" means the opposite of "unable to read German", while "capable at reading German" means "having a high skill level in reading German". I don't agree that "capable of" would be patronizing in this context, since it's very common in English-speaking forums for people to be totally unable to read German.

There's a difference between "correct" and "how people actually talk." I was offering a correction because when learning a language, you don't want to sound like textbook. Sure, it's all technically correct, but the goal is to sound natural. I don't know anyone who says "capable at," so it "just sounds wrong."

Basically, the two parses are different. One is "being <capable of>" something, as in "I didn't think he was capable of murder", i.e. "I didn't believe he could commit murder". The second parse is "being capable <at something", as in "be skilled <at something>". "I didn't think he was capable at murder" sounds weird and would mean "I didn't think he was very good at killing people", but you'd use it in something like "he was capable at math".

The "patronizing" part was because "this is for people who are capable of German" sounds more condescending to me than "this is for people who can read German".

> Basically, the two parses are different.

I'm not convinced this is the case. Standard analysis would say that "capable of murder" parses as (capable (of (murder)), not ((capable of) (murder)). Assuming that analysis is correct, you have a prepositional phrase (with of) licensed by the adjective "capable" itself in specific, and a prepositional phrase (with at) licensed by the semantics of the adjective but not by "capable" specifically.

Some examples of what I'm talking about:

1. "I believe in live-and-let-live." Here, the verb believe takes a complement that must be marked by in. An in-phrase with the same sense cannot be attached to other arbitrary verbs; it can appear here because it is licensed by believe. Invest also licenses an in-complement, with a meaning related to investing but unrelated to believing: "I prefer to invest in small companies". But "I affirm in live-and-let-live" is nonsensical despite being semantically very similar to "I believe in live-and-let-live". Affirm does not license such a complement.

The adjective capable individually licenses an of-phrase in this manner.

2. "He ran to the park." Here, the phrase to the park is not licensed by the verb run. It is licensed by the semantics of running as a verb of motion, and can appear with the same sense attached to any motion verb: "He swam to the park"; "He ambled to the park"; "He somersaulted to the park"; etc.

Capable licenses an at-phrase in this manner, just like good, skilled, adept, inept, competent, etc.

3. "The ceremony begins at 8:00." Here, at 8:00 is licensed by all verbs that exist now or might in the future. Semantically, it has nothing to do with the verb.

The thing is, the parse tree you get for all of those cases is exactly the same. It's true that the of example is bound to capable more closely than the at example is, but the closeness doesn't lie in the parse tree, it lies in the level of generality at which the complement is licensed.

Es heißt "unhöflich", und da fehlt ein "dass" (...gehe davon aus, dass wir alle...).

Stilistisch etwas besser wäre: "Es tut mir leid, wenn das unhöflich wirkt, aber ich gehe davon aus, dass wir alle unseren Schreibstil verbessern wollen." (I'd say the first comma should be left out, but I have the tendency to leave out vital commas as well, so...)

;)

Bah. Das ist was passiert, wann man Deutsch in Berlin gelernt hat. Schlampig und umgangssprachlich.

Thank you very much. I have a lot of "typo-creep" although I should know better.

So, they apologize. I'm sure the damage inflicted is noticable, will PayPal cover that?

And this is the problem of the modern service industry: they never stand in for damages, even if the damage is inflicted through a wilful decision. As a client, you are at their whim.

Sure, an apology - because the negative PR is starting to hurt Paypal.

But how many other tens or hundreds of other companies experience the same kind of censorship from Paypal, but never get to cause the same level of outrage for Paypal to "apologize"?

The page does not translate very well, but is PayPal admitting fault here? Does this open them up to litigation from Seafile?

After working with a non-profit who had transactions frozen because they mentioned Cuba in a comment field I have stopped using Paypal on all future projects. It's easy to implement for non profits but it's just not worth it to these people to have to worry about the hassle of actually getting their money.

And yet again, no explanation what this "illegal content" is supposed to be.

Or a change to a more clear policy for that matter.

Paypal only apologizes when they can't get away with being themselves quietly.

Remember, customer outrage (sometimes) works!

This appears to contains comments from a previous post that linked to google translate, but I don't see a comment from dang mentioning a change/merge. Too early in the morning?

It was changed by 'sctb':

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11961301

I've been hoping they would become a better partner as an independent company. Maybe this is the first sign.

Slightly off topic, but does anyone else feel like the article title used here ("Paypal apologizes to Dropbox Alternative seafile") is a pretty big slap in the face to Seafile?

First off, why include "Dropbox Alternative"? Putting the competitor's name in an article title about the other company? Seems a bit odd/kind of putting down Seafile. That'd be like seeing "XYZ happens to Twitter alternative Facebook."

Secondly, they didn't even capitalize Seafile's company name, but they did capitalize the competition's name (Dropbox).

May not seem like much but it's pretty shitty, if you ask me.

EDIT: I guess the 2nd point is more the fault of Google Translate. I still think the first point sticks. It's odd to have that in the title, it wouldn't be as weird if that was in the body of the article, though.

I think this is standard journalism. I had no idea what Seafile is. Know I know.

Lesser known companies get this treatment. "Intel in talks to buy mobile chip maker $unknown_company," for example. Its completely non-biased and a part of journalism. I don't see the controversy here.

It may be standard to include it in the actual article, but it's not standard to have that in the title. Totally degrades the company the article is about by listing their competitor first (capitalized, when they aren't even capitalized) in the title.

There was a previous article about them here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11944011

That's Google Translate, original article says Seafile with a captial-S.

> Secondly, they didn't even capitalize Seafile's company name, but they did capitalize the competition's name (Dropbox).

That was the fault of Google Translate, see the original: http://www.golem.de/news/sperrung-paypal-entschuldigt-sich-b...

Well, that's weird. Why would Google Translate make it a non-capital letter in the translation when it used a capital one in the original document? I don't think that should be happening in any scenario? Is this Google's "unsupervised" AI running amok?

> Well, that's weird. Why would Google Translate make it a non-capital letter in the translation when it used a capital one in the original document?

Because the German Language loves to put Capital Letters anywhere it feels like, which does not translate 1:1 to what would be appropriate in English Use.

Google Translate seems to have a poor heuristic to detect names as such.

>anywhere it feels like

It's not as arbitrary as you make it out to be: Names, nouns and the beginnings of sentences are capitalised.

German capitalizes a lot of words that aren't capitalized in English. English capitalizes "American" but in Spanish it's americano. So no, you can't always preserve that aspect of translated text.

"All nouns are capitalized in German". So it probably needs to do this somehow to get decent translations. German also throws together multiple words, right? So maybe it detected "seafile" as a compound noun of "sea file".

Compound words are common too in English. They're really just treated as new words, there isn't a real reason to syntactically split them. German does have some more comical examples though. My favorite was an archaic german book we had in highschool that for "typing" used the word, "schreibmachineschreiben" which is literally "write-machine-writing." It looks like the modern word is "Tippen."

All nouns in German are capitalized, not just proper nouns as in English.

For example:

"Das Mädchen trägt ein blau Hemd" becomes "The girl is wearing a blue shirt."

Mädchen -> girl, Hemd -> shirt both get downcased.

(Note: my translation might be a little off. I haven't used german in a good 15 years)

> (Note: my translation might be a little off. I haven't used german in a good 15 years)

Wow, very good! It was nearly perfect, it should have been "Das Mädchen trägt ein blaues Hemd".

Yeah. Modifying adjectives to match the case / gender always got me.

Could be something to do with German and auto translate.

The capitalization was lost in translation because in German all nouns are capitalized, whereas in English only proper nouns are capitalized. Perhaps Google Translate assumes "Seafile" to not be a proper noun, so it was downcased in English.

I don't think it's shitty. Firstly nobody knows who seafile is, so it's just clearer. Secondly, by comparing them to Dropbox they are also acknowledging that seafile is a "legit" file sharing company.

I agree. By adding "Dropbox alternative" everybody immediately knows what the company Seafile is doing...

Like snooping on their users' files, and reporting them to the police? Because that's what Dropbox is doing, and is exactly the opposite of what Seafile is doing.

'Cloud backup' or 'cloud file storage' (whichever is appropriate) would work without namedropping a competitor.

I don't know anything about Seafile, but my little music startup was written up in Forbes once with "Spotify" in the title and we were quite pleased with that. Good SEO, great brand association. There are benefits to this situation.

No. I had never heard about seafile before the last article, and then i had assumed they were another megaupload style site pretending to be legit. Adding Dropbox alternative to the title framed them differently in my mind.

Can we ask the moderators to capitalize Seafile and drop the "Dropbox Alternative" at least from the HN headline?

If not a duplicate at least here's a non translated form for English users.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11960092

wow, at least the translated verion mentions seafile in the title. the fortine article doesn't mention it at all in the title, just dropbox alternative

Yeah that site has odd SEO - I believe this is why Google uses multiple methods to parse an article title - as such I'm pretty sure they parsed the title from the <title> tag on that page

If you search the link on most search engine's it shows that the title is "PayPal Restores Account of Dropbox Rival Seafile After Monitoring Row"

"<title>PayPal Restores Account of Dropbox Rival Seafile After Monitoring Row - Fortune</title>"

Of course the article title in-line doesn't have that but it was probably a bad move on the developer's part to not create as much duplicated content on the page would be my guess as to why that occurred.

Either way it is very confusing I agree!

Just thought users would like a non-translated form as not everyone can spend extra time re-reading sentences to understand the exact context of the article!

We updated the link of this submission to the Fortune article from this: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev....

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