Maybe, but it could definitely be illegal. Anyone could have the right intentions, but make a mistake during an act of Good Samaritan-ship and get sued.
I think the point was that many people reuse their passwords, so if Google et al were proactive about it, they would force reset passwords for the emails in this leak. But I agree, that may be over-protective/paranoid in some sense...
Said person entered the number of metric tons of concrete 3 magnitudes higher than it should have been. Imagine the cost difference between 1.0 * 10^6 and 1.0 * 10^9 metric tons... Our boss was not pleased, to say the least.
But imagine how easy it is to enter a few extra zeros in an excel data cell. Yikes!
I believe he was referring to the sign up process, which is just as easy (if not easier). In fact, I often have a very difficult time (as a payer) paying through PayPal with my credit card and not my PayPal account. Sometimes I just don't want PayPal to be a part of all of my transactions. Basically, anything outside of eBay.
It would be interesting to experiment with scraping the <title> tag of the linked webpage. This is what Quora does for links in questions, answers, and comments.
I love the way that HN shows the top domain of the linked site. Very elegant, and something that Quora (arguably) should implement.
I agree with you because (afterall) they aren't a charity. They makes money by investing early in these start-ups, so they need to focus on bringing people through their program that have a higher chance of success.
As a tangent, would you consider biometric identification (in the broad sense - retina, finger print, DNA) a priori identification as well?
I'd argue that one thing would make payments more seamless: identity = payment, in other words, you don't need a middleman (e.g. credit card, chip and pin, or mobile device) to verify your identity. You just show up and pay. No more carrying anything around. Think: Minority Report. That would possibly take decades and involve many privacy concerns from citizens.
Meanwhile, you'd have the same security risks you had before, playing the cat-and-mouse games with hackers (of all types, including biometric hackers).
Would you be upset if they were slowly fading MacBook Pros out and instead replacing them with the retina MacBook Pros? From a different perspective, what if they were trying to drive the cost down to produce the rMBPs? Biding their time.
Interesting perspective. I like the look back to the beginning juxtaposed with the look to the future.
I think the current state of payments is seeing a "payments 2.0" renaissance, if you will, akin to the "web 2.0" movement that started in the early 2000's. Now, obviously the web is going the way of mobile, and it will be interesting to see where payments goes next. There will only be more volume for more players to take advantage of, and the only way to "lose" is to fail to grow, "miss the mark", or lack of innovation because the (online) world is evolving faster than ever.
ah, yes, that particular angle could probably use some more research. I haven't read the consumer financial protection bills, but then again most legislators probably haven't either, and there certainly could be some loopholes that someone is trying to exploit right now.
Also important to note that most merchants opted NOT to switch to charging extra because it would have upset their customers, so really, by allowing that in the past, it primed consumers to expect the same price for both. Tricky devils...
Merchants want zero fees, and instant payout (like cash), but "wait a minute" you might say. Don't businesses pay taxes, and how do you think those tax dollars are spent (in a non-gov't shutdown state)? Partially keeping the dollar bill presses running.
Herein lies the problem. Cash is a government-run operation, and credit card networks are privately owned. We forget that our cash system doesn't run itself and isn't free to operate, so we take cash for granted, and undervalue or ignore the "interchange" fees.
By changing their perspective, merchants might see that zero fees is unrealistic. It's an unfortunate(?) consequence of leaving the bartering days behind, and joining a money economy.
It's worth mentioning a specific term here, too: "card not present" That covers all ecommerce, and even some card scanning technology, too, EVEN if the card is present. As you pointed out, it's all about fraud/risk. It's easier to circumvent the credit card companies' "security" features (magnetic strip, hologram, signature on the backside of the card, the actual card itself, a chip if your card has one, etc.) when the card is not present during a transaction. A good analogy would be paying with counterfeit $100 bills. There are security features built into cash that allow merchants to verify their authenticity. It's difficult to prove that the person on the other side of the internet is who he says he is when paying with a card. Is the card stolen? So as you pointed out, card not present transactions are riskier, thus require a higher interchange fee, etc.
VISA et al can still take away a merchant's ability to charge customers' credit cards if they catch you asking for minimum payments on cards or offering discounts for cash. It doesn't happen all the time, and usually consumers don't report establishments that practice this behavior.