Internet Giants Consider SOPA Strike

The Stop Online Piracy Act in the US is getting ever more publicity with GoDaddy one of the high profile companies to suffer from supporting it as we wrote a couple of days ago.  In our previous article Martin summed up SOPA very effectively.

If you are living in the United States, you should have heard about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and Protect-IP, which, when passed, would give companies rights that they should not have. If it passes, IP rightsholders (a term vaguely defined) could send notices to payment processors or ad services like Google Adsense to force them to stop doing business with listed websites, all without legal process.

Site owners have five days to file a counter-notice, but neither payment processors or ad networks have any obligation to respect it. Even worse, they are granted “immunity for choking off a site if they have a “reasonable belief” that some portion of the site enables infringement”.

Now a loose confederation of Internet giants are considering shutting down the entire websites for 24 hours and instead showing a messagew urging their visitors and customers to contact their representative in the US congress the day before the vote goes to the house there.

The coalition is made up of some very big names on the Internet including Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal, AOL, Foursquare, IAC, LinkedIn, Mozilla, OpenDNS and Zynga.  If the plan goes ahead all these services could be taken offline for 24 hours.

In a report by CNet…

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you’ll know they’re finally serious.

True, it would be the political equivalent of a nuclear option–possibly drawing retributions from the the influential politicos backing SOPA and Protect IP–but one that could nevertheless be launched in 2012.

“There have been some serious discussions about that,” says Markham Erickson, who heads the NetCoalition trade association that counts Google, Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo as members. “It has never happened before.”

This wouldn’t be the first piece of anti-piracy legislation around the world to face stiff opposition.  France have already passed an Internet copyright law but the Digital Economy Act in the UK stalled in the face of arguments from major Internet Service Providers British Telecom and TalkTalk.

Many reports say that SOPA is still set to pass the US congress and that very few Americans have heard about it.  Shutting down services such as Facebook and Google, and replacing them with anti-SOPA messages for a day would certainly raise awareness, but a question mark remains over whether doing so only one day before the congress vote would be effective enough.

This is the first time ever that major websites have threatened to effectively go on strike to boycott something, and it is completely unprecedented.  It is unclear at this time whether the services would be taken down worldwide or just in the US and also how serious the coalition are about the boycott, which would inevitably lose them all a day’s trade.

Services are commonly targeted for IP addresses anyway and it wouldn’t be difficult for these companies to target messages to their US-based users.  With many millions of visitors every day in the US, companies such as Google and Facebook could achieve this on their own.  Imagine then how much more leverage they would have with Amazon, Yahoo! and others on board.  If this goes ahead it is still possible that other companies could follow suit, effectively crippling the Internet in the US for the day before the vote.

So what do you think of SOPA and your favourite websites being taken offline for a day?

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© Mike Halsey MVP for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: aol, congress, ebay, facebook, foursquare, Google, IAC, linkedin, mozilla, opendns, paypal, SOPA, twitter, wikipedia, yahoo, Zynga

How To Verify Your PayPal Account Without A Credit Card

PayPal is a popular payment processing system that is used by millions to make purchases and transactions on the Internet. Much of PayPal’s appeal stems from the fact that its system supports user to user transactions.

New PayPal accounts are limited automatically until they are verified. Limitations block certain site features and limits the amount of money that unverified PayPal users can transfer to other PayPal users or withdraw to a bank account.

Accounts can be verified either by adding and confirming a bank account or credit card. Both verification options may not be available in all countries. (You can use this page on the PayPal site for additional information on the process for select countries)

To verify a PayPal account click on the Get Verified link underneath the welcome message on the start page.

You then have the option to verify the PayPal account either by Credit Card or by bank account.

Verify PayPal by bank account

If you select the bank account verification option you are asked to enter the account information in the verification form. PayPal will make two small payments to the account in the next business days which you need to confirm once they are listed in the account statement. Just visit the PayPal website again to complete the verification.

Verify PayPal by credit card

PayPal will withdraw a small amount of money from the credit card as part of the card’s verification. The company will refund the money to the PayPal account after the verification. Verifying by credit card is usually faster than verifying by bank account.

Verify PayPal by virtual credit card

What can you do if you cannot verify by bank account or credit card? You could create a virtual credit card and use that card to get the account verified. Services like EntroPay offer virtual credit cards. This comes as a price though, as many services require you to deposit money into the virtual credit card account and charge you for that.

As far as EntroPay is concerned; The service does not charge for the account or the creation of the virtual Visa card. It does however charge for loading a credit card, exchange fees and money that’s transferred to the card.

Please note that EntroPay accounts need to be verified as well.

Closing Words

It also needs to be noted that the initial account limitation is different from other PayPal account limitations. There are a number of reasons why PayPal limits account, a common one being unusual account activity.

Using a virtual credit card to verify an account should work for users from all over the world. Please note that you may still run into troubles when withdrawing money from PayPal (To be honest, I’m not 100% certain that you can withdraw money to a credit card. You may need a bank account for that after all.).

The credit card is on the other hand useful to get the account verified and to fund money. Plus, you can limit automatic withdrawals to a specific sum of money.

Have you had troubles getting your PayPal account verified? Let me know in the comments.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: credit card, paypal, paypal account

Need To Enter A Valid Credit Card? Try This

Some websites or services let you sign up only if you enter a valid credit card. This can happen even if you have no intention of ever buying something from the service or website. Sometimes you may prefer not to enter your own credit card information on the Internet, and sometimes you do not have a valid credit card that is accepted in another country.

What other options do you have? You could try and get a virtual credit card, either from a bank that is offering those cards or an online service such as Entropay. The first may work fine and without lots of administration, the second can be quite the hassle to setup and maintain. Plus, it can happen that virtual credit cards won’t be accepted by the service or website, in which case you are still not able to complete the sign up process.

An alternative to this are test credit card account numbers. They are not linked to any accounts or names. PayPal has a public page with test credit card account numbers available where you find credit card numbers for major companies such as American Express, Mastercard, Visa or Discover.

The expiration date can be freely selected, the only requirement is that it needs to be a data in the future in mmyy format.

The credit cards cannot be used to make purchases. What they can be used for however are services that require you to enter a credit card either during signup or for specific services they offer. One example would be Amazon’s AppStore service which requires you to enter a valid credit card account number to download the free apps that it provides on a daily basis.

It is likely that at least some sites and companies have banned those credit card numbers from being used on their sites. You’ll probably be surprised that they will work on a lot of sites on the other hand.

Disclaimer: Please note that companies or organizations may see it as fraud if you are using credit card information that are not your own. Neither ghacks nor the author of this article are responsible if this happens.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: credit card, credit cards, paypal, virtual credit card

How Much Is A Hacked PayPal Account Worth?

We all know that you can practically buy anything on the Internet, from bulk email accounts over credit card information and even PayPal accounts. Brian Krebs in a post on the Krebs on Security blog sheds some light on the latter. He identified websites were PayPal account data, and sometimes linked email account information, were sold in bulk.

According to his information, PayPal accounts are sold for as little as $50 per 100 unverified accounts. 50 cents per account may not seem like much, but you need to consider that unverified means that the original owner has not linked the account to a bank account or credit card. This limits what can be done with the account (while it is possible to use it to move money, it cannot be used to make purchases if the PayPal balance is not sufficient).

Verified accounts on the other hand start at prices of $2.50 for PayPal accounts with a balance of up to $10, and more if the balance is larger. You see a larger account with a balance of more than 1000 Dollars go for $45 at the site selling those hacked accounts.

It is rather interesting that the site not only lists the account balance, first name address and type of account but also much of the user’s email address. Registration at the site is closed and only possible by contacting a site operator over ICQ.

Considering that email addresses are listed, it would make sense of PayPal to try and get an account to block all hacked accounts before third parties can use them for illegal activities.

Brian believes that the majority of accounts for sale have been collected via phishing attacks, but that trojans on user computers have also been used considering that some of the PayPal accounts are sold with linked email account log ins.

It feels kinda strange that a site like this can operate for a relatively long time without being taken down by the authorities. I won’t link directly to the site, but you find the link and a sister site mentioned in Brian’s article.

I personally would have expected the accounts to be sold at higher prices. This can either mean that demand is not high, or that the site operators have access to a lot of hacked PayPal accounts.

What’s your take on this?

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: Hacking, paypal, paypal account, paypal phishing, phishing