PayPal Accuses Google of Poaching Mobile Payment Trade Secrets, Personnel 103
jhernik writes with a selection from eWeek Europe's short story on a snag facing Google's new mobile payment system: "PayPal, eBay's payment service, has sued Google over its new Google Wallet service, accusing the search engine of poaching trade secrets for use in its mobile payment service. The suit, filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court just hours after Google unveiled its Wallet payments sheme, alleges that two key executives who created the near-field communication (NFC) service used company secrets about mobile payments to fashion its own service."
Re:Fuck Paypal. (Score:5, Insightful)
Checks are far, far too costly.
There's nothing stopping someone from sending you a bad check. What happens if you cash it? Your bank charges you a bounced-check fee, not them, YOU. (And yes, their bank changes them a fee too.)
Why do you think just about every retail place has stopped accepting checks now? They're inherently a bad system, and the cost of dealing with a bad check is too high.
When you're selling old shit on Ebay or Craigslist or whatever, a $30 bad-check charge will eat up your profits for several items, not just that one. It just isn't worth it.
On top of that, it's too slow. It takes several days for stuff to arrive in the mail, but you also don't know how prompt the buyer is in paying for his shit; some of them sit on it for days before paying. Then you have to wait 10 days for the check to clear before you can send their stuff. Meanwhile, they're bitching because it's taking 3 weeks for them to get their item. And what if something goes wrong? What if the buyer didn't pay at all? This is very, very common on Ebay for some reason: I'd guess that fully 5% of buyers never pay for their items. This number isn't pulled out of my ass, it's what happened to me when I sold all my old Transformers on Ebay a few months ago. With Paypal-only payments, you file an unpaid item dispute, and if payment doesn't show up on Paypal in 1 day, then you re-list and void the old transaction. With checks and the USPS, you have to wait a week or two.
Sending a check would be fine if the vast majority (like 99.99%) of buyers were honest, but they're not.
Re:Tuesday called, it wants its story back (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fuck Paypal. (Score:2, Insightful)
Is that you, Grandpa?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fuck Paypal. (Score:4, Insightful)
The dishonesty issues are better dealt with by mechanisms like, say, jail. All you people who make sure schools can't teach morality -- it's on you @@sholes. Not my fault you've moved society from "don't do wrong" to "don't get caught". Use the wire fraud system when someone writes you a bad one. It would only take a few more doing this to make even the more ignorant criminals wake up.
I like having the records of what I spend -- it's helped me stay rich once I got there by seeing where the money goes. Yeah, you can do that other ways, but the bank is a nice paper pusher and cheaper than one I'd hire.
Ever heard of a business account, you know, like you have to have if you're a legit business, rather than a freeloader avoiding taxes and regulations? They clear checks right now, and I mean right now -- and I get a phone call immediately if a deposited check doesn't fly. Maybe you're just too dumb to bank-shop and get a good one?
And yeah, I'm a luddite -- a weird thing for an ex dev and current physicist. I've had all the other payment options, and 100% of them have been hacked more than once, till I just gave up on them. But at the small town bank, if something goes wrong, I can just offer to take my business across the street. And, so far, 100% of the time -- if I even feel the need to say that -- it's enough and "nothing ever happened, please have a nice day and keep your business with us".
Like paper ballots, it's a lot harder to cheat this system, you're not being very smart to call for ditching it. So you got hosed. Karma -- or sloth. Takes one or the other.