by the way https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X27Sw7r6gB8 (DEF CON 30 - Paul Roberts - Brazil Redux - Short Circuiting Tech-Enabled Dystopia Right to Repair)
Re:I fought the PayPal and I won
by galangalalgol on Friday November 04, 2022 @10:27AM
(#33467250)
Are there options for small business payment processing that don't invite comparisons to dystopias? I think crowdsourced patronage is a great model for society to fund creative works now that copyright regulations have largely been captured, but with Patreon ignoring security, and paypal being this disfuncional... Is there a safe way to accept something like vinmo for micropayments?
Paypal owns venmo
I think Kafka's The Trial is an even better fit - in Brazil, you could at least see some of the machinations unfolding - in The Trial, like in reality, you only hit a wall of the bureaucrats telling you that your case is being studied with no way of knowing when or if you will ever get anything more.
This sounds like AWS support on a bad week.
The scale of these absurdities is just wild. Years ago I signed up for a domain for my blogger.com blog. At some point google decided to transfer the management of that domain to google workspaces ... I don't know how or why but they did. So when it expired I was told to login to google workspaces, but I don't have a google workspaces account at the email they kept emailing me at ... and their emails never told me what email to login with.
To get help on the website I was told to contact my google workspaces administrator ... but not who that is.
I figured out who the domain registrar was and told them my story and they helped me get a hold of the domain. Kudos to them to having a very fast and effective support team.
Now even more years later I get more emails from google workspaces that my account is expiring and sorta implying some consequences (but not actually saying) ... not that I can do anything about it.
At this point I have it in the back of my mind that any given day google could find this weird situation, assume malice, and ban me... a situation that 1. I didn't make happen. 2. I can't even fix. 3. I don't even know how it happened / what the problem is / google won't really tell me.