Problems with online payment service PayPal persist for fifth day
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SAN JOSE, Calif. Despite repair efforts, service outages at the online payment service PayPal continue for the fifth consecutive day.
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DreamHost customers woke up to a nightmare on Tuesday after the Web hosting company made a major billing mistake overnight that has resulted in many getting their credit cards charged automatically for hundreds -- and even thousands -- of dollars.In an official blog posting, the company said that Monday night it ran &quot;a standard billing cycle to clean up stragglers from 2007&quot; but by mistake set the overdue-payment parameter for the end of 2008.&quot;This caused everyone to be billed as if today was 2008-12-31, wreaking the havoc that we are so sorry you had to be put through,&quot; the posting reads.The wording on the posting seems to indicate that all of DreamHost&#39;s customers were affected by the billing mistake. DreamHost hosts more than 600,000 domains, according to its Web site.WebHosting.Info, a research and statistics portal focused on the Web services industry, lists DreamHost as the 11th-largest Web hosting provider in the U.S. and the 15th-largest in the world .DreamHost, which has been in business since 1997, didn&#39;t immediately reply to requests for comment.At press time, DreamHost was in the process of issuing refunds to customers who got charged automatically.Among the hundreds of mostly angry comments that customers have made to the blog posting are complaints that the billing pushed credit card accounts over their limit, triggering bank penalty fees and locking up cards.&quot;If I end up having to pay special interest fees because you trigger an overbalance, I&#8217;ll be contacting your billing team for compensation,&quot; wrote one customer.Other customers commented that they are spooked that DreamHost could make a mistake of this magnitude with something as sensitive as billing, and have thus decided to cancel their accounts.&quot;My account is due for renewal at the end of this month, and barring something spectacular, it looks like I&#39;m taking my business elsewhere,&quot; wrote another customer.A quick scan of the company&#39;s DreamHost Status blog shows that it has encountered a steady stream of system outages over the past month or so.
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PayPal, the popular payment method on auction site eBay Inc., has fixed the technical problems that had plagued the systems for almost a week, leaving many users unable to access their accounts or conduct business.
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Reposted in the queue as it's impossible or at least very complicated to move it as I asked (although the post where aphrael said such thing disappeared so perhaps this is not the case after all - another minor K5 mystery).  The original discussion can be found here (read it as there are some clarifications by rusty). All right, here is the (adapted) diary. Rusty posted a comment in the diary entitled "Would you pay 10USD for K5 Life Membership?" saying that K5 will become a pay site once new user registrations will be reactivated: "I was thinking $5.00 (none / 0) (#18) by rusty on Thu Sep 06, 2007 at 04:42:15 PM CET But it would actually be charged. That plus a hash of the identifying CC info so you only get one account ever, and I think we'd either shrivel up to nothing and die, or solve the spamming and crapflooding issues. Funny that someone else is thinking about this right now. It'll probably happen before I turn new signups back on." This of course begs the question: HIBT? If so I'll bite (see some considerations under the fold).
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InfoWorld - PayPal unveiled a new Security Key on Friday that will add an additional layer of security to user accounts and help prevent online criminals from gaining access to them. The PayPal Security Key is a small electronic token that generates a unique code that can be used in addition to a user name and password when users sign in to their PayPal account.
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Blog: PayPal rolls out its security key fob, a little device designed to thwart password-stealing bad guys out to pilfer your online payment account.
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(InfoWorld) - PayPal unveiled a new Security Key on Friday that will add an additional layer of security to user accounts and help prevent online criminals from gaining access to them. The PayPal Security Key is a small electronic token that generates a unique code that can be used in addition to a user name and password when users sign in to their PayPal account.                                                     The company announced the news as part of eBay's week-long Developer Conference in Boston. It provides PayPal customers with so-called "two factor" authentication that makes it harder for online criminals to raid accounts, even if they do trick users into giving up their user name and password using online "phishing" scams, according to Michael Barrett, chief information security officer at PayPal. "This is something that will help the community to be more secure," Barrett told InfoWorld. PayPal and parent company eBay are top targets for online scam artists, who use dummy Web sites in so-called "phishing" attacks that attempt to trick users into revealing their user name and password. Those accounts can then be raided or used to fraudulently purchase goods. The Security Key isn't a silver bullet for phishing attacks, but just one part of a multi-pronged defense by PayPal and eBay, Barrett said. In recent months, the company has begun digitally signing all outbound e-mail messages and putting pressure on ISPs to take action on fraudulent mail that claims to come from both eBay and PayPal. More recently, the companies have been working with two leading ISPs in a beta program to automatically block all non-signed e-mail that claims to come from eBay or PayPal, according to Barrett and eBay CTO Scott Thompson. PayPal has been testing a beta version of the Security Key program in Germany and has already issued tens of thousand of the password tokens to its users. Already, the favorable response from users has been strong. "We never advertised this. It was all by word of mouth, but it's still been extremely popular," Barrett said. Starting Friday, PayPal will begin making the Security Key, which is part of the VIP (VeriSign Identity Protection) Network, available to its U.S. customers for a one-time fee of $5.00. PayPal users in Germany and Australia will also have the option to receive a Security Key, and PayPal plans to add other countries in the near future, according to a PayPal statement. PayPal and eBay began working closely with VeriSign after a deal to buy VeriSign's payment gateway business in October, 2005. PayPal has no plans to charge its customers for the token beyond the initial $5.00, which covers shipping and handling. Nor will the company levy a subscription fee for the two-factor authentication service. "This isn't something we're making money on," Barrett said. That said, PayPal will be paying attention to the number of users who adopt the password token and to the company's rate of fraud in an effort to figure out whether the tokens are worth the cost of the program, he said. Currently, fraudulent transactions amount to around $35.2 million dollars a year, or one third of one percent of PayPal's total global payment volume of $11 billion, Barrett said. Lowering that fraud rate even a little could offset the cost of the program. PayPal is also taking cues from other online financial services firms like eTrade, which launched a program in 2005 to allow all its U.S. account holders to use an RSA SecurID token for two-factor authentication, Barrett said. "eTrade has been pretty bullish about this," he said. "One thing that they noticed is that the customers who have (the token) use their account more because they feel safer," he said. Even before the news was announced, PayPal and VeriSign were promoting the new program on the floor of eBay Live at the Boston Convention Center, and VeriSign employees were handing out free PayPal tokens to attendees and signing them up for the new program. Charles Hu, an eBay Live attendee who sells concert tickets under the name "SummerComets" on the online auction Web site, said that he liked the idea of having an additional layer of security for his eBay account. "I'm always worried that someone will steal my password," Hu said. "I've seen (the password tokens) used in other industries, too." However, Hu wasn't ready to sign up for the program because he was worried that doing so would lock his wife out of their eBay account. "She's back at the hotel, so if I sign up now and they change our account, she's not going to be able to log in," he said. Barrett said that PayPal was prepared for the increased support calls that will come after the secure tokens are in widespread use but says that his company has a duty to protect customers from scams, even if it adds to the cost of doing business for PayPal and eBay. "Customers have been telling us they want this, so we're going to give it to them," he said.
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PayPal began getting back to normal Tuesday afternoon and improved significantly on Wednesday after a 4-day intermittent problem left many users unable to access their accounts.
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Executives at eBay apologized to frustrated customers who were frozen out of the online auction&#39;s payment transaction service, which experienced at least five days of intermittent failures earlier this month.
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WASHINGTON - A cash-flow problem in a federal program is hindering the ability of many schools and libraries to pay for Internet service.
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PayPal, eBay Inc.&#39;s (EBAY.O: Quote, Profile, Research) online payment service, will expand its US buyer protection program to cover up to $1,000 for qualified transactions, the company said on Thursday.
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eBay battles several days' worth of PayPal glitches.
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OCTOBER 12, 2004  - A routine monthly code update performed Friday for the PayPal.com online payment Web site has caused havoc for users, many of whom have managed to access the site only intermittently since the changes were made
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eBay, the online marketplace, is enjoying continued growth thanks to increased international sales and the success of its online payment service, Paypal.
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Some users of PayPal are having trouble logging onto the site and are getting security warnings -- problems apparently tied to an SSL security certificate used by Omniture, which is gathering data for the online payment site.
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Online payment Web site PayPal.com was back in service late last night after a coding error disrupted service for four days.
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DESPITE furious repair efforts, intermittent service outages at the online payment service PayPal continued Tuesday for the fifth consecutive day, affecting payments, log-ins and account creations.