hiddenfeatures

No worries. Indeed direct debit would be awesome - at least for the marginal subset of "companies doing business in Germany"

That may be true for you & me, but probably not relevant to the millions of PEBKAC internet users out there, who can't even tell IE from FF.

n.b. we were talking about DIRECT DEBIT (which is something else entirely from debit cards). You basically allow a company to directly withdraw money from your bank account (assuming sufficient funds on the account)

I found a few of their examples had errors in them. Plus a general dislike towards the Samwer brothers. (I know that this shouldn't affect business)

Very good point there! Sadly we (as usual) have found our own way of doing things :-/

Oh man... I love that Stripe is finally coming to Europe.

BUT seriously (going on a disappointed rant here): Belgium & the Netherlands get into private beta and Germany gets nothing? I mean: Come on. BE + NL together have 27m people - Germany has some 80m AND a world-class economy. I don't want to bash on our neighbors (God knows we've done that one or two times in the past), I just want me some Stripe.

I know that the delay is probably because of some ridiculous red tape in Germany. :-(

tl;dr: Please absolve us from PayMill & the Samwer brother

Either that was

a) one hell of a marketing stunt to launch your book on the same day as Stripe launching in the UK OR

b) you are one lucky man!

Anyway: Godspeed with your launch!

Believe me, I am empathetic to the pain this is causing you. I can understand the anger you are feeling.

But I don't think that I am trivializing things. The fact is, that phishing sites are causing a real pain (as in millions of dollars lost by the victims, hundreds of thousands of computers becoming zombies, etc). All major browsers are trying to mitigate these risks by implementing phishing & malware filters. None of these implementations are perfect (you probably know a bit or two about bugs in software development).

But on average these filters have a positive ROI - especially for the target market (which is Joe WebUser and sadly NOT your company - or mine for that matter). The costs of a false positive ("I'll go & find that information on another site") far outweigh the costs of a false negative ("I put my login+password into this legitimate looking website and now I can no longer access PayPal").

As much as I can understand you being upset that Chrome shows a warning for your site, I don't think that the approach they are using is unreasonable.

I'd take bets that those criteria show a correlation to phishy sites. Especially if you combine those metrics together.

Is it perfect? No. Does it produce false positives? Yes. Is it beneficial on average? I think so.

PS: Since you have found the relevant file in the open source project (or 'kiddie playground' - as you like to call it), why don't you supply a superior implementation with less "foolish" measures?

In my experience over the last few weeks, younger Germans (my age, 30 years & younger) are blissfully ignorant ("I don't have anything to hide" - sounds familiar ?) to the impact of the government spying on its citizen.

24 years are a long time & that part of history is not as well-ingrained in the collective memory as the Holocaust. :-(

"These business men are here to tell you why you are going to break your leg tomorrow" - I love that :-)

> Why not?

That is exactly the WRONG question. Government power & influence needs to be restricted to the bare minimum necessary - for the security(!) of its citizen.

We can all clearly see what extensive government power leads to. Just wait for the HN front page to be flooded again with reports about Snowden/PRISM.

There are certain tasks that should be put in the hands of the government (ensuring the rule of law, national defense, making sure free elections happen) and others that have a good ROI (education / healthcare). But beyond that, it is just more power to the wrong institution.

Going completely 1984 here: Today they distribute Linux, tomorrow they distribute Linux with a Rootkit pre-installed.

Regarding UI changes: Boy... I hate those. 20 years of Moore's law have left us with incredibly powerful computers and we manage to waste all that raw power, those billions of CPU cycles per second on fancy UI. You are completely right - from a technical, educated standpoint.

BUT, that's not how the human brain works. For your average consumer the rule of thumb is "if it looks fresh, it is fresh". Plain & simple. They don't "get" that NTFS now supports transactions and that atomicity in file operations is like the holy grail and just completely awesome - but "Oh boy! That start button with lights up when I move the mouse over it!!!!"

Tell you what: Microsoft has that shit figured out - at least with every other version ;-)

Wait... That's what I am paying my taxes for? That's where my money goes?

I am NOT against Linux being more widely used. And I like the idea that the city uses Linux to save money & more efficient.

But pushing citizens to use Linux is NOT government business

They probably need the CPU cycles somewhere else. Maybe a lot of calls going on right now...

Title win!