I had a secondary Gmail account with a really nice short nickname (from the early invite/alpha days), forwarded to another of my mailboxes. It had a weak password, leaked as part of one of the many database leaks.

Eventually I noticed some dude in Brazil started using my Gmail, and he changed the password — but I still got a copy of everything he did through the forwarding rule. I caught him bragging to a friend on how he cracked hashes and stole and sold email accounts and user details in bulk.

He used my account as his main email account. Over the years I saw more and more personal details getting through. Eventually I received a mail with a plaintext password... which he also used for a PayPal account, coupled to a Mastercard.

I used a local website to send him a giant expensive bouquet of flowers with a box of chocolates, using his own PayPal and the default shipping address.

I included a card:

"Congratulations on acquiring my Gmail account, even if I'm 7 years late. Thanks for letting me be such an integral part of your life, for letting me know who you are, what you buy, how much you earn, who your family and friends are and where you live. I've surprised your mother with a cruise ticket as you mentioned on Facebook how sorry you were that you forgot her birthday and couldn't buy her a nice present. She seems like a lovely woman. I've also made a $1000 donation in your name to the EFF, to celebrate our distant friendship"

I wonder why banks are always so terribly insecure, given how much money there's for grabs in there for hackers.

Just a while ago I got a new prepaid credit card from bpost, our local postal service that for some reason also does banking. The reason for that being that - thank you 'Murica! - a lot of websites out there don't accept anything but credit cards and PayPal. Because who in their right mind wouldn't use credit cards, right?! As it turns out, it's pretty much every European I've spoken to so far.

That aside, I got that card, all fine and dandy, it's part of the Mastercard network so at least I can get my purchases from those shitty American sites that don't accept anything else now. Looked into the manual of it because bpost's FAQ isn't very clear about what my login data for their online customer area now actually is. Not that their instruction manual was either.

I noticed in that manual that apparently the PIN code can't be changed (for "security reasons", totally not the alternative that probably they didn't want to implement it), and that requesting a forgotten PIN code can be done with as little as calling them up, and they'll then send the password - not a reset form, the password itself! IN THE FUCKING MAIL.

Because that's apparently how financial institutions manage their passwords. The fact that they know your password means that they're storing it in plain text, probably in a database with all the card numbers and CVC's next to it. Wouldn't that be a treasure trove for cybercriminals, I wonder? But YOU the customer can't change your password, because obviously YOU wouldn't be able to maintain a secure password, yet THEY are obviously the ones with all the security and should be the ones to take out of YOUR hands the responsibility to maintain YOUR OWN password.

Banking logic. I fucking love it.

As for their database.. I reckon that that's probably written in COBOL too. Because why wouldn't you.

Bloomberg has revealed that Google has signed a secret deal with Mastercard that allows it to track what users buy offline

TL;DR: Why does that online shop NOT support paypal?

I'm a LITTLE pissed.

I wanted to buy some stuff online (since my gf birthday comes closer and I have no city, no car nearby to go shopping) - and this website doesn't support paypal. You know why? Because they had to high fees.

Why on earth don't they do it like any other online shop?! - the user can pay with paypal for a little more % or €.

I don't have an actual credit card but the thing you can get <18yo. Paypal works with it but I can't use any other payment option.

Gj Mastercard! My card just got blocked because every time I want pay and 3D secure code is needed, every first SMS that day is delayed by 5 minutes so session expires and I have to try again...now it happened quite a few times and card got blocked. Fucking shit...

Why do German companies hate paying interns decent wages?

I just had an interview for an internship at a decently funded startup, and they proposed MINIMUM WAGE as a salary. Acted like it was the most normal thing in the world, too.
I do have a Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering and some actual working experience as a developer, yet they suggested they’d pay me even less than that if they were legally allowed to. Is that their way of saying they don’t want me after all? They did invite me to a second interview.
I get that interns generally aren’t as productive as senior devs who spend years on a certain project, but minimum wage? Fuck that!

Luckily, they’re just the first company I talked to, but I do feel a little offended.

Just spent the whole morning making a custom loading indicator for our app (an animated version of our logo). Animations are fun!

!rant && isSorry = true
this aint StackOverFlow but I need a tiny help here, I'm receiving data result from an API that is formatted as x-www-form-urlencoded, do I add a valid url at the beginning and use URI parser in Android or is there some other solution for it?

Sample of the result I'm receiving:

repositoryId=TEST&response.gatewayCode=BASIC_VERIFICATION_SUCCESSFUL&result=SUCCESS&sourceOfFunds.provided.card.brand=MASTERCARD

Is bunq netherlands only then or is it just full of NL fanboys? I find it pretty funny considering NL doesn't like foreign cards, debit or credit. Oh you want to pay for your stroopwaffels with a Visa card ? no... want to buy your la trappe with your mastercard? no. ING or Rabbobank only.... Netherlands needs to join the 21st century...

Watched 2 different vendors struggle to get something going.

I stayed quiet during both meetings, the first, was a misconfiguration error on their project code. They were tailoring the product that they sold my institution, I could see the simple error: key-value settings on one of their json files (it is a dotneto app)
I don't get paid to troubleshoot the code for an external company, so I was silent, knowing full well this would take longer to get done, needless to say, I had originally advised against purchasing this product but was not listened to, very well then.

The other was a configuration issue on the side of a different Java based product, there were some strange XML configuration entries, some other project files that made little sense, but again: quiet.

Department head is concerned about the delays that this might cause and will still not ask if I am willing to help since he knows I A) was against this product purchase from the get go and B) knows DAMN well I will say that I don't get paid to troubleshoot the issues that third party vendors charging us over 100k of product "worth", they wanna spend the money on "enterprise" shit that does not work,they can deal with their own shit programs.

Morale of the story: money moves people. If there is no bling in my account: then I ain't doing it.

Now, I do get paid well for what I do, and for that I do bust my ass, for everything else: there is mastercard.

bunq, N26 or revolut? I am also a bit sceptical because of brexit - i am sure it would affect revolut. I don't like the pricing of n26 but the metal MasterCard looks sexy and I love the features of bunq.
Not sure which bank I should choose...

Has anyone here got some more info about those three mobile first banks?

The credit card autocomplete function of Google chrome issues TWO bank statements each autocomplete. 1. -1$ 2. +1$ :/

I need an advise for my capstone project. I'm planning to make an online booking system for a ferry company. Planning to make it for android and ios and maybe for web too. Did some research and found about ionic. Looks amazing but not sure if it's the right tech to use for my plan. Also about the payment gateway, I want the customers to pay on the app or the website directly without redirecting them to other website. Not really sure if I can use paypal with this, also i need the system to accept mastercard and visa.

I did the research, so please no hate, I'm not asking for the code. I just want to know the right tech to use. I'm just super confused and lost right now.

Guys i need your help, i'm in my 3. semester where i have a REST project and therefore i need to implement some APIs and for this i shoud write a documentary where i discuss my decisions. And here is my problem
I need to implement a payment Api but i cant find a Big difference between the Visa and MasterCard Api, maybe some of you already worked with this api's and can help me out
What's better and why.