Hobbyist Geeks Pwned by PayPal

2009-06-07T00:53:00.000-07:00

Where do you go to buy new peripherals (like SD card readers) in 2009 for your 1985 Atari ST? Not to the local corner-shop, that's for sure. ACSI SD card readers might be essential for some folk, but some things are more essential than others.
Retro enthusiasts and other tech hobbyists face this challenge all over the world, and the solution is often to create the new parts they need collaboratively.
This is what Miro Kropacek was trying to do by manufacturing an open-source SD Card reader developed by another member of the "ST scene" when he came up against PayPal policy which doesn't allow users to pay for products which can't be shipped within 7 days of purchase.
When eager enthusiasts started making advance deposits required by Miro's manufacturer in April, PayPal refused him access to the money, locked his account, and after a series of emails gave him the ultimatum that he either ship the product immediately, refund those who paid, or let the money cool down in PayPal's coffers for 6 months. This was all despite receiving reassurance from those who had paid the money that they understood the that the product was not yet available.

In case you missed it, allow me to summarise PayPal's logic: "You can't take the money to manufacture the goods until you mail the manufactured goods to the people who paid the money". There's a bug in their code somewhere...

Not the first time
This is not the first time PayPal's inflexible application of this policy and a lack of pragmatic customer support has threatened to scuttle an enthusiast-developed and manufactured hardware project. One very well-known instance was with the Pandora project, an open-source, handheld gaming console that runs Linux. Around 100 preorders for this project were cancelled by PayPal in October last year, forcing users to find alternative payment methods.

Users of the Impulse PC games distribution platform have also had issues with preordering games using PayPal.

Frustration
Attempts to explain the the nature of the payments to his account by Miro after his account was locked were fruitless, with PayPal's inflexibility growing so exhasperating that at one stage he requested community members from the US try to contact PayPal customer service there, as email communications were failing.

Email communication is way to hell, I was mailing with different person everytime and they don't seem to be interested in fact all of you [purchasers] agree with such schedule conditions at all

Miro ended up with little option but to take PayPal's "refund" option and return around 80 payments.
These buyers, if they elected to continue with the purchase of the SD card reader at all, had to pay using alternatives such as sending cash in the mail, using European-based Moneybookers.com, or using the expensive (but secure!) services of Western Union.
Naturally, the whole experience has left a bitter taste in the mouths of the community as a whole.

After though [sic] thinking, discussion with Jookie etc I decided to send whole Paypal to the hell, with all consequences it implies.

The reason is simple -- I'm paying THEM, not vice versa, i.e. it's crazy I should beg them for some exceptions and feel like a criminal doing some nasty things. Maybe you don't realize that but Paypal could got quite a money for this "sale", 3.4% from nearly 80 people with average payment about 100 Euro... that's quite a lot. And if they don't want our (your!) money, so be it.

I instructed them to do a refund but as soon as I received their nice "I forwarded this to my retarded-colleague-behaving-like-another-machine" email I decided to do the refund manually, before they do any other stupid action (like "It came to our attention you want to do a mass refund, so we have frozen all your money until we decide to do so"). It was really nice hour, I am mouse-clicked to the death ;)

Rationale
PayPal have this policy to protect consumers. As a blanket rule it does, of course, make a lot of sense. If someone wins an item on eBay and pays the seller via PayPal, the seller should obviously be obliged to send the item to the buyer in a timely manner (even if it is just an empty box! With no Pandora in it. I had to get that joke in somewhere in this post).
This policy is not the issue. The issue is the narrow view of the world that PayPal have taken, refusing to see that there are sometimes transactions that don't fit into their narrowly defined model of "exchange of currency for product". This smacks of immature and ill-considered business rules for a company pushing to be the backbone of the information economy. Their IF statement has no ELSE clause, their methods have no CATCH's (Aha, there's your bug ;-).

It would not have taken much effort at all for someone with the power to make a decision to see that Miro's account's transactions were legitimate. The issue is that none of their low-cost employees would appear to have had the option or the awareness to escalate this case to such a person. PayPal executives and managers just want our money, they don't want to have to actually think about it.

Impact
The ST scene is small and fragile. Like the Pandora project, active users worldwide are probably less than 5,000. Unlike the Pandora project, not a lot of development of software or hardware takes place anymore, it's an old platform that dies as its user base ages, gets married, has kids, and grandkids. The loss of even 20 users because of these PayPal difficulties has an impact, and I believe this is more universally important than it might at first appear.
Enthusiast culture and collectives develop new ideas, experiment with old ones, tinker with new and old hardware. We might be nerds and geeks, but it's an important job because in doing it enthusiasts are, consciously or not, fostering technological diversity.
This hobbyist development and experimentation lives at the edges (and beyond) of mainstream technology manufacture and consumption, but like genetic diversity it is healthy, and many developments can evolve back towards the mainstream.
Many technology companies and products that we know today didn't come from research grants, academia, or Fortune 500 ventures. Two examples of such enthusiast-born companies are Apple and Microsoft.

UltraSaTan
I will leave you with a video of the SD card reader at the heart of this saga in action. It's name is UltraSaTan (I am assured that the "Satan" in the name does not have any etymological connection to a red bloke with horns). Here, an SD card is "hot swapped" and the file system is refreshed in the TOS operating system to show the contents on the new card.

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Hobbyist Geeks Pwned by PayPal