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  66. <h1>PayPal and their semingly-automated responses</h1>
  67. <p>Day 00021: Saturday, 2015 March 28</p>
  68. </header>
  69. </p>
  70. I received a response from PayPal, and it shows just how incompetent they are.
  71. I had to submit my request in the form of a formal complaint because of a combination of factors relating to their idiotic system.
  72. Because I don&apos;t hava an account, I have to choose a category of inquiry, and none of the available categories fit the issue.
  73. I explained all of this in my complaint, yet in their response, they said next time I should use the contact form that I explained why I couldn&apos;t use.
  74. </p>
  75. </p>
  76. Next, PayPal said that because the email address I gave them is not associated with an account, they were unable to locate my failed transaction.
  77. There are two issues with this.
  78. First of all, I told them that the transaction was not made with an account.
  79. Or rather, I told them that I had no account, which if they had any intelegence, would tell them that any transaction I make throughh them is not accosiated with an account.
  80. Yet they still tried to locate my account by my email address.
  81. Second, I&apos;ve had this same issue before in the past, even back when I had an account.
  82. When PayPal declines your card, they <strong>*fail to log that a transaction attempt was even made*</strong>.
  83. Not finding the transaction has nothing to do with not finding the account.
  84. Because the card was declined by PayPal, PayPal doesn&apos;t even keep record of it.
  85. </p>
  86. </p>
  87. Next, PayPal tells me that if I have further questions, I need to contact telephone support.
  88. I thought I had told them that I do not have a telephone, but looking back over my initial message to them, I did not.
  89. I suppose I will let this one slide because of that.
  90. However, redirecting people to telephone support is not a valid way to handle issues.
  91. Telephone support is agrovating and time consuming.
  92. Not to mention the fact that not everyone has a telephone and it should not be expected that everyone does.
  93. </p>
  94. </p>
  95. I tweeted almost verbatim most of the above (publicly) to @AskPayPal.
  96. We&apos;ll see if that gets me anywhere.
  97. I have also recontacted PayPal through the form they asked me too.
  98. I chose the category &quot;How do I spend money&quot; under &quot;Sending/Reciving money&quot;, which isn&apos;t quite the right category, but it seems to be the closest they offer.
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  101. Waking up several times in the middle of the night, I manages to install the system with an encrypted /home directory before having to go to work in the morning.
  102. I&apos;m not too happy with the results though.
  103. I have to enter my password three times before the system fully comes up (once for the encrypted swap partition that the installer insisted on and is probably a good idea, and twice for the encrypted /home partition).
  104. That&apos;s fine, but it seems that if I make a typographical error when entering the password, the system throws a fit, fails to boot properly, then dumps me in a root console.
  105. The proper way to handle it would be to request the password again, but instead, it hands root access over to whoever doesn&apos;t have the password.
  106. That seems like a security issue wating to happen.
  107. Sure, they can&apos;t access my sensitive data right away, but with root access, they can install whatever they like on my machine.
  108. They could for example install a key logger or a way to remotely access my data next time I mount the file system.
  109. I&apos;m going to try something new when I get off work.
  110. </p>
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  112. For the time being, <a href="/a/canary.txt">I am still not under a gag order</a>.
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