Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne
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Problem: I'm going for an interview far away, and the company is going to reimburse my travel expenses. Their only payment option is Paypal.
Solution: Get a Paypal account.Problem: I already have a Paypal account, but it's "located" in Poland, which is rather inconvenient, due to different currency etc.
Solution: Move the account to the USA.Problem: You cannot change country of Paypal account.
Solution: Close the account and open a new one (that's what it says in the FAQ). There's this handy giant "Close account" button in account settings.Problem: The button doesn't work (inb4 Spaceballs). After clicking it, I get a screen that says: "Before you close the account: Something went wrong". Well, yeah, I guess so.
Solution: Call the Customer Service and make them close the account.Problem: Because I'm cheap as fuck, instead of calling Polish department (ie. making intl call at the rate $5/min or something), I call American one. The result is, Customer Service Guy that I was connected with has limited access to my account, which mean he can close it, but only if the balance is 0. My balance is 0.04PLN (at the current rate it's equal to 0.01089USD; slightly more than a penny).
Solution: Forward my call to an Account Specialist, who hopefully can do it.Problem: Customer Service Fucktard hit a wrong button and I get redirected to nonexisting number, which ends my call.
Solution: throw a few kurwas, call them again, be sure to make it extra clear to Customer Service Gal that she better not repeat the same mistake.Problem: She tells me the only way is to call the international department located at country code +31, which is Netherlands. As I said, I'm a cheap fuck and don't want intl call.
Solution: tell her that; she forwards me to a local number instead.Problem: Account Specialist Gal says she cannot close my account if I have a positive balance.
Solution: Tell her to zero my balance. The account gets closed successfully, and my penny-and-a-tenth hopefully goes to SpaceX researchers.Problem: With the account closed, I can finally open a new one. So I go to homepage, click "Sign up", enter e-mail and password, click next, enter my address, click next, BAM! "Something's wrong with your information." That's literally the error message I've got. Zero useful information on what's wrong.
Solution: Call Customer Service.Problem: If you tell Customer Service Siri that you have no account and want to open a new account, she enters the tour guide mode and tells you what steps you have to take on the website to sign up. She doesn't react to any commands except "Next", which gets you to next step, or "Help", which instead of helping, repeats the instructions but in more detail.
Solution: Enter Konami Code, ie. press 0 which places you in proper CS call queue. It's worth noting she never says that it is an option. At least she's not as bad as Verizon's Siri, who refuses to put you up with a representative the first three times.Problem: Customer Service Gal #2 has a problem understanding that my closed account isn't the one I'm calling about, and that my new account isn't set up yet.
Solution: Retry signing up in order to tell her the exact error message. Try a different password, one that doesn't contain "ł" (that's not dirt on your screen, that's a lower case "Ł" which is like "L" but with a strikethrough). Be not surprised that this time it all worked. (Note: the website says that my password is A-OK.) Because I'm in Good Samaritan mood today, I decide to let the technical department know about the problem.Problem: Customer Service Gal #2 has a problem understanding that the issue is fixed. She tries to make me change website language to English, but instead of telling me that, she guesses what I currently see on the screen and tells me where to click. The problem is, none of the buttons she mentions exist anywhere on my screen, neither when logged in nor out, neither on homepage, dashboard, nor account settings. This last one actually has a combo box to select language, but in a different place than where she insisted it is. Did I mention the whole website has been in English all the time right from the start?
Solution: None.
Workaround: Eventually she gives up and we go back to the issue of Polish letters in passwords.Problem: She says that since I'm registering in the USA, my password has to be in English, so obviously non-English characters won't work.
Solution: Cry inside. Tell her to connect me with technical department (repeated half dozen times; I've already got used to it with her).Problem: They have no technical department. That's literally what she said. There's no such thing. Nowhere I could be forwared to with my bug report.
Solution: None.
Workaround: Fuck this shit.
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@gąska said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
my password has to be in English
lfrd934jd939890I3Q-)*&JSjw#$%fd#5s is (or should be) a perfectly valid password, but it's definitely not English.@gąska said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Cry inside.
That is an appropriate response.
I'll admit I've never been brave enough to try non-ASCII characters in a password (mostly due to the difficulty of entering them on an en-us keyboard or phone), but if they're doing passwords at all right, it should work perfectly. Of course, anyone reading TDWTF already knows that. You also know that the likelihood of it working is much smaller than it should be. :(
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Holy crap. More layers of shit than a septic tank shared by a Taco Bell and Chipotle.
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Moral of the story: Paypal can go fuck a cactus. I really wish that it didn't have a monopoly on payment-partner stuff.
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@pie_flavor said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Moral of the story: Paypal can go fuck a cactus. I really wish that it didn't have a monopoly on payment-partner stuff.
Huh, TIL . I joined in 2006,which (I'm probably mathing wrong) means I was indeed only 17 when I got the account. But I wonder if they'll actually catch on...
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@tsaukpaetra said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@pie_flavor said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Moral of the story: Paypal can go fuck a cactus. I really wish that it didn't have a monopoly on payment-partner stuff.
Huh, TIL . I joined in 2006,which (I'm probably mathing wrong) means I was indeed only 17 when I got the account. But I wonder if they'll actually catch on...
Just created an account with an invalid email address? Password (for when I forget: hhaa22hh )
Didn't even ask for my age, which is a mere footnote of requirement on another page they don't require you to actually visit.
Edit: sorry for the poor sap that owns the email address vermillion@greatings.com. Your sacrifice is appreciated.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@pie_flavor said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Moral of the story: Paypal can go fuck a cactus. I really wish that it didn't have a monopoly on payment-partner stuff.
Huh, TIL . I joined in 2006,which (I'm probably mathing wrong) means I was indeed only 17 when I got the account. But I wonder if they'll actually catch on...
Read the article. Yes, they will, and you'll be fucked.
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@pie_flavor said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@tsaukpaetra said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@pie_flavor said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Moral of the story: Paypal can go fuck a cactus. I really wish that it didn't have a monopoly on payment-partner stuff.
Huh, TIL . I joined in 2006,which (I'm probably mathing wrong) means I was indeed only 17 when I got the account. But I wonder if they'll actually catch on...
Read the article. Yes, they will, and you'll be fucked.
Cool. Something I'll see about chatting up support over...
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@tsaukpaetra said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
chatting up support
Let's see how they respond:
I just got a scare mail saying PayPal will destroy accounts for being created before the user as 18 years (and one day) old.
I've been an outstanding user since day one for over a decade, but seeing this notification got me fearful.I really don't want to lose PayPal as a nice solution, but I was hoping that if the rules are that stringent that even an 11 year old account can get banned, what steps should I take to recreate mine "just in case"?
Obviously maintaining my current account identity and data would be paramount, which a banning would inevitably destroy, followed by a length of time while I re-establish all the many service payments I currently use PayPal for.
Please advise.
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Checked my account settings, and not only was I 18 or 19 when I joined, but I also found some money in there that I forgot about.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
they respond:
Oh, automated response was pretty quick. I guess that satisfies (technically) their promise of "We'll get back to you within 24 hours" SLA.
Well, damn. If I'm not limited by the next business day because of this I'll donate $10 to the first WTDWTFer who replies with a paypal.me/$username link. :D
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I wasn't using my PayPal for too much, it had no money in it, and it was created by one of my parents before I was 18. I decided to just close it - we'll see what happens, I suppose. Surprisingly it was quick and easy to close my account, no questions asked. I wonder how much of an issue I'll have if I ever try to create a PayPal account again - e.g. will my paypal.me custom URL be available again? Also I now have a decorative piece of plastic in my wallet, the PayPal mastercard that behaved similar to the Google Wallet Card (which also became decorative plastic when they shut it down).
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@lb_ said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
the Google Wallet Card (which also became decorative plastic when they shut it down).
I think I still have mine! :)
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@hardwaregeek said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
I'll admit I've never been brave enough to try non-ASCII characters in a password (mostly due to the difficulty of entering them on an en-us keyboard or phone), but if they're doing passwords at all right, it should work perfectly. Of course, anyone reading TDWTF already knows that. You also know that the likelihood of it working is much smaller than it should be. :(
The main worry (apart from keyboard layouts) would be variability in the character encoding. Sane password hashes will work on bytes (or other fixed width codepoint holders).
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@dkf said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
The main worry (apart from keyboard layouts) would be variability in the character encoding.
Bugs in clients aside, all characters within the same HTTP connection have the same encoding. Nowadays, it almost always means UTF-8. And if it isn't UTF-8, it can be easily converted to it.
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@gąska said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Bugs in clients aside, all characters within the same HTTP connection have the same encoding.
Hahaha no. It's a message property, if you're lucky. Requests typically don't have it set, and for headers and the request line there's not even any place to specify the character set.
It's perfectly valid for one server to serve different URLs in different character sets.
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@pleegwat said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
It's perfectly valid for one server to serve different URLs in different character sets.
It is really messy what the encoding is in GETs, but in a PUT or POST the browser can (and should!) say what the encoding is. A trick I've seen in Ruby-on-Rails is to pass a parameter around that allows detection of whether the UTF-8 that it wants to work with has been scrambled, and if so, perhaps how. But it's still pretty much awful. :(
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@pleegwat said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@gąska said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Bugs in clients aside, all characters within the same HTTP connection have the same encoding.
It's perfectly valid for one server to serve different URLs in different character sets.
Can we just go ahead and ban non-UTF8 character sets already?
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@benjamin-hall said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Can we just go ahead and ban non-UTF8 character sets already?
Are you going to take the responsibility for rewriting Java, .Net and Windows to support UTF-8 internally? It's a pretty huge task.
Other than those three, yes, everything should be UTF-8 now.
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@blakeyrat said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@benjamin-hall said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Can we just go ahead and ban non-UTF8 character sets already?
Are you going to take the responsibility for rewriting Java, .Net and Windows to support UTF-8 internally? It's a pretty huge task.
Other than those three, yes, everything should be UTF-8 now.
Sorry, my response was mostly tongue in cheek. I still use python which has (had? but mostly fixed?) huge issues with unicode. I should have marked my post better. I do think that we should be heading in that direction, phasing out the non-legacy uses of other character sets where practical.
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@benjamin-hall Well Java and .NET are both open source, so there you go, put up a kickstart and terrible website and get going!
Windows, though.
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@blakeyrat said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@benjamin-hall Well Java and .NET are both open source, so there you go, put up a kickstart and terrible website and get going!
Windows, though.
But that takes effort. And if there's one feature that's consistent in me, it's sheer laziness. (No, this is not a serious response. It is a true response, however.)
A more serious response--I have a feeling that even Windows is being incrementally reworked in that direction. Thankfully, Microsoft cares about backwards compatibility, unlike certain fruit-named companies. Heck, I'd settle for even all inter-computer communications being in UTF-8 with the internals doing whatever they needed to.
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@blakeyrat said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@benjamin-hall said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Can we just go ahead and ban non-UTF8 character sets already?
Are you going to take the responsibility for rewriting Java, .Net and Windows to support UTF-8 internally? It's a pretty huge task.
But as you said, it's internal, so it doesn't matter as long as it's properly converted to UTF-8 at web interfaces boundaries.
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Perhaps they mistook it for the Aye-Seventeen-Anne and banned the account.
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I've just got an email that they decided to return those $0.01094 to me after all. I can expect a deposit in 5 working days.
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@benjamin-hall said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
I still use python which has (had? but mostly fixed?) huge issues with unicode.
Python 3 uses UTF-8 by default. If you're stuck maintaining legacy Python 2 applications, you have my profound sympathy. If you're writing new Python 2 applications, .
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@hardwaregeek It supports it by default...mostly. I've had issues with printing things to the console and it erroring out due to mismatches between encodings. That may be since I was doing it on windows and cmd doesn't speak unicode right.
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@benjamin-hall cmd does speak Unicode. It doesn't speak UTF-8 though.
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@gąska said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@benjamin-hall cmd does speak Unicode. It doesn't speak UTF-8 though.
That would be why then. I was using it to test before dumping output to a file, and got really really frustrated for a while.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@tsaukpaetra said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@pie_flavor said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Moral of the story: Paypal can go fuck a cactus. I really wish that it didn't have a monopoly on payment-partner stuff.
Huh, TIL . I joined in 2006,which (I'm probably mathing wrong) means I was indeed only 17 when I got the account. But I wonder if they'll actually catch on...
Just created an account with an invalid email address? Password (for when I forget: hhaa22hh )
Didn't even ask for my age, which is a mere footnote of requirement on another page they don't require you to actually visit.
Edit: sorry for the poor sap that owns the email address vermillion@greatings.com. Your sacrifice is appreciated.That's an interesting city to pick as an address...
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@sloosecannon said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@tsaukpaetra said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@tsaukpaetra said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@pie_flavor said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Moral of the story: Paypal can go fuck a cactus. I really wish that it didn't have a monopoly on payment-partner stuff.
Huh, TIL . I joined in 2006,which (I'm probably mathing wrong) means I was indeed only 17 when I got the account. But I wonder if they'll actually catch on...
Just created an account with an invalid email address? Password (for when I forget: hhaa22hh )
Didn't even ask for my age, which is a mere footnote of requirement on another page they don't require you to actually visit.
Edit: sorry for the poor sap that owns the email address vermillion@greatings.com. Your sacrifice is appreciated.That's an interesting city to pick as an address...
It went through multiple iterations before the validation ended up accepting it, so ;)
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@hardwaregeek said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Python 3 uses UTF-8 by default. If you're stuck maintaining legacy Python 2 applications, you have my profound sympathy. If you're writing new Python 2 applications, .
Our codebase is Python 2, but we plan to move it next year if things go the way we expect and hope (i.e., it's a funding-linked condition). The issue is that we're doing some moderately low-level hackery in some places — some of the networking code changed quite a bit in places, and we're doing stuff for which there isn't a higher-level library to hide the details — so porting things over will take quite a bit of effort.
Once we've ported, we'll probably just drop 2.7 support like a hot potato.
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@gąska said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@benjamin-hall cmd does speak Unicode. It doesn't speak UTF-8 though.
It isn't exactly Unicode either. It's a weird variant of UCS-2, and not UTF-16. Windows isn't really fond of characters outside the BMP, they say, although personally I've never tried to name a file "\u1F4A9.txt". That's U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO, if you don't mind.
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@steve_the_cynic Windows switched fully to proper UTF-16 in Vista.
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@steve_the_cynic said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Windows isn't really fond of characters outside the BMP, they say, although personally I've never tried to name a file "\u1F4A9.txt". That's U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO, if you don't mind.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if they detected that and replaced the filename with
cmd.exe
…
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@gąska said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Problem: She says that since I'm registering in the USA, my password has to be in English, so obviously non-English characters won't work.
Did you try a poop emoji?
PAYPAL IS KILLING POLISH CULTURE
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@gąska said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@steve_the_cynic Windows switched fully to proper UTF-16 in Vista.
I'm not sure whether I should feel reassured that they did it or puzzled that anything good came of Vista.
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@gąska said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@benjamin-hall cmd does speak Unicode. It doesn't speak UTF-8 though.
It (supposedly) does if you switch its codepage to 65001 via chcp or some registry key I forgot.
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@benjamin-hall said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@pleegwat said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@gąska said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Bugs in clients aside, all characters within the same HTTP connection have the same encoding.
It's perfectly valid for one server to serve different URLs in different character sets.
Can we just go ahead and ban non-UTF8 character sets already?
How else will you serve Russian, Arabic, and English versions of the same page without using Unicode (which was not widely used at the time the spec was written)?
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@pleegwat said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@benjamin-hall said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@pleegwat said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@gąska said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Bugs in clients aside, all characters within the same HTTP connection have the same encoding.
It's perfectly valid for one server to serve different URLs in different character sets.
Can we just go ahead and ban non-UTF8 character sets already?
How else will you serve Russian, Arabic, and English versions of the same page without using Unicode (which was not widely used at the time the spec was written)?
But this is 2017. Unicode is available everywhere.
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@benjamin-hall said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
But this is 2017. Unicode is available everywhere.
We've had people here admitting they're still on Win95 and Vista. (ok, actually their parents)
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@dcon said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@benjamin-hall said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
But this is 2017. Unicode is available everywhere.
We've had people here admitting they're still on Win95 and Vista. (ok, actually their parents)
Kill it with fire? I gave up my old computer to my parents when I moved to Florida because they were still on a P4 with WinXP (in 2012).
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@benjamin-hall said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@pleegwat said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@benjamin-hall said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@pleegwat said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@gąska said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Bugs in clients aside, all characters within the same HTTP connection have the same encoding.
It's perfectly valid for one server to serve different URLs in different character sets.
Can we just go ahead and ban non-UTF8 character sets already?
How else will you serve Russian, Arabic, and English versions of the same page without using Unicode (which was not widely used at the time the spec was written)?
But this is 2017. Unicode is available everywhere.
True. But this is probably not sufficient reason to modify a 20yo standard in a not-backward-compatible manner.
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@dcon said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@benjamin-hall said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
But this is 2017. Unicode is available everywhere.
We've had people here admitting they're still on Win95 and Vista. (ok, actually their parents)
Tell them their license is expiring and Microsoft isn't selling renewals? (I actually checked: they won't do anything if you talk to them about this problem).
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@pleegwat said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@benjamin-hall said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@pleegwat said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@benjamin-hall said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@pleegwat said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@gąska said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Bugs in clients aside, all characters within the same HTTP connection have the same encoding.
It's perfectly valid for one server to serve different URLs in different character sets.
Can we just go ahead and ban non-UTF8 character sets already?
How else will you serve Russian, Arabic, and English versions of the same page without using Unicode (which was not widely used at the time the spec was written)?
But this is 2017. Unicode is available everywhere.
True. But this is probably not sufficient reason to modify a 20yo standard in a not-backward-compatible manner.
I will admit that my first comment was not entirely intended to be a serious proposal. More an expression of disgust, much the same as with someone making a new project in PHP 4. That is, I can understand that, for the time, it was important, but that time has passed. There are better ways now. Please use them. For all our sakes.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Tell them their license is expiring
I regularly get phone calls about that. And now they're starting with Apple too - with those, they actually got the caller id string to say "APPLE" too!
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@dcon said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
they actually got the caller id string to say "APPLE" too!
I hear it's not that hard to do, actually...
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@tsaukpaetra said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@dcon said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
they actually got the caller id string to say "APPLE" too!
I hear it's not that hard to do, actually...
Caller ID is notoriously insecure.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
@dcon said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
they actually got the caller id string to say "APPLE" too!
I hear it's not that hard to do, actually...
True, but most of those scammers don't bother. (local number? no caller id string? Yeah, the answering machine can handle that.)
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@dcon said in Paypal and the Aye-Eighteen-Anne:
Yeah, the answering machine can handle that.
It seems rude to have your answering machine scream at people. Is it programmed to "Press 1" or whatever a lot of them do these days to get you to a person?