Life as I find it

I just got this email from paypal:

Hello Vidyut,

Your payment of  $$ has been sent back to the sender of the payment.

We reversed this payment because we have stopped allowing personal payments to be sent to or from India.

If this was a payment for a purchase of goods or services, and not a personal payment, then you may contact the buyer and have him or her resend the payment as follows:  (a) click the Send Money tab, (b) select “Goods,” and (c) provide a shipping address.

If this payment was a personal payment such as a gift, then we have requested that the sender find another payment method until we restore personal payments to and from India.

We are trying to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and we’re sorry for any inconvenience.

Thank you,
PayPal

Now, this is really strange. This was payment for an online job I have already completed. More difficult are those payments to be made to web hosting providers and so on. I doubt if it is just me with this problem. There are people whose entire livelihoods depend on being able to accept payments. I am just wondering at the wholesale damage this action has probably caused. Also wondering about people who delivered based on the payment which later got reversed.

Yet another reason why paypal suchs, and still is quite necessary to have an online career

Dayum, I can’t afford this loss right now.

If you have a test server installed on your machine at home (or elsewhere) to do web development work, you may run into this common problem. You try to do something that writes to your server (wordpress plugin upgrades, for example) and it wants ftp information!

What ftp? Its already running on the same machine. The thing is, your wordpress has not been installed by the same user as your apache. The easiest way to sort this out is to change ownership of the wordpress folder to the same user as apache, and the thing will no longer want ftp passwords, because it can write to the directories and uses its regular ‘get’ thing.

How do you go about doing it? You tried changing ownership, and it refused. You are sure you own the wordpress, but are not able to transfer it. This happens because this ownership can only be changed by the root. So what you have to do it:

sudo -i <-- This makes you root (as different from running stuff as root, which you probably tried while changing permissions)
Then you go into your wordpress directory:
cd /var/www/wordpress <-- This has to be whatever your path is
Now to change the permissions:
find wp-content | xargs chown www-data:www-data <-- Here, wp-content can be any folder you want the software to be able to write to.

That's it. Done. Now try to upgrade those plugins, and it should be smooth as silk - no questions asked that you can't answer.

In a world where online services abound and flourish under the comparitive anonymity the net offers, fraudulent service providers have a whole new market to themselves. Being too trusting is a bad idea.

I had been meaning to submit my site to online directories for a long time, as many people said its good to be listed, and links and all that.

Some surfing brought me to Submit Edge, which offers submissions to 750 high PR directories for 60$. The site really looks like these guys know what they are doing, and have an understanding of Search Engine Optimization, Link Building, etc. Kush Infosys Pvt.Ltd. which runs the site and service are based in Mumbai, so I thought that I’d be giving business to someone from our town. Sounded good, so I paid them, filled in their form with the link I wanted submitted and careful descriptions.

Done, right? Wrong!

Once I received acknowledgement of my payment, there was complete silence on their end.

As you see, the submissions should have been done in two weeks. As the duration came to a close, I started wondering what happened of the services I had booked, and wrote them an email. I got a response saying that it will happen soon.

Finally, about 3-4 days after their stated time was up, I got my “submission report”. Imagine my horror to see:

1. The main page of the first site I was submitted to (PR7) had links to adult sites!!! Checking a couple of days later, the entire directory was gone and replaced by some video site in some language I don’t understand.
2. The second site in the list doesn’t have a category for where they claimed they submitted by link to.
3. The third site has a domain name with random letters, and is listed as a PR6 site, when in reality it has no PR at all.
4. In fact, many of the sites had random letter domain names.
5. Their High PR list has exactly 21 directories that state a PR of 5 and above. Please note that these also aren’t really all actually High PR, as the third point shows.
6. From there on, it is PR4 and PR3 till 41 and goes downhill from there.
7. Not a single incoming link from these sites points to the link that was submitted (which I guess is a good thing, though it defeats the entire purpose of the exercise)

Aghast at what I had paid for, what I was getting, and what it could potentially mean to my site, I emailed them with my findings to receive no response at all. I tried calling them, but kept getting through to an automated mailbox.

I filed a dispute under PayPal, upon which I got a response within hours from them offering to replace links with problems or provide new links.

Not desiring new links of this kind, I asked for a refund, and escalated my claim out of an unnecessarily overdeveloped sense of responsibility so that PayPal could see what their services were being used for, and other buyers could be protected. Turns out, PayPal wasn’t particularly interested if their sellers use their services to cheat people, as long as there are no goods involved. What is more, they did no investigation of any kind, but automatically shut down my claim because:

As stated in our User
Agreement, the claims process only applies to the shipment of goods. It
does not apply to complaints about the attributes or quality of goods
received. Therefore, we are unable to reverse this transaction or issue a
refund.

This is mentioned in the PayPal policy as intangibles not being eligible for consumer protection.

However, the payment in my account allowed me to create a dispute, even though there was no shipping address provided, and I clearly mentioned “services” as the transaction type and the dispute was successfully created about something PayPal had no intention of looking into, or resolving. It allowed me to escalate the dispute into a claim, upon which it was automatically closed.

This is clearly a strange and problematic service from PayPal that unscrupulous providers can exploit to their advantage, because it gives the illusion that the dispute will be investigated, when in reality what happens is that it gets discarded and finalized as closed. No investigation happens, and while justice is implied, it actually removes all options a claimant has in the system. Thus, even when the seller might have initiated some kind of compensation, he is actually released and essentially set scot-free to lather, rinse, repeat with some other gullible consumer.

Additionally, the fake service provider actually gets the credibility of having disputes against them dismissed by the “authority”.

So, to summarize:

• Don’t pay anyone for any service online, unless you trust them.
• DON’T trust PayPal’s dispute system unless you are dealing with tangible goods, regardless of what their dispute form says.
• Don’t know about other submission services, but SubmitEdge is clearly a fraud.

For whoever is interested, this is a sample report of submissions made, and if you want something like this associated with your site, go ahead:

The Horror Submissions Report from Submit Edge

Was looking for something fun to do, and came across this Flirting game – Extreme Style by VO5, You basically create an avatar for yourself, and enter a flirting game online. Its quite fun.

What I found really interesting about this was the mischief element. Mischief always calls to me. Here was an opportunity to create a “look” for myself and interact with two other individuals – and what interaction – witty, amusing, and a competition.

Basically, three of us enter a room and one is assigned the role of a judge. The judge asks the other two questions and the winner is decided on the basis of their answers. This is a picture of me as I was waiting for my companions to join me.

My look

And this is me with my Victory Hair:

My Victory Hair Celebration

I found this to be quite an appealing promotion for the Victory Hair products – VO5 Extreme Style. It invites an attitude.

So what are you waiting for, go for it, and share your results. Join me there. I’m hoping to win some free styling products along with creating an awesome reputation for flirting.

I seem to be on a learning swing. Just back from the Group Relations Conference in Bangalore, and as I headed to my email, I saw that Cisco certification has a possibility for a review to be written. So I headed over to their site to take a look. No surprise so far.

What I found there was a relatively newish site with an eye for quality. This I admire. Further exploration led me to the learning center where the first article to cath my eye was one about soft-skills in IT managers. NOW, this is what I appreciate in an educational institution whether online or physical.

Just the last week, on an induction programme for young IT professionals in a leading organization in Mumbai, we had talked about how important it is to forget the competition orientation of education and learn to collaborate and achieve practical functionality.

The unfortunate fact of life is that people want to know what you know, and your own claim of competence is not an adequate measure in their eyes. So unless you are a mighty famous professional, it is important to have an idea of where your skills lie, build on them and get them officially acknowledged to certain standards to make them more visible and credible to those employers who have no clue of where your talents lie.

We had spoken of different ways to accredit and improve on this competence. In my opinion as both a consultant and an active webmaster, it is important to not just keep learning and updating our knowledge, but also to be able to apply it in a practical and functional way. One way of doing this is to step out of your comfort zone and take a risk to test your knowledge and get a stamp of acknowledgment.

The sorrow of much education today is that it doesn’t account for the human factor, which is what actually makes things work. To find a site that talks about soft skills while encouraging the certifications in various subjects makes me happy to be.

The online world is a good place to unfurl wings and chase development and growth in our chosen careers. This site is a useful tool for those.

The certifications themselves are well thought out and useful. In a world of competence, it is getting increasingly important to have skills verified and attested, which is exactly what this site helps you accomplish. Rather than duplicate the contents of that site to tell you everything about it, I invite you to actually experience it and perhaps you may want to share how you found it here.