As we know, PayPal decides to refuse service to whomever it likes now and then. Some of the memorable PayPal users that got the boot were WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay. Why were they no longer able to receive funds? Well, because both services were attempting to raise money for illegal services in one way or another, according to PayPal.

So what’s wrong with Zivity? It involves nudity, which isn’t illegal at all. Zivity is a brilliant site co-founded by CEO Cyan Bannister that lets photographers and models work together to build portfolios and charge access for them. Using PayPal, of course. The service is extremely classy and professional.

PayPal has decided to give Zivity the boot too, saying that the site “could be considered obscene”, whatever that means. What’s worse is that there was no prior warning to Zivity, its founders, or the photographers that make money using the site.

PayPal has been the service Zivity used to make its money since 2006.

According to a conversation with NBC Bay Area, Bannister says she’s going to fight the issue and work with PayPal to get things back to how they have been.

NBC Bay Area also points out that Zivity’s other co-founder, Scott Bannister, is an original board member and early investor in none other than PayPal. Needless to say, the company can easily find the right people to talk to and smooth this out.

I find all of this surprising, as PayPal shouldn’t even bother trying to be a moral compass for the internet, let alone decide who can and can’t make money. It’s one thing to shut down a site like WikiLeaks that has heat on it from every government in the world, but a tasteful site that may or may not sell access to nude photos really doesn’t bother anyone. It sounds like someone at PayPal had a personal axe to grind.

This is further proof that the internet needs another viable option to the eBay owned PayPal. We’ve reached out to Bannister for updates, and will let you know what we learn.

Do you think PayPal or any other payment service should step in and say who can and can’t make money? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Payment systems are one of the more complex, if not the most complex roadblocks in developing services that incorporate any type of e-commerce or payment. Obviously, developers want to get paid, and simple options for this have only been PayPal or Google Checkout.

Stripe wants to make it easier for developers to get paid for their hard work. The company says processing transactions should be handled in code and not in finance. This could knock down a lot of walls for developers.

According to Stripe:

You don’t need a merchant account or gateway. Stripe handles everything, including storing cards, subscriptions, and direct payouts to your bank account.

To make it all happen, we work with some of the largest financial institutions in the world, including Wells Fargo and First Data.

Of course for sellers of goods on the street, Square has been a great option for them, requiring only an iOS device and a $10 dongle. But online has always been difficult to start and manage for yourself. Stripe wants you to work with them, as it has relationships with all of the major banks. You can use its simple API with a few lines of code to start processing transactions.

Coding languages like Ruby, PHP, Python are supported, which makes Stripe a pretty universal solution to start processing payments without a hassle.

Of course the company charges for its processing headaches, but that’s so you don’t have to worry about it. There are no no setup fees, monthly fees, minimum charges, validation fees, or card storage fees for Stripe. Surprisingly, there are no charges if a payment fails either, which is completely rare in this space.

The team’s posted mission statement is:

Stripe is a simple, developer-friendly way to accept payments online.

We believe that enabling transactions on the web is a problem rooted in code, not finance, and we want to help put more websites in business.

If you’re interested in checking out Stripe, it’s best to get started with the Stripe API tutorial.

The men were picked up from addresses in the West Midlands, Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire, Surrey and London this morning, charged with a connection of offenses under the Computer Misuse Act.

The attacks, which were organised by an online collective called ‘Anonymous’ targetted a number of websites that withdrew their services from Wikileaks, many of them banking or payment companies including Visa, Mastercard and PayPal. The collective would use specialised software to bombard a targets server with unsolicited traffic, taking the website down as a result.

The arrests were made as part of an investigation by the Central e-Crime Unit in conjunction with authorities in Europe and the US.

Pandora’s box of the Internet, 4chan.org is currently down. 4chan is the largest online community in the English-speaking world, essentially an imageboard website where people post and discuss pictures, but it is also a notorious group suspected for launching numerous attacks both on and off the Internet.

And it seems that the old idiom, “If you play with fire, you’ll get burned,” rings true today. An announcement on 4Chan’s status page says it has been taken down due to a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack. “We now join the ranks of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, et al.—an exclusive club!”

As of posting, downforeveryoneorjustme.com confirms that the site is down. 4chan’s Twitter account confirms the DDoS attack.

As reported by Geekosystem, the Internet vigilante group Anonymous (who has loose ties to 4chan) launched a DDoS attack against Bank of America’s website yesterday, in retaliation to Bank of America’s refusal to process payments or donations to WikiLeaks. Geekosystem speculates that either the banks of the past month may behind the attack (doubtful) or there may be a war with Tumblr brewing (seriously?).

While the front page is up, the boards and static files are down. On average, 4chan receives over 800,000 posts a day. The site’s founder Christopher “moot” Poole (pictured above) has been described by The Observer as “the most influential web entrepreneur you’ve never heard of.” To date, 4Chan, now 7 years old, hosts 642,022,167 posts and has a user base just shy of 60,000.

As first reported by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has sold his memoirs to two publishing houses, Canongate in Britain and Knopf in the United States.

Assange, who has reached worldwide celebrity status for controversy over Wikileaks and recent sex crime charges, describes himself in the following way, “Physically and intellectually pugnacious; pig headed, absolutist, megalomanical, an extreme statisitcal outlier, a difficult character and a cad — and those are just my good points.”

Pretty soon, we’ll know a whole lot more about the infamous man who sees himself as a “martyr without dying,” and has been heralded by open Internet advocacy groups and hackers worldwide. Reuters reports that Assange is expected to have a manuscript ready in March. News of the memoirs leaked via a tweet from Spanish publisher Random House Mondadori, with head of the literary division Claudio Lopez telling the world that “Manuscrito listo en marzo” — the manuscript will be ready in March.

Last week, we reported that 39-year-old Julian Assange was let out on bail, to reside in the English countryside under “Hi-Tech house arrest” on the following conditions: surrendering his passport, a curfew from 10am-2pm and 10pm-2am, an electronic tag and the duty to report to the police everyday at 6pm.

We’re looking forward to learning more about Assange. Will you read his memoir?

The concept of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks finally entered the mainstream public consciousness this month after assaults on the websites of Visa, MasterCard and PayPal made front page news.

Whilst these particular incidents were extremely high profile, a host of other DDoS attacks dating back to 1999 have littered the path leading up to Operation Avenge Assange.

The beginnings of DDoS attacks

The first notable use of a DDoS attack downed a University of Minnesota computer for over two days, but only a year later in 2000, sights were set higher when Amazon, CNN, eBay and Yahoo were all hit within the space of 24 hours, either slowing the sites down significantly or taking them altogether offline. Estimated losses to Amazon and Yahoo added up to approximately $1.1m.

Between 2001 and 2005, use of DDoS attacks silently grew with a few prominent attacks, most notably on Register.com and once more on eBay, for which a single man was prosecuted for causing damage of “at least $5000” over a year. The early botnets stemmed from to Trin00 and Tribe Flood Network, two of the earliest DDoS programs.

The seedier elements of DDoS attacks showed around this time as the technique began to be used by organised criminals to blackmail and extort money from small businesses by threat of cyber-attack. The growing commonness of these crimes coincided with the formation of the UK’s National Hi-Tech Crime Unit. Though they were tasked with finding the hackers at the root, the situation was ultimately resolved by improved servers leaving cyber-criminals unable to overwhelm the strengthened servers.

Despite the gradually improving ability to handle denial-of-service attacks, DDoS incidents persisted with increasing scale in the second half of the decade.

As early as 2006, DDoS tools became a staple of a hacker’s arsenal, but assaults were still typically created and coordinated by individuals rather than en masse. One highlighted case in the UK involved a teenager sending a former employer five million emails to take their servers down. The hacker was acquitted in the trial that ensued, but the judgement revealed flaws in the 1990 Police and Justice Bill, consequently amended to ban any and all denial of service attack.

An instrument of war

Whilst the UK seemed to be gaining some stability regarding DDoS attacks, 2007 brought diplomatic consequences to online warfare in Estonia as national websites suffered from Russian attacks. Initial tensions broke out when the proposed movement of a Soviet war monument from the Estonian capital turned into riots from the ethnic Russian population. This then spilled over into cyberspace as the websites of several government offices and cities were taken down or defaced by Russian activists. The event led many European officials to evaluate the protocols in such attacks as there was no precedent in the magnitude exhibited.

Not soon after, Russia was once again linked to DDoS attacks in the build up to their five-day war with Georgia. Reports at the time indicated that several Georgian, Azerbaijani and Russian sites were driven offline with claims tying particular attacks to Russian intelligence and the Russian Business Network, a criminal gang alleged to have also been a part of the cyber attacks on Estonia. The intensity of attacks in 2008 dwarfed those against Estonia as DDoS use escalated for that point onwards.

The disputed Iranian election of July 2009 saw street protests reflected online when many pro-Ahmadinejad websites were brought down by mass DIY denial of service tools. Rather than using automated botnets, PHP scripts were utilised in crowd-sourced assaults on the government. The two DDoS incidents with Russia and the Iranian election revealed that hacking, particularly using denial of service tools, had shifted from personal gain or targetted abuse, to politically motivated statements and attacks.

This was taken to extremes last year when Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and YouTube all suffered downtime when a Georgian blogger under the name ‘Cyxymu’ was individually targetted. The blogger was a vocal critic of the 2008 South Ossetia War between Russia and Georgia, and claimed that the KGB perpetrated the attack to silence him. Though the political aspect of hacktivism played a prominent role in the events that unfolded, the increasingly worrying concern was the weakness of major sites under DDoS attacks.

Grassroots payback

Despite preventative measures existing since the turn of the millennium, many of the victim
websites were inadequately protected against DDoS attacks, something made glaringly obvious in the last half of this year as Anonymous began their crusade against copyright with Operation: Payback.

The group’s attacks were initially mounted as a response to the MPAA contracted firm, Aiplex
Software, who used DDoS attacks to take down The Pirate Bay in September. Retaliation by Anonymous was swift and organised as the first week brought down time to Aiplex, the MPAA, RIAA, British Phonographic Industry and ACS:Law, the law firm notorious for aggressively targeting file-sharers. The more significant outcome of the attacks on Aiplex and ACS was the leak of sensitive private data that has since spread through torrents.

The actions of Anonymous as activists (particularly against Scientology) are well documented, but the focus delivered in the proceeding months outweighed previous organised cyber and real world protests. October saw DDoS attacks occur almost daily on the likes of Hustler.com, Ministry of Sound, the UK Intellectual Property Office, the US Copyright Office and Gene Simmons’ websites, the latter a result of taking a copyright-aggressive stance in a statement.

The profile of targets hit by Operation: Payback began to drop approaching November and a failed high-publicity series of attacks on Guy Fawkes Night seemed to evaporate the momentum built over the previous two months. The quietus of the attacks apparently culminated with the US and UK Pirate Parties asking for a DDoS ceasefire in late November, less than two weeks before WikiLeaks would suffer their own attacks in an attempt supposedly by a US patriot to halt the leak of the US Embassy Cables.

WikiLeaks

The early murmurings of Operation Avenge Assange began as WikiLeaks went viral and the
Swedish Pirate Party’s website was hit by DDoS attacks. John Perry Barlow, author of ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ and founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), tweeted on the first day of attacks: “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.”

Since then, attacks have been launched from both sides at sensationalist targets like MasterCard and PayPal, as well as some indirectly affiliated ones including Borgstrom and Bodström, the lawyers representing the women Assange allegedly assaulted, and PandaLabs, serial trackers of Anonymous’ attacks.

The key element shared by all the targets of DDoS attacks in the last week has been an inability to cope with a decade-old threat. However, this is not to do with a lack of preparation. The Anon Ops website was taken down suddenly despite having upgraded to what PandaLabs describe as a ‘bullet-proof server’ designed to resist botnet attacks.

The fact is that the sheer number of hacktivists on each side has overwhelmed servers, leaving the online war in a very open state. Although the EFF has condemned the attacks on both sides, the 1000s that have resorted to such tactics reveal it as an effective, if legally dubious, outlet for protest.

DDoS attacks may have started out as a way to shut down servers for fun, annoyance or gain, but key
events of the last decade have allowed the tool to transcend mere hacking, causing it to become simultaneously a form of protest and a weapon of war. The failure of Anonymous to take down Amazon (by either lack of support or strength of server) shows that the future of DDoS attacks lies only with the “hacktivists” themselves.

One week ago, we reported that Julian Assange had been arrested. He was first denied bail after surrendering to authorities in London early last Tuesday morning.

This morning WikiLeaks‘ Julian Assange went to his court hearing in London to fight possible extradition to Sweden on sex-crimes charges. Midday, Assange was granted bail to cheers from both inside and outside the courtroom. No word yet on whether he’ll pay the £200,000 bail with Paypal, Mastercard or Visa.

Assange’s high-profile lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, argued against the allegations of rape, “We doubt whether this actual category of rape would be rape under English law.” Robertson assured the judge that “the mere absence of a fixed residence does not give rise to a danger of absconding” and offered a permanent address in the U.K. where 39-year-old Assange would stay. Bail conditions also include surrendering his passport, a curfew from 10am-2pm and 10pm-2am, an electronic tag and the duty to report to the police everyday at 6pm.

According to the latest updates from the Guardian’s live blog of the hearing, Swedish prosecutors aren’t letting him go so easily. They are now launching an appeal against granting Assange bail. They will have 48 hours to submit an appeal and Assange will not be freed until that process is over.

Assange has since left the courthouse and is suspected to be on his way back to Wandsworth prison. He will remain there until the appeal is submitted.

Vaughn Smith, the founder of the FrontLine club in west London, is one of the many people offering security. If Assange is released, he will stay at Smith’s estate, Ellingham Hall in Suffolk, and report to a nearby police station at Bungay every evening. Here, Assange will await his next hearing on January 11th, 2010.

Jemima Khan – who had earlier offered a surety on behalf of Assange – said: “It’s great news. I can hear them all cheering outside.”

Novelist Tariq Ali said: “I’m very pleased that he is out. I think the extradition charges should now be dealt with in the same way. His barrister made the same point, that this is not rape under English law and there is absolutely no reason for extradition. We are delighted he is out, and he should never have been locked up in the first place.”

Author Yvonne Ridley said: “It is a victory for common sense. If he had been refused bail, it would have meant the court had become a political arena.”

Gavin MacFadyen, of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, said: “I am very pleased, and it is about time. We do not know what the prosecution will do now. And there is still a possibility of an appeal.”

The overwhelming support for Wikileaks has come in various forms from $20,000 from filmmaker Michael Moore to a deluge of online hacker attacks from groups like 4Chan/Anonymous who initiated Operation:Payback, a call to action to bring down the websites of companies that have publicly removed services once used by the Wikileaks website, targeting Swiss bank PostFinance, PayPal, Visa and Mastercard. Assange has also won the Readers’ Choice for TIME’s Person of the Year 2010.

Updating…

The saga of WikiLeaks is just getting worse for them. After jumping around the world to different servers, having its domain name pulled, DDOS attacks…I’m just waiting for a Biblical plague to hit the site…they have a bigger problem tonight: cash flow:

PayPal suspended the account after the U.S. said WikiLeaks activities were in violation of the law, a spokesman for the company said. PayPal wasn’t contacted by any government agency and took the action on its own, the spokesman said.

“PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity,” PayPal said in a blog posting. “We’ve notified the account holder of this action.”

via PayPal Cuts WikiLeaks’ Access to Funds Amid Global Scrutiny – BusinessWeek.

PayPal’s blog post, was short and sweet. No political statements or the rest, just “you violated the TOS so you’re out”. Pretty cut and dry there.

One of the options that Julian Assange has had for receiving donations has been through PayPal, it looks like that door has been closed. And this isn’t the first time that WikiLeaks has run afoul of PayPal. Last January large influxes of cash triggered money-laundering alarms and PayPal turned off the account when they couldn’t get an answser about what WikiLeaks was doing.

It sounds like this might be the final chapter with WikiLeaks and PayPal this time.