I recently signed up for adobe CC to test out premiere for some video editing work (side note, Final Cut is better) and instead of inputting a real card I used a privacy.com one. When I decided I didn't want it, I just disabled the privacy card. I only have to deal with a few annoying emails from adobe. I didn't even bother trying to cancel. Reading your comment makes me realize how smart that was.
Is that legal in the USA? Entering into a purchase agreement ("koopovereenkomst", not sure if I'm translating the jargon correctly) and then just not paying? Because that's certainly not legal where I live.
I understand that the odds of repercussions are small and that there are no damages on Adobe's side since you haven't physically taken their goods so it would probably have to be taken up by the public prosecutor rather than become a civil case... but still, I'd not be happy having my name on a "doesn't pay their bills" list, nor is it quite honest.
Or am I misunderstanding the situation and did they advertised with monthly cancelable? (False advertising) Nobody mentioned that in the thread though, and from this comment it sounds like it was very clear that you were agreeing into a year-long subscription: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24232282
Here in the Netherlands Adobe breaks our laws by not allowing one to cancel a subscription every month after the first year. It took me 45 min on the phone and 4 forwards and saying expressly that they were breaking the law before they cancelled the subscription. No more Adobe for me.
All conversations could only be done in English, something my wife would already be pretty uncomfortable with.
Yep same experience with a US company that had gone broke, publicly said so on their website, yet still had renewed a subscription I had with them after the public statement that they would no longer deliver anything.
Ended up with months of paperwork, claims from the other party that I ordered it myself (no idea where as the website to order was gone) including printouts of Stripe with my IP address which was supposed to prove their point.
Five or six mail forms to fill out (yes _mail_ not email) over the period of months with very strict deadlines.
They must have gathered the IP address from an earlier transaction a year before that. It also did not raise any flags that the transaction was exactly one year later on the minute.
An incredible waste of my time and if I had to go through all of that again I will just let it go.
Exactly. I tried to reverse some charges. The bank told me I had to file a police report. I did find that the company returned the money pretty promptly when I told them I was reporting them to the police...
> Everybody on the net is always like "Just told my bank to block the transaction" - when I did that, in a EU country, my bank was very reluctant.
Depends on what it is. Any recurring SEPA payment I can get back up to 60 days. Separately I can block those payments. All from the app or their website, I don't need to talk to anyone.
I thought being able to get that money back, plus being able to block companies were SEPA rules. Meaning, applies to loads of countries (at least the countries with the Euro).
You shouldn’t be contacting a bank - I think that might be the distinciton. When people say this, I interpret it as contacting their credit card and asking for a chargeback.
This depends on the credit card company but mine is very willing to charge back if I call. They find it pretty trivial.
I’ve never done anything like this with a debit card or bank though. I think the money that leaves through debit is actually gone and that’s a distinction. I know the EU is more debit focused.
Which country? Because here in south eu all banks give out debit cards as standard card. NL is different in that they use maestro so if you want to travel (outside of eu) you have to request a regular debit/credit card and most NL banks do not issue debit cards outside maestro, so you get a Cc.
> if you want to travel (outside of eu) you have to request a regular debit/credit card
The era where maestro cards were impossible to use abroad was already over ten years ago. The only thing you might need a creditcard for abroad is hotels and car rental, which you wouldn't be able to do with any kind of debit card (outside of a relatively small selection of hotels).
That doesn't match, at all, with my experience. I had to travel for work all over the world the past 8 years, usually twice a month and my maestro cards didn't work in any US atms or shops, nor in chinese ones, nor in hk, indonesia, australia, cambodia, most atms in thailand and other places.
In the US & China, it had big maestro stickers everywhere, but it didn't work at all. Different cards, different banks; on calling the banks they said they did not even see a transaction coming in and they the cards are set for international travel (and work fine everywhere they are accepted in the EU).
And it's not for lack of trying; One time on a big slog from US -> China -> AUS, I (stupidly) brought 1 credit card and 3 maestros and my CC got cancelled (fraud); I tried literally every atm , shop in these countries and could not get $1. I had to borrow from my colleagues. This is a few years ago.
Usually they ask you to fill an online form and attach any evidence.
After that it always felt like a call center employee decided whether to start the refund or not.
If you write something smart, well researched, polite, and long, chances are that poor person will just skim through it and click “accept”.
Then on the other side the company has 30-45 days to object via their bank.
With big companies they probably think it’s not worth their time.
With small companies the bank notices about a new dispute probably go to an inbox nobody monitors.
I had immense issues with this in NL, even on a credit card; however in spain/portugal, I just send an email with the transaction id they cancel it without asking anything.
Holy crap, that is some dark pattern :/ Every website allows you to choose between annual and monthly payments, but but adobe just presents their annual plan in two different ways.
From "koopovereenkomst" I assume you are Dutch or Belgian. In the Netherlands, a "koopovereenkomst" most often means you have a "payment obligation" (betaalverplichting). The whole invoicing system where people pay afterwards, hinges on this principle.
Disclaimer: IANAL (But I helped as software developer at a factoring company: which buys unpaid invoices from freelancers for a fee or a percentage of the invoice-amount)
> a factoring company: which buys unpaid invoices from freelancers for a fee or a percentage of the invoice-amount
Getting way off-topic here, but I’ve never heard of this. Is it like a bill-collector for freelancers? Who do the non-payers tend to be - is it companies who think they can stiff a freelancer, but who will pay up when someone with teeth comes knocking? Also, can anyone sell an invoice on to someone else to collect it, or does that possibility have to be written into the initial contract between the freelancer and the employer?
Not sure about freelancers specifically but factoring is normally used by small companies to reduce short term capital requirements, as most companies will only pay invoices after 30 days and some have payment terms of much longer eg 90 days. Anyone can factor an invoice and if it was issued by a large and credit worthy company then this is a cheap way to access secured credit.
More recently, see the development of reverse factoring, where the customer initiates financing for its purchases from its suppliers. It's dangerous, as you can imagine; if the customer can't pay for its invoices, instead of being indebted to a supplier, they are in default to their creditor. See Greensill, a $1.5bn-from-Softbank startup that is involved in several recent crises among its creditors in the UK (see https://www.ft.com/content/d5a5951f-bab8-4ea8-b0d7-2b70455c9..., and for a more indepth explanation of what reverse factoring is (with jokes also), see https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-iyz8z-e06e88)
Thanks, this makes sense. Do you have any idea what the factor’s cut is? It can’t be too much, because otherwise the freelancer would wait for direct payment - unless they are really tight for money - so my gut feeling is somewhere between 5% - 10%
These are debt collectors, you've definitely heard of them, and they're all super shady. This is just how it works.
A normal business, say your bank or you energy supplier or your software supplier, will try and recover a debt with some basic attempts. But then they'll bundle together all their debts and sell them to debt collectors for pennies on the pound.
Don't know why they're called a factoring company in Holland.
“Factoring is a financial transaction and a type of debtor finance in which a business sells its accounts receivable (i.e., invoices) to a third party (called a factor) at a discount“
> "Don't know why they're called a factoring company in Holland."
To me it sounds like a bad translation. "Invoice" in Dutch is "factuur". "Facturering" is the process of sending an invoice. I have often encountered the word "factoring" as a supposedly-English translation of it.
Being from the Netherlands and having had a company there for 30 years, I know how well the law works; I have had many companies simply not paying invoices. And because the amounts are small (few 1000 usually) they get away with it without issues. We have tried everything: even winning in court but they still did not pay. Possession indeed is 9/10 of the law. So I would not worry about it too much not paying some Adobe bill.
I recently wanted to get some practical knowledge with cloud storage buckets and my first choice was Azure (for no other reasons that name was shrouded with mystery).
Free trial, etc. I give my phone number (something like "for legal reasons"). Then it asks for my CC. I already hate it because it's highly dubious they need my CC number for a free trial since it's not needed to deliver the product. Fine, I give it. Then the process is declined because they don't like my rechargeable CC.
I am a happy AWS freeloader and potential customer now (well, for one year at least).
1. Phone number is required to minimize fake/bot/fraudulent use accounts.
2. Credit card is required in case you want to immediately scale up, and also, used as anti fraud as depending on the card used, and address is used to judge you as a customer and whether or not you should be disabled immediately upon account creation.
Credit cards first six numbers are the BIN, or bank identification number, these are used to sort whom the issuing bank is, what type of credit card line, and whether or not it is a virtual or such.
These are compounded to give you an antifraud score. Address and connecting IP address help too.
So that's why it was denied, but for a company like Micrsoft, their billing practices are very much streamlined and not so hidden vs other companies nor do they introduce "tricky" language such as Adobe's yearly contract, payable monthly SAAS.
> 2. Credit card is required in case you want to immediately scale up, and also, used as anti fraud as depending on the card used, and address is used to judge you as a customer and whether or not you should be disabled immediately upon account creation.
That's not what MS says the credit card is for (edit: which doesn't mean they aren't using it the way you explained they do):
> We ask for your credit card number to verify your identity and to keep out spam and bots. You won’t be charged unless you upgrade.
They don't want me because of my CC (I specifically want a pre-paid CC I can put money on as I need it and can never be overcharged) because my CC can't be easily charged in case I forget to cancel the service.
Amazon, PSN store, paypal, online clothing store, pro and non pro pc parts store, etc. are all fine with this card.
edit: I understand Azure is a recurring payment with potential upcost at some point or another and that the examples I gave are one time payment but then they really should find a way to let me try their stuff for free as they say they want or just stop giving me resources if the card is declined.
Remember, it is to stop bad actors from using azure services for phishing, tricky things, etc (since a default instance w/ IIS, or any web service will literally be on windows.net.)
That card has my whole name on it and the bank has a trail of everything I do with it. MS also now have a verified phone number and can see they both come from the same country.
> Remember, it is to stop bad actors from using azure services for phishing, tricky things, etc (since a default instance w/ IIS, or any web service will literally be on windows.net.)
Nothing prevents me from doing that with a regular credit card.
Nothing prevents them from shutting down services/instances that break their ToS.
How convenient for them the only way to try out their free offer is to give them the ability to withdraw money from me.
It's legal, you just still owe them the money. Nothing is stopping you from canceling a debit card that you have active reoccurring payments on, just if your mortgage was one of those the bank can still find you in default.
Similarly if Adobe owed you money they may make you run through a customer service maze in order to get it. That's legal too. They don't have to provide you with a method to automatically take as much money as you assume you are owed.
For anyone not doing professional video editing work I can definitely recommend DaVinci Resolve. The basic version is completely free and is extremely powerful.
Once you get over the initial bump in the learning curve that most high-end content creation tools have, Resolve is one of those tools that grows with you; most of the time if you need a "new-for-you" function, it always had it ready for when you need it. Some people report stability problems, for me Resolve (stable releases) has been the most stable content creation tool - any category - I've personally used.
Pro tip: Do go through the slight additional hassle of setting up a local postgresql server with their installer and use that instead of the "local database" (=SQLite). Saving projects with a lot of internal data (e.g. many clips using correctors with trackers) is much quicker (>10x) with pg.
DaVinci Resolve free version should provide enough functionality and powerful features for even most professional work! DaVinci is a product I'll happily promote. I feel that the software somehow flies "too much under the radar": if you don't know where to look for and seek free video editing software, you end up easily in a swamp of terrible freemium software even when DaVinci Resolve is easily available.
DaVinci Resolve is, if anything, excellent for professionals. I have used it professionally for years, but realize it was originally only available with a grand console system that only large studios could afford.
I second this recommendation, especially if you deal a lot with 4K footage (no need for proxy videos that both Premiere and After Effects needs to not be janky) and color grading, as it's amazing in DaVinci Resolve.
And works on Linux! I still have a working MacBook Pro (now 6 years old) to do FCPx on, but when/if it bites the dust I am not planning on replacing it with another Apple.
I always thought DaVinci was extremely powerful and overkill. I need something which can handle HDR and is a bit better than iMovie, but, both FCPX and Premiere were too much work for me to learn.
Recently did the exact thing with a Privacy card and SiriusXM (fuck that company). I have a plot twist tho, SiriusXM continued to extend my service after my trial period ended and payment declined then tried to make me pay $10. Turns out, I still had to manually jump through all of the hoops of manually cancelling my SiriusXM account and the $10 is the pro-rated bill between the end of my trial and when finally cancelled.
Seriously, fuck that company.
edit: seems I have a fancy for run on sentences. sorry
The rub with all of these services is that your account is burned in addition to your credit card. You can walk away from the remaining 11 months of Lightroom as long as you don't need to continue using Premiere for a project or rely on them for any other ongoing service like downloading stock photos you purchased through them (I think I remember seeing that service?)
Similarly, doing this to a Steam account or iTunes account cuts off your access to all your previously "purchased" content.
You don't have to worry about that BS if you use free software alternatives either. Plus you get to contribute to an alternative ecosystem that is also a lawful and moral alternative (Because piracy is both illegal and immoral in many circles.)
You already contribute by growing the community. Software benefits from network effects. E.g. a large hurdle for Libreoffice adoption is the fact that many documents are in the MS proprietary formats. Messengers like Signal or Telegram are in the same boat. As the community grows, the chance increases for someone to contribute by coding or money, or hiring the lead devs for support contracts. It doesn't have to be you, but if you (and others) hadn't used the software before them, that person might not have used it in the first place.
Yes, you can increase your value to the project thousandfold with more direct contributions like coding, bugfixes, donations, community work, etc, but already being part of the community is of help.
If you participate in the community, you can be a boon or you can also be a drag (if you just use the software in the privacy of your home, report problems and ask questions, without every giving back in any way, not even by answering other folks' questions).
If you want your open source developers to eat, they need cold hard cash.
From the lwn link above:
> Words fail me to express how beyond-utterly-broken the
existing TDF / desktop model is for the ecosystem around selling
Desktop LibreOffice.
> Collabora - despite C'bra still putting a lot of work into
LibreOffice Desktop, having an outstanding support capability, doing
lots of marketing, being the largest code contributor to LibreOffice,
and having lots of existing happy customers / references for desktop
LibreOffice, ... etc. etc.
> We have not had -one- -single- -new- Collabora Office
customer since 2018 - zero.
(for context: the former LibreOffice development team of SUSE joined Collabora in 2013, so they're not a scrappy new startup completely disjointed from Libreoffice)
> If you participate in the community, you can be a boon or you can also be a drag (if you just use the software in the privacy of your home, report problems and ask questions, without every giving back in any way, not even by answering other folks' questions).
Whether problem reports are a help or hindrance depends strongly on the type of report. A low information "it broke" post is a hindrance. A high information post giving steps to reproduce, having looked for similar bug reports, giving system details needed to reproduce the report, should be a help.
Thanks for linking the E-mail, it was a very interesting read!
200 million users means the community is huge. Not every project is in a situation like that. It means that Libreoffice creates tremendous value around the globe, and extracting just some of that value means the development efforts can be grown.
There are positive things in that e-mail as well: many large institutional users do contribute back.
Also note that well researched bug reports can be helpful for the community, especially if you post workarounds you found into the bug thread, and the thread is accessible by search.
As for Collabora, I'm not sure how much they engage in marketing? Maybe if they increase such efforts/change strategy they can grow their number of customers.
As a major Open Source contributor, I'd say that advocating the software goes a long way.
For example, in one of my last job (I'm a freelance), I could get paid full time to contribute to open source tools because the guy taking the decision heard about PostgreSQL and open source somewhere. If that guy has only heard about Oracle, the same work would have gone closed source.
If the person responsible for the office solution of a school heard of open office from you, you did help a lot. Because many times, big open source users will invest in open source, in form of support, custom development or just sponsoring.
Easy: send them some money. I do, at times I even sent money to projects I deem important though I'm not actually using them, like FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
It's true only if you find torrents "in the wild". You can lurk/participate in an established torrent forum which gives you user reports, discussions, seeder score and a community mindset instead of a c00l w4r3z download mindset in general. Idk of english or international ones, but only because I never looked for one. TPB and KAT are not good examples, cause these look(-ed) like boards rather than forums, although I never had any issues with using them either.
In addition to gp's point: After settling my income I began buying software (games mostly) on steam/etc to support studios I like, but it is still much easier to torrent it afterwards and to not deal with bs that stores represent. I never realized before how much hassle it is to own a legal version of everything. You pay your money and they don't even bother of your convenience or digital rights, only theirs. Recently I bought starcrart remastered (without torrenting) and that battle.net downloads over 200mb over my adsl line every flipping time I try to run it. As a result, I just watch falcon pal match reviews at youtube and never run it. Blizzard deserved that money for sure, but man isn't that stupid.
I don't know about software, but pirated games are generally more secure, stable and performant with less spyware than the official games with all the DRM.
Haven't played video games for some time, but at least when I was still pirating, malware and spyware was pretty common. Bugs and incompatibilities caused by pirating were also not unheard of.
Playing pirated game is putting trust into the hands of some anonymous hackers. And that begs the question, what do they gain from giving out the game for free?
They could be doing it just for fun, for coolness, or out of altruism. And that's true for probably many case. But to say none of them wanted to earn expedient money would not persuade me.
Citation needed. I guess you’re probably right but companies are way more accountable than random internet person who modified the dll/binary to work without copy protection.
I remember hearing about at least one game that was significantly more performant when pirated (I think it was by Ubisoft). They had so much code for DRM and network tracking that it was faster to just stop that code from executing by hacking the game.
This happened with Monster Hunter World's Iceborne expansion. It updated the included version of Denuvo and added many, many threads that constantly scanned the game executable for modifications as an anti-cheat mechanic.
A modder distributed a tool to bypass the anti-cheat and restore performance the same day the expansion released. It took over two weeks for Capcom to get the game playable again, and many more before they improved performance back to roughly pre-update levels.
For reference, I'd been using Steam Proton to play the base game on Linux and was getting 60fps at nearly max settings. After the update, I got 1. One frame per second. I saw a number of similar reports from native Windows players.
You don't follow games recently (meaning 10 years at least). There are few publishers that put pretty nasty DRM protections inside that run constantly, take few % of the CPU and do constant full memory checks (among other things). Performance drop is visible unless you have obscurely expensive hardware.
This is kind of expected for online gaming due to many folks fucked up mentality of using cheats and playing with rest of the crowd (some psychologists could probably go quite deep on breaking this down to mostly childhood issues). If you play on your own, its just a pain in the a.
Many people buy the game and then play pirated version, just to avoid this kind of punishment of the lawful citizens.
Probably over half the popular multiplayer products on Steam have rootkits in them that send a lot of data about you straight to the publisher. Companies are not accountable for the things you want them to be accountable for, so for normal people it just looks like they're not accountable at all.
I tend to buy (indie, Linux) games on gog/humble bundle/itch.io, or on the official developer website. When I have to use steam it really pains me, their client, drm, marketing forced accounts, pricing policy .. are a pita.
Are there any subscriptions on Steam to do this to? I thought temp credit cards were meant to solve passing your real cc details to a merchant for 1 off transactions or when things like adobe do sketchy stuff. If you're buying games on steam it shouldn't matter if you use a temp credit card or not.
If a company does something sketchy and you cancel or reverse the charges, you generally lose everything on the account - not just the thing you're disputing.
Adobe is similar to Steam in that a single account is likely to have a variety of different products associated with it. If you somehow end up in a dispute involving Steam and reverse a charge, Valve will (IIRC) close out your entire account.
The core question to ask here is why the payment card networks allow merchants to circumvent the chargeback process by stealing subscription goods in retaliation for disputing fraudulent charges.
The card industry imposes a lot of regulation on merchants in the name of security (e.g. PCI) and customer experience (e.g. not allowing merchants to demand secondary ID for in-person transactions). Retaliation fraud by subscription merchants is something the card industry could stop and the industry should not be let off the hook for allowing this practice.
Neither, for that matter, should governments be given a free pass. Consumer dispute resolution processes exist for a reason (in no small part to reduce the load on the legal system) and circumventing them should not be tolerated.
Not likely, I tried that route about 2 years ago... they started calling and leaving threatening messages every day until I paid up. Not sure what would have happened if I kept ignoring them.
For video editing you can always try DaVinci Resolve. Free and very powerfull. There are some limitations, but they will very likely not be important for "some editing" work.
As usual, I got invited to the early beta of Privacy quite a while back. Unfortunately, being an Indian resident we have no alternatives that works like Privacy nor Apple Pay.
The privacy policy of Privacy.com makes me question if they should be trusted with the detailed transaction information of their users. The policy does make it clear that they share personal data with third parties under, what they call, "controlled circumstances":
"With third parties, within the United States and in other countries, who may access data about you to perform functions on our behalf"
Here it would be nice to get a clear picture of what these functions are. If they are only for the processing of payments then this is fine (they actually mention this case in the second bullet point so my example does not hold). If these functions are to data mine my data for reselling to a third party advertisment network that would not be alright.
it's like VPNs. or DOH. it's not a matter of absolute privacy, it's a matter of privacy wrt a certain party.
if privacy.com really were private, you'd fund an account with bitcoin. which afaict you cannot. so you need another level of abstraction/privacy to keep your details from privacy.com.
Are card numbers from privacy.com not recognizable as prepaid cards? Why I am asking - recently I was trying to use my Revolut card to register MS Azure account but it threw an error saying something about prepaid cards not allowed. I had to use the card I have from my bank. I am wondering whether it would be like that with cards from privacy.com as well.
Thanks for flagging this service, I just signed up. Looks very sleek and easy to use. Not sure what I would do with it, but nice to have as an option, especially when working with sketchy merchants.
I know Revolut don’t have the best reputation et al, but one handy feature is generating one-time ‘virtual’ credit cards for use online. Use it once and it deducts from your balance and is ‘burnt’.
