PayPal hit by outages and other glitches today

PayPal is suffering from site issues today, according to its U.K. Twitter feed, and is striving to fix them:

We've been made aware of site issues today & are working to get this resolved. Apologies for any inconvenience. Will update asap. Tks, MW

Downrightnow.com, which tracks the online availability of different sites, has recorded a string of outages for PayPal today. As of around 8:30 a.m. PT, PayPal had been up for the previous 30 minutes or so. But the site had previously been down for one long stretch and several shorter stretches starting early Monday morning.
PayPal users have reported other problems, such as delays in payment processing and transactions.
Users chiming in on PayPal's forum say that transactions are not showing up right away on their activity pages. As a result, some have made multiple payments for the same item.
Based on the forum comments, the glitches appear to be affecting people across different countries, notably in Europe.

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A Web Site called Blue Griffon said PayPal is "apparently suffering from severe system glitches." People who pay for Blue Griffon items through PayPal could be hit with long delays before receiving a link to download their purchases. The site added that it's seen reports from other sellers complaining of the same issue.
Daniel Glazman, a co-chairman of the W3C CSS Working Group and developer of the BlueGriffon software, said on his blog today that PayPal apparently ran a system upgrade on Friday. And since this morning, he's seen delays in the notifications that PayPal sends to shopping baskets and sellers.
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Founder of Paypal, Elon Musk, to build 80,000 person city for vegetarians on Mars.

Small city to be built for vegetarians on Mars

London:Jan 8, 2013 PTI

 Private space entrepreneur and billionaire co-founder of Paypal, Elon Musk is planning to build a small city on Mars for 80,000 space explorers - but only vegetarians are invited!

Musk, whose Falcon 9 rocket delivers NASA cargo to the International Space Station, wants to construct a futuristic settlement on the red planet.

The new civilization would run off sustainable technology and cater only to vegetarians, The Sun reported.
Speaking to the Royal Aeronautical Society, Musk, 41, revealed he had been waiting ten years to share his vision.
“Then it seemed ridiculous because there were no rockets, no infrastructure and NASA was the only game in town - and it had no schedule for exploring Mars,” said the co-founder of PayPal, a global e-commerce business.

“But with my work, and many others working in the private sector, the mission is coming closer to reality,” he added.

“On Mars you can start a self-sustaining civilization and grow it into something really big,” he said.
The 146-year-old Royal Aeronautical Society last November awarded Musk, who founded his third company SpaceX in 2002, a gold medal for his contribution to space exploration.

The California-based engineer has previously talked about sending the Mass Cargo Transport rocket - powered by liquid oxygen and methane, to Mars - carrying volunteers for about £3,00,000 a person.

One of America’s most respected private space entrepreneurs, Musk - worth about £1.25 billion - has admitted the challenges remain daunting. These include the dangers of deep-space radiation, bone-rot and toxic dust.
He recommends the size of the new society should be around 80,000 people.

“Too few, and the gene and culture pool dries up. Too many and you risk civil war,” he said.

SOURCE

PayPal names names as IRS chases tax evaders

By Paul Lashmar
Sunday, 6 November 2005


PayPal, the internet money-transfer arm of eBay, is to disclose the identity of customers who use the service to evade paying US taxes.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is demanding records of customers using Paypal through offshore accounts in all tax havens, including Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Gibraltar and other UK dependencies.

According to the IRS, PayPal's services have proved very attractive to tax evaders and the problem is growing. Customers can buy goods from eBay and many other shopping websites, pay for them from untaxed income held offshore and get the goods sent to their home address.

Tax authorities are also concerned that PayPal can be used to "launder" untaxed money between an individual's offshore and domestic accounts.

The IRS said: "Because the elements necessary to transfer money require only two email addresses attached to two bank accounts and/or credit or debit cards, PayPal's structure not only allows persons with monies held in a foreign account to purchase goods and services, it also allows a person with assets secreted in a foreign country to repatriate them to their own domestic bank account without going through traditional banking methods such as a bank-initiated wire transfer."

The IRS is the first domestic tax agency to take action against tax evaders using PayPal.

Founded in 1998, PayPal has 76 million accounts and is available in many parts of the world. It now has more account holders than American Express, and eBay's 2005 second-quarter figures celebrated a 49 per cent increase in the value of payments made through PayPal, to a record annual total of $6.5bn (£3.7bn).

The IRS has asked a federal court for permission to serve a "John Doe" summons on PayPal as part of a clampdown on tax evasion using offshore credit and debit cards. The IRS petition says: "The records requested in the summons will identify the holders of bank accounts at, or payment cards issued by banks in, the listed jurisdictions."

It follows successful IRS applications to file similar summonses on MasterCard, American Express and Visa as part of its investigation of offshore tax evasion. The IRS says "over $40bn in federal tax revenue is lost every year due to the use of credit cards linked to accounts held in foreign tax havens".

Do You Have To Pay Tax On PayPal Earnings?

In October 2011, federal CIO Steven VanRoekel gave federal agencies three years to allow third-party credentials to validate identities for citizens wanting to do business with them online. As a part of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), the Federal Cloud Credential Exchange encourages secure citizen-to-government interactions by removing the requirement that people set up separate usernames and passwords with individual agencies. 
Acknowledging growing citizen expectations for online services, procurement documents describe the challenges faced by users drowning in dozens of online accounts and agencies struggling to cost-effectively provide online services.
According to Information Week, a new pilot program at the U.S. Postal Service will test acceptance of third party identity verification services like PayPal and Google for use in government transactions. The large scale test needs to support approximately 135 million U.S. Postal Service customers and up to 1 million transactions per hour. Several vendors, including Symantec, Xceedium and Amazon Web Services, have indicated interest in participating in the pilot program.
Several other pilot programs, including some in cryptography and online privacy, are also being conducted in conjunction with NSTIC, according to Information Week.
Image: Steven Good / Shutterstock.com

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