n.b. we were talking about DIRECT DEBIT (which is something else entirely from debit cards).
You basically allow a company to directly withdraw money from your bank account (assuming sufficient funds on the account)
Oh man... I love that Stripe is finally coming to Europe.
BUT seriously (going on a disappointed rant here): Belgium & the Netherlands get into private beta and Germany gets nothing? I mean: Come on. BE + NL together have 27m people - Germany has some 80m AND a world-class economy. I don't want to bash on our neighbors (God knows we've done that one or two times in the past), I just want me some Stripe.
I know that the delay is probably because of some ridiculous red tape in Germany. :-(
tl;dr: Please absolve us from PayMill & the Samwer brother
Believe me, I am empathetic to the pain this is causing you. I can understand the anger you are feeling.
But I don't think that I am trivializing things. The fact is, that phishing sites are causing a real pain (as in millions of dollars lost by the victims, hundreds of thousands of computers becoming zombies, etc).
All major browsers are trying to mitigate these risks by implementing phishing & malware filters.
None of these implementations are perfect (you probably know a bit or two about bugs in software development).
But on average these filters have a positive ROI - especially for the target market (which is Joe WebUser and sadly NOT your company - or mine for that matter). The costs of a false positive ("I'll go & find that information on another site") far outweigh the costs of a false negative ("I put my login+password into this legitimate looking website and now I can no longer access PayPal").
As much as I can understand you being upset that Chrome shows a warning for your site, I don't think that the approach they are using is unreasonable.
I'd take bets that those criteria show a correlation to phishy sites. Especially if you combine those metrics together.
Is it perfect? No. Does it produce false positives? Yes. Is it beneficial on average? I think so.
PS: Since you have found the relevant file in the open source project (or 'kiddie playground' - as you like to call it), why don't you supply a superior implementation with less "foolish" measures?
In my experience over the last few weeks, younger Germans (my age, 30 years & younger) are blissfully ignorant ("I don't have anything to hide" - sounds familiar ?) to the impact of the government spying on its citizen.
24 years are a long time & that part of history is not as well-ingrained in the collective memory as the Holocaust. :-(
That is exactly the WRONG question. Government power & influence needs to be restricted to the bare minimum necessary - for the security(!) of its citizen.
We can all clearly see what extensive government power leads to. Just wait for the HN front page to be flooded again with reports about Snowden/PRISM.
There are certain tasks that should be put in the hands of the government (ensuring the rule of law, national defense, making sure free elections happen) and others that have a good ROI (education / healthcare).
But beyond that, it is just more power to the wrong institution.
Going completely 1984 here: Today they distribute Linux, tomorrow they distribute Linux with a Rootkit pre-installed.
Regarding UI changes: Boy... I hate those. 20 years of Moore's law have left us with incredibly powerful computers and we manage to waste all that raw power, those billions of CPU cycles per second on fancy UI. You are completely right - from a technical, educated standpoint.
BUT, that's not how the human brain works. For your average consumer the rule of thumb is "if it looks fresh, it is fresh". Plain & simple. They don't "get" that NTFS now supports transactions and that atomicity in file operations is like the holy grail and just completely awesome - but "Oh boy! That start button with lights up when I move the mouse over it!!!!"
Tell you what: Microsoft has that shit figured out - at least with every other version ;-)
I would have probably said (with some imprecision):
Electrical circuits either carry a current (binary 1) or they don't (binary 0). [Ignoring the fact that you could also measure the AMOUNT of current carried here] Because of this underlying limitation in electrics you need to make do with just a binary system in computers.
Depending on the amount of time remaining I would either go into more depth or point him towards "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold (http://amzn.com/0735611319)