timrogers

I guess they were trying to say this version of evtdiag.exe. But I still agree it was a little unnecessary.

YMMV but opening a US bank account as a UK citizen is easy as long as you're present on US soil.

Opened a checking account at a Chase branch in San Francisco with my passport and as many other proofs of address as I could muster. Everything gets delivered to my UK address.

I'd love to use this - guess it's not available outside the US? I'm in London.

If it was there, it probably still is. I can't imagine BA moving fast ;)

I agree. I'm glad people don't though, as I like de-privatising "private APIs" ;)

Done - thanks for the poke.

Fair point on the Charles certificate. Not something to keep installed! I'll add that now.

The short answer is "no" - you're always playing a cat and mouse game, so you're wiser not to put things behind an API that you're really not happy for people to play with.

I suspect this is why we've traditionally seen banks (in the UK, at least) use web-pages-embedded-in-apps rather than true native apps.

Nothing really - I suspect that Charles is more approachable for the average person though. And besides, I hadn't spotted any alternatives when I wrote the article ;)

Just tried it - much cleaner than Charles for Terminal lovers like the average HN user.

Thanks! I think this is a super interesting thing to do - there's tonnes of great stuff to discover - and something that's not very well documented online. I wanted to make it easy for anyone to do this kind of thing.

Just taken a look. I agree there's some stuff in there they probably don't want you or I to know, but no sign of ability to book from what I've discovered.

Never seen MITMproxy - how does it compare to Charles? I've found super interesting stuff - pretty much invariably find that (a) there's cool stuff you can do and (b) the app's developers haven't gone to significant lengths to stop you doing it.

SEEKING WORK - Remote

I'm a Ruby developer based in London, looking for contract work to go alongside my part-time work at a successful YC startup and my undergraduate studies.

I love working in Rails, and have particularly outstanding experience building Twilio applications, from whole-company phone systems to small SMS services. I spoke about a cloud-based phone system I built at Twilio's European conference in 2013.

Apart from that, I have plenty of general Ruby experience, working with clients from charities to web hosting companies. I'm not afraid to work in Javascript, HTML5 and CSS3, and am happy to negotiate on price to find an arrangement that works for you.

https://github.com/timrogers http://timrogers.co.uk/portfolio

Think I can help? Drop me a line at me@timrogers.co.uk.

I imagine finding stuff is going to be pretty tough in such a large area - but it'll sure be interesting.

SEEKING WORK - Remote

I'm a Ruby developer based in London, looking for contract work to go alongside my part-time work at a successful YC startup and my undergraduate studies.

I love working in Rails, and have particularly outstanding experience building Twilio applications, from whole-company phone systems to small SMS services. I spoke about a cloud-based phone system I built at Twilio's European conference in 2013.

Apart from that, I have plenty of general Ruby experience, working with clients from charities to web hosting companies. I'm not afraid to work in Javascript, HTML5 and CSS3, and am happy to negotiate on price to find an arrangement that works for you.

https://github.com/timrogers http://timrogers.co.uk/portfolio

Think I can help? Drop me a line at me@timrogers.co.uk.

The full list is pretty incredible. http://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/t11sdn.pdf

SEEKING WORK - Remote, based in London, UK

I'm a Ruby developer based in London, looking for contract work to go alongside my part-time work at a successful YC startup and my undergraduate studies.

I love working in Rails, and have particularly outstanding experience building Twilio applications, from whole-company phone systems to small SMS services. I spoke about a cloud-based phone system I built at Twilio's European conference in 2013.

Apart from that, I have plenty of general Ruby experience, working with clients from charities to web hosting companies. I'm not afraid to work in Javascript, HTML5 and CSS3, and am happy to negotiate on price to find an arrangement that works for you.

https://github.com/timrogers http://timrogers.co.uk/portfolio

Think I can help? Drop me a line at me@timrogers.co.uk.

OP here. At the moment, there isn't such an option built in, but removing the friend "pugomatic" on Snapchat directly will do the job.

If anyone has any concerns along these lines, or any other comments, feel free to drop me an email at tim@pug-o-matic.me.

OP here - it's just an idea that I had at work following GibSec's full disclosure [1] of Snapchat's (ostensibly) private API.

Pugs are a favourite and long-running meme, and Snapchat is very much a part of current internet culture, so combining the two in a new way seemed like an interesting thing to do.

[1] http://gibsonsec.org/snapchat/fulldisclosure/

#lazyweb, you're my only hope...

I found this article particularly amusing because I think we all see these behaviours in ourselves some of the time. The real trouble comes if you're working in this way most or even all the time.

This product is overly restricting it's market, I feel, since in Europe EMV (or "chip and PIN" as it's known in the UK) is ubiquitous. Payments worldwide are moving over to this system from magnetic strip cards, so I fear that this (useful) product has been invented too late once the tech it relies on is already speedily in decline!

I imagine, due to how the cryptography works, it might not be as simple to create a product like this for chipped cards.

No one is obligated to alter their own behaviour in order to sustain someone else's business model, that's why it's totally okay to shoplift if it's more agreeable and convenient to you.

Indeed - Twilio is awesome purely because it allows you to integrate with the phone networks, which are basically a legacy system, naturally within your applications.

I've not really played with Asterisk. How is it to configure, and what has your experience been like? We outsource the PBX side of our system to a SIP provider called Voipfone (http://voipfone.co.uk) but it would be appealing if we could do this in-house and have even more flexibility.

We've generally found it to be decent, although (naturally) variable. We use Twilio alongside a UK SIP provider called Voipfone (http://voipfone.co.uk) which is how we actually get our calls through to PSTN.

Twilio Client (https://www.twilio.com/client) seems to provide better quality, but we really like the convenience of hardware phones and built-in PBX functionality.

Hi Josh - I'm the same. Building solutions to these kinds of problems is really interesting.

We've not implemented that yet, but I've spoken to another company doing similar things with around 100 agents and they've managed to implement this using Twilio's conferencing facility. It's easy to drop in and out of a conference silently, which is perfect for this.

Our support is certainly not at scale, and lots more features will become appropriate as we grow, from letting people schedule callbacks to manager eavesdropping to more sophisticated management of waiting calls.

Have you built anything like this?

OP here. If you have any questions about building this kind of thing, feel free to comment or drop me an email at tim [at] gocardless [dot] com.

I work at GoCardless.com, a UK-based payments startup (YC S11), and thus I have a above-average insight into these kinds of issues from my day-to-day work.

From the point of view of fraud protection and risk management, I can see why PayPal take this kind of unilateral action. Payments providers are always at high risk, and since they deal with and indemnify other financial firms further up the chain, they're the ones taking the risk.

Even when you're charging relatively high fees as PayPal does, one case of fraud or even something as simple as a project that doesn't materialise (not that I think that'll happen with Mailpile!) can eat up tonnes of your revenue and make your business unviable.

As such, GoCardless sometimes has to make decisions that account holders won't like. However, the difference between us (as well as, I believe, other providers like Stripe) and PayPal is that we will be (a) reachable and (b) reasonable.

For me, PayPal's failing is in the lack of customer engagement on these issues. Every story like this shows PayPal as cagey, unhelpful and unwilling to have a discussion or reconsider at all. Everyone can, to a degree, understand why PayPal has to make unpopular decisions to protect itself from unacceptable risk (as all businesses will have to do in various ways), but their approach and manner in doing so is what is unacceptable.

Awesome! Speak to you soon hopefully!