Hail Satan.

Kbin
Sharkey

Using Mbin as a backup to my main Kbin account due to tech issues on Kbin.social. May either switch to this one permanently or abandon it, depending on how Kbin’s development goes. All my active fedi accounts are linked.

  • 10 Posts
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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • I use an animation from this live wallpaper app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.at2_software.terracollageapp&hl=en_US

    I believe it was just a one-time purchase for the full version of the app. The animations don’t loop very well, but I’m not staring at my home screen long enough to see the loop that often, so it’s not a big concern to me. They’re pretty much all swirly, inky, starry sort of abstract animations, but there’s a lot of color options so it’s pretty easy to pick something that fits well with the rest of your phone’s theme.

    The developer hasn’t updated it for over a year now, so if the previews don’t look like something you’d like, I wouldn’t bother buying the full version since it’s unlikely that any more will be added.





  • You do realize that if the bank authorizes a transfer, that you did not… it’s wire fraud and they’re obligated to refund that cash, regardless if they recoup the cash or not.

    You do realize that not every transaction happens in countries where these protections exist, right? Not everybody can rely on something like the FDIC to protect their funds.

    On the other hand, if you give your credentials to a 3rd party, that’s against the ToS none of us actually read, and if something happens to your account; they’re going to deem it as your fuck up.

    You’re not providing your bank credentials directly to the third-party, either. They use OAuth-like systems to log you in, typically. I’m not familiar with Ozow, specifically, but from what I can tell about their company, they appear to be doing mostly the same things as Plaid.


  • It’s also risky to give. Banks will generally approve all transactions between two accounts if one of them is a business account, because the assumption is that those are business transactions and are legitimate 99.99% of the time, so there’s very little scrutiny involved for those transfers. Giving the merchant your routing/account number gives them access to make withdraws from your account at will and at any time and can’t be revoked, and giving that access to somebody you may not fully trust the reputation of is a dangerous move.

    A trusted financial institution as a middleman can be useful for those situations, because they’ll tokenize your details to expose as little as possible to the merchant, directly. These services are typically insured, so even if something did happen to your account, you’re more likely to get your money back than if you gave a merchant direct ACH access to your bank account. It’s basically a modernized version of Western Union.


  • That’s unusual, but not unheard of. Some online merchants will allow you to make payments via ACH transfers. Can be useful for things like international purchases or if you don’t have a normal credit/debit card to use. Sometimes smaller merchants will prefer this, if they don’t have an existing business partnership with a payment processor already.

    Usually these will go through a third-party system that tokenizes your login with your bank. This way the merchant can only access your routing/account numbers to do the transfer. As for why you’d need to provide your bank login instead of the routing/account numbers directly, it’s usually just a form of fraud prevention, as the login verifies that you’re actually the account owner and not trying to pay with a checkbook you found on the street.

    It’s similar to Plaid, which is a near-identical service that some merchants in the US use. From what I can tell, Ozow appears to be legitimate, so realistically it’s probably safe to enter your login details as long as you’re not getting any certificate errors on the page.

    E: Not sure why this is downvoted. I’m not saying it’s a good system, just saying that it’s not inherently a scam.







  • We did this in Austin, and I hate it. It’s probably fine if you go to the store and use your own totes, but my situation requires that I have to get my groceries delivered, so that isn’t an option for me. And instead of plastic bags which I could crumple up to take up near-zero space and actually reuse, my house is filled with enormous paper bags that have already ripped before I got the groceries up the stairs in the first place and take up tons of space and have basically zero reuse value and go straight into the trash after one use. I used to reuse plastic shopping bags all the time; waste basket liners, collecting random odds and ends to throw away together, organizing and storing dozens of random cables and chargers, etc.

    I wish there was a better way to dispose of plastic bags. Because while I understand the reasonings for the ban, the result is majorly inconvenient and ironically results in more single-use products in my life.