Hi Valerie , did see you got nice gift card.... congrats

Thank you in advance , What kind of gift are you going to buy for me ?

Why should Valerie buy you a gift
Oh I did see the success story of Valerie. So is she going to buy a gift only for you or for all

Yes I did buy a gift for everyone. I bought them off the empty shelves. It did not cost me anything and your gifts are on the way by 'Lucy in the sky with diamonds' delivery service. The driver will be wearing rose colored glasses.

tasman1 wrote: Hi Valerie , did see you got nice gift card.... congrats

Thank you in advance , What kind of gift are you going to buy for me ?

Confusing topic, I looked under success stories, nothing, then I said "Oh maybe she won the state lottery"
Then I went for the payment proof section and saw the GC redemptions - no, these are for the tech support person who called her and asked her to buy gift cards to unlock her computer (I hope she doesn't fall for those fake tech support scams that ask you to buy gift cards for payment).

So your bidet should arrive any moment now

valerie wrote: Yes I did buy a gift for everyone. I bought them off the empty shelves. It did not cost me anything and your gifts are on the way by 'Lucy in the sky with diamonds' delivery service. The driver will be wearing rose colored glasses.

Nice nice , big thanks , hope it will be here before end of 2025 ,

Darkstar , if you sometimes are confused what I am saying just google,,,,,,,,Translate Ape language to English

tasman1 wrote:

valerie wrote: Yes I did buy a gift for everyone. I bought them off the empty shelves. It did not cost me anything and your gifts are on the way by 'Lucy in the sky with diamonds' delivery service. The driver will be wearing rose colored glasses.

Nice nice , big thanks , hope it will be here before end of 2025 ,

Darkstar , if you sometimes are confused what I am saying just google,,,,,,,,Translate Ape language to English

No I understand you very well - all these years, you learn new dialects

That was my earnings from last year that I waited to cash out this year so I would not need to enter a ss number.

valerie wrote: That was my earnings from last year that I waited to cash out this year so I would not need to enter a ss number.

Very clever accounting tricks but US members would be punishing themselves by doing that, I see US members earn thousands of $ monthly from surveys on other GPT sites that have a huge list of routers to work from, it's unbelievable when I see those lists, I'm sure your SS and other private info are safe here, besides they have your real name and home address and DOB, so I'm pretty sure that they do not store personal data in plain text format or do they ? I don't know why Prodege would ask for a SSN - did CS ask for one ? PayPal automatically reports your earnings to the IRS after $600 - have you ever asked Prodege or anyone here why they ask for a SSN ?

Prodege is a company LLC that files tax's. Since they report their tax's, they must lawfully send out the W-4 forms to USA members that make over $600 in the year. It is up to the member to file and report their own tax's.

ClixSense did the same. ClixSense did not have enough security in place. In fact, when I first logged into ClixSense under Jim, I saw the full SS numbers displayed. I contacted him immediately about that and they updated so only the last 4 numbers of the ss displayed. That insecurity was the worst part of the data breach and what really got CS in trouble.

valerie wrote: Prodege is a company LLC that files tax's. Since they report their tax's, they must lawfully send out the W-4 forms to USA members that make over $600 in the year. It is up to the member to file and report their own tax's.

What about other GPTs, do they do the same ? What if a GPT had their head office in the UK or another country as an example, there might be clever ways for GPTs to avoid having to request this information.

Quote:
ClixSense did the same. ClixSense did not have enough security in place.

Yeah we'll never forget that one - or ANY security for that matter Plain text is no security, I mean I'm not a WEB coder, Jim was, but I could write code from scratch to encrypt data with proprietary encryption schemes, without using a single library - so I'm sure CS could have easily managed to do so on the web side, so yeah I still love CS, because when I joined CS I never expected data security to begin with, remember the moment you connect to the internet, the notion of security goes down the toilet what I didn't see coming is CS being hacked and making the news around the world as if WW3 has begun

Quote:
In fact, when I first logged into ClixSense under Jim, I saw the full SS numbers displayed. I contacted him immediately about that and they updated so only the last 4 numbers of the ss displayed. That insecurity was the worst part of the data breach and what really got CS in trouble.

I've done my homework - you would be shocked at how many big companies had / have this same breach of security, it's not only CS, but it was discovered that other big providers with hundreds of millions of customers were using plain text !!! it cannot get any worse than that There is an AMAZING op code that is there to allow bits to be manipulated at machine code speed - that simple XOR command, all you do is build clever algorithms around it to make complex keys, then salt your passwords. I dunno if it is that easy in web coding, but I'm sure web coders have access to libraries too - it can be done in C++ from scratch, I used to do that stuff even in BASIC and 6502 assembly
It's just unbelievable that coming from a person in the IT field, that he would not protect his site. It's very obvious that the CS hack was an inside job, by inside I mean former disgruntled members - one of those members made an extension to cheat advertisers and click ads for you, guess he was banned, and I'm pretty sure banned cheaters were part of the whole scheme, but here's the interesting part - CS was hacked in 2016 - it still recovered from it and lasted 3 more years and things were great - I think what got CS the most bad press is its affiliate levels program - even though it was 100% legal - some people referred to it as a ponzi scheme, I guess these people never heard of BUX sites

Most of the GPT's are still mom pop programs, not company's and are not legally registered. People including the owners, is left up to them to report their earnings on their taxes. Each country has their own laws in regards to tax.

I'm not sure how much coding Jim did with CS. He had one or more employed that did that.

I just saw in the news on BBC which described the US as a looters paradise,Pictures show rail lines in LA littered with packaging material and waste slowing down trains and helping people to loot cargo containers from UBS AMAZON FEDEX looting has increased by 160% in many places in the US,wonder how people are reimbursed for the loss FEDEX carrier even important documents when looters are just throwing everything on track weather they want it or not well atleast the CHINESE are not looting people are looting their own country

I don't know.

You know what? I will tell you.

People are the same wherever you go. There are good people, there are bad people, there are various colors of people, there are happy people, sad people, and all the people in the world are HUMANS.

USA, India, China, and on and on, we are ALL the human race.

To say people in China never steal or loot, would be inaccurate.

You know, these are big countries. To pick out one large city in the USA with some people looting and compare it to the entire country of China, is rather derogatory to say the least.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZtiJN6yiik

and

https://youtu.be/OXWrjWDQh7Q

valerie wrote: Most of the GPT's are still mom pop programs, not company's and are not legally registered. People including the owners, is left up to them to report their earnings on their taxes. Each country has their own laws in regards to tax.

I'm not sure how much coding Jim did with CS. He had one or more employed that did that.

Jim is an IT person, he worked in this area before acquiring the operations of CS, he worked on the team of previous owner of CS, the former owner did not just pick a random guy to run CS in the end, he had the qualifications, I'm pretty sure he did the coding along with the million other things to do, he probably had some help in other departments mainly support, but nonetheless, he was the owner, so responsible for everything that goes on with the business. Perhaps the plain text thing was something that was left over from the former owner, which I would not be surprised - and who knows, maybe even Stormpay stored user data as plain text, I would not be so surprised either But whatever, I think ClixSense and Jim made up for its shortcomings, big time, though they made some mistakes along the way that have pushed potential partnerships along the way - but there again, the Affiliate program was very popular at the time, especially when the site started as a PTC and the optimal way to earn good money was through that program, and some people did, including you CS had a great run over the years, I'm not going to go into why I was not too concerned about the 2016 hack but let's just say that even though I had gullible years before CS, I knew better than to think my data was safe on ANY given site I remember CS on its legacy, and had CS continue to run he would have still processed those payments manually This is one area that ySense has done better, automated some of the processes that are still done manually by some owners, and well let's hope Prodege secures our data and does not use plain text, who shall we ask to find out ? Or better yet, let's not open a can of worms

Jim was part of stormpay and as far as I know, also a part of ClixSense.

Anything can be hacked. The most important thing in my opinion is to limit your risks.

I think life is kind of like that to a large extent. I mean, I wouldn't climb mt Everest but I might hike a hill on a trail.

Today Darkstar won 10 cent from Admin [ and tasman1 but we will hide that ]
Now it is Darkstar time to send gift to all
Digital banana for me , thank you

valerie wrote: Jim was part of stormpay and as far as I know, also a part of ClixSense.

Yes as an IT person, this is how the original CS / Stormpay owner knew him and brought him over to CS - so it's safe to assume that Stormpay was insecure and stored data in plain text format, it would be kinda messed up if Stormpay was secure and CS not though

Quote:
Anything can be hacked. The most important thing in my opinion is to limit your risks.

That's not the point - sure anything can be hacked, but if your data is stored in plain text, that's really REALLY bad.
But if you hack and retrieve a database of encrypted and secured data, it's pretty much useless, there are clever uses of encryption to make it very difficult even with brute force - and you cannot sell a huge list of encrypted data on the dark web, but you can sell a huge list of millions of unencrypted data (that you had in your posession or rather, a small sample of that). Some hackers will hack and brag, but there is not much they can do with all that encrypted data if it is properly and securely encrypted - on sites, like e-mail providers, passwords are not stored in the database, but rather their hash (the digest), but before, the password is salted (1 extra character appended at the end) then a digest is generated and that is stored. Are hackers gong to waste time brute forcing millions of highly encrypted data or are they going to target non secured data ? The answer is simple, and there are more non secure sites than you think.

Quote:
I think life is kind of like that to a large extent. I mean, I wouldn't climb mt Everest but I might hike a hill on a trail.

Sure you could climb Mt. Everest, why not, just bring a good supply of oatmeal squares and some oxygen tanks along the way - it's on everyone's bucket list, who doesn't want to climb Mt. Everest - find some sponsors, the incentive, if you get to the top and still alive, you win a life's supply of Oatmeal square or anything oatmeal

tasman1 wrote: Today Darkstar won 10 cent from Admin [ and tasman1 but we will hide that ]
Now it is Darkstar time to send gift to all
Digital banana for me , thank you

Strange, how did you know that Tasman1 ? I would never have known if not for this post This wasn't publicly announced, I went to the topic and did not see it, after reading your post I went to my transactions history and that's the only way I found out - which brings me to a feature request - when we receive courtesy credits or admin credits, we should receive notifications through the bell icon - had you not posted I never would have known - Thanks admin

For gifts, you have the following choices, pick only 1:

* Ask anything you want to know about your life and future, problems, etc, except the age of your death or loved ones or any medical questions.

* A digital banana

* A poem

* A free pass to climb Mt. Everest **subject to availability!

It's my point. Anything can be hacked and therefore I do keep my risks as low as possible and that contains not placing my ss number here.