Good news – the Paypal account is restored.

I would like to think that the big social media fuss wasn’t necessary and this would have been happily resolved quickly anyhow, but I somehow think it might have been more to do with the large discussion on reddit, all the Tweets, and the 220,000+ hits we had on the blog post. I am happy though about the outcome 🙂

Thanks to everyone for their support.

Here is the email.

Dear Julian Wills ,

Thank you for contacting PayPal regarding the recent limitation of your
PayPal account.

We have further reviewed your case and determined that your account is
currently not in violation of our Acceptable Use Policy. As such, the
limitation on your account has been lifted.

We sincerely appreciate your business and offer our apologies for any
inconvenience this disruption in service may have caused. 

In the future, if you have any questions regarding what items are
prohibited under PayPal's Acceptable Use Policy, please see the following
URL for the complete text:
https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=ua/AcceptableUse_full&locale.x=en_US

Again, we thank you for your cooperation and understanding in resolving
this matter and appreciate the fact that you chose PayPal to accept
payments for your business. If you have any further questions, please
contact the PayPal Brand Risk Management Department at euaup@paypal.co.uk.

Sincerely,
Zoe
PayPal, Brand Risk Management

This issue is now resolved – please see https://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/2013/01/good-news-paypal-account-restored/

We have a donation page where we have accepted donations via Paypal for the project and site. This money goes towards the project, with money sent to developers, and helps covering costs etc.

Today I received an email from Paypal informing they have frozen my account.

Dear Julian Wills,

We are hereby notifying you that, after a recent review of your account
activity, it has been determined that you are in violation of PayPal's
Acceptable Use Policy regarding your sales / offers on
www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum.

Please refer to: 
- Transaction x
- Transaction x
- Transaction x

Therefore, your account has been permanently limited. 

Per the User Agreement, when PayPal permanently limits an account due to an
Acceptable Use Policy violation, we may hold your funds up to 180 days. We
will review your account at 30 days from the date of this email, we will
calculate our exposure and will release any excess funds to you for
withdrawal. If there are any funds remaining in your account at this time,
we will review your account every 30 days until either all your funds have
been made available to you for withdrawal, or a period of 180 days from the
date your account was limited is reached. Please log in to your PayPal
account and verify that your account information is accurate, as PayPal
cannot be held responsible for incorrect information provided by the
account holder.

You will need to remove all references to PayPal from your website/s and/or
auction/s. This includes not only removing PayPal as a payment option, but
also the PayPal logo and/or shopping cart. 

The PayPal User Agreement states that PayPal, at its sole discretion,
reserves the right to limit an account for any violation of the User
Agreement, including the Acceptable Use Policy.

Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive
payments for items that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others
to engage in illegal activity.

The complete Acceptable Use Policy can be found at the following URL:
https://cms.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=ua/AcceptableUse_full&locale.x=en_GB

To learn more about the Acceptable Use Policy, please refer to our Help
Centre page here:
https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/helpweb?cmd=_help

We thank you in advance for your cooperation. If you have any questions,
please contact the PayPal Brand Risk Management Department at
euaup@paypal.co.uk.

Sincerely,
Nadine
PayPal, Brand Risk Management

So it looks like I am guilty until I have proved my innocence. It is strange they refer to the forum link rather than the main site url. Am I being accused of something they have found on the forum? Hard to know since they give no real information at all to what I am guilty of. “PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for items that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.” – in reference to? Are they suggesting XBMC4XBOX facilitates/encourages or instructs people to engage in illegal activity? Are they referring to the software itself or some specific forum discussion ? Hard to know, but no project donations have been used for anything like this. The transactions they listed in the email are just donations to the project from users. All money goes towards project costs, and to developers for their time.

Googling for this sort of email shows it happens by mistake time and time again. From freezing charity donation funds, to other cases similar to ours. I have had my Paypal account frozen twice before, firstly when a card expired (some random security audit), and a second time when I made a transaction from another country and it was frozen since I was connecting from a different geographic location. Both times were a pain to resolve, even though I did nothing wrong, which seems to be the way Paypal like it.

I have already spoken to them on the phone. But guess what, they can’t do anything, because I need to speak to the “AUP” team, who of course only have an email account. Email has been sent. I wonder how long this will take to resolve. I suspect later rather than sooner. It’s also worth noting that a note on my paypal account states “This limitation cannot be appealed against.“ – that’s fair!

*update*
I realise the article title with “Guilty until proven innocent” is not that well worded, and this is in relation to the AUP and not a court case. In hindsight I could have made it clearer. In fact it has been decided I am guilty of breaking the rules, with no real information as to how, and with no right to appeal the decision. Oh and hi to all the visitors from reddit that have kept me up late making sure the server doesn’t fall over 🙂 Interesting to read other peoples stories and opinions.

Please do tweet/facebook/link to this post. If it gets some attention you never know, Paypal might actually look into it.

There is a large amount of useful software available for the XBox1. From original apps, to ports of emulators from other platforms. The large majority are ports of existing software. This was made possible usually due to the original authors making the source code available, often under the GPL licence. The idea is that you are allowed to use, and modify the code, but any changes will also come under the same licence – meaning you must make the source available to others.

Current XBox 1 developers seem to have no respect for the GPL and no respect for the work of the original authors of the software they have ported. They are building on top of others work, but keeping the changes private. This is an issue that has been bothering me for some time, but has gotten significantly worse over recent times. We wouldn’t even have the large selection of emulators had the source not already been available. It seems a pretty easy concept to grasp – we benefit from  the source licence of the original software, so we should follow suite and comply with the original authors wishes. Licence aside, it’s still the respectful and decent thing to do.

What is happening currently, is not only a breach of the original licences, but very disrespectful to the original authors.

I have read countless excuses, the most prominent one being “Author X will use our code if we release it and they don’t release theirs”. This isn’t an excuse though – if they are breaking the GPL, then why not contact them about it (or the original authors of the software). The old saying “Two wrongs don’t make a right”. Devs should look at their own compliance first.

XBMC is GPL licenced for example, and as such we make all XBMC4XBOX code available in a public code repository – https://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/development/ – if you use code from XBMC in your own GPL project, you are expected to release the source. (http://xbmc.org/team-xbmc/2003/10/31/please-respect-the-gpl-license/

There have been discussions (some heated) about this recently. I happened to be reading a forum earlier that suggested I was breaking the GPL, by providing XBMC code to others who are not GPL compliant. This is of course nonsense – and I did no such thing. Our code is public, and the author in question took the patch from our repository. Thanking me in a readme is actually no thanks at all if you are breaking the source licence. Today was the first I had heard about it, and the code in question.

Because of this and the fact XBMC code was being used in a few of the emulators I wrote a polite request on the http://www.emuxtras.net forum for the sourcecode to a emulator update. Shortly after my post was deleted, so I asked again and queried the deleted post.

Pretty shameful state of affairs. How do you think all the original authors would feel – to see the way their hard work is being abused. This childish attitude has to stop. I am hoping when I get a reply later the author in question on emuxtras is going to do the decent thing.

That goes for the all the GPL emulators over at Emuxtras that are not released with source, coinops, and the XBMC based apps such as Dragon/Vision. Release your source code. Even better work on it in a public repository, and you can all benefit from each others improvements, as well as making it far easier for people to collaborate.

It’s worth noting this doesn’t happen in the other homebrew scenes. This bad behaviour seems an Xbox exclusive.

One last note:
Something that came up in an earlier discussion, was an accusation of double standards on our part, for arguing about the GPL and then providing builds created with the XDK, which is a breach of Microsoft’s end user licence. One wrong does not excuse another, but we will not be providing any new builds.

News from http://xbmc.org – http://xbmc.org/zag/2012/10/05/10-anniversary-for-xbmc/

Note that this news is written as a perspective from XBMC not XBMC4XBOX (Although it’s a 10 year celebration for us too). Thanks and a big congrats to Team XBMC for their hard work building XBMC, and taking it from the XBOX onto other platforms. Kudos!

Happy Birthday To Us!

Today marks a very important and proud milestone in our history. On 5th October 2002, one of the first ever betas of the XBMC source code got uploaded, as the result of a merge between two different home theatre applications. Frodo, the founder of “YAMP” (Yet Another Media Player), joined the Xbox Media Player team and the two projects were merged. The first release of the combined projects was called “Xbox Media Player” and its first beta source code was released, 10 years ago to the day!

We have had many releases since then, reaching the first stable of the newly named “Xbox Media Center” v1.0.0 in 2004, another name change to “XBMC” v2.0.0 in 2006 and Linux support in 2007. As we developed and grew, there were even more stable releases all the way up to the multi-platform “Eden”, and the soon to be released “Frodo”.

The project has continued to evolve, with many changes such as the move from CVS to SVN and now ultimately GITHUB, support for various new platforms and a huge amount of new features, add-ons and beautiful skins.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their support and commitment to XBMC over the last 10 years, from the creators, developers, testers, skinners, add-on writers and especially to the users – you are the reason the project was started and without your constant support, we wouldn’t still be here!

Every one of you has made XBMC what it is today and helps us go from strength to strength. We hope you are as excited as we are to see what the next 10 years will bring!

Here’s to the next 10 years!!

This was also posted on our forums, so feel free to discuss there – https://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=525&p=4459

Thanks to XPhazer, we have a handy realtime conference chat system set up, using TeamSpeak so that users and developers can chat about the project, and other things. A good way to discuss ideas, as well as get to know other users.

TeamSpeak is a communication system including high quality voice communication, text chat, file sharing with many great features. It is available for all major platforms including Windows, Linux and Android.

Full Instructions and server details

In the last two and a half months there has been a lot of progress with XBMC4XBOX.

This project site has improved, with better integration (visually) of the forum, as well as a brand new bug-tracker at http://redmine.exotica.org.uk/projects/xbmc4xbox which includes all the data from the old Sourceforge hosted Trac. The restoration of the wiki is currently in progress, thanks to the help from the XBMC team – especially Ned Scott – who has provided us with a full xml dump of their wiki to use as a base for the reconstruction.

The forum is now getting established and currently has 400 members with over 3500 posts. If you haven’t signed up please do – and join in the discussions. You will find a friendly bunch of XBOX enthusiasts, with topics covering skin / python development, XBOX modifications and more. It is also a good place to get help if you are having any troubles installing or using XBMC4XBOX.

Development of the XBMC4XBOX codebase has been ongoing with numerous improvements and the introduction of the Confluence Lite skin to the development builds, which functions much the same as the version shipped with XBMC. Thanks to Jezz X and the XBMC team, as well as XBS for modifying it to work with our code and Dom Dxecutioner for the global search functionality.

If you would like to test any of the bleeding edge code, you can find nightly builds on the download link above. It is recommended to install alongside your current version as there may well be issues that need fixing, but feedback about problems is always welcomed over at the forum.

RetroArch is a modular multi-system emulator system that is designed to be fast, lightweight and portable. It has features few other emulator frontends have, such as real-time rewinding and game-aware shading. For each emulator ‘core’, RetroArch makes use of a library API that we like to call ‘libretro’.

Libretro is the API that RetroArch uses. It makes it easy to port games and emulators to a single core backend, such as RetroArch.

For the user, this means – more ports to play with, more crossplatform portability, less worrying about developers having to reinvent the wheel writing boilerplate UI/port code – so that they can get busy with writing the emulator/porting the emulator/game.

Read more…

I am pleased to announce another release of XBMC4XBOX – v3.2

A number of bugs have been fixed, including a working fix for the lockups when using UPnP. There has been some significant performance improvements also, with the addition of the libjpeg-turbo library. Based on some code from XBMC, and some of our own, we now use this SIMD optimised library for decoding and thumbnailing JPEG images. The speed up is very noticeable – with navigating photos feeling at least twice as fast as before. XBMC4XBOX will now also use less memory when displaying and zooming in on images.

Release Includes:

• libjpeg-turbo support for images
• Fixed UPnP lockups
• Browse by Country support in movie library
• Scraper fixes
• Switch to Roboto font in Confluence skin
• Plenty of misc bugfixes and code backports from xbmc mainline
• Lots of code refactoring to better match upstream changes

Thanks to all those who helped out, including those who spent lots of time helping users on the forums. Thanks to http://xbmc.org for the support after we lost our previous hosting place (see previous news). And thanks for all the code of course 🙂

Hope you enjoy the release, and should you want to show your support, donations are always welcome – and much appreciated. We are also always on the look out for anyone who is able to contribute time and skills to the project, from the main code development to skins and python scripting.