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EU-US Privacy Shield – Status Report

If you are a resident of the European Union and a customer of ours, chances are you have been watching (or at least are aware of) the situation regarding data transfer policy between the EU and the US.

On October 6, 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union (the “CJEU”) invalidated the European Commission’s Decision on the EU-US Safe Harbor arrangement, determining that the Commission’s finding that Safe Harbor was adequate was, in fact, inadequate. More on this decision may be found here.

On February 2, the US and the EU reached an agreement in principle to construct a framework to replace Safe Harbor and to reconcile differences between the laws of both governments. That framework has been named the EU-US Privacy Shield. In response to the agreement, the US Department of Commerce released a fact sheet, which we are making available as a pdf, here.

As the new framework promises to have farther reaching implications for how personally identifiable data is handled by third parties, we have contacted both of our current payment processors (Stripe and PayPal) for their comments. While we are still awaiting comment from PayPal, Stripe has responded that they, too, are monitoring the situation, but have not yet made any changes to their policies or procedures, pending more concrete guidance.

We want you to know that we take the privacy concerns of our customers very seriously, and we will continue to monitor this and any other legislation which may have an impact on doing business with us, whether you are located within the US or anywhere in the world. We believe that our current privacy policy remains in accord with the spirit of the new EU-US Privacy Shield as we anticipate it, but we will keep you apprised of the situation and will make adjustments as necessary.

More information and commentary on the EU-US Privacy Shield may be found on these sites:

Digital Media, Technology & Privacy Alert >> Agreement on EU-U.S. Privacy Shield to Replace Safe Harbor Faces Hurdles, Kibel, Gary A, Partner (Digital Media, Technology & Privacy), Davis & Gilbert, LLP, February 4, 2016.

Article 29 Working Party Reacts to the U.S.-EU Privacy Shield Agreement, Tielemans, Jetty and Steinhardt, Ezra (Data Privacy and Cybersecurity group), Covington & Burling LLP, February 2, 2016.

Stripe

Arca Noae now processes major credit cards through Stripe

We understand that not everyone is enamoured of processing payments through PayPal’s gateway, for a variety of reasons, whether they be security concerns or other bad customer service experiences.

We feel strongly that how you pay us should never become an obstacle to transacting business with us. We remain committed to providing our customers with the broadest possible range of payment solutions to get the business end of things out of the way as quickly, easily, and painlessly as possible.

We know that for some of you, the wait has been long. Today, we are pleased to announce that Arca Noae has established a relationship with Stripe to handle our credit card processing for all major credit and debit cards, internationally.

Based in San Francisco, California, USA, Stripe’s investors include Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Elon Musk. Read more about Stripe on their press page.

N.B.: As always, if you have any difficulties with your shopping or payment experience, please contact us immediately, either via our convenient web form or direct email (sales AT arcanoae DOT com).

Updated roadmap and anticipated changes

We have updated our roadmap to reflect some recent changes in project status, namely the beginning of the beta testing phase of our graphical package management tool, our participation in some very exciting USB development, and our initial investigation of support for some SATA RAID and SAS controllers.

Also of note are some upcoming changes to our store checkout which will soon allow for credit card processing through Authorize.net, a recognized world leader in payment processing. We know that this will be a welcome option for those who prefer not to transact business through PayPal. We anticipate this capability early next year.

Our online store has been open for exactly one month today. The response has been overwhelming, and customer feedback has been of immense help. We continue to work hard to address some lingering issues with server performance and website compatibility across browsers and platforms, and appreciate the valuable input from all reporters.

Searching for something? – Try our OpenSearch plugin

As we continue to add content and products to the Arca Noae site and online store, we thought it might be handy to have a way to search that content from Firefox or SeaMonkey (or any other browser which is OpenSearch-compatible).

To add it to your browser, simply follow this link to the Mycroft Project, click the Arca Noae link, and allow the search provider to be added to your browser.

So, what would you like to see next?

Our mission at Arca Noae is to do what we can to ensure the longest term of usefulness of the OS/2 platform, for both individuals and enterprises. Part of that mission is addressed by updates to existing drivers and applications, part by adding new functionality to those softwares, and part by adding new drivers and/or applications entirely.

What we’d like to know is: What do you need to be able to stay on OS/2?

Other platforms (both closed and open source) tend to follow their own path. A large software developer in the state of Washington in the US decided a couple of years ago that the entire desktop interface was somehow no longer useful, and needed to be scrapped in favor of something completely different, taking a one-size-fits-all approach across desktops and mobiles. Linux has had desktop wars waging for decades between Gnome and KDE, and once Unity appeared, it seemed to draw almost universal scorn from both camps (and somehow, the steering groups of various distros tend to make unilateral decisions insofar as which desktops to include by default in their distros).

Arca Noae is different in that our direction should always be guided by the needs of the community. As we have pledged to reinvest as much of our earnings as possible into further development, we need to regularly solicit input from you, so that we may be assured we are heading in the right direction.

So please drop us a note on our contact page and let us know what you need. We’re listening, we care, and we’re not going away anytime soon.

[solved] Trouble registering for an account?

This is just a quick note to confirm that several hours ago we did indeed fix the issue causing the blank page on user registration.

If you continue to experience difficulties with your account, please do not hesitate to use our contact form or email us directly at webmeister [at] arcanoae [dot] com.

We apologize for any inconvenience which this may have caused.

Thanks again for visiting Arca Noae!

Trouble registering for an account?

We are aware of an issue on the site when registering for an account. Upon clicking the Register button on the My Account page, the user is greeted with a blank page. Rest assured, your account has been created, but a minor internal error has occurred, preventing the acknowledgment from displaying.

Simply click the Back button in your browser, and if prompted to re-send your previous post, click Yes or OK. The My Account page should redisplay, with a message that the account already exists. That indicates that the account has been created successfully (attempting to create an account which really does exist will immediately return the error and not a blank page).

If you continue to experience difficulties, please do not hesitate to use our contact form or email us directly at webmeister [at] arcanoae [dot] com.

We apologize for any inconvenience which this may cause, and are working to correct the problem.

Thanks again for visiting Arca Noae!

Online Store Opening Pains

We never knew how much work it would be to get an online store like this operational! From custom components for the site to back-end scripts to entering descriptions and uploading content, everyone at Arca Noae has been working very hard to get things working. We have some things available now, with more coming in the days and weeks ahead.

If you experience problems, please be patient with us, we are working as hard as we can. Also if you see some things missing, again, please be patient. We are adding items as quickly as we possibly can.