We have a short demo video on the homepage and a tour page. We also made a free account for people to try out. I wanted to make a bookmarklet demo to let you install the widget on arbitrary sites, but it's not a high priority at the moment.
We recently added a script include that referenced the google AJAX api via http instead of https. That was causing the scary message. It's been fixed now.
I agree we need to add some copy and badging to reassure the user that we store all cc information securely through our payment gateway.
The Braintree API wasn't too hard hard to integrate with, but their web interface for configuration and management is pretty ugly and unintuitive. I especially dislike how they share test instances between multiple customers. Their customer support is really responsive and helpful though.
I wrote a quick Rails plugin to interface with the recurring payments with Braintree. It doesn't implement all or their API's, but it's enough to handle monthly recurring billing for Outspokes. I pushed it up to github in case anyone finds it useful. Let me know if anything's confusing about it. I'll polish it up when I have more free time.
If your cousin is interested in doing that kind of work, why not suggest him to volunteer with the school? All the other responses seem to romanticize the rogue hacker. Instead, I think he should come clean, and do his work in the public. He could offer to audit the school's network. For a 13 year old, this would be a great opportunity to teach him to be professional and helpful.
from my experince at 16, you are correct. volenteering with te school will get you into trouble. get the kid a computer of his own with an open source operating system on it. this is a) harder to break than windows and b) a more friendly platform for exploration. I did this at 13, but my parrents are hacker literate.
I cannot comment on ethics though, or parrenting. Both of my parrents were computer scientists at one time in there carreer, and I still bounce Ideas off of my father. Personaly, I think this is the best way to grow up with such a skill set. my only regret is that I have not had much motivation to hack when I can have a rely interesting discussion with my father.
