14 ms·

How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

330 points by tghw 14y ago

wlesieutre 14y ago
I know some people have voiced concerns about Gatekeeper in 10.8, but this seems at least as bad. Especially from a normal user's perspective.
- jasomill 14y ago
  Gatekeeper is not nearly as bad for small developers, though. Unless Microsoft has started offering, as part of a $99 MSDN subscription, the ability to generate a signed certificate that doesn't expire for five years automatically from inside Visual Studio as soon as you've signed in with your Microsoft ID. The problem with Microsoft's strategy has always been the reliance on companies like VeriSign for whom recurring revenue from certificate renewal is a primary revenue source. And when I've had to deal with VeriSign for code-signing certificates in the past, it's easily cost more than $99 in time ("I'm sorry for the delay, but could you please fax that to us again, only this time, on official company letterhead?").
  - redbeard0x0a 14y ago
    Last I checked, you didn't even need the $99 Mac Developer program to get a signing certificate. You just needed an Apple Developer Id. The $99 program allows you to submit apps to the app store and gives you access to pre-release binaries, etc.
    - X-Istence 14y ago
      I keep hearing that all I need is a developer ID to get a signing certificate, but nowhere on the developer website for Apple do I see where I can get this certificate without first forking over $99 for the mac Developer Program... https://developer.apple.com/resources/developer-id/ https://developer.apple.com/resources/developer-id/
    - jasomill 14y ago
      Even better — I was already a member of the paid program when Mountain Lion was announced, and this point wasn't clear from the original announcement. Even more significant: as a registered developer, it took me less than ten minutes on developer.apple.com to obtain a Developer ID, to use it to successfully sign an executable and an installer package, and to verify the resulting signatures. In contrast, as an MSDN Universal member, Microsoft directs me to a list of root certificates installed in current versions of Windows [1], leaving me to puzzle out which are willing and able to sign third-party code-signing certificates (as, presumably, organizations like the French Secrétariat Général de la Défense Nationale are not). As an aside, the official copy of this list is posted on TechNet as an unlocked wiki page I'm permitted to edit!?! [1] http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/2592.aspx http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/2...
    - gergles 14y ago
      That's incorrect. The copy is: "1. Getting your Developer ID. Mac Developer Program members can get their Developer ID now. If you’re not already a member, join today." "Join today" links to https://developer.apple.com/programs/mac/ https://developer.apple.com/programs/mac/, where they politely ask for their $99/year software development tax.
  - binarycrusader 14y ago
    Apple Developer IDs are free, as are the certificates.
    - dmdeller 14y ago
      I was under that impression as well--perhaps something has changed since the initial announcement--but certificates are not free. I just went through this process with my free, non-App-Store Mac app, and there was no way to do it without paying $99.
  - briandear 14y ago
    Verisign is a massive scam. Their SSL certs, for example are several hundred dollars. They get away with it because the big corporate-types have "heard" of verisign and "heard" they need security.
dmethvin 14y ago
If you are creating a Windows binary and expect a user to download it, you should be signing the binary. Period. It's not just IE that considers unsigned downloads suspect, many antivirus programs do as well. If you are proud of your work, sign it.
- tommi 14y ago
  You forgot one step: "If you are proud of your work, then buy a certificate and sign your work"
  - evolve2k 14y ago
    Anyone have opinions on good SSL certificate providers or do you agree with the authors recommendation of http://startssl.com http://startssl.com ?
    - Karunamon 14y ago
      They do what they say they do at a decent price. However, their web interface sucks. Absolutely and completely sucks.
      - MichaelApproved 14y ago
        This is one of those times I miss the upvote counter on HN. I think it's important for the makers of StartSSL to see just how many people agree with you that their interface completely sucks. Without the counter, it just seems like one person's opinion while I bet many people agree.
        chris_wot 14y ago
        HN is not there for the marketing purposes of companies.
        antidoh 14y ago
calvin09 14y ago
Basically you're just an idiot.
gmurphy 14y ago
In general, not using the platform your users use is a path to trouble. For example, because so many designers in the valley use Macs, we continually have to fight an OS X bias in our design process; when designing something, you tend to calibrate it against what you're used to, but when OS X is only 5% of the market, OS X-based designers of client software end up with a massive blind spot when it comes to understanding what comes naturally to the rest of the world. One example is font and font size choices - because the system fonts and font rendering styles differ between platforms, it becomes very hard to tell what looks broken or 'not quite right' on the platform you're not used to. It's not uncommon to see sites launch with font choices that look rubbish on ClearType, but if you're not used to ClearType, it's hard to tell whether the rubbish is your fault or not. Apple's excellent execution and Windows' (no-longer-deserved) poor reputation also mean you frequently hear excuses for this behavior like "Windows users won't care because they don't care about design" or "The Apple way is better, so we should do it that way on Windows too". Both of these are infuriating and lead to terribly designed products.
- justindocanto 14y ago
  5% of 'the market' does not translate to 5% of users on your site. Depending on the site's demographic, as a developer, I see approx 15% Mac users making up traffic. Not to mention an ADDITIONAL 25% iPhone users. That's an average of 40% of apple traffic on the sites I work on. Some of which are getting 30k - 60k hits a month. Obviously this isnt the same stats across the board on all websites... but It is by no means FIVE percent.
  - protomyth 14y ago
    Your Mac number is not far off from Apple's Mac percentage in the US - 12%.
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    Indeed. According to Google, something like 39% of viewers on my blog are running Windows and 9% are running IE. There are more Mac and Linux users together than there are Windows users.... Somehow I don't think this translates to the general market.
vegas 14y ago
How not watching four hours of television a day put me out out of touch and was really awesome.
- vegas 14y ago
  Seriously, this gets downvoted?
lini 14y ago
In windows 8 the smartscreen filter is part if the OS and not just IE. Even if you download unsigned code with another browser, trying to run it will result in the same nasty warnings.
tomjen3 14y ago
While that is nice to know, it still smells of Raketeering to me. "that is some nice software you have there, would be a shame if users thought it was dangerous" "pay a little money to one of these approved companies and that warning will go away" If MS was serious about this only being for security they could issue the certificates for free and prove me wrong. On the other hand, why is it that about 20% of users click past BOTH of these EXTREEMLY scary warnings? Don't they read them at all?
- SomeCallMeTim 14y ago
  >If MS was serious about this only being for security they could issue the certificates for free and prove me wrong. Make it too easy, and the scamware software will just get a free cert and sign apps. It takes some amount of effort, possibly by a human, to approve you to receive a cert. Even the "free" certs I've applied for have taken time and human interaction on the side of the registrar, and I'm certain those certs are offered as loss-leaders for their other products.
  - hobin 14y ago
    I'm unfamiliar with many of these certificates, but is there any reason such 'scamware' woudln't be able to get one even though it costs money? Because, if they still can, they the whole certification business definitely seems like a big scam to me.
    - dennisgorelik 14y ago
      When you pay money - you are leaving money trace which is likely to bite you if your product hurts people.
      - yuhong 14y ago
        Yea, the SmartScreen filter is based on the reputation of the publisher, and the certificate is used to identify the publisher for this purpose.
    - 14y ago
lisper 14y ago
Is there a reason you don't offer deblurring as SAAS? I have a photo I'd happily pay to have deblurred, but I use a Mac.
- sp332 14y ago
  That sounds like a completely different product. He would need to maintain infrastructure and an entire software stack under his deblurring program, design an API and/or security-hardened web interface to upload and retrieve photos, and consider bandwidth costs for every photo uploaded and downloaded.
  - teuobk 14y ago
    Pretty much spot on. Deblurring is extremely CPU intensive, so it would take a lot of hardware on the server side. Or, I could do something like a CUDA port, but then that would mean owning and grooming my own servers, since decent GPUs are still rare beasts on leased dedicated servers. The more likely route for Mac support is to release a native OS X version, since the GUI is written in Python and the underlying deconvolution stuff is written in portable C++.
    - fluxon 14y ago
      Back in May, Jeff wrote on his blog: https://www.blurity.com/blog/2012/05/01/blurity-is-back/ https://www.blurity.com/blog/2012/05/01/blurity-is-back/ "What happened to the web version? In short, the market happened: nobody wanted web-based photo blur removal. A minor pivot, but a pivot nonetheless!" This seems to be that effort: http://fixblurryphotos.com/ http://fixblurryphotos.com/ Blurity is mentioned after the deblur is performed.
      - teuobk 14y ago
        Yeah, fixblurryphotos.com was an experiment to see if people would be satisfied with very simple photo improvements rather than the full deblurring power of Blurity. When I was experimenting with the SaaS version of Blurity, I found that many of the people who did eventual make purchases were, firstly, interested in only a single photo; and secondly, satisfied with the most trivial of improvements. I lamented that those people would be just as satisfied with auto-levels and unsharp mask as they were with Blurity, so my friend Tyler threw exactly that simple service together in about 10 hours. The results? Turns out that people aren't willing to pay for something simple like that after all.
krobertson 14y ago
Better subject: "How not testing my website with all browsers, even IE, and ignoring metrics for months cost me dearly"
qntmfred 14y ago
I was browsing HN on my WP7 and this link gave me a "We're having trouble with this site's security certificate" message
- jasomill 14y ago
  That's probably because the news.ycombinator.com certificate is rooted an Entrust certificate thumbprinted "‎50 30 06 ...", trusted by Windows [1] but not Windows Phone [2]. Yet another reason Apple's "one and only one way to do it" approach to code signing certificates may not be such a bad idea after all. [1] http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/2592.aspx http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/2... [2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg521150(v=VS.92).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg521150(v=VS.92).as...
  - qntmfred 14y ago
    blurity.com gave me the cert error, not HN.
    - teuobk 14y ago
      Interesting. I had some initial problems with installing the certificate for blurity.com when I got the intermediate cert chaining backwards, but this is the first I've heard about problems since I fixed that a few months ago. Could you drop me an email at the address in my profile? Thanks!
      - jasomill 14y ago
        A quick Google search turned up this [1], this [2], and this [3], all which seem to indicate that StartCom certificates were unsupported on Windows Phone, at least as of 7.0 RTM. So the problem may indeed be as simple (and frustrating!) as an untrusted root. [1] http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/windowsphone7series/thread/3afb8283-6615-40e9-a663-d1877ba876dc http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/windowsphone7seri... [2] https://forum.startcom.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1802 https://forum.startcom.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1802 [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8430849/app-using-startcom-ssl-certificate-possible http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8430849/app-using-startco...
Hario 14y ago
I'm no expert on these sorts of things, but it seems like the story goes something like this: 1. Dev checks out his site using IE 2. Dev realizes that IE users were getting scary warnings about his software 3. Dev has to pay up money to a third company to make the scary warnings go away. Seems like a bad state of affairs to me.
- CamperBob2 14y ago
  I'd love to hear how this isn't grounds for a product disparagement lawsuit. Are any attorneys familiar with SmartScreen Filter? A couple of relevant points that may be overlooked: 1) Signing your code, even with an expensive class-3 Authenticode certificate from Verisign that allows you to sign kernel drivers, is no guarantee that IE will not accuse you of distributing potential malware. 2) Contrary to various postings by Microsoft, there appears to be no avenue for appealing IE's poor judgement calls. This happened to me a few months ago -- again, with a signed .exe -- and all of the links on microsoft.com that I followed to submit my download to a whitelist went nowhere useful. 3) Mentioned in the article but worth emphasizing: the ridiculous "This application is not commonly downloaded" criterion almost seems designed to penalize smaller vendors who release frequent updates. This SmartScreen bullshit is one of those cases where if you're not outraged, you're either not paying attention, or you're profiting from the scam somehow.
  - ascendant 14y ago
    Do you have a better idea? Signature-based malware scanning is a joke and a half. I know CA"s can be gamed but unless you're proposing a better solution then don't complain.
    - CamperBob2 14y ago
      Yes; they can do what they're doing now, but drop the scary language. Scaring users with non-specific threatening language does not enlighten them. Since it's almost unheard-of for malware to be signed with a legitimate, unrevoked certificate, they could also afford to give signed executables much greater leeway when deciding what to report to the user. People seem to be assuming that signing the .exe is enough to keep the dire warnings from appearing. That is not the case, or at least it wasn't the case a few months ago. Finally, they can provide a standardized method for whitelisting URLs (and not individual executables) instead of what they're doing now, which is apparently nothing.
kuhn 14y ago
Thanks for sharing the numbers. Great to see the process by which you worked out how much it was costing you. Good wakeup call really. Shame it took you so long to cotton on.
- g-garron 14y ago
  I like how you found a good side to this story, instead of being criticizing what the writer should or should not know.
DeanCollinsNYC 14y ago
Thats ok Twitter with their massive dev team and budget have had a massive IE8 scripting problem which is locking up any browser that tries to reply to a tweet (posting and retweeting works fine). its day 35 and counting Twitter. lol make me chuckle that not a single person over there is using IE8 abnd that these basic problems are not being picked up by their QA testing.
keithnoizu 14y ago
Although ~half of your revenue came from the IE users the numbers may not significantly improve after resolving this issue as the ie users that completed downloads are also the IE users invested enough in the application to download it despite the ie warning.
jmboling 14y ago
If you care about your product you have to draw a line somewhere. The more developers that take a stance and don't support the criminal negligence of IE's support of broadly accepted standards the sooner we can all eliminate needless time costs of making sites agnostic to the point of stupidity.
- dbattaglia 14y ago
  Huh? The issue was with an .exe not being digitally signed and IE's scary warning that it might be malware. Very similar to what Apple are going to do in 10.8 (Gatekeeper).
fluxon 14y ago
On the subject of conversion rates, the Download and Buy links are separate, with no mention of an unregistered trial or watermarked demo mode. That uncertainty might be affecting your tryout rate. If the "Download" button said "Try it!", then the certainty that there is some usable trial would be higher. Side note: I notice that the (watermarked) saved images lack EXIF info - is that preserved in the registered version? This is very important for many photographers...
- teuobk 14y ago
  I've done some A/B testing with various download button labels, but I should probably go back and do it again now that I've switched from a 30-day trial model to a watermarked-demo model. As for preserving EXIF data, I think that should be an easy change, so I'm going to add that one to the feature list. Thanks for the suggestions!
rwallace 14y ago
Does it make any difference if you wrap the executable in a zip file, or does IE look inside the zip file and raise an alarm anyway?
- teuobk 14y ago
  That's an interesting question, so I gave it a try just now. On Windows 7 with IE 9, there were no warnings presented when downloading the zip file containing the unsigned installer executable. When the installer was extracted from the archive and run after the download completed, I got the standard Windows security warning about "The publisher could not be verified", which was far less scary that the SmartScreen warning. So yes, it looks like that could be a viable work-around.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
raam86 14y ago
You have created the perfect layman meter. I can't of any of my friends or collegues who would even consider searching for such a program since in blurring can not be done. Didnt use your program but this can be proved mathamatically. These people will never use explorer and even if they would, They are the kind if crowd who actually reads error messages. On the other hand you have my grandma,aunt. Random old folks who fall into the red messege = panic & insta call super urgent call to me. So yea far more layman are using IE Sent from android. As for the cert. When you know about you simply explaon this on the page.
- tghw 14y ago
  If I'm understanding you correctly, you think only laypeople would search for such a thing because more knowledgeable people think that what the program is doing is mathematically impossible? Sounds like a classic example of thinking you know more than you do, and trying to look at the world as binary, black and white. In actuality, images have a wide range of sharpness. In this case, Blurity can improve the image. (Using mathematics no less!) Will it be perfectly sharp? No, not always, but it will be better. And that's something people will pay for. Even experts.
simonbrown 14y ago
This reminds me of: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/10/23/the-ie-css-bug-which-cost-me-a-months-salary/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/10/23/the-ie-css-bug-which-cos...
lelele 14y ago
Reworded: "How not putting yourself into your customer's shoes while you are testing your software will cost you dearly."
gubatron 14y ago
yup, Microsoft and the companies issuing certificates have been at this for over a year, we had to get a certificate last year when we saw this issue. It's a nice money maker for them getting all those yearly certificates, some charging several hundreds of dollars per year.
alan_cx 14y ago
Just generally, and very simplistically.... buy this or we scare away your customers. Errr, um, sort of.....well.... Mafia protection racket, yes? Put it this way. What is the first thing that springs to mind when some one is scaring off your customers demanding, sorry, politely implying a payment to stop? Yes, yes, yes, I know. Security, user safety, lots of lovely logical arguments for it, Im sure there are plenty. But strip it back to basics and, well, there it is. I presume since MS is a big huge "evil" business which probably funds some political rodent its all cosy and legal. Its more complicated, right?
- Maascamp 14y ago
  Or maybe cost of doing business? I mean, I can self sign SSL certs, so why does the browser give me warnings on https URLs? Mozilla must be arm in arm with Verisign. I'm shocked an open source company could be this evil. I will never browse the internet with Firefox again. I hope they get burnt for this. NOTE: All of the above was sarcasm
scosman 14y ago
Ahh the irony! (the linked article has a SSL warning on IE9 on WinPhone) https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9906763/IMG_7965.JPG https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9906763/IMG_7965.JPG
drucken 14y ago
Just zip it.

330 points by tghw 14y ago

I know some people have voiced concerns about Gatekeeper in 10.8, but this seems at least as bad. Especially from a normal user's perspective.

jasomill 14y ago
Gatekeeper is not nearly as bad for small developers, though. Unless Microsoft has started offering, as part of a $99 MSDN subscription, the ability to generate a signed certificate that doesn't expire for five years automatically from inside Visual Studio as soon as you've signed in with your Microsoft ID. The problem with Microsoft's strategy has always been the reliance on companies like VeriSign for whom recurring revenue from certificate renewal is a primary revenue source. And when I've had to deal with VeriSign for code-signing certificates in the past, it's easily cost more than $99 in time ("I'm sorry for the delay, but could you please fax that to us again, only this time, on official company letterhead?").
- redbeard0x0a 14y ago
  Last I checked, you didn't even need the $99 Mac Developer program to get a signing certificate. You just needed an Apple Developer Id. The $99 program allows you to submit apps to the app store and gives you access to pre-release binaries, etc.
  - X-Istence 14y ago
    I keep hearing that all I need is a developer ID to get a signing certificate, but nowhere on the developer website for Apple do I see where I can get this certificate without first forking over $99 for the mac Developer Program... https://developer.apple.com/resources/developer-id/ https://developer.apple.com/resources/developer-id/
  - jasomill 14y ago
    Even better — I was already a member of the paid program when Mountain Lion was announced, and this point wasn't clear from the original announcement. Even more significant: as a registered developer, it took me less than ten minutes on developer.apple.com to obtain a Developer ID, to use it to successfully sign an executable and an installer package, and to verify the resulting signatures. In contrast, as an MSDN Universal member, Microsoft directs me to a list of root certificates installed in current versions of Windows [1], leaving me to puzzle out which are willing and able to sign third-party code-signing certificates (as, presumably, organizations like the French Secrétariat Général de la Défense Nationale are not). As an aside, the official copy of this list is posted on TechNet as an unlocked wiki page I'm permitted to edit!?! [1] http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/2592.aspx http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/2...
  - gergles 14y ago
    That's incorrect. The copy is: "1. Getting your Developer ID. Mac Developer Program members can get their Developer ID now. If you’re not already a member, join today." "Join today" links to https://developer.apple.com/programs/mac/ https://developer.apple.com/programs/mac/, where they politely ask for their $99/year software development tax.
- binarycrusader 14y ago
  Apple Developer IDs are free, as are the certificates.
  - dmdeller 14y ago
    I was under that impression as well--perhaps something has changed since the initial announcement--but certificates are not free. I just went through this process with my free, non-App-Store Mac app, and there was no way to do it without paying $99.
- briandear 14y ago
  Verisign is a massive scam. Their SSL certs, for example are several hundred dollars. They get away with it because the big corporate-types have "heard" of verisign and "heard" they need security.

dmethvin 14y ago

If you are creating a Windows binary and expect a user to download it, you should be signing the binary. Period. It's not just IE that considers unsigned downloads suspect, many antivirus programs do as well. If you are proud of your work, sign it.

tommi 14y ago
You forgot one step: "If you are proud of your work, then buy a certificate and sign your work"
- evolve2k 14y ago
  Anyone have opinions on good SSL certificate providers or do you agree with the authors recommendation of http://startssl.com http://startssl.com ?
  - Karunamon 14y ago
    They do what they say they do at a decent price. However, their web interface sucks. Absolutely and completely sucks.
    - MichaelApproved 14y ago
      This is one of those times I miss the upvote counter on HN. I think it's important for the makers of StartSSL to see just how many people agree with you that their interface completely sucks. Without the counter, it just seems like one person's opinion while I bet many people agree.
      - chris_wot 14y ago
        HN is not there for the marketing purposes of companies.
        antidoh 14y ago

calvin09 14y ago

Basically you're just an idiot.

gmurphy 14y ago

In general, not using the platform your users use is a path to trouble. For example, because so many designers in the valley use Macs, we continually have to fight an OS X bias in our design process; when designing something, you tend to calibrate it against what you're used to, but when OS X is only 5% of the market, OS X-based designers of client software end up with a massive blind spot when it comes to understanding what comes naturally to the rest of the world. One example is font and font size choices - because the system fonts and font rendering styles differ between platforms, it becomes very hard to tell what looks broken or 'not quite right' on the platform you're not used to. It's not uncommon to see sites launch with font choices that look rubbish on ClearType, but if you're not used to ClearType, it's hard to tell whether the rubbish is your fault or not. Apple's excellent execution and Windows' (no-longer-deserved) poor reputation also mean you frequently hear excuses for this behavior like "Windows users won't care because they don't care about design" or "The Apple way is better, so we should do it that way on Windows too". Both of these are infuriating and lead to terribly designed products.

justindocanto 14y ago
5% of 'the market' does not translate to 5% of users on your site. Depending on the site's demographic, as a developer, I see approx 15% Mac users making up traffic. Not to mention an ADDITIONAL 25% iPhone users. That's an average of 40% of apple traffic on the sites I work on. Some of which are getting 30k - 60k hits a month. Obviously this isnt the same stats across the board on all websites... but It is by no means FIVE percent.
- protomyth 14y ago
  Your Mac number is not far off from Apple's Mac percentage in the US - 12%.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  Indeed. According to Google, something like 39% of viewers on my blog are running Windows and 9% are running IE. There are more Mac and Linux users together than there are Windows users.... Somehow I don't think this translates to the general market.

vegas 14y ago

How not watching four hours of television a day put me out out of touch and was really awesome.

vegas 14y ago
Seriously, this gets downvoted?

lini 14y ago

In windows 8 the smartscreen filter is part if the OS and not just IE. Even if you download unsigned code with another browser, trying to run it will result in the same nasty warnings.

tomjen3 14y ago

While that is nice to know, it still smells of Raketeering to me. "that is some nice software you have there, would be a shame if users thought it was dangerous" "pay a little money to one of these approved companies and that warning will go away" If MS was serious about this only being for security they could issue the certificates for free and prove me wrong. On the other hand, why is it that about 20% of users click past BOTH of these EXTREEMLY scary warnings? Don't they read them at all?

SomeCallMeTim 14y ago
>If MS was serious about this only being for security they could issue the certificates for free and prove me wrong. Make it too easy, and the scamware software will just get a free cert and sign apps. It takes some amount of effort, possibly by a human, to approve you to receive a cert. Even the "free" certs I've applied for have taken time and human interaction on the side of the registrar, and I'm certain those certs are offered as loss-leaders for their other products.
- hobin 14y ago
  I'm unfamiliar with many of these certificates, but is there any reason such 'scamware' woudln't be able to get one even though it costs money? Because, if they still can, they the whole certification business definitely seems like a big scam to me.
  - dennisgorelik 14y ago
    When you pay money - you are leaving money trace which is likely to bite you if your product hurts people.
    - yuhong 14y ago
      Yea, the SmartScreen filter is based on the reputation of the publisher, and the certificate is used to identify the publisher for this purpose.
  - 14y ago

lisper 14y ago

Is there a reason you don't offer deblurring as SAAS? I have a photo I'd happily pay to have deblurred, but I use a Mac.

sp332 14y ago
That sounds like a completely different product. He would need to maintain infrastructure and an entire software stack under his deblurring program, design an API and/or security-hardened web interface to upload and retrieve photos, and consider bandwidth costs for every photo uploaded and downloaded.
- teuobk 14y ago
  Pretty much spot on. Deblurring is extremely CPU intensive, so it would take a lot of hardware on the server side. Or, I could do something like a CUDA port, but then that would mean owning and grooming my own servers, since decent GPUs are still rare beasts on leased dedicated servers. The more likely route for Mac support is to release a native OS X version, since the GUI is written in Python and the underlying deconvolution stuff is written in portable C++.
  - fluxon 14y ago
    Back in May, Jeff wrote on his blog: https://www.blurity.com/blog/2012/05/01/blurity-is-back/ https://www.blurity.com/blog/2012/05/01/blurity-is-back/ "What happened to the web version? In short, the market happened: nobody wanted web-based photo blur removal. A minor pivot, but a pivot nonetheless!" This seems to be that effort: http://fixblurryphotos.com/ http://fixblurryphotos.com/ Blurity is mentioned after the deblur is performed.
    - teuobk 14y ago
      Yeah, fixblurryphotos.com was an experiment to see if people would be satisfied with very simple photo improvements rather than the full deblurring power of Blurity. When I was experimenting with the SaaS version of Blurity, I found that many of the people who did eventual make purchases were, firstly, interested in only a single photo; and secondly, satisfied with the most trivial of improvements. I lamented that those people would be just as satisfied with auto-levels and unsharp mask as they were with Blurity, so my friend Tyler threw exactly that simple service together in about 10 hours. The results? Turns out that people aren't willing to pay for something simple like that after all.

krobertson 14y ago

Better subject: "How not testing my website with all browsers, even IE, and ignoring metrics for months cost me dearly"

qntmfred 14y ago

I was browsing HN on my WP7 and this link gave me a "We're having trouble with this site's security certificate" message

jasomill 14y ago
That's probably because the news.ycombinator.com certificate is rooted an Entrust certificate thumbprinted "‎50 30 06 ...", trusted by Windows [1] but not Windows Phone [2]. Yet another reason Apple's "one and only one way to do it" approach to code signing certificates may not be such a bad idea after all. [1] http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/2592.aspx http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/2... [2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg521150(v=VS.92).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg521150(v=VS.92).as...
- qntmfred 14y ago
  blurity.com gave me the cert error, not HN.
  - teuobk 14y ago
    Interesting. I had some initial problems with installing the certificate for blurity.com when I got the intermediate cert chaining backwards, but this is the first I've heard about problems since I fixed that a few months ago. Could you drop me an email at the address in my profile? Thanks!
    - jasomill 14y ago
      A quick Google search turned up this [1], this [2], and this [3], all which seem to indicate that StartCom certificates were unsupported on Windows Phone, at least as of 7.0 RTM. So the problem may indeed be as simple (and frustrating!) as an untrusted root. [1] http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/windowsphone7series/thread/3afb8283-6615-40e9-a663-d1877ba876dc http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/windowsphone7seri... [2] https://forum.startcom.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1802 https://forum.startcom.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1802 [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8430849/app-using-startcom-ssl-certificate-possible http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8430849/app-using-startco...

Hario 14y ago

I'm no expert on these sorts of things, but it seems like the story goes something like this: 1. Dev checks out his site using IE 2. Dev realizes that IE users were getting scary warnings about his software 3. Dev has to pay up money to a third company to make the scary warnings go away. Seems like a bad state of affairs to me.

CamperBob2 14y ago
I'd love to hear how this isn't grounds for a product disparagement lawsuit. Are any attorneys familiar with SmartScreen Filter? A couple of relevant points that may be overlooked: 1) Signing your code, even with an expensive class-3 Authenticode certificate from Verisign that allows you to sign kernel drivers, is no guarantee that IE will not accuse you of distributing potential malware. 2) Contrary to various postings by Microsoft, there appears to be no avenue for appealing IE's poor judgement calls. This happened to me a few months ago -- again, with a signed .exe -- and all of the links on microsoft.com that I followed to submit my download to a whitelist went nowhere useful. 3) Mentioned in the article but worth emphasizing: the ridiculous "This application is not commonly downloaded" criterion almost seems designed to penalize smaller vendors who release frequent updates. This SmartScreen bullshit is one of those cases where if you're not outraged, you're either not paying attention, or you're profiting from the scam somehow.
- ascendant 14y ago
  Do you have a better idea? Signature-based malware scanning is a joke and a half. I know CA"s can be gamed but unless you're proposing a better solution then don't complain.
  - CamperBob2 14y ago
    Yes; they can do what they're doing now, but drop the scary language. Scaring users with non-specific threatening language does not enlighten them. Since it's almost unheard-of for malware to be signed with a legitimate, unrevoked certificate, they could also afford to give signed executables much greater leeway when deciding what to report to the user. People seem to be assuming that signing the .exe is enough to keep the dire warnings from appearing. That is not the case, or at least it wasn't the case a few months ago. Finally, they can provide a standardized method for whitelisting URLs (and not individual executables) instead of what they're doing now, which is apparently nothing.

kuhn 14y ago

Thanks for sharing the numbers. Great to see the process by which you worked out how much it was costing you. Good wakeup call really. Shame it took you so long to cotton on.

g-garron 14y ago
I like how you found a good side to this story, instead of being criticizing what the writer should or should not know.

DeanCollinsNYC 14y ago

Thats ok Twitter with their massive dev team and budget have had a massive IE8 scripting problem which is locking up any browser that tries to reply to a tweet (posting and retweeting works fine). its day 35 and counting Twitter. lol make me chuckle that not a single person over there is using IE8 abnd that these basic problems are not being picked up by their QA testing.

keithnoizu 14y ago

Although ~half of your revenue came from the IE users the numbers may not significantly improve after resolving this issue as the ie users that completed downloads are also the IE users invested enough in the application to download it despite the ie warning.

jmboling 14y ago

If you care about your product you have to draw a line somewhere. The more developers that take a stance and don't support the criminal negligence of IE's support of broadly accepted standards the sooner we can all eliminate needless time costs of making sites agnostic to the point of stupidity.

dbattaglia 14y ago
Huh? The issue was with an .exe not being digitally signed and IE's scary warning that it might be malware. Very similar to what Apple are going to do in 10.8 (Gatekeeper).

fluxon 14y ago

On the subject of conversion rates, the Download and Buy links are separate, with no mention of an unregistered trial or watermarked demo mode. That uncertainty might be affecting your tryout rate. If the "Download" button said "Try it!", then the certainty that there is some usable trial would be higher. Side note: I notice that the (watermarked) saved images lack EXIF info - is that preserved in the registered version? This is very important for many photographers...

teuobk 14y ago
I've done some A/B testing with various download button labels, but I should probably go back and do it again now that I've switched from a 30-day trial model to a watermarked-demo model. As for preserving EXIF data, I think that should be an easy change, so I'm going to add that one to the feature list. Thanks for the suggestions!

rwallace 14y ago

Does it make any difference if you wrap the executable in a zip file, or does IE look inside the zip file and raise an alarm anyway?

teuobk 14y ago
That's an interesting question, so I gave it a try just now. On Windows 7 with IE 9, there were no warnings presented when downloading the zip file containing the unsigned installer executable. When the installer was extracted from the archive and run after the download completed, I got the standard Windows security warning about "The publisher could not be verified", which was far less scary that the SmartScreen warning. So yes, it looks like that could be a viable work-around.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

raam86 14y ago

You have created the perfect layman meter. I can't of any of my friends or collegues who would even consider searching for such a program since in blurring can not be done. Didnt use your program but this can be proved mathamatically. These people will never use explorer and even if they would, They are the kind if crowd who actually reads error messages. On the other hand you have my grandma,aunt. Random old folks who fall into the red messege = panic & insta call super urgent call to me. So yea far more layman are using IE Sent from android. As for the cert. When you know about you simply explaon this on the page.

tghw 14y ago
If I'm understanding you correctly, you think only laypeople would search for such a thing because more knowledgeable people think that what the program is doing is mathematically impossible? Sounds like a classic example of thinking you know more than you do, and trying to look at the world as binary, black and white. In actuality, images have a wide range of sharpness. In this case, Blurity can improve the image. (Using mathematics no less!) Will it be perfectly sharp? No, not always, but it will be better. And that's something people will pay for. Even experts.

simonbrown 14y ago

This reminds me of: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/10/23/the-ie-css-bug-which-cost-me-a-months-salary/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/10/23/the-ie-css-bug-which-cos...

lelele 14y ago

Reworded: "How not putting yourself into your customer's shoes while you are testing your software will cost you dearly."

gubatron 14y ago

yup, Microsoft and the companies issuing certificates have been at this for over a year, we had to get a certificate last year when we saw this issue. It's a nice money maker for them getting all those yearly certificates, some charging several hundreds of dollars per year.

alan_cx 14y ago

Just generally, and very simplistically.... buy this or we scare away your customers. Errr, um, sort of.....well.... Mafia protection racket, yes? Put it this way. What is the first thing that springs to mind when some one is scaring off your customers demanding, sorry, politely implying a payment to stop? Yes, yes, yes, I know. Security, user safety, lots of lovely logical arguments for it, Im sure there are plenty. But strip it back to basics and, well, there it is. I presume since MS is a big huge "evil" business which probably funds some political rodent its all cosy and legal. Its more complicated, right?

Maascamp 14y ago
Or maybe cost of doing business? I mean, I can self sign SSL certs, so why does the browser give me warnings on https URLs? Mozilla must be arm in arm with Verisign. I'm shocked an open source company could be this evil. I will never browse the internet with Firefox again. I hope they get burnt for this. NOTE: All of the above was sarcasm

scosman 14y ago

Ahh the irony! (the linked article has a SSL warning on IE9 on WinPhone) https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9906763/IMG_7965.JPG https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9906763/IMG_7965.JPG

drucken 14y ago

Just zip it.