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

blurity.com

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

#51

Post by PotatoEngineer »

tomjen3 wrote: post #13

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 cli…

Many users have figured out that if they click the OK button (or maybe the Cancel button), the dialog goes away. In this case, they know that they get what they want (downloaded file) if they hit the right buttons; they've probably hit exactly this before, on innocuous programs, and don't trust the warning messages.

Or we might just have a bunch of reasonably-savvy users that have realized that lack of a signature is not the same as untrustworthy software.

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

#52

Post by jasomill »

rbanffy wrote: post #30
jamesaguilar wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nice, but you can't eat dignity. :P

But you can hold yourself to higher standards. My family taught me to always do the right thing, which, most of the time, is neither the most convenient nor the most profitable. It should be trivial to provide a free binary signing service that required some steps to prove the person (or website) is the person asking the binary to be signed (much like Google asks me to upload a file or setup a DNS record) and match t…

It's possible that the reason Authenticode doesn't work like this is legal rather than technical: it was deployed at a time when Microsoft was already subject to considerable regulatory scrutiny for a wide variety of alleged anticompetitive practices, so, independent of motivation and technical merits, scary warnings about third-party code not "certified" by Microsoft may have been legally ill-advised.

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

#53

Post by X-Istence »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #44
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ce…

Apple gives out free developer id certificates. There's no reason Microsoft couldn't do the same.

Where does Apple give out free developer id certificates? Last I saw I had to purchase the $99 developer program ...

https://developer.apple.com/resources/developer-id/

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

#54

Post by CapitalistCartr »

barista wrote: post #34
tomjen3 wrote: post #13

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 cli…

>> it still smells of Raketeering to me Racketeering indeed! I am sure that was the goal of the SmartScreen filter in IE. Cert vendors and MS must have colluded to add this feature so that developers of all binaries are forced to buy certs. Right?

As the saying goes, "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Welcome to the 'law' of unintended consequences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences

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

#55

Post by X-Istence »

redbeard0x0a wrote: post #15
jasomill wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recurrin…

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.

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/

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

#56

Post by praxulus »

Karunamon wrote: post #19
tomjen3 wrote: post #13

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 cli…

>it still smells of Raketeering to me. Congratulations - you have been enlightened to the state of PKI as it stands today. (I.e. a complete fucking scam).

I'm afraid I haven't been enlightened. How else can the PKI be structured while providing the same amount of security?

Is public/private key cryptography itself fundamentally flawed? What's the alternative?

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

#57

Post by qntmfred »

jasomill wrote: post #47
qntmfred wrote: post #22

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

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/2... [2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library…

blurity.com gave me the cert error, not HN.

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

#58

Post by teuobk »

sp332 wrote: post #38
lisper wrote: post #16

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.

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.

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++.

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

#59

Post by yelloblac »

ben0x539 wrote: post #32
jamesaguilar wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nice, but you can't eat dignity. :P

That's exactly my point. This is clearly an issue of business and not "pride", so the whole "pride" argument to shame someone into a business decision is really questionable.

Well, clearly it would be an issue of "pride" if you'd be too proud to cave in to "certificate blackmail" as you call it.

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

#60

Post by teuobk »

qntmfred wrote: post #57
jasomill wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/2... [2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library…

blurity.com gave me the cert error, not HN.

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!

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