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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

#91

Post by lesterbuck »

hobin wrote: post #40
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…

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.

The certificate authority should revoke their signing certificate if their binary is found to contain malware, returning them to the big warning state.

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

#92

Post by jasomill »

teuobk wrote: post #60
qntmfred wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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/windowsphone7seri...

[2] https://forum.startcom.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1802

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8430849/app-using-startco...

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

#93

Post by teuobk »

fluxon wrote: post #82

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 vers…

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!

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

#94

Post by teuobk »

fluxon wrote: post #84
teuobk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dec…

Back in May, Jeff wrote on his blog: 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/ Blurity is mentioned after the deblur is performed.

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.

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

#95

Post by teuobk »

rwallace wrote: post #88

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?

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.

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

#96

Post by yuhong »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #49
ascendant wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 ke…

They are giving signed EXEs much greater leeway, since the publishers is verified by a CA, providing a secure base on which the publisher's reputation is determined.

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

#97

Post by achal »

NinetyNine wrote: post #86
achal wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> font and font size choices Agreed. I don't know if it's just me, but Helvetica looks rather bad on Windows. I've found that Segoe UI almost always looks more pleasing, and yet Helvetica is omnipresent on the web (partially because of Twitter bootstrap).

I can't verify this, but unless you installed Helvetica manually, windows installations won't have it and will fall back to whatever is specified next in the family (usually Arial or the default Sans Serif).

Which is even worse; Arial looks terrible compared to Segoe UI or Calibri.

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

#98

Post by yuhong »

harshreality wrote: post #70
praxulus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Some combination of distributed notaries, warning for unusual certificate conditions (e.g. certs changing when they have lots of time until expiration -- Dear Google, please stop doing that ), and other ideas. Convergence http://convergence.io/ (notary) Perspectives http://perspectives-project.org/ (notary) CertPatrol http://patrol.psyced.org/ (cert checking) TACK http://tack.io/ (only one cert per organizational gro…

Note that many of these are only usable for SSL.

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

#99

Post by MisterMerkin »

jcbrand wrote: post #87
antidoh wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN and all other web sites are there for whatever purposes their users wish to use it for, within the constraints of whatever actions are implemented on a site. This is one of the things that infuriates me about StackOverflow and its army of article closing moderators. A real community will change its practices and perceptions over time according to the needs of the community. If you have a subset of people who decid…

So if the community (through an influx of new users) decides that the purpose of HN is to spread cat pictures and memes, you'll be cool with that?

It wouldn't be HN anymore at that point.

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

#100

Post by antidoh »

jcbrand wrote: post #87
antidoh wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN and all other web sites are there for whatever purposes their users wish to use it for, within the constraints of whatever actions are implemented on a site. This is one of the things that infuriates me about StackOverflow and its army of article closing moderators. A real community will change its practices and perceptions over time according to the needs of the community. If you have a subset of people who decid…

So if the community (through an influx of new users) decides that the purpose of HN is to spread cat pictures and memes, you'll be cool with that?

No, I'd probably leave. Unless the cats were really interesting.
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