Soapbox

My new company’s website uses SSL. I ordered an “extended validation” certificate from GoDaddy, instead of my usual CA, RapidSSL/GeoTrust, because GoDaddy’s EV certificates were cheap. EV certificates are security theater more than anything else, I probably should not have bothered.

Immediately after switching from my earlier “snake oil” self-signed test certificate to the production certificate, I saw SSL errors on Google Chrome for Mac and Safari for Mac, i.e. the two browsers that use OS X’s built-in crypto and certificate store. I suppose I should have tested the certificate on another server before going live, but I trusted GoDaddy (they are my DNS registrars, and competent, if garish).

Big mistake.

I called their tech support hotline, which is incredibly grating because of the verbose phone tree that keeps trying to push add-ons (I guess it is consistent with the monstrosity that is their home page).

After a while, I got a first-level tech. He asked whether I saw the certificate error on Google Chrome for Windows. At that point, I was irate enough to use a four-letter word. Our customers are Android mobile app developers. A significant chunk of them use Macs, and almost none (less than 5%) use IE, so know-nothing “All the world is IE” demographics are not exactly applicable.

After about half an hour of getting the run-around and escalating to level 2, with my business partner Michael getting progressively more anxious in the background, the level 1 CSR tells me the level 2 one can’t reproduce the problem (I reproduced it on three different Macs in two different locations). I gave them an ultimatum: fix it within 10 minutes or I would switch. At this point, the L1 CSR told me he had exhausted all his options, but I could call their “RA” department, and offered to switch me. Inevitably, the call transfer failed.

I dialed their SSL number, and in parallel started the certificate application process on RapidSSL. They offered a free competitive upgrade, I tried it, and within 3 minutes I had my fresh new, and functional certificate, valid for 3 years, all for free and in less time than it takes to listen to GoDaddy’s obnoxious phone tree (all about “we pride ourselves in customer service” and other Orwellian corporate babble).

I then called GoDaddy’s billing department to get a refund. Surprisingly, the process was very fast and smooth. I guess it is well-trod.

The moral of the story: GoDaddy—bad. RapidSSL—good.

Update (2012-08-26)

I switched my DNS business from GoDaddy to Gandi.net in December 2011 after Bob Parsons’ despicable elephant-hunting stunt.

French economist Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850) wrote a pamphlet titled Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas (What is Seen and What is Not Seen) where he demolishes the make-work fallacy in economics. When Jacques Bonhomme’s child breaks his window, paying for a replacement will circulate money in the economy, and stimulate the glassmakers’ trade. This is the visible effect. Bastiat urges us to consider what is not seen, i.e. opportunity costs, such as other, more productive uses for the money that are forgone due to the unexpected expense. This lesson is still relevant. The cost of repairing New Orleans after Katrina, or cleaning the Gulf after Deepwater Horizon, will cause a temporary boost in GDP statistics, but this is illusory and undesirable, another example of how poorly conceived metrics can distort thinking.

Another example is that of electric cars. Advocates for the blind have raised a ruckus about the dangers to blind people from quiet electric cars they cannot hear or dodge. Nissan just announced that their Leaf electric car will include a speaker and deliberately generate noise, in part to comply with the Japanese Transport Ministry’s requirements. To add injury to insult, the sound selected is apparently a sweeping sine wave, a type of sound that is incredibly grating compared to more natural sounds, including that of machinery.

Unfortunately, this is illustrates the fallacy Bastiat pointed out. Authorities are focusing on the visible (well, inaudible) first-order effect, but what is not seen matters as much. Most urban noise stems from transportation, and that noise pollution has major adverse impact on stress levels, sleep hygiene, and causes high blood pressure and cardiac problems from children to adults to the elderly. According to the WHO, for 2006 in the UK alone, an estimated 3,000+ deaths due to heart attacks can be attributed to noise pollution (out of 100,000+).

These figures are mind-boggling. For a country the size of the US, that probably comes around to five  or six 9/11 death tolls per year. Quiet electric cars should be hailed as a blessing, not a danger. There are other ways to address the legitimate concerns of the blind, e.g. by mandating transponders on cars and providing receivers for the blind.

There are streets in Paris commemorating Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

There are no corresponding streets in Washington D.C., for all that it was designed by a French urbanist, apart from Lafayette Square (it really should be de la Fayette Square). Rochambeau is ignored. Not remembered at all is the man who did the most for the American revolution, and arguably paid for it with his life, Louis XVI.

Please print a QR code for a page where the manual can be donwloaded, on the manual itself.

Thank you.

As a foreigner living in San Francisco for the last ten years, I never cease to be baffled by US voters’ tendency to vote for candidates who are clearly class warriors on the side of the rich and other influential special interests. Political scientists have long wondered why people vote against their own best interests, e.g. Americans voting for candidates beholden to health “care” provider lobbies and who hew to the status quo, saddling the US with grotesquely overpriced yet substandard health care. Another example would be the repulsive coddling of an increasingly brazen Wall Street kleptocracy.

Ideology cannot explain it all. Certainly, some people will put principle ahead of their pocketbook and vote for candidates that uphold their idea of moral values even if they simultaneously vote for economic measures that hurt their electorate. That said, there is nothing preventing a political candidate from adopting simultaneously socially conservative positions and economic policies that favor a safety net, what in Europe would be called Christian Democrats.

Media propaganda and brainwashing cannot explain it either, to believe so, as do conspiracy theorists on both right and left of the US political spectrum, is to seriously underestimate the intelligence (and cynicism) of the electorate. In a mostly democratic country like the United States, special interests can only prevail when the general population is apathetic, or at least consents to the status quo.

I believe the answer lies in loss aversion, the mental bias that causes people to fear a loss far more than they desire a gain. Our brains did not evolve in a way that favors strict rationality. Most people’s intuition about probability and statistics is unreliable and misleading—we tend to overestimate the frequency of rare events. The middle class, which holds a majority of votes, will tend to oppose measures that expose it to the risk of being pulled down by lower classes even if the same measures would allow them upward mobility into the upper classes. The upper class exploits this asymmetry to maintain its privileges, be they obscene taxpayer-funded bonuses for bankers who bankrupted their banks, or oligopoly rent-seeking by the medical profession.