Quinthar (a David Barrett blog)

How to execute code whenever Back button is pressed?

So I'd like to execute some JavaScript every time the page loads, regardless of whether it's from a new visitor, or click of Reload, or a click of Back, or whatever. However, I'm finding Back to be particularly tricky. Here's the test code:

<html>
<body onload="alert('Hello world!');">
<a href="link">link</a>
</body>
</html>

Nothing fancy there, should pop an alert box every time right? Wrong: click on the link and then click Back, and the alert doesn't show. (At least, not on Ubuntu 8.04 Firefox 3.) Odd.

Even stranger, it *does* show if you include a large (~100KB) external script:

<html>
<head>
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.js"> </script>
</head>
<body onload="alert('Hello world!');">
<a href="link">link</a>
</body>
</html>

But try it with a small (~4KB) external script and it stops working. The mystery deepens.

The only explanation that makes sense is there must be some kind of delay when the page loads for the Back button to trigger the onload event. Too small a delay (too small a file to load) and it doesn't work.

Any ideas how to reliably execute code on every load, including Back? I'll use the jQuery trick for now, but I'm concerned that it won't always be reliable.

Update: Curtis figured it out: It's due to fancy Firefox caching rules. There are several criteria that go into whether the page is reloaded each time, one of which is whether there's an "unload handler". Turns out it wasn't the *size* of including jQuery, it was due to jQuery setting an unload handler. Anyway, of the many solutions, the easiest is to simply set "Cache-Control: no-store" (or "no-cache", if HTTPS). Thanks Curtis, mystery solved!

Review: Everything Bad is Good For You

For reasons I don't understand, people love to hate. Democrats love to hate Republicans, Christians love to hate Atheists, VI hates Emacs, etc. But the one thing people of all walks of life seem to jointly hate is how the modern way of life is gradually corrupting the moral and intellectual fiber of their fellow man.

I think Idiocracy gave the most condensed (and entertaining) presentation on the topic, essentially arguing that stupid people reproduce faster than smart people, and because everybody is getting stupider, there's a global "race to the bottom" where the intellectually meek inherit the earth.

But this notion was refined and socially reinforced well before that movie came onto the scene. For as long as I've known, I've been surrounded by people who make dire predictions and cynical extrapolations of today's trends, with the inevitable conclusion that humanity's end is just a choice between Nevil Shute or Aldus Huxley. More or less destructive, but with mass stupification taken for granted.

That pessimism, that general hatred of the new and wistful longing for better times, never sat well with me. After all, the only reason the "new" came to be was because billions of people individually and as a group chose to make it so. It's hard to believe that generations would labor endlessly to actively worsen the world and squander their mental capacities.

So at risk of engineering my own "scenario fulfillment" I was drawn to Everything Bad is Good For You -- a book making the outrageous claim that, shockingly, humanity's toil is paying off. Yes, it sounds incredible, but what if people *weren't* getting stupider, and in fact all these brilliant information innovations were in fact contributing to a global rise in intellect?

I expect the top rejection of the book amounts to the carefully researched rebuttal: Sounds too good to be true. Watching TV doesn't rot your brain? Playing video games doesn't erode your morals? You mean education and self improvement could actually be fun? Heaven forbid!

But that's precisely what the book argues -- quite compellingly. It's the sort of thing that seems so obvious when you read it, it's truly refreshing.

Indeed, it's such an obvious conclusion, I don't even know what to say about it.

And perhaps that's its core weakness: it's got no punch. It has no "call to action". As a meme, it lacks any sort of virulent property that would convince people to convince others.

Somehow, conventional wisdom has adopted the opposite of this book's conclusion. But how to turn that around? Or, is it even necessary?

After all, this "sleeper curve" will continue whether or not people acknowledge it. And I'm not sure if acknowledging it explicitly will make it happen any better or faster.

Similarly, even after reading it, I'm not sure what advice to take from it. How do you "learn" from a book that seems so common sense (even if that sense is far from common)?

So it's a bit of an anti-climax for me. Good stuff, reassuring, but it leaves me with a sorta "ya, so now what?" feeling.

Why are future user interfaces so lame?

What is it with futuristic user interfaces being so pointless? Whether it's g-Speak or Microsoft Surface (even the spherical one), all the applications are absurd -- after years of touch screen technology, everybody *still* shows off that stupid photo-organization application.

Seriously: when is the last time you dumped a bunch of pictures in a pile and manually sorted them? I honestly don't know if I've done it once in my life; this isn't solving a problem I have. Every time I see that application I think "you *still* haven't figured out anything useful to do with that thing?"

Everybody is trying so hard to become the next-generation UI that they've forgotten a critical lesson: *this* generation of UI is really pretty good. It's refined through thousands of iterations of tweaks and real-world experimentation.

Take the multi-touch fad that has generally fizzled out. Honestly: how often do you use multi-touch on your iPhone? At the end of the day, most actions work perfectly fine with one finger: just because you *can* use two fingers doesn't mean doing so adds any value.

So I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that the user interface of tomorrow is going to look a helluva lot like the UI of today. And that's because the UI of today looks an awful lot like the desktop of yesterday.

The key is continuity: making small, gradual steps from what you know to what you don't. And all these fancy "next generation operating systems" keep managing to stay in the distant future because everyone else is too busy living in the now.

Which reminds me of a surprising lesson I learned when moving from Windows XP to Ubuntu (Vista was the last straw). And that lesson was just how awesome the command line is, and how just splitting the window in VI as needed is so much more powerful than managing a bunch of stupid windows.

Indeed, the lesson was all the "advances" in UI technology provided by generations of Windows have actually *reduced* my productivity. But like the boiling frog, I just never noticed.

At the end of the day, most data is not amazingly beautiful 3d graphics projected in a virtual cave environment. Most of it is really boring: rows of numbers, to do lists, log files, email. Most of it is text. And I don't see that changing anytime soon.

So I'm looking forward to the UI of the future. But I bet the primary mode of interaction will still be a keyboard, and it's amazing feature will not be sorting piles of random photos, but sorting, processing, and generating text and numbers in amazing ways.

Personally, I'm hoping for LCARS.

-david

When did Agile become so Rigid?

I really dislike the term "agile development". I'm fine using "agile" to describe people or teams. But using it to describe a methodology seems to completely miss the point. You wouldn't say a gymnast uses an "agile technique". You'd just say the gymnast "is agile".

So articles like "When Agile Projects Go Bad" sorta confuse and grate on me.

You'd never read an article titled "When Agile Gymnasts Fall" because it makes no sense; a gymnast who falls is -- by definition -- not very agile. Similarly, an agile project that fails due to a lack of agility is rather paradoxical. (Though there are many other ways to fail than by lacking agility.)

But this isn't just a problem of semantics. Rather, I think this is symptomatic of a broader problem in the agile movement: it doesn't frickin' work. To borrow from my good friend Lao Tze:

"The agile that you know is not the true agile."

You can't learn agility by reading and following. You become agile by doing, failing, changing, and doing again. The most agile people I know read the fewest books on it. Similarly, I don't know anybody who's seriously studied the subject of agile development techniques gotten the least bit better.

So here's my advice: if you want to be agile, put down the book and just start making it up as you go. If what you're doing isn't working, try something different. If what you're doing works, try cutting out a step and see if it still works -- or even works better. Repeat.

You're certain to make wrong steps. You're certain to encounter failure -- indeed, failure will likely be your steady state.

But eventually you'll figure it out, and every once in a while it'll work out great.

Welcome to the world of agility. No reading required.

- David Barrett

ThePirateBay passes 25M simultaneous peers, leaves iTunes in dust

I know there's a dearth of real-world data on piracy, but here's a dash: the Pirate Bay recently passed the 25M mark in terms of simultaneous peers. Here's the data itself, from TorrentFreak:

   Date            Peers (M)
   11/01/2006      1
   11/01/2007      6
   09/21/2008      15
   11/01/2008      20
   11/15/2008      25

That's interesting, but it looks much more compelling graphically:

So the rate of real pirates seen by The Pirate Bay has increased by 25x in just over 2 years. (As for how meaningful this data is, it's suggested that TPB tracks about 50% of all torrents.)

Anybody care to guess whether that 20:1 ratio of illegal to legal downloads ratio is going? Might it be more like 100:1 today? The growth of piracy over legal downloads is just staggering.

-david

Tribler. Almost so cool! What I would do:

So I finally made it through to the Tribler website and I think it's *almost* really cool. Don't get me wrong, I installed the app and it seems to do interesting stuff. But I think they're biting off more than they can chew. Basically, I'd layer the content-acquisition experience as follows:

Social: The experience of sharing and learning about new content
Index: Determining who has a given piece of content
Transport: Getting content from somebody else

Tribler tries to vertically integrate the entire stack, and they do a decent job, but it's just too much for one application. It's like coming out with Prodigy today and trying to complete with "The Internet". If Tribler came out before ThePirateBay then it'd be something. But then it'd be called Kazaa.

No, instead I think they should do something less. Indeed, the whole brilliance of BitTorrent was that it *didn't* do it all. BitTorrent does nothing but standardize transport, which enabled a huge diversity on the upper layers. Doing *less* than Kazaa is what made BitTorrent succeed.

So if BitTorrent is on one side, and Kazaa on the other, what should Tribler do? I'd say stick with the old saying "only innovate one thing at a time" and just integrate the index into the transport layer, and then call it day. Leave ThePirateBay and everyone else to figure out the social layer, recommendation engine, and just focus on getting rid of the tracker. How?

I think they should create a tool where you can type in the SHA1 sum of any piece of content,* and it'll download it. That's it. Nothing more. Think of what kind of interesting applications could come about if the recommendation engines and such didn't have to host torrent files, and didn't need to take on the risk of trackers!

* In practice it'd probably be a SHA1 sum of a list of SHA1 sums.

Because really, search engines like TPB only make sense when "what we have" is a small subset of "what you want", and when there is no general consensus on what a "good" copy of each thing is. In this environment, you literally need to "search" for something you want.

But in practice, TPB has pretty much everything, and for each thing there's usually one version that pretty much everybody uses (ie, the version with all the seeds). So there's usually little "searching" involved. More often than not, just type in the name of what you want, pick the one with the highest number of seeds, and you're done.

Given this reality, it probably makes more sense to ditch the unstructured search interface and go to a structured "table of contents" indexing "all music" and "all movies", with the "best" version of each one given front and center. Then you just click a "p2p://<sha1sum>" link and your client connects to the cloud and pulls it down. (And all the recommendation engines would just layer atop that.)

Accordingly, TPB shouldn't copy Google: they should copy IMDB. Create a comprehensive library of all content, and provide one recommended copy of each (or maybe a selection of encodings: iPod, HD, etc).

As for how to manage spam and such, again, embrace reality. In theory, anybody could post a good copy of anything, and nobody is more trustworthy than any other. In practice, there's usually one guy who is the uber-fan of a particular type of content, and that person posts all the good stuff. Why not just explicitly recognize that uber-fan by making him moderator of the corresponding ThePirateIMDB wiki-like page for that band/TV-show/movie/etc. Then you stop moderating content on a piece-by-piece basis, and start moderating on a curator-by-curator basis. That uber-fan needn't be the one to post all good content (though in practice he probably would); others could recommend content to him and he'd sift through and find the good stuff.

Anyway, that's all just dreamy "what I'd do if I were a megapirate" talk. Somebody's going to do it, and it probably won't be me. I highlight it to make it clear that this is inevitable. If this scenario frightens you, then your instinct is right: be afraid. The future is coming, and if it's not to your liking, then now's the time for some deep introspection because there ain't nothing you can do to stop it.

Tribler == Another nail in the coffin for copyright

The weak link in BitTorrent from a piracy perspective has always been the torrent sites. They're the last centralized holdout vulnerable to attack from copyright enforcers (though those attacks have so far been futile). Regardless, that vulnerability seems to be on the demise with the latest release of Tribler, which includes totally decentralized tracking ability.

I've long said copyright's days are numbered, and tools like this just make that number smaller and smaller. Sure, copyright will still be enforceable on major customers like movie studios, satellite radio services, and other entities with a large financial and physical presence -- large enough to be worth defending, and worth attacking.

But Joe Plumber will be given an increasingly free hand to ignore copyright with impunity. Whether that's morally right or wrong isn't the issue. It's simply true, and more true every day.

In other news, I'm particularly interested in learning more about Tribler's "Give-To-Get" algorithm. (The website is slammed right now, so I'll have to check it out later.) I'm hoping/assuming it takes a less paranoid stand than the standard "tit-for-tat" algorithm BitTorrent employs, recognizing that the universe doesn't reset at the end of each download.

In short, if we share data via tit-for-tat, I only give you data if you also immediately give me data. If you don't have any data for me, or if you give it to me slowly, then I'll withhold my data from you. In a sense, data is like currency.

This is a brilliant model that allows for the protocol to succeed in scarce network conditions with different implementations: it protects each user from wasting data on users who don't respond in kind.

But it also makes downloads go unnecessarily slow in an abundant network situations because you can only download (on average) as fast as you can upload. And because uploading is generally constrained to about a quarter your download speed, that means you can only generally download about 25% as fast as you could otherwise.

Now, BitTorrent gets around this with "seeds", who volunteer data without asking anything in return. With enough seeds, anybody can download at full speed. But seeds undermine the whole notion of tit-for-tat.

Indeed, the easy availability of seeds suggests that the whole assumption of tit-for-tat -- the scarce network environment -- is wrong. Somehow, lots of users are more than willing to give away their bandwidth for free, without any obligation to do so.

Now, there are clever design decisions that encourage this: most torrent clients automatically begin seeding once you finish your download, some tracker sites monitor "seeding ratios" (the ratio of data uploaded to data downloaded), etc.

But the point is: despite there being no technical requirement for people to seed, people still do so, in huge numbers, and don't care.

Which brings me back to the original point: if this is "true" about the universe, then tit-for-tat is non-optimal. It's like wearing a stillsuit in a rainforest.

So the question is: what *is* optimal. And the answer is: upload when it's *cheap*, not when it's expensive. Let me explain that:

Tit-for-tat makes you upload at the same time you download. But the act of uploading actually makes you download slower. Even worse, because downloading fast requires uploading fast, then the faster you download the more download capacity you're spending on uploading. The upshot is even were it not for the asymmetric upload/download bandwidth ratio, tit-for-tat makes you upload when bandwidth is the most expensive. Tit-for-tat takes a scarce bandwidth environment and makes it *worse*.

The alternative is to wait until the download is done and the upload later, when your network is idle (such as when you are watching the thing you just downloaded). This way when you download, you download as fast as possible without wasting time uploading. And when you upload, do it in a way that minimizes its impact upon the user who is volunteering the bandwidth.

Doing this, however, requires trust else people will download without ever uploading. That trust is very difficult to enforce against people's wills. (Even tit-for-tat suffers from BitThief problems.)

But the very fact that seeders are in such large supply in a tit-for-tat model shows that users are generally willing to donate their bandwidth voluntarily. As such, even though there's no way to force people to upload, people still do it anyway. If you make it more convenient to just "do the right thing" than try to fight the system, then people will just go with it and everybody wins.

Hopefully Tribler does this. Once the website comes back, we'll see.

Isn't there a better way to save lives than a Golden Gate suicide net?

I'm not pro-suicide. But $40-$50 million dollars + $78K/year to build a net under the Golden Gate Bridge in order to dissuade just a few dozen jumper a year seems outrageous, on so many fronts.

First, anybody who actually does jump is probably pretty serious about killing themselves -- serious enough that they'll find some other way. So probably the most absurd part is it being a completely stupid and pointless plan on its face that will probably end up saving zero lives.

But ignoring that -- after all, I'm willing to endorse symbolic plans on occasion -- the price for this meaningless gesture is astronomical. $40 - $50 *million* dollars? To encourage only 39 jumpers a year to go somewhere else? Who can possibly suggest it's a wise expenditure of money, especially in this economic climate, to spend over a *million dollars* to stop just *one* jump a year?

To put that in perspective, if we kept that same money as cash, we could spend over $100,000 per jumper per year for the next century. We could hire 50 full-time-people to just stand there, 24/7, and watch the bridge -- perhaps talking down anybody who looks like they might jump -- until 2108. Even just investing $50M dollars at a 5% interest rate would earn $6.5 *billion* dollars in 100 years.

Even if it were "only" the $78,000 per year maintenance fee (that's right, once built, it needs to be maintained), that's like $2000 per jumper per year. Even that "paltry" amount could be better spent saving actual lives, or even just hiring another full-time member at a suicide prevention line.

So the cost is outrageous and simply indefensible, especially given it will completely fail to accomplish its objective. But on top of this, the Golden Gate Bridge is a historic landmark that probably brings in billions of dollars a year in tourism to San Francisco. We're seriously going to be some huge frickin' ugly net under it? What kind of effect will that have on tourism or even our international reputation?

Who is in charge of this boondoggle of a plan, and is there any time to breathe sense into the process? I'm down with spending money to save lives. But this is just such a ridiculous waste of money it's infuriating.

-david

Note to Movie Studios: Don't Fight the Future

What should the movie studios do to avoid a fate similar to the major music labels?

The labels mined and salted the fields of digital music such that commercial success was impossible. Their legacy will be intractable resistance to and wholesale destruction of the commercial music industry, effectively sending it back to the stone age.

What should the movie studios do differently? To be certain, they're starting off on an equally self-destructive course, as this RealDVD episode shows. But what other card do they have to play?

All I can think of is convenience and a superior experience. For example, I know how to download pretty much any movie or TV show, but I still rent movies and series's all the time from Blockbuster just because it's way more convenient. Likewise, I go to movies all the time because I am a sucker for the big screen.

The only meaningful asset the movie studios have is people don't absolutely despise their existence and wish them dead. (The music labels were never so lucky.) I wonder if they'll realize how valuable this asset is before it's lost, and if they realize how quixotically battling the future one RealDVD at a time earns them absolutely nothing while eroding the popular support they utterly depend upon to survive.

- David Barrett

A nation united in opposition of its leaders

Isn't it really surprising how much people hate this $700B bailout bill?

I read a report there was near unanimous opposition among constituents -- so much opposition that websites were crashing under the volume. I thought this was probably bull, but when I went to call Barbara Boxer I found her voicemail full. On her website there's a special note that the contact form might not work due to high volume. Her alternate number is full. Diane Feinstein's number is busy.

(Here's a helpful page showing California Senator contact info.)

Is this level of true grassroots opposition unprecedented, especially given that both Republican and Democratic Party leaders support it unequivocally?

Personally, I agree with the masses. America is going bankrupt and I'm much more concerned about another $700B of debt -- especially when I have zero confidence it will actually accomplish its intent of rescuing the economy -- than waiting to see what happens and letting the market sort itself out. And now that they're trying to sweeten the deal by trowing in tax cuts? Have we completely lost our minds when it comes to fiscal responsibility?

Furthermore, the defense is just absurd. Granting that there are probably really good arguments for it, given that this whole episode was triggered by irresponsible lending, can't we find some other defense than "this is needed to let people borrow money to buy homes"?

Regardless, it sounds like the masses' opposition might have tapered off given the stock market crash, so who knows. Maybe we'll get bailed out, whether we like it or not.

-david

Voting for the loser is no excuse

The other day I read a post on a mailing list lambasting the current state of the union (specifically how both candidates are shirking their jobs to run for office) and saying, essentially "it's not my fault, I voted Libertarian". I've heard that a bunch of times in a variety of forms, so I had to respond as follows:

"If you're advocating a policy change to prevent active senators, legislators, governors, and so forth from campaigning while on the job, I think you'd have many supporters from all sides. We need more of that constructive discussion.

But it's not helpful to bash the status quo and then claim you're not responsible merely because your party consistently loses at the polls.

If you're a US citizen, then you're responsible for the result of our political system, whether or not your guy won. Voting for the loser doesn't excuse you from the results of the process. It just means you're doing a shitty job."

We're all equal participants in this process. We all share equal responsibility for its results, both the good *and* the bad. if you dislike like those results, don't vent: rally some friends and make a difference. Because if you don't, somebody else who thinks otherwise will just rally their friends, harder.

My Internet != Your Internet

So I'm debugging this SOAP protocol and having a certain problem: me and a vendor are submitting the "exact same" request but getting different responses. Furthermore, each of us repeatedly get the same response to our requests, but never get each other's.

At this point I realize that we have different meanings of "exact same". In my mind, "same" means "the bytes that go over the wire are identical". In their mind, "same" means "the objects being serialized have the same data". The difference there, of course, is the manner of serialization. Different request serializations produce different responses. Same != Same.

This made me realize that we all have different notions of how the internet works. I'm a low-level guy so I think in terms of bytes, whereas others think in terms of higher level protocols. I think there are benefits and detriments to thinking on every layer, but the most important thing is to identify when you're thinking on *different* layers.

Furthermore, it's caused me to wonder what I'm missing out on by thinking of the internet as a series UDP/TCP flows. What magical wonders are happening at the IP layer that I'm just overlooking? How does BGP *really* work? What are the actual differences between 802.11 a-g? I have no idea.

But I bet there's going to be a lot of exciting developments happening at these lower layers as programmable radios become commonplace and the average Joe can suddenly whip up a new wireless protocol from scratch.

Similarly, what's going on at those higher layers? I've heard of microformats and semantic data and agent programming and the like. It all sounds dreamy. But maybe I should be considering them in a more practical sense?

Regardless, back to the present. It's always an interesting to discover that the common ground you think you share isn't so common after all. My notion of the internet is not necessarily your notion, so beware.

Expense Reports (and a Million Bucks) for Those Who Hate Them

Expensify isn't so much a labor of love as it is a retaliation against paper expense reports.

Don't get me wrong: making business purchases doesn't phase me. I'm fine buying tickets, renting cars, booking hotels, and generally getting things done on my own credit card. But the process of getting paid back is just so excruciating.

I'm not sure which is the worst: keeping track of the receipts, typing it all in, waiting to receive the check, or actually depositing it once I get it. The whole experience is so bad it blurs together into a general morass of pain. It's so bad I find myself just paying for things out of pocket because that's preferable to the torturous process of getting reimbursed.

This has been the case for years, and as I clawed my way up the startup circuit, I always rather assumed the big companies had some magical solution that made it all easy. Well, they don't. It's horrible from top to bottom, and what few corporate card solutions exist are targeted squarely at the big guys. I've got news for you: there are 25 million businesses in the US today, and 24 million of those have under 20 employees. That means 97% of the market is has been neatly overlooked, leaving the rest of us in expense report hell.

Well, I'm proud to say that all that ends now. Expensify is the corporate card for everyone else, the expense report service that not only pays you back faster, but pays you back *more* -- and does so without the grueling pain we've all come to associate with the words "expense report".

In case you don't already know, Expensify uses electronic payment cards to enable one-click expense reports. Every purchase you make with the card we give you is billed back to your regular credit card -- there's no new monthly bill, and you keep all your frequent flier miles. Come back to the site at any time to print out full expense reports (including receipts: just scan them in with our iPhone app or email them to receipts@expensify.com using any cameraphone), or type in your manager's email address and we'll mail them a PDF and bill them for the amount of the expense report, crediting it back to your credit card. No checks to cash, no days to wait, we'll just instantly pay off your credit card when your boss approves the report.

Anyway, you might have heard we launched last week at the TechCrunch 50 and Wow. What a response. We were cautiously optimistic that people would like it -- we were unprepared for how much people would absolutely *love* it. We pitched it over 150 times, and everyone was ecstatic. One guy even gave me a hug as thanks for how much time we were going to save him. I think he had a tear in his eye.

All this enthusiasm has really highlighted to us just how big a problem we're solving, and how important it is that our launch go smooth. So as much as it pains me, we've decided to slow things down a bit and put some extra testing and polish into the site, and to send out our cards in smaller batches than initially anticipated. We'll still send them out on a first-come first-serve basis, and once we're through the backlog our plan is still to get cards to your door within a week. But we're going to take our time with these first batches to ensure the highest quality experience possible.

That said, we want to thank you, the TechCrunch crew, and most importantly all the many, many people who spoke with us at the TechCrunch 50 and gave us such kind words of support and encouragement -- not to mention voted us 2nd place winner of the Demo Pit over a hundred other companies. And what better way to give thanks than with cold hard cash!

That's right, from this moment on, the next 1000 users who sign up will get $1000 in free purchases. That's a cool million dollars of Expensify service we're giving away for free to you, the early adopters, the TechCrunch readers, and the fledgling group of Expensify fans who make it all possible. So sign up today and get in line for your Expensify card and $1000 of zero-surcharge purchases. Your card will be in your mailbox before you know it, and your dread of expense reporting will soon be a distant memory!

Thanks again to Jason Calacanis, Michael Arrington, and the entire TechCrunch 50 crew for putting together a fantastic venue and the best launching pad that anybody could ask for. These guys did a fantastic job, under difficult circumstances, and I can't wait to see what they cook up next year. With any luck, Expensify will be there!

- David Barrett, Founder, Expensify

It's Alive! Expensify: One-Click Expense Reports

Well, the word is out: Expensify is live and taking orders for our one-click expense report service. I'll have more to say in a bit, but for the moment I'll let Travis Kalanick (our advisor) do the talking:

"Expensify is launching at TC50!

Who here has a bag of stale receipts sitting in their closet? Receipts that long, long ago should have made it into some expense report. . . of course to get there, you would have had to organize that big bag of receipts in chronological order, affixed and taped each of them to a separate blank sheet of paper, gotten some excel sheet or web-form and done a few hours of data entry. Of course, you’d also have to remember what was discussed at that steak dinner in Denver (it was with customers. . .yeah, I’m sure it was), and then list their full names and titles. The list of headaches stretches for miles. . .Taxi receipts not filled out, separating room charges from room service and hotel Internet, old faded receipts that are illegible. .. the list goes on and on.

So I think we all would agree that there is one word that is synonymous with doing expense reports. .. PAIN.

So much pain that it takes up to 45 minutes per $1000 of expense reporting. For employees with expense-prone job descriptions (there are 50 million of you in the US: salespeople, office managers, small-business owners) that comes to 30-40 hours a year. That’s a week’s worth of vacation, or a week more of actual selling to hit your quota.

The pain for many of the less expense-disciplined among us, hits us in our pocket book. Some estimates are that 5% or more of all legitimate expenses never get reimbursed because of receipts that get lost, and expense reports that don’t get filed (referring to that bag of wilting receipts above).

Expensify wants to change that

Expensify’s Company Mission: Empower small-business employees, independent contractors and sole proprietors with easy tools for PAINLESS expense reporting.

Expensify accomplishes this with 3 main Expensify components:

1) Expensify expense card – a card that you use to make expense purchases. You top-up Expensify card with your existing credit card. The card makes expense categorization a breeze, and allows Expensify to automatically fill out expense reports.

2) Receipt capture and upload – take pictures of your receipts and upload with either Expensify’s iPhone application or with simple email attachments from your phone or PDA.

3) Expensify Dashboard – Expensify automatically associates the receipt images with the expense card entries. You’re only a few clicks away from a completed expense report. Submit digital expense reports to your boss or client (via email) or print out and send physical expense report.

So now you’re saying, this is all way too easy. Expense reports done with only a few clicks, submitted before I even get back to the office from a trip. No more lost receipts or expense report hell??!! How much does Expensify cost?

Identical to PayPal pricing on an existing credit card, Expensify charges 3% of transactions made to the Expensify expense card.

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- Enter email address and password
- Verification email sent to you
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- iPhone users: Install iPhone application for quick uploading of your receipt images
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- Should be delivered in one week

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Thanks for checking us out. Give Expensify a shot, let us know what you think, and don’t hold back. .. feedback for the product, venting over previous expense report nightmares, just sound off. .. . and thanks for getting EXPENSIFY’D!!

Travis Kalanick
Expensify Advisor and happy customer"

A great quote from Travis: "David thought it was a good idea, but when I started digging into the data, I determined it was a *great* idea." Thanks for the intro Travis, I'll follow up in a bit once I have some free time -- the next flood of TechCrunchers are on their way!

Vote for Adam

Adam Frisk is an awesome P2P engineer and a major contributor to both Limewire and now Littleshoot. He's trying to put together a panel at SXSW -- go sign up and vote for him today!

Border Control: Ripe for Copyright Enforcement

PC World reports that Australia is considering a plan to scan for pirated music at border crossings, just one of many treats in a broader international treaty propping up the war on pirates, or citizens, or somebody.

Ignoring whether that plan makes any sense at all, how would it be done? One way they could do this would be to switch to a "proof of payment" system, and use sampling for fast scans. Basically, pick a random 10% of songs on the device, check their waveform fingerprints against some copyright database, and then verify that there is a digital signature embedded in the MP3's ID3 tag proving that the name of the customer who bought the song matches the name on the passport.

However, I don't really see this actually happening in any wide scale. To make it workable too many things would need to happen, one of which is the music labels actually adopting digital purchases for real and then forcing all legit distributors to include information in each file. It's not technically impossible, and would have been quite easy had they decided to do it in '98 when all the online merchants were begging for instructions and permission to make legit services.

Furthermore, the obvious response to this is to just put all pirated music in a hidden encrypted volume. I'd expect somebody would come out with an application for "unlocked" iPhones that lets you enter a password to unlock the hidden volume, designed in such a way that without the right password it's impossible to know the hidden volume even exists.

The upshot is -- once again -- technical advantage goes to the pirates, as they can retool far faster than the TSA. It would take years and years of complex negotiation on the part of a hundred corporations and government agencies, and it would all be rendered completely irrelevant by a simple, free iPhone application released by a nameless Russian programmer.

So once again, to anybody who's listening, give it up. Copyright enforcement is and will be forever hopeless in this modern age. Find another way to flourish.

-david barrett

PS: Just because it's fun to see your predictions validated, let me share an email I sent to a private mailing list a couple months back that seems strangely prescient. (Though admittedly, only somewhat prescient because it's not that hard a leap to make.)

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: An Essay Concerning MPAA Understanding of 'Making Available' in the P2P Context
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:42:23 -0700
From: David Barrett <dbarrett@quinthar.com>

I'll take a stab at my own question and say "yes", but the shift will go from pursuing distributors to pursuing downloaders. And I think they'll next try some sort of "proof of payment" scheme, such as used by public transportation:

In San Francisco, there are MUNI trains that you can board anywhere and get off anywhere; there's no physical requirement to buy a ticket. However, you're legally obligated to have one, and if you fail a spot inspection by an officer of the law, you'll pay serious fine.

I wonder if that's the model they will attempt next if "making available" fails. Basically, all stores will move to individually-tagged songs and movies where proof of purchase is encoded in the content itself. (This is impractical in the old world of physical media distribution, but becomes more feasible as we move to on-demand downloads).

One way to do this would be with watermarks: so long nobody has incentive to remove them, they'll stick around fine. But then again, you could probably do it with just ID3 tags and digital signatures (a message "Bob has bought track <SHA1>" signed by Time Warner's public key would suffice). Technically it's an easy problem to solve.

The problem will come in the audit: both how to audit the devices in question, and when to do it.

As for how, the challenge (as always) is to distinguish between content in the public domain and content you need permission from the copyright owner to have. One possibility would be to build an opt-in waveform fingerprint of all copyrighted works that elect to participate in this proof of payment scheme. This won't truly catch everything (and won't catch anything released before the scheme launched), but even if it catches only the new releases with some regularity, that starts to make an effective tool for general compliance enforcement.

So, auditors could conceivably have a device that has USB and iPod connectors that plug into basically anything, scan all content for waveform matches, confirms the file has a proof of payment certificate, and alerts if not.

Ok, so all this could technically be built by a sufficiently incented (or incensed?) party. This brings us to the next question: when would the audit occur?

This is where it'd probably fail on constitutional grounds. A scan under most circumstances would be "unreasonable search and seizure". But one place that is notoriously exempt: border control. They can basically take anything and do anything for as long as it takes.

Granted, this cedes the vast majority of domestic piracy. But their goal isn't to eliminate the potential for piracy; their goal is to make it such a pain that people still choose to buy. If they first make it impossible to travel internationally without first cleansing all devices of pirated works, this will start to bite. And after that, they'll find other excuses to audit devices: airport security for domestic flights?
PCI and SOX compliance audits? Build auditing straight into the iPhone itself?

The big question in my mind is whether everybody just gives up on copyright before then and "just says no" to proof of payment and spot copyright checks.

By and large, society as a whole has already given up on copyright, as evidenced by overwhelming adoption of piracy. It's possible that if pressed to make a decision that we'll simply refuse to pass any law that allows for reasonable enforcement. Then businesses that depend on enforcement will die and get replaced with those that don't, and gradually the courts will limit the scope of copyright to where it can be realistically enforced.

Anyway, so I see a copyright-free (or copyright-very-limited) future as a legitimate possibility. And society might just refuse to allow the proof-of-payment scheme to go into force.

So, let me conclude with my prediction: if "making available" fails (and if they truly accept this -- not necessarily a sure bet), then major copyright holders will marshal their forces and attempt to create a "proof of payment" system with enforcement starting at border crossings and gradually increasing from there. This will trigger a showdown with society at large as it really begins to weigh how much it cares about copyrights, and the people who hold them. And I think it's very possible that society decides the cost of copyright enforcement outweighs its benefit and essentially curtail copyright in all areas where it stopped making sense, long ago.

-david

The Wheel of Piracy

Poor Pandora, and we loved you so. (And by "we" I mean "they", as I wasn't a user.) Regardless, I wonder if there's an inevitable cycle at play:

1) Business tries to do it legit
2) Business goes bankrupt due to impossible pricing
3) Pirate does it the easy way
4) Pirate gets sued to oblivion
5) Pirate does it the hard way.
6) ... it's free for the rest of eternity

If so, when it comes to web radio, it seems we're passing stage 2. Next up should be a round of central pirate stations -- essentially large-scale shoutcast installations -- which briefly flourish followed by being wiped out. The third wave should come in a couple years -- maybe some sort of centralized preference engine tied to decentralized streaming straight from trackerless torrents? Sounds like a fun project!

- david barrett

Tragedy of the Anti-Commons

Fantastic article in the New Yorker (via Slashdot) discussing the "Tragedy of the Anti-Commons" -- summarized as "The commons leads to overuse and destruction; the anticommons leads to underuse and waste."

The term has apparently has been around for a while, but that I hadn't heard it before.

Regardless, I'm particularly interested in the theory at the end for why the anti-commons goes underused, to everybody's detriment. Basically, everybody over-estimates the value of their individual component, meaning the entire joint venture becomes more expensive to execute than it's actually worth. Fascinating stuff.

- david barrett

Send your congressman... a DMCA takedown notice?

Saw this article on the ease of framing arbitrary computers/users as pirates and I immediately thought: they should identify the IPs of bunch of congressmen, RIAA members, judges, and reporters and flood them with fake DMCA takedown notices. (Or, rather, real notices for fake downloads.) What better way to get the attention of your representative than with a frivolous lawsuit?

- david barrett

Another YouTube lawsuit, more of the same

There are always two responses to this sort of thing.

One class says "Geez, <prosecution> are idiots for not recognizing the potential for new revenue and partnering with YouTube!"

The other class says "Yep, YouTube is a criminal racket hiding behind a thin veneer of flimsy, untested law -- it's amazing they've gotten away with it for so long."

Granted, both could be right (they're not strictly contradictory). But I tend to align more with the latter camp.

This doesn't mean I think YouTube is morally abject. Rather, I think the law is stupid. (Both the law they're guilty of breaking, and the law they use as a defense.) But the law is the law, and it's frustrating to see YouTube profit from such blatant criminal activity** while so many others -- most of who were far more creative in either trying to comply with or circumvent the law -- were ground into dust.

- david barrett

** Yes, I realize the jury's out on what fraction of today's traffic is copyright infringing. But there's little debate that YouTube's founding principle was massive copyright infringement, and only through a stroke of luck and the grace of time has managed to attract a sufficiently non-criminal userbase to maintain plausible deniability.