Credit Card Signatures Are About to Become Extinct in the U.S - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/08/business/credit-card-signatures.html <comment><USER3> In the UK cards moved to 'chip and pin' in 2006! Fraud in a 'customer present' scenario is very low at our stores. The last fraud in fact was a foreign card that didn't support chip and pin. I can't believe Visa and MasterCard have not made it mandatory world wide...

...except card fraud lossed are recharged to the merchant so perhaps they don't care?

Out of interest there is a special exception for disabled people who cannot use a pin pad btw...

<comment><USER4> I'm visiting London this summer (I'm from Texas).

Normally, I pay for everything with American Express. Would you recommend I get a different card for London? I wonder if there's a US card that support chip and pin?

<comment><USER5> A lot of businesses in the UK/Europe do not accept American Express due to higher fees. You would be better off getting a different card preferably that supports contactless payments so you could use it on the tube and buses instead of an Oyster card (remember to touch it on the way out as well).

[https://tfl.gov.uk/fares-and-payments/contactless](https://tfl.gov.uk/fares- and-payments/contactless)

<comment><USER6> A Revolut card supports chip and pin and contactless, I'm not sure if it's 100% launched for US customers yet though: [https://www.revolut.com/us/](https://www.revolut.com/us/)

<comment><USER7> Upvote and reply, because Revolut is a dream. Prepaid so fraud is minimum risk (no possible overdraft), top up via mobile app, disable the card when you're not using it. It's so convenient that I use it to buy from shady sites (game keys, in game currency etc) and just disable the card once the purchase is complete. I can't believe it's still free.

Sorry for gushing. I love Revolut.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I found it odd that Mastercard would say "[...] it has been wanting to make the change for years, but held off until cards embedded with computer chips became common."

Whose responsibility is it to make those cards more common, if not Mastercard's?

In Sweden, cards have only been issued with chips since the early 2000s, and consequently merchants only very rarely use signature purchases. Why they didn't push this sooner in the US is a riddle wrappen in a mystery...

The only place I've seen signatures used recently around here have been in busy bars/nightclubs, where stressed-out bartenders don't want to wait for online validation. I guess they get few enough fraud attempts at cocktails that they don't care too much about validation.

<comment><USER9> It might be that non-chip CCs had long expiry dates and only now they're being replaced?

<comment><USER10> This is not a new situation...

I was involved with Australia's chip-and-pin switch in 2006. At the time, we were amazed how slow USA was getting rid of magstripe cards and signatures. And that was 12 years ago...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Signatures haven't been required for credit cards in many other countries for quite some time now.

I have often wondered why the US has historically lagged behind for everyday banking. (e.g. email money transfers, chip enabled cards, pin number verification, tap to pay)

<comment><USER12> because legacy tech wants to be amortised over long time periods. If you start implementing things later you can pick the best tech. US banking was among the first to become digital and thus still has to maintain technical choices of the past

<comment><USER13> The resistance to change can be explained much simpler:

It benefits only consumers, while costing the banks and payment providers. It's the same excuses for still having critical banking infrastructure written in COBOL.

<comment><USER14> > It benefits only consumers, while costing the banks and payment providers

Hogwash. Yes I know all bankers live in extinct volcanoes but one thing they know a lot about is money. It is ridiculously expensive to support the US's conservatism when it comes to finance. The lack of chip and pin pales into insignificance compared to their addiction to paper checks, for example.

It would be completely in the banks' interests if everyone moved to internet banking, NFC cards etc because the running costs and fraud costs are vastly less. The problem is all those pesky, inertia-laden customers.

<comment><USER13> > The lack of chip and pin pales into insignificance compared to their > addiction to paper checks, for example.

Paper checks are indeed a silly cost, but NFC provides banks no gain over chip. Chip provides gain over magnet stripe by basically rendering skimmers ineffective, but only _basically_ in that credit card fraud is still a big business. Instead of skimmers, you use trojans or data leaks. Physical credit cards also sell _very_ cheap on the black market.

In other words, NFC benefits only consumers, not banks. Chip benefits banks _a little bit_.

> if everyone moved to internet banking, NFC cards etc

Those are very different things. Internet banking benefits banks directly because they can shut down local branches and screw over customers (which they do here—I have to drive to a different city to insert cash, and can only do so within very limited hours).

NFC has no benefit to them (and might slightly increase fraud that the bank will have to cover by allowing ~$40 withdrawals made wirelessly from quite a far distance). Chip presents a pretty tiny benefit to them.

And most certainly, if you have a customer that already use a magnet stripe credit card, giving them an NFC card will result in instant adoption of the feature. We had some statistics when the feature rolled out—it was adopted by everyone with a supported card on the spot. It's much different when you're trying to change a check user to be a credit card user, but that might be more of an issue with the consumer experience with the bank—credit and debit cards over there sound so _cumbersome_ compared to our system where the bank issues both credit and debit cards tied to your account. We don't have the "benefit" card mess.

It's a bit too easy to blame user inertia.

<comment><USER15> The benefit of NFC for banks would be an image and PR boost, the bank could say that they are the hip and trendy bank, come to us. Then other banks would have to follow eventually.

Why else would banks in europe adopt NFC or contactless payments?

<comment><USER13> I am only speaking for a single EU country here. In DK, features such as NFC are released for all banks simultaneously (that is, fully implemented and functioning) through the national payment provider, who is also the issuer for our national credit card type (which is a dual-type card by also being a VISA for international use, and is tied _directly_ to a bank account). I don't think they have a choice, and they certainly gain no PR or image from it.

Now, the national payment provider (a private company) does it because _they_ earn money on terminals, and want to fight to stay relevant in a world of emerging mobile payment solutions such as MobilePay (a Danish mobile payment solution of which over half the population are users).

The only exception to this rule appears to be Apple Pay, which is implemented by some individual banks. I am not sure if this is due to platform differences, or whether it is just the national payment provider fighting back. I'd suspect the latter, as Apply Pay just see our dual-type credit cards as VISA, sending _them_ transaction fees that the national payment provider lose out on.

Other than that, banks here are only differentiated based on their financial solutions, and maybe in some rare cases by their mobile/internet banking solution (all have feature complete variants, but some are nicer than others).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It turns out that a signature on a bank check means nothing. Neither does the payer name on the check. Not the amount in cursive. Nor does the check paper.

The only things that are checked are the digits of the amount, and the account number.

The rest of the check can be complete garbage, and the check will go through and the bank will pay it. Then the banks will blame you, the account holder.

I learned this the hard way.

<comment><USER17> It amazes me that cheques are still used. I'm 36 and I've never issued a cheque, I think I was issued a cheque book with my first account but never used it.

<comment><USER18> Do you still live with your parents or rent from a slum lord who only takes cash? Most landlords seem to only take cash or checks, it's really only the national apartment companies that take online payments.

<comment><USER17> I live in New Zealand. Everything is done by electronic fund transfers. I have been a renter, now I'm a landlord. I have also run businesses.

<comment><USER19> Here in Australia I'm not even sure if my real estate agent would accept a cheque for rent at all - I'm pretty sure they told us from the outset that electronic payment was the only option they offer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I took my new chip enabled CC to Germany 3 yrs ago and paid for a train ticket with it. The clerk said "ugh an American card" and had me sign some random piece of paper. I felt like an antique.

<comment><USER21> Most European cards use Chip & PIN with pin preference: If the terminal supports it the card will ask for a chip instead of a signature. Chip-based signature transactions are only used as fallback if the terminal doesn't support pins (which is very uncommon).

Unfortunately most US cards don't use a pin code at all. There are a few issuers that provide you with a pin code, but even in those cases there's typically a signature preference and the pin code is only used as fallback if the terminal doesn't support signatures. So if you're using a US card in Europe pretty much the only places where you can use the pin code are automated terminals (e.g., at train stations). At most other places you're going to have to use a signature.

There are a few US issuers that issue Chip & PIN cards with PIN preference - for example UNFCU and First Tech Credit Union. Those cards work great in Europe, but are sometimes a pain to use in the US. E.g., if you're paying at a restaurant and you have to go with the waiter to the terminal in some backroom, because the terminal asks for the pin. That's not an issue in Europe, as waiters usually carry mobile terminals with them.

<comment><USER22> > Those cards work great in Europe, but are sometimes a pain to use in the US. > E.g., if you're paying at a restaurant and you have to go with the waiter to > the terminal in some backroom, because the terminal asks for the pin.

Huh? I have a European card (chip & PIN, PIN preference), and at restaurants in the US I've always signed and never had to go to the terminal in some backroom.

<comment><USER21> Depends on the restaurant. Most of the times the terminal doesn't support PINs and so it falls back to signatures. But some restaurants use PIN-capable terminals in which case that issue occurs.

<comment><USER23> I think it also depends on what buttons they press. I believe if they select credit card it forces it to be a signature.

<comment><USER21> That's only for US debit cards where a debit transaction requires a PIN code, but a credit transaction prefers signatures. For credit cards with PIN preference it shouldn't make a difference, as it's up to the card to decide which mode to use (based on the options that are supported by the terminal).

<comment><USER23> I know some terminals here in the UK lie about their capabilities, for example they'll tell the card they're offline only even if they do support online transactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Now if we could only eliminate them for everything else.

Buying and selling houses is excruciating thanks to the number of signatures required.

I went to a closing on behalf of my then-wife who didn't want to deal with it; because it was her house we were selling, I had to sign all the paperwork on her behalf, which involved a signature plus some additional verbiage. My hand was in pain by the time we were finished.

<comment><USER25> Most of the time a signature isn't for verification but rather for acknowledgment.

I don't give two shits what you put down as a signature, I just want a record that you consciously were present and signed something, so I don't get accused of trying to pass off something quietly that you never agreed to.

If I have some scribble you made at a time and place, the onus is on you to prove it wasn't you who did that.

<comment><USER26> My recent apartment lease was delivered online, but required me to go through every page and click a button that filled in my initials in a cursive font. It's silly, yes, but I'm sure it's just there to "prove" that I acknowledged each page individually.

<comment><USER27> That's the e-equivalent of initialing every page of a contract. The cursive part is funny. Rituals change slowly. People trust moused signatures and fax machine timestamps more than RSA public keys.

<comment><USER28> If it's DocuSign, they actually let you pick your own font from a list, so you can claim it's "your" handwriting because you chose it. And it's been a while, but I think they let you mouse a signature and initials if you don't like any of the fonts.

The funny thing is that for the last few years, I've been trying to make my own handwriting resemble an italic serif font as much as possible, so I actually do write like a font. But for everything except my signature. I never sign anything the same way twice, and my signature is always just a random scribble. Sometimes it's even an X.

<comment><USER29> >I never sign anything the same way twice, and my signature is always just a random scribble.

Is that legal? o.O

<comment><USER30> It is, but it means parent will lose any contractual dispute ever on the signature proof part.

Here is how it goes in a dispute. You have A saying B signed a contract, and B saying he didn't. It's A's job to prove he did first, and he indicate there is a signature on there, and it's B's. So now it's B's turn, and he needs to show it isn't his (if he does, then A become accused a making a false, and will need to prove he didn't).

To do that, B needs to prove that he usually signs a different way, so he provides other signatures everywhere to show it. Since parent signs differently everywhere, he cannot show that he has a regular signature that doesn't match the one on paper. In fact, it shows that any scribble CAN be his signature as long as there is one, and thus the court will tend to assume the one on the contract is his.

So parent's strategy is terrible, and you really shouldn't be playing that game, because it doesn't catch you until it really does.

<comment><USER31> > To do that, B needs to prove that he usually signs a different way, so he > provides other signatures everywhere to show it. Since parent signs > differently everywhere, he cannot show that he has a regular signature that > doesn't match the one on paper.

How often does that work? Presumably a fraudster would copy B's signature from a receipt out of their trash or something (a priori they have no way of knowing that B signs differently every time); how likely is it that someone going to that effort would _not_ get a signature that's a "good enough" match compared to B's normal signature, however careful B is about always signing the same way?

<comment><USER30> The vast majority of cases where this relevant (99+%) are identity theft, where you got the name / ssn /address through some mail or website or whatever and uses that to contract things on someone else's name.

Also, finding differences in signature is much easier and much more advanced / developed than you would think. Even if you copy mine after seeing it or having a model, the places where you slow down your pen etc... Vary compared to me, and that can be detected.

Is it possible with technology to make a perfect copy? Of course, but then you just move to the next steps of the case, and you already cleared out the majority of bogus cases.

So having a fixed stable signature is a very good thing for you the user, and it always surprise me when I see people who think they played the system when they screw their own protection like parent.

<comment><USER31> > Also, finding differences in signature is much easier and much more advanced > / developed than you would think. Even if you copy mine after seeing it or > having a model, the places where you slow down your pen etc... Vary compared > to me, and that can be detected.

How often is this actually effective/useful?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "Mikiah Westbrooks, the owner of Brix, a wine bar in Detroit, said she worried that skipping signatures will affect her workers' tips."

May tips disappear next.

<comment><USER33> Yes can we please get rid of tipping and pay waiters and staff what they should be earning? Build the price into the menu and let the market decide the price. Too expensive? You will lose customers. Too cheap? You will have lines out the door and you know you can increase prices.

The rest of the world does not tip (Europe & Asia). Only in North America is this awkward tipping practice still a thing.

<comment><USER34> Tipping still happens in Europe and SE Asia it's just not silly like North America. In the UK we'd leave a few pounds typically, let's say table bill was 47gbp, you have be a shameless mingebag to collect the 3gbp change if you were happy with the meal and service. But we don't subscribe to the non sense of 10% tip if unhappy, 15-20% if happy, if crap you don't leave a tip or pay service charge.

<comment><USER35> Most importantly, you don't have to tip in the UK. It's appreciated but literally no one minds if you don't.

<comment><USER36> I've never had a meal out in the UK (with different people, family, work, etc) where a tip wasn't left, unless possibly when service was really bad.

<comment><USER35> Sure, and I leave tips the vast majority of the time too - but I've had situations where I had no cash on me, the card machine didn't accept a tip, so I just left without feeling bad about it, it's not a big deal.

<comment><USER37> Not to you I guess. The server has only a very fixed opportunity to get tipped in a shift. To miss out on one is actually significant. Not to mention depressing.

<comment><USER35> And what am I supposed to do about it?

My point is - in US not tipping felt like being an absolute asshole, to a point where people would be upset - they grew up in a culture that values money above all else and not being tipped is I don't know, an equivalent of being spat in the face? In UK I've never felt that way. I've had perfectly good meals that I didn't tip on, just like I did in France, Spain or Germany and it never felt like the server _expected_ a tip. They might be a bit disappointed that they didn't get one, but that's their problem. I'm disappointed about a lot of things but that doesn't mean I'm entitled to them.

<comment><USER37> So its not up to you to enter a restaurant prepared to pay for the meal? You can do lots about it; in fact nobody else but you can do anything about it.

I'd rant about "this generation is so entitled" but hey that post says it all.

<comment><USER35> >>So its not up to you to enter a restaurant prepared to pay for the meal?

I have paid for the meal. At the end of my visit I was given a receipt and paid the indicated price - what else do you want? If the server is disappointed they didn't get a tip, then I think I know who is entitled in this relationship, and I have a very strong suspicion it's not me.

>> in fact nobody else but you can do anything about it

I pay my employees a good wage - so why can't the restaurant owner do the same? It's not up to me to make sure that a waiter is satisfied with their job - it's their employers problem, just like I have to take care of my own employees.

<comment><USER37> There it is - the deliberate explaining away of personal responsibility to make oneself feel better. The last comment gives away how we all know the first is false.

The restaurant owner in America does _not_ pay a good wage, because tipping is a thing and the market adjusted. Not tipping for service is victimizing the least powerful person in the relationship. And the need to make it 'ok' is self-serving doubletalk.

A famous dude said "I _will_ judge you by how you treat the least powerful person in the room"

<comment><USER35> >>The restaurant owner in America does not pay a good wage, because tipping is a thing and the market adjusted.

The market would adjust itself overnight if everyone stopped tipping, and I'm sure even you can see that.

On my end, what can I do to stop _this_ country becoming more like America in terms of tipping? Well, not tip of course, in which case it won't become expected and necessary to support shitty business practices. Amazon has "suggested" tipping for drivers now. Uber suggests tips. Deliveroo expects tips. It is imperative that if you live in UK you select ZERO on all of these. If you enter any value above zero you are sending a clear signal to Amazon etc that they can pay their drivers shitty wages _because_ the customer is willing to subsidise them. Is an Uber driver going to feel sad they got zero tips that day? You bet they will - and I still couldn't care any less, their personal job satisfaction should not be subsidised by me.

But I've gotten away from my original point - yes, I recognize that in US the market is adjusted for tipping. But my original comment wasn't about US - <USER2> was about UK, where - to my relief - tipping isn't a requirement. Fortunately I can still pay only as much as the bill says and not feel bad about it in the slightest, because I know the person serving my table does not rely on my tips to survive. And like I said above - I do tip when the service is good at restaurants. I just don't want it to become a norm like in the US of A.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> For a long time I would put 'see id' on the signature line of the credit card suggesting that if someone where trying to use it the vendor would ask to see identification and that would alert them if it wasn't me using the card. And then it became clear it was trivial to just print a new card and I stopped even caring about the signature. And now a squiggle is all I leave if they insist.

So now I find I can get impatient when someone is painfully trying to recreate their exact signature using a digital signature pad that could never possibly have the resolution to do it justice.

<comment><USER39> I haven't signed a credit card in about a decade. I sign the receipts, but not the cards. That's got to be thousands of transactions by now. No one cares.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Also please make handing me a receipt extinct too or only if requested. Especially at drive thru(s) where the receipts become trash I later have to do work .. aka clean up this annoying trash in my car.

<comment><USER41> Nope. They have to give you proof of what you bought for the thousands of times a day across the country there is a quarrel with the order.

<comment><USER40> Use Apple Pay or Android Pay ... you see the charge right on your home screen and view your transactions whenever.

The receipt needs and will go the way of the dodo bird, credit card signatures and etc...

<comment><USER42> Can I submit that with my expense report to get reimbursed for my business expenses?

<comment><USER40> Sure and in time you will be able to.

It's going to take time for payments to all go digital but they will. Whipping out your phone and swiping it and then your done is way quicker and easier then the current payment UX we are doing now.

<comment><USER42> If it's not an itemized receipt its not going to be accepted for an expense report unless the charge is very, very small. (I think my company is less than $25 doesn't require a receipt) I'm not going to screw around with being unable to prove my business expenses and being potentially liable for paying them personally.

Even if they were itemized, I question if my company would accept it over the "official" receipt. Anyway, in this case you are just talking about moving to digital receipts, which is surely convenient, but its not "go[ing] the way of the dodo bird," it's "going digital."

The current failure rate of mobile payments is currently much too high for me, personally, to move them them. I love the idea in theory but currently the execution is poor. Its just embarrassing for me to be standing there fiddling around with my phone for 60 seconds so its not even worth attempting when I know my credit card will always work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > _For nearly a decade, Doug Taylor, a sales manager who travels often for > work, has signed credit card receipts with a doodle of a dog wagging its > tail._

Well, this story/hoax/experiment from the late 90s was at the time the funniest thing I had ever read online:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130120184305/http://www.zug.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130120184305/http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit_card/)

</comment><comment><USER44> Just this morning, my 5yr old daughter asked me "Daddy, why did you do just a scribble!?" in a scandalized tone of voice

<comment><USER45> I had to sign approval for a field trip for my daughter once. Her teacher returned it with her the next day because it needed to be "a real signature."

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I once saw a cashier compare the signature on the back of the card (There is a little field for "signature" on the back of credit cards) - to the one I signed.

When I noticed I hadn't signed my card he said he couldn't accept my purchase, so I had to sign the card first, then he could compare the signature...

<comment><USER47> In the UK cards still have a signature strip on the back and if a merchant notices you haven't signed your card they legally have to refuse to accept it.

I rarely remember to sign my cards and this tripped me up one time last year when trying to return something to a store which I'd bought online with my credit card.

I had to leave the store, buy a pen, sign the card and re-enter the store.

<comment><USER46> > I had to leave the store, buy a pen, sign the card and re-enter the store.

That's exactly what I did too. And yes, this was when visiting the UK. I had no idea the strip on the back of the card was for comparison, never seen it used elsewhere. Would be interesting to hear the person who thought that the signature-comparison thing was a good idea explain how they were thinking.

<comment><USER8> It's because in some countries, not everyone has an ID card on them at all times.

(Backwards, I know, but them's the breaks...)

<comment><USER46> That's why we have PINs. If not everyone can be asked to get ID, and not every store can be asked to get chip+pin gear then stores should still not pretend to do some identification charade based on doodling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> My apartment's leasing office accepts UPS/USPS/FedEx/etc. packages on my behalf when I'm not available. Whenever I go in to pick up a package, they ask me for both my ID and my signature on a tablet. Immediately after I tap the 'Confirm' button, I get an email with a PNG of the signature I just "signed". When I first moved into my apartment, I made _some_ effort to give my regular signature. Nowadays, I just make a couple waves with a single finger movement which looks like nothing out of the alphabet. The mailroom staff really couldn't care less how I sign since they've already looked at my ID.

I always wonder what the point of the signature is in this scenario.

<comment><USER49> The point of a signature isn't identity proof, atleast not primarily. The primary purpose is conscious acknowledgement of whatever you signed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> It would be nice if they would start requiring a PIN.

<comment><USER51> The kind of fraud prevented by a PIN enabled chip card is supposedly pretty rare. What would be more useful is a standard for browser attached chip card readers to bring the anti-fraud protections of a chip card to everyday Internet transactions.

<comment><USER52> This already exists. If EMV specified an X.509 certificate instead of a proprietary one, then we could be doing card-present transactions over the Internet right now thanks to TLS client certificates.

<comment><USER53> The RSA certificates used in EMV are not used to authorize transactions, but only to authenticate card to the terminal (and optionally to encrypt communication between pin pad and the card). Only effect of using full-blown X.509 for that would be that the certificates will be three times larger. Transactions are "signed" with issuer-specific symmetric algorithm (the specification AFAIK recommends CBC-MAC and HMAC), original motivation for this constructions seems to be backward compatibility in the sense that the algorithm can be designed such that it produces 8 digit decimal numbers that can then pass through various backend systems in field originally intended for swipe card online authorization code.

And by the way nothing technically prevents the issuers to combine EMV application with some PKCS#11 applet with X.509 certificate on the same physical card. EMV is in fact to some extent explicitly overdesigned to allow not only this but even multiple EMV "cards" on same physical chip.

One interesting idea would be to do EMV transaction over the internet by just forwarding the PDUs sent to the card over the internet, but it has lots of subtle usability and security issues to be really practical.

<comment><USER52> There is definitely nothing that prevents another applet (JavaCard, not PKCS#11 -- that's just a generic interface) from running on smartcards currently running the EMV applet. Or any other smartcard from running more than one applet -- this is a result of ISO7816 more than EMV.

But my point is that if EMV had chosen to use X.509 instead of inventing their own certificate format then we could re-use the existing infrastructure with zero cost.

Passing arbitrary APDUs from webpages to your card isn't a great idea and it will be SLOW since it will require multiple round-trips -- it's already slow enough just reading objects from smartcards. This is the mechanism used by Citrix/MS Remote Desktop, which is to forward a PC/SC connection -- this has a disadvantage that the remote side must have drivers and is also real slow, but the advantage that the resource can be used for anything, just like it were local.

For what it's worth, I'm the author of some smartcard middleware (CACKey) and have worked with the EMV specification and EMV applets to a lesser degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> In india, a pin is mandatory for all the purchases even when there were no chip cards. Uber had some trouble because it could not charge credit cards like they do in US, as our cards needed two factor auth.

</comment><comment><USER55> I haven't used a signature for a credit card transaction in at least 10 years.

I was somewhat amazed to see it was still I thing when I visited the US recently.

Strictly speaking it's still a thing in Australia, but there are always better options -- chip, pin.

</comment><comment><USER56> Once in the UK, the cashier didn't want to take my credit card because there was no signature on the back.

I wondered, which kind of graphology training do Tesco cashiers go through in order to be able to identify a fake signature?

<comment><USER57> For Visa, the merchant should require your card to be signed because a card with no signature is invalid. Other credit card companies are probably the same.

> _Unsigned Cards_

> _While checking card security features, you should also make sure that the > card is signed. An unsigned card is considered invalid and should not be > accepted. If a customer gives you an unsigned card, the following steps must > be taken:_

> _• Check the cardholder's ID._

> _Ask the cardholder for some form of official government identification, > such as a driver's license or passport. Where permissible by law, the ID > serial number and expiration date should be written on the sales receipt > before you complete the transaction._

> _• Ask the customer to sign the card._

> _The card should be signed within your full view, and the signature checked > against the customer's signature on the ID. A refusal to sign means the card > is still invalid and cannot be accepted._

> _• Ask the customer for a different signed Visa card_

> _"See ID"_

> _Some customers write "See ID" or "Ask for ID" in the signature panel, > thinking that this is a deterrent against fraud or forgery; that is, if > their signature is not on the card, a fraudster will not be able to forge > it. In reality, criminals often don't take the time to practice signatures. > They use cards as quickly as possible after a theft and prior to the > accounts being blocked. They are actually counting on you not to look at the > back of the card and compare signatures; they may even have access to > counterfeit identification with a signature in their own handwriting._

> _In this situation, follow recommended steps listed above under Unsigned > Cards._

[https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/card- accept...](https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/card-acceptance- guidelines-for-merchants.pdf)

<comment><USER58> I stopped signing credit cards several years ago, as an experiment; how long will it take someone to notice?

I'm still waiting.

<comment><USER47> I never do either. It happened to me last year. Possibly only because the guy was a trainee and was literally going by the book though.

<comment><USER59> I worked the night shift at a hotel in college. I turned down a "SEE ID"-signed card once, where the guy started the transaction with "hey loser, got a room?" to amuse his girlfriend. Turns out that's an excellent way to get me to be nitpicky about the rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Every time I'm in Germany I'm baffled that they use signatures quite often in order to pay... basically copying the signature that's on their cards. It's quite silly as when you'd steal someones card you'd pretty much just be able to use it to pay for things, given you can copy a signature.

It's quite the contract with the Netherlands, but then again about 10 or so years ago I wasn't able to identically copy my signature and was unable to get a new bank card... luckily I didn't have this issue online filling out a form.

<comment><USER61> In Germany, payments with signature are legally just a direct debit (that's the small contract you sign on the bill, the reason there's so much text on there). If the card was stolen, the merchant takes the risk. The account holder can get the money refunded for a very long time (think 3 months but at least several weeks after the monthly statement).

Most stores have an automatic system where they require pin if a payment has bounced before and in random intervals. But using the direct debit system instead of PIN is so much cheaper that even higher fraud rates don't matter much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> We Australians are two steps ahead - I barely even use a pin now! I use PayWave (NFC) nearly all the time and often businesses find it strange when you want to insert or swipe your card.

<comment><USER63> You generally still need a PIN for payments over $100 though.

But in general you can't actually sign anymore, you have to either use PayWave or chip and pin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> There's something missing from this article.

When you sign a receipt, you're not just providing a sample of your signature for comparison against the one on the card. You are signing a document, usually saying that 'I agree to comply with the terms of the cardholder agreement'

If this is no longer necessary, the card issuers must have determined that they have other legal agreements which cover purchases, and that the signature on each transaction is not necessary.

Also missing is a discussion of why PINs are not seen by the banks as an obvious next step.

<comment><USER65> Where does it say on the receipt that I am agreeing to the cardholder agreement?

This sounds like the old myth that "if you don't sign the back of your card, you can't be held liable for the debts you incur if you contest it later."

This is of course not true.

<comment><USER66> It depends on the receipt, but many receipts do say that you agree to pay for the purchase in accordance with the cardholder agreement, or some such wording. This has been decreasingly common in recent years, and I don't know the requirements, but it's not gone.

You're right about the old myth you cite. The cardholder agreements are usually accepted either by signing the card or by using it.

<comment><USER19> The wording is highly dependent on the country. I don't think I've seen that in Australia in a long long time, on the rare occasion that I've had to sign rather than use PIN or contactless, but I've been in Asia for the past three weeks and did a lot of signing for my card with wording that sounds like that.

<comment><USER66> Most of my experience with this is in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I've been drawing a horizontal line, sometimes with a slight arch, for years now. I almost never get a reaction and when I do, it is at most a laugh or giggle. Nobody cares (not that they should). Anything I scrawl is (more or less), by fiat, my signature _.

I'm glad we can finally stop wasting time (and resources, for physical signatures).

_This is especially fun with e-signatures in California: "Electronic signature" means an electronic sound, symbol, or process attached to or logically associated with an electronic record and executed or adopted by a person with the intent to sign the electronic record.

[https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?sectionNum=1633&lawCode=CIV)

<comment><USER7> I write "Check I.D.". Merchants have typically been good at asking for some, especially the older ones. Teens and trainees tend to mumble and just process it anyway.

The thought process is that my UK drivers license has my picture, full name, and signature. The merchant looks at the ID and sees my photo next to my name, checks it with the name on the card to see if they match, then checks the signature against that on the ID. Unless a thief has the same name as me, they can't use the card as either the photo or the name won't match. The signature doesn't matter as it will be caught in fraud alerting / rejected by the bank.

<comment><USER59> One problem with this is that your credit card isn't technically valid unless it's signed with your actual signature. Piss off the wrong clerk who's having a bad day, and it would be completely within their right to deny the sale (or car or hotel rental).

<comment><USER7> I understand that, and it's a risk I'm willing to take. I'd rather find out that a person is an ass before I give them my money than after. There's always another store, another car dealer, another hotel, another vehicle rental chain. It's likely that the after-sales service will match, or be worse than, the pre-sales service. I'd rather not give them my money at all than have to fight for recompense after the fact.

<comment><USER59> I don't think that's a reasonable attitude. Ignoring the signature line, even if common, puts a company at much greater risk of eating any fraud committed with it. If an unsigned stolen credit card is recovered, its owner has a very easy claim against any stores that accepted the thief's signature: "obviously they _didn 't_ check the back of the card, now did they?" It feels a little entitled to insist that a merchant who wouldn't accept an unsigned card is a bad vendor giving bad service.

<comment><USER7> An opinion doesn't need to be reasonable. I'm aware it's not the _correct_ way to do things, but it provides me and my money with a little more protection IMHO. No card thief will hand over a card with "Check I.D." written in the signature strip to a clerk, just in case it's one that will ask. If the clerk does as asked, they verify everything is in order. If they process it anyway, it falls back to the remainder of the fraud protections available; heuristic monitoring at the bank / card processor, regularly checking bank statements etc.

One thing I'd like to challenge is that the card isn't valid unless it is signed; Technically the valid signatures for my cards are "Check I.D."; the act of signing makes the card valid, just as if you sign a contract with "Mickey Mouse" you are still contractually bound by its terms. You are treated as assuming the persona of "Mickey Mouse" or "Check I.D." while signing; it's the act that is important.

Just don't tell the card thief that ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Signatures have never had anything to do with identity. They are a physical manifistation of ones willingness to contract. They draw the line between drafts and final contract language. The action counts, not the image.

That signatures are somwtimes compared is secondary, akin to comparing paper types or forensic prints. Contracts are not like a signed bat. They do not become worthless because you forget to cross your T.

</comment><comment><USER69> A friend signs all of his transactions with "poop" as it is his way of demonstrating that signatures are a complete waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER70> Somewhat related, instead of signing the back of your credit card write "ASK FOR ID". Many merchants that otherwise wouldn't ask but look at the back instinctively tend to ask when they see it. I reinforce the behavior by thanking them. The only problem I've encountered is some USPS offices refuse to run a card without a signature on the back.

</comment><comment><USER71> Actually, doing away with the signature seems a bit odd, given all the machine learning flying around. An electronic signature that records the speed strokes in the signature are made, as well as the final result, is probably a really good way of identifying the purchaser. Of course then a lot of the smaller merchants would have to upgrade their 90's era dial-up credit card processing.

<comment><USER72> > An electronic signature that records the speed strokes in the signature are > made, as well as the final result, is probably a really good way of > identifying the purchaser.

Not so sure about that. If I use a different mouse then my "signature" using those metrics will fail, as I'm basically a completely different (inept) person using other mice. Just an example, but I don't think that e-signatures can be trusted by using machine learning techniques, at least not any that I know of today.

<comment><USER71> Yes, part of it would require some level of standardization of the electronic pad/pen.

I'm not really suggesting it as "trust" thing, but a better "pin" code that could be combined with the current shopping history/etc metrics being used to detect fraud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> From experience, a signature in the checkout line usually takes about 5-10 seconds. Removing it may seem like a small negligible change for users, but for retailers, it most likely adds up.

Imagine being able to pick up your receipt and leave. What I see being the stalwart of signatures are probably restaurants. They require that extra step with the tip.

<comment><USER74> > From experience, a signature in the checkout line usually takes about 5-10 > seconds. Removing it may seem like a small negligible change for users, but > for retailers, it most likely adds up.

Your right, can we also remove that stupid bag tax in SF. It easily takes 20 - 30 seconds per transaction.

"Do you want a bag?"

"Ugh, yeah I do"

"Alright that's 50 cents"

"wait, could I get three bags, not two - I don't want my bag to rip"

"Sure, we can do that, 75 cents"

Every. single. time.

<comment><USER75> I think the policy is working as designed.

The grating, low-grade, annoying, time-wasting inconvenience is supposed to continue to irritate the purchaser until they decide to bring their own bags.

<comment><USER74> Its funny - I do bring bags, but often I get more than one or two items. Aka I'll often get more than planned, as I look for sales.

Regardless, and to the point the whole line is slowed down by this transaction. Meaning every time I went to the store I had to wait an extra few minutes for this.

Moving back to Illinois recently, I find it amazing that the lines most move at least 3× faster. Probably in part due to the more "let's get shit done" attitude of the Midwest, but also the lack of bag related questions.

I then come home with my paper bags and recycle them. It honestly seems like more harm to the environment the waste of time + the polyester bags we buy instead

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I just use "Ask ID" on all my cards. Surprised every time people ask and wonder if it would help if card is lost/stolen.

</comment><comment><USER77> America is so stuck in legacy tech. Nobody checks signatures. Strong Factor Authentication requires min 2 of 3. India is leapfrogging to biometrics using Aadhar. Europe is current with chip and pin. America is in quill pen stage

<comment><USER78> Chip and pin isn't current; CDCVM is. Some european countries are still lagging on that front.

<comment><USER79> Having to buy your own till is progress?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Interestingly, many credit card companies don't keep the required paperwork to legally collect on their loans.

This is a business decision they've made not to be in compliance.

Cases are routinely deemed uncollectible in court when challenged and they are required to remove the items from your credit report.

<comment><USER27> It depends on the issuer. Some will sue card (debt?) holders for as little as $1000, probably because attorney fees can be rolled into the judgement.

<comment><USER80> What I'm suggesting is that if you are taken to court, and you understand what defense to use, they literally will lose the suit and you will win the right to have it removed from your credit report for good.

I spoke to a lawfirm in PA who has literally won 100% of the time against Capital One in hundreds of debt cases because they can't provide the proper documentation required by law when asked to collect on their debts.

They primarily rely on people being afraid or ignorant of the laws.

This was mind blowing to me when I first realized it and then researched it and saw actual cases in real time be ruled for the defense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> I've noticed the chip and pin systems getting much faster. Safeway in the DC area had a sign that they're speeding it up, and it was really insert, pause, remove. More like swiping.

</comment><comment><USER82> This is great, since there were certain stores that would require my signature when I was using Apple Pay but not when I used a credit card. Completely negated the convenience benefit of contactless payment.

<comment><USER83> That is actually very funny. _Silicon Valley_ material.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> > ShopKeep and Square, two popular small business payment systems, said they > do not plan to immediately update their systems to allow retailers to skip > signatures on all transactions. (Both currently allow merchants to disable > them on transactions below $25.)

> "We'll play it a little bit by ear," said Michael DeSimone, ShopKeep's chief > executive. "Right now, I don't think there's a high level of awareness about > this. Let's get the changes in place and see how they work operationally, > and then we'll adapt."

I can't imagine the hell of a place that must be to work when extending a feature which works at $25 to any sum — or no sum at all — is that hard. I can think of some _really_ good reasons for it to be that difficult, but all of them sound like a terrible working environment.

</comment><comment><USER85> The only time I ever sign for credit card stuff is when I visit the US. When it comes to banking it feels like the US is always chasing Canada who is always chasing Europe.

<comment><USER86> On the other hand, a large number of merchants in Germany still don't accept credit cards. Many are even cash-only. Run across them all the time in Munich, whereas not accepting credit cards was rare in the bay area, even at stands at farmer's markets, or at food trucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> It's not like the signature actually mattered. I've literally wrote "blah blah"

That is when the signature pad actually works.

<comment><USER88> I've left one unsigned and another had the strip wear off to the point the card says "VOID VOID VOID".

Never once stopped me using them. I'm glad for it because my signature isn't exactly consistent.

In fact, I don't think the swipe and signature method is generally allowed in the UK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> so what happened to chip+signature? now it's chip only? i guess physical theft isn't a thing they care much about anymore.

<comment><USER90> The signature being wrong doesn't actually make the card unusable, and there's statutory liability limits based on reporting the card missing/stolen. There's virtually zero difference for the issuer between chip+signature and chip-only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> This is really about who's responsible if someone else uses your card. The point of chip-and-pin was to shift responsibility for card security to you. If your card is used in a chip-and-pin scenario it must be your fault for not keeping the pin secure. Nearly every chip-and-pin device has a CCTV camera pointed at it, so it's impossible for you to avoid someone seeing your pin.

</comment><comment><USER92> I've been using a big smiley face or stickfigure for years now.

Always gets a smile out of the people accepting it.

</comment><comment><USER93> ARE extinct. I am visiting Australia right now and I have not signed a CC transaction in 10 days

<comment><USER94> I live in Australia and I haven't even signed my signed my credit card. Technically I'm supposed to, but I have never had to sign for a transaction in the past decade that I've been using cards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> The article doesn't mention how great this could be for reducing transmission of the common cold! I hate signatures, especially ones at a drugstore where every single person has to use the same digital pen.

Since Square is still requiring signatures though, we can add this to the endless list of things that Jack Dorsey is fucking up.

<comment><USER96> So now everyone has to use the same pin pad? Then god forbid they each touch the same door handle on the way out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> I have been signing "burrito" for the past year with no adverse consequences.

<comment><USER28> Half the time, I write an actual X. Especially when it's those shitty touchscreens that don't pick up much of anything. I've never had a problem.

During election years, I always tell myself I'm going to sign as the presidential candidates, but I never get around to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> What if I like doodling on all those iPad POS systems?

</comment><comment><USER99> Any picture of mentioned dog wagging tail signature?

</comment><comment><USER76> I just use "ASK ID" as a signature on all my cards.

</comment><comment><USER100> Wait, what it's 2006?

</comment><comment><USER101> Can we stop signing checks sometime?

</comment><comment><USER102> 20 years too late

</comment><comment><USER103> Forget about cards, there's a ton of restaurants and stores in NYC that only accept cash due to the transaction fees.

<comment><USER104> And they could be forced to change in a heartbeat if a law passes...

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> Good riddance. Signatures are stupid anyway.

Regards,

A man who currently has a broken wrist.

</comment><comment><USER106> So this comes up every time the US starts to approach the way credit and debit cards are processed in the rest of the world.

EMV (Euro/Master/Visa) defines the standard for a chip card. [1]

The cards can be configured as chip+signature, chip+pin or both. The priority ordering can be pin only, sig only, pin then sig or sig then pin (and a bunch of other esoteric rules).

Paywave (VISA) and Paypass (Mastercard) are contactless standards for EMV transactions.

The rules for chip+pin transfer the liability to the merchant (and the merchant bank) for fraudulent use. The liability moves from the card issuing bank. It's a "stick" to make the merchants upgrade. That's why merchants are going to at least chip+signature (ie EMV chip reduces fraud). Moving to chip+PIN reduces fraud even further.

The card issuing banks tend to introduce rules about how safe your PIN is and apply rules to your PIN to stop things like repetitive numbers (eg all 1s), sequences, birthdate matches etc.

Chip + PIN was introduced in the EU and other more advanced than the US banking environments (ie, everywhere) a number of years ago. The "liability shift" for Mastercard happened ~2006, Visa was ~2010, later in some places (eg AU was 2015).

It is only just happening in the US (according to Wikipedia it will be completed by 2020-10-01).

Paywave/Paypass implement new rules on when a PIN is required. In AU it is $100. If the amount is below that, then the liability is accepted by the merchant bank (ie the merchant will get paid). If it is >$100, then a PIN is required for the merchant bank to accept the transaction.

In Australia, if you report your card lost/stolen, then you are not responsible for Paywave/pass transactions. If you don't ("an unreasonably long time"), then you are, unless the card issuer (your bank) can chargeback the merchant (ie <120 days).

This applies to the Credit Card networks (Amex/MC/VISA/Discover/JCB/Union etc). MC and Visa also have "debit" cards that use the same network and are treated basically the same for the merchant.

There are other payment networks (eg in AU there is EFTPOS) which is an AU bank owned network that basically does direct debit from cardholder to merchant online. So if you actually insert your card in the reader, you'll get the choice of "CR" (ie the MC/VISA network, SAV (EFTPOS) or CHQ (EFTPOS)).

So an "ANZ Bank Mastercard" can have 3 different accounts attached, the Mastercard CC account, and two different savings accounts. No one really has a "cheque" account anymore. The banks also issue Mastercard/VISA debit cards (that also offer CC/SAV/CHQ, but CC actually means SAV) and their own debit cards (EFTPOS only).

EFTPOS has much lower fees for both merchants and the banks. That's why Apple Pay hasn't been accepted yet by 3 of the 4 major AU banks, because they don't want to lose their sweet EFTPOS network or pay more to MC and VISA. They also don't want to pay Apple (or Google) more fees in the interchange.

For a while, supermarkets were making people with MC/VISA debit cards insert their cards and only allow them to use the SAV/CHQ options so that they didn't have to pay CC transaction fees for EFTPOS debit transactions.

Anyway, the summary of all this is that moving the US away from signatures is painful because of the disjointed and irrational US banking and payment systems as well as the baked in insistence by users on signatures and paper checks (not cheques, 'cos nowhere that spells it correctly still uses them much :) ).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV)

</comment><comment><USER107> Heh. In 35 years Americans might finally stop writing checks, too.

<comment><USER50> I would, but there are certain institutions that don't accept any other form of payment other than check or money order. Even if they do accept a credit card payment, they add a 3% or greater convenience fee to the amount.

<comment><USER108> Surely you can do internet banking transfer to the recipient's bank? In New Zealand, we didn't used to have many credit cards so that's how you'd pay your bills, buy a house, pay small businesses, or just about anything that can wait a day.

<comment><USER42> >Surely you can do internet banking transfer to the recipient's bank?

No, there isn't really a "standard" to do this.

As far as bills go, each company has their own billpay system. Small businesses pretty much all take credit or debit cards now. If they don't you pay by check. I pay my property taxes with a check because if you do an electronic payment with their system they want you to pay like a $3 fee. Buying a house requires you to get a cashier's check.

You can do "billpay" online with your bank, but if their systems aren't "hooked up" to the other party's systems the bank will mail a physical check to the other party. None of it is instant or even fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> Can we also standardize the noise the machine makes when the transaction is a success? You know that sound "ENGHH ENGHH ENGHH" that is somehow a positive sound? It's like an alarm clock sound. Why is it not a positive "Ding!" And some will say well it's to remember your card. Well if that's the case, how about force the POS system not to print the receipt until the card is pulled? Or better yet, why does the card have to stay in the machine so long?

<comment><USER110> Visit Japan and you'll hear ATMs play a little tune as they hand you money. The sound design everywhere you go is amazingly and thoughtful. America can be way too brutalist.

<comment><USER111> The Zojirushi rice cookers also play you a song after they are done making you rice.

<comment><USER112> My Samsung washing machine plays a little ditty when a wash cycle completes. It's actually kind of annoying! :D

<comment><USER111> Samsung is Korean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> Why was "...in the U.S.?" removed from the title?

</comment><comment><USER114> It's high time. Nothing irritates me more than a cashier asking for my signature.

<comment><USER115> Really? _Nothing_?

<comment><USER100> Nothing irritates me more than people taking idioms literally, with the exception of discussions where strictness/correctness is required (e.g. engineers building a bridge, court proceedings, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER116> I haven't touched a physical credit card in 2 years. Mobile payments is the future</comment>


Nearly 1 in 6 Americans in poverty - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Nearly-1-in-6-Americans-in-apf-1861149683.html?x=0

<comment><USER2> Poverty is a complex issue that requires more than just knee jerk solutions and tossing money at it. I don't know the answer, and I'm not positive that there is an "answer". But I _can_ tell you that people like me have a tendency to tune out when we read things like:

 _The poor include Nekisha Brooks, 28, of Fort Washington, Md., who lost her job as a customer service representative for AT &T several months ago in a round of layoffs. Raising five young children, she is now on food stamps and partly leaning on friends and family for help._

I know this is just one anecdote, and it is unfortunate that she clearly wants to work and is having trouble finding even semi-skilled labor... but _five_ kids? Seriously?

<comment><USER3> This reminds me of a conversation I was having recently with some engaged friends of mine, who are in their early 30s and were worried about whether they were really financially ready to have children yet. Of course they were extremely middle-class and presumably have a combined income _well_ into the six-figure range, but they were still worried about whether they could financially support one kid. And then you've got stuff like _this_.

Whenever they interview a poor person for one of these sorts of articles, it always seems to be someone who has managed to make some really bad life decisions.

This should make us happy -- it indicates that if you can avoid the following bad lifestyle decisions:

1\. Gambling

2\. Drugs

3\. Excessive alcohol

4\. Becoming a single mother

5\. Dropping out of high school

then your chances of being poor in America are really extremely low.

<comment><USER4> Not sure about #4. Single parenthood can sometimes be a choice (e.g. mother with donor), but it's much more likely not to be (e.g. unwilling divorce, death of a partner, teenagers who aren't ready).

<comment><USER3> Well, the vast majority of cases are caused by failure to use (sufficient) contraception by unmarried couples, which is a bad lifestyle decision. And even for divorce the vast majority of cases are caused by marrying an inappropriate person -- another poor lifestyle decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are some straightforward solutions to many of these problems that have been made more complex (unnecessarily) because they cross precious lines of ideology and religion, among other things.

For example, there are homosexual couples in the world who want children. Many are wealthy enough to adopt more than one child. In any sane debate it should be unquestionable that a child is better off being child #1 in a middle-class family, with better opportunities for economic and social stability than they would have as child #5 in a poor household. But there are people who would shout until they're blue in the face to prevent this from happening, simply because the parents are gay.

Another extremely unpopular but practical solution is contraceptives and even abortion. Why are parents shamed into birthing a child that they cannot afford to raise, in a world whose population is greater than at any point in history? Unquestionably if the average size of families decreased, incomes would be less strained and poverty levels would have a fighting chance to go down as well.

A third unpopular solution is grouped housing. For some reason it's been hammered into everyone's heads that they should have a house and a yard and a dog, and that a single family should live in it. But the reality is that a large structure could hold 2 families or more, if people were willing to live like that. It would not only decrease costs, but it would improve nutrition: it's much more practical to cook a decent meal for many people than for a few people (it's easier to acquire good food in quantities that won't go to waste, etc.).

<comment><USER5> You missed the fourth.

[http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop- operati...](http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative- who-left-cult/1314907779)

Jebus, Rich-white-guys-who-look-and-talk-like-dad bankrupting the country, a social safety net. Pick two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The "poverty line" is arbitrarily set to get the proper number of people into various government programs. It has no objective meaning. This news just means that the poverty level has been chosen badly.

Edit: source [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Poverty_in_th...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States)

<comment><USER7> Exactly, the "poor" in the United States have it better than the middle class in Europe. This is from an article today,

"...the typical household considered "poor" by census officials has a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household has cable or satellite TV, two color televisions, a DVD player and a VCR. If children (especially boys) are in the home, they have a video game system such as Xbox or PlayStation. In the kitchen, the household has the ordinary conveniences: refrigerator, oven, stove, microwave.

Half the poor now have a personal computer. A third have a widescreen TV (plasma or LCD); a quarter have a digital video recorder such as TiVo."

<comment><USER8> Well, of course, as one would expect the poor to take out hugely unfair debt agreements to load up their small houses in bad neighbourds with all the electronic gear they can muster for as much entertainment as they can barely afford to have.

They do not, unlike the (European and American) middle class take foreign holidays, drive foreign cars, take trips to the movies, go to theme parks, go on school trips, shop at nice places, eat healithly, etc...just because they have a bunch of cheap electronics crap stuffed inside their homes it does not make them rich.

Seriously, what do you think life is like for the European middle class? In rich Europe, it's extremely comfortable.

<comment><USER9> > They do not, unlike the (European and American) middle class take foreign > holidays, drive foreign cars, take trips to the movies, go to theme parks, > go on school trips, shop at nice places, eat healithly, etc...just because > they have a bunch of cheap electronics crap stuffed inside their homes it > does not make them rich.

Actually, they do, apart possibly from take foreign holidays, and even that's a suspect difference. Remember, they that they live in the US, so visiting Texas from CA, which they do, is comparable to visiting Italy from the UK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While "1 in 6" appeals as a lot, the actual statistic of 15.1% poor people seems significantly less harmful -- as, ipso facto, the vast majortity of all American people (84.9%) are not poor.

Isn't this the way the model essentially works out in our system? There is a small "working class" at the bottom, then a giant bump in the middle for the middle class, and a tiny spot at the top for the 1% of wealthy -- wealthy, not merely rich -- individuals.

I wouldn't simply try to brush off poverty, as surely every effort must be made to ensure social mobility among the classes (both up and down), but in a country as large as America having 45 or so million poor people isn't only to be expected, but actually relatively necessary for our economic model -- which, on the whole, works quite well for most people.

<comment><USER6> I think the problem recently is that the bump in the middle is getting relatively smaller, as rich people seem to be getting richer while the poor and middle-class get poorer.

<comment><USER3> Is that true, or just oft-repeated political rhetoric? (Telling the middle class that they're being ripped off is, of course, a time-honoured political ploy.)

I'm sitting in the middle of the income curve right now, and it looks fine around here. In terms of income distribution the main effect of the recession has been to destroy wealth at the _top_ end of the scale, since these are the folks who owned all the assets which are now performing poorly.</comment></comment></comment>


Airbnb Releases Trove of New York City Home-Sharing Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/technology/airbnb-releases-trove-of-new-york-city-home-sharing-data.html <comment><USER2> > _The new data set released on Tuesday, which is made available only by > making an appointment to visit Airbnb's New York City office._

Grr. Not what I expected when I read the headline.

I wanted to make pretty charts. :(

<comment><USER3> So who's going to get a copy of the data set and upload it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 40% of revenue is from commercial operators.</comment>


Does Amazon S3 really save money? - <AUTHOR> With a price tag of $0.150/GB/month, storing 1TB of data costs around $150/month on Amazon S3. But this is a recurring amount. So, for the same amount of data it would cost $1800/year and $3600/2-years. And this doesn't even include the data transfer costs.
Consider the alternative, with colocation the hardware cost of storing 1TB of data on two machines (for redundancy) would be around $1500/year. But this is fixed. And increasing the storage capacity on each machine can be done at the price of $0.1/GB. Which means that a RAID-1+redundant copies of data on multiple servers for 4TB of data could be achieved at $3000/year and $6000/2-years in a colocation facility. Whereas on S3 the same would cost $7200/year and $14,400/2-years.
Also, adding bandwidth+power+h/w replacement costs at a colocation facility would still keep the costs significantly lower than Amazon S3.
Given this math, what is the rationale behind going with Amazon S3? The Smugmug case study of 600TB of data stored on S3 seems misleading.
I do see several services that offer unlimited storage which is actually hosted on S3. For example, Smugmug, Carbonite etc. all offer unlimited storage for a fixed annual fee. Wouldn't this send the costs out of the roof on Amazon S3?
If your startup is using Amazon S3 for its storage needs, for the benefit of the startup community, can you please elaborate your rationale for choosing this service? <comment><USER2> The reason is that you don't have to deal with it. Amazon isn't magic and they use the same hardware available to everyone else. Sure, there's some scale involved when it comes to labor and power and bandwidth, but they can't undercut what you can do yourself.

However, spraying files everywhere is a pain! MogileFS makes it a lot better, but you're still in charge of monitoring it and making sure it's healthy. With only two boxes, you have to be always on call so that you can order another box from your provider fast.

Plus, there's the issue of multiple data centers. S3 doesn't just make redundant copies of your data. It makes copies across data centers. So, you're paying $0.10/GB for data in, but you don't have to pay for when it replicates copies into several data centers.

You also have to realize that you have to pay for excess capacity anytime you're doing your own storage system. If you like to keep a 50% buffer (a reasonable size), you're going to be paying 1.5x the base cost of $0.10/GB that you've come up with.

And then there's the issue of having to make sure you're monitoring it and that if you see a spike in storage usage you can add drives fast enough. . .

You pay for a bit of convenience with S3. I'm not going to argue that it's cheaper, but it's definitely a lot less headache. Are you going to colo several boxes in different data centers, constantly monitor the storage, make sure that they serve the files properly, making sure that more copies get replicated if one server dies, replace drives as they fail, adding more servers as needed. . .

If you're on a large scale, I'd say you should do your own storage because you can justify making that someone's job (or a large enough portion of their job). I'm not sure I agree with SmugMug using S3, but I'm not sure I disagree either - it allows them to concentrate on what they want to do. Remember, for every tech person on HN, there's 100 that will say they're doing backups and aren't (ok, maybe not true, but you have to find an employee to manage your storage who you trust as much as Amazon).

However, most people don't have that much to store. If you're storing 100GB of data, you'd then be paying for multiple servers all with RAID and managing MogileFS or the like for what? 20% savings? $150/year? I'm as cheap as the next person, but I also like sleep. I don't want a pager calling me telling me that one of my two file stores is down and that I need to provision and configure a new box at 2am. And do you want to focus your time on creating a compelling product that your customers think is awesome or do you want to spend your time creating an awesome file store that works really well? Life has tradeoffs. You're not wrong, but I don't see Amazon as ripping people off with their pricing and I don't mind someone profiting from giving me a hassle- free, no-lock-in solution.

EDIT: I personally think your estimate of buying boxes and colo'ing them is a tad low so my 20% might be your 50% and so it might make sense by your numbers more. Maybe I've just seen crappy colo offers. Link if you know good ones! I love being proved wrong.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for such a detailed and reasoned answer. I'm learning a hell of a lot from this thread already.

<comment><USER2> Well, I think what it really comes down to is what your business is. If your business is storage, get good at doing your own storage. If your business is web applications, get good at web applications. Then there are companies on the cusp. Flickr is clearly storage heavy enough that they need to be a storage company. 37signals, on the other hand, stores attachments and some pictures, but it their primary function isn't storage - it's the interaction with that stored content.

Is storage such a thing for your business that you're willing to put a lot of labor behind its solution? Or is storage important to your business, but as long as you get something reliable it doesn't have to be the most efficient possible because it's a small part of your business relative to the other things you do (like HTML, CSS, Ruby/Python/Perl/et al., MySQL/PostgreSQL)? Your time might be better spent on other company work than on storage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey there, I'm the CEO & Chief Geek at SmugMug. You're overlooking a few things:

\- Amazon keeps at least _3_ copies of your data (which is what you need for high reliability) in at least _2_ different geographical locations. That's what we'd do ourselves, too, if we continued to use our own storage internally. So your math is off both on the storage costs and then the costs of maintaing two or more datacenters and the networks between them.

\- When Amazon reduces their prices, you instantly get all your storage cheaper. This isn't something you get with your capital expenditure of disks - your costs are always fixed. This has upsides and downsides, but you certainly don't get instant price breaks to your OpEx costs. When they added cheaper, tiered storage, our bill with Amazon dropped hugely.

\- There's built-in price pressure with Amazon, too. The cost of one month's rent is roughly the same as the cost of leaving. So if it gets too expensive (or unreliable or slow or whatever your metrics are), you can easily leave. And Amazon has incentive to keep lowering prices and improving speed & reliability to ensure you don't leave.

\- CapEx sucks. It's hard on your cashflow, it's hard on your debt position if you need to lease or finance (we don't, but that just means it's even harder on our cashflow), it's hard on taxes (amortization sucks), etc etc. I vastly prefer reasonable OpEx costs, with no debt load, which is what Amazon gets us.

\- Free data transfer in/out of EC2 can be a big win, too. It is for us, anyway.

\- Our biggest win is simply that it's easy. We have a simpler architecture, a lot less people, and a lot less worry. We get to focus on our product (sharing photos) rather than the necessary evils of doing so (managing storage). We have _two_ ops guys for a Top 500 website with over a petabyte of storage. That's pretty awesome.

Hope that helps!

<comment><USER5> Just curious, do you keep your own backups as well? Do you have any contingency plans for if Amazon's services go down?

I'm not trying to be cynical, but I'd hate to be in the position where Amazon has your business by the balls if something goes wrong. How do you guys deal with this?

<comment><USER6> amazon did go down once. smugmug has a blog post about it and what they did. go google it. the entire blog is amazing and informative and i highly recommend it.

i'd link you, but i'm lazy

<comment><USER7> [http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/02/15/s3-outage-we- werent-...](http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/02/15/s3-outage-we-werent- affected/)

or maybe this: [http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/01/30/amazon-s3-outages- sl...](http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/01/30/amazon-s3-outages-slowdowns- and-problems/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You are paying a premium for scaling, bandwidth, operations and lower capital cost.

Being able to smoothly scale from 1TB to 2TB (or down to 500GB) is nothing to sneeze at. Nor is having a metered 250mbps connection (shop around -- hard to get less than $30/mbps at low volume), or having someone else handle the pager 24x7x365, or paying $150 at the _end_ of the month instead of $5,000 up front.

There are systems and scales for which S3 is actually too expensive, and of course Amazon is making a profit off of all of this.

But there are a lot of hidden costs to DIY. Ask anyone who's tried to get 6 more servers flown in on the weekend, or had to cut short a holiday to drive to the damned colo at 3am, or overbought capacity, etc.

(edit) As for the "unlimited" option -- SM et al know to the byte what their average user uses so they price the unlimited option to make a profit on the average case.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hypothetical case study:

You want to host a liveblog for the Apple keynote at Macworld. No matter if you are a small site or Engadget, your traffic for that 90 minutes would be 2x to 100x bigger than your daily average.

So do you:

a) buy or rent extra servers for the whole month, spend a few man-weeks (or pay somebody for) setting them up, working on their synchronization, etc.

b) write a small script that regularly uploads the static liveblog HTML (or JSON) to an S3 dubomain and rely on Amazon's thousands of servers and flexible scaling (Dynamo, which powers S3, will allocate as many servers as needed to handle your load) to do the work?

Granted, option b)'s per-GB cost would be a bit higher, but your fixed cost for labor and hardware in a) would be even bigger.

</comment><comment><USER10> Don't forget time to spec servers, install the OS/Apps/Backup system, configure, test, drive to the datacenter, install the kit, document it. Also you will need to spend time setting up an account with a rackspace provider and arranging all the DNS, public IPs, any necessary firewalls, etc.

Also, server warranties, UPSs and the sheer hassle of specifying, ordering configuring servers and taking them to somewhere and fiddling with them and regularly patching them and so on.

 _And increasing the storage capacity on each machine can be done at the price of $0.1/GB_

No it can't, you need to pay a competent admin to go to the servers, shut them down, install new drives, and start them up again and expand the RAID onto them. 1hr minimum. Assuming the RAID is expandable and there is physical space in the server - if you need to add more mounted disks the app must be adjusted to support that. If there is no space, you may need to replace some drives and handle moving the data onto them (several hours?), or worse buy a new extra server.

Assuming your backup system can just take another TB of data without any changes.

And what if something does go wrong? You're talking of at least half a day from the time you find out until you get someone to go, wait for the travel time, diagnose and repair and restart, then dealing with problem reports and complaints.

I hope Amazon has better monitoring on S3 than anything I have set up as well.

</comment><comment><USER11> The problem is that storage costs are a step function. Once you cross a certain threshold (the threshold depends on your performance requirements a.k.a. IOPS), storage gets Really Freaking Expensive (tm). The steps start to get really, really steep as your capacity increases, and that's just for the primary copy of your data.

Once you get into truly large data amounts, other things start to break (RAID 5, RAID 6, tape backup, disk backup, synchronization, the ability to replace storage systems without massive outages). The good news is that they're almost all solved problems, but you're usually stuck with buying overpriced crap from EMC, Hitachi, NetApp, 3PAR and IBM (storage is a protection racket). All of this combines to explain why a good storage admin pulls down 6 figures a year.

I may be a bit myopic, but I see a world coming where technology startups trade capital costs for operating costs. S3 is pricey if you're dealing with small quantities of data, but once the step increase in your per-GB storage costs goes over 30%, you might want to reconsider. The steps only get bigger.

<comment><USER12> Something about your argument is not making sense. You say that as storage needs increase, the costs go up dramatically (that there are significant DISeconomies of scale).

Yet Amazon is acting as an aggregator of all those ever-increasing storage needs, operating at even higher scale, yet is able to turn a profit providing a service at scale. Amazon almost certainly isn't building their own hardware.

It seems you're arguing in circles somewhere there...

<comment><USER11> Sorry, I forgot to mention one of my assumptions...

There are tremendous diseconomies of scale if: you're buying the storage through traditional storage vendors. When your storage needs get really big, you'll realize that stuff is 1) a waste of money, and 2) not meeting your needs (you shape your needs to fit the available products, not vice versa). At that point, it makes enough sense to roll your own storage solution (write your own S3), tailored to your very specific needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> James Hamilton posted a fairly robust model of how to think about this (and evaluate S3), just prior to joining Amazon.

[http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/12/22/TheCostOfBulkCol...](http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/12/22/TheCostOfBulkColdStorage.aspx)

His is a more datacenter-level view (considering $/GB, from the perspective of arbitrary GB), but builds a convincing case why S3 @ $0.18/GB is fair).

</comment><comment><USER14> Whenever you outsource anything to an "as a service" company, there are a couple of sweet spots where it makes sense, and a (generally) larger area where it does not make sense to pay someone else to do the service for you.

Amazon makes sense for companies that are too small to dedicate an admin to a server and/or to load that server and bandwidth to 60%+ capacity. At some point, when you have a need for a small server farm and the uptime of those servers is core to your business you will likely find it is more cost effective to do the operations in-house.

Think about companies like Salesforce.com, for their datacenter needs, I don't think you could ever justify Amazon (or a similar) service.

As a rule of thumb, I charge customers in my colo facility $60/U/mo as a starting price. You get a shared pipe and relatively unmetered/unlimited bandwidth (for "business" use, no torrent hosting or stupid shit). For a little more you can get dedicated bandwidth, 95% billing, etc. I've got someone who is looking at bringing in a 3U backup server, they'll pay $200/mo to have 3mb dedicated bandwidth and the colo space. That server will have a few TB of data replicated from their main site, I don't think S3 would make sense for them.

</comment><comment><USER15> Regarding those services that offer "unlimited storage", I think they are really banking on the fact that many people _won't_ use enough space to cause the company a loss. Sure, there are heavy users, but when it all averages out, the company (hopefully) makes money.

Also, you have to read the terms of some services closely. IIRC, some of the online backup services are limited to "personal use only". They have separate pricing tiers for business backup (because they know those customers will use more).

<comment><USER16> That's called "over-selling" - its a pretty common model amongst any resource intensive businesses, which reminded me of a blog entry on the Dreamhost blog where Josh Jones makes a connection between the recent finance market debacle and over-selling: <http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/10/22/how-to-make-money/>

Edit: the blog post is meant for light reading

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> With AWS i don't have to buy, set up, maintain or upgrade the hardware... or manage employees who do. Nor do i own the hardware. Nor do i have to travel to and from a datacenter.

For that service, the cost is very reasonable.

<comment><USER18> This goes for any hosting service and not just AWS as long as we are not talking about VPSes though.

I just did the math on what using S3 instead of my current business class shared hosting plan would cost me for one of my audio streaming sites.

I have around 10-15GBs of data which gets rotated regularly, so nothing is kept around for longer than around two months. With the amount of traffic I get, around 70GBs per month, and the number hits I get, I still pay less for my business class shared hosting plan than I would pay for S3.

And I also have full shell access and scriptability.

To top it off my plan actually covers 1TB traffic a month, so my site could scale up to 12 times traffic-wise before I would need to upgrade my account. At that cross-over point Amazon S3 would still be 54% more expensive than my current solution.

This might not apply to everyone, but in my case getting S3 would be plain dumb.

<comment><USER17> just be aware because you're on a shared host, they may kick you off to a more expensive machine if you start using all that bandwidth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> SmugMug's cheapest plan is $40/year, which is $3.33 a month

S3's most expensive tier is $0.15gb/mo

So, not counting bandwidth, a user would have to store roughly 22GB of images to eat up that cost.

Being conservative, a high-res JPEG out of camera (12mp) is probably 3mb on average. So, we're talking about over 7,000 images.

<comment><USER14> FYI, most people using high-res DLSR's are storing data in .raw format, instead of a lossy (jpeg) format.

My 12.8MP Canon EOS5D produces .RAW files of around 13MB each. I don't store in .jpg, but generally post-process a jpg thumbnail and mid-size image to make browsing my photo catalog easier (or for emailing samples).

Edits to pics are always saved as a sub-rev, so it's not uncommon for all the files associated with an image to add up to 20-40MB. This is fairly standard for anyone who shoots for $$ (full time, or for a hobby as I do).

Anyway, kind of off topic, but your 3mb number is too low :)

<comment><USER15> I'm fully aware of the raw file aspect (I shoot professionally with various gear, including a 5D). I didn't consider it in my calculations for two reasons:

\- SmugMug doesn't include it RAW file storage as part of the their accouts. You have to pay extra for it: <http://www.smugmug.com/help/smugvault>

\- Most pro photogs are using services like SM after first editing their raw files locally (in Aperture, Lightroom, etc.) and then exporting high-res JPEGs.

<comment><USER19> I have a 5d and use flickr, where I typically upload jpegs at full res and the highest quality settings. It's not uncommon for me to run into flickr's 10 meg limit. I'd say the average jpeg size that I upload there is more like 7 mb.

<comment><USER15> I personally haven't seen a lot of 7+mb JPEGs from a 5D but I'm sure it's possible. When I output images from a wedding at level 10, they generally range from 2 to 5mb. My editorial work usually gets exported as tiffs, so those are huge.

I'd consider saving your JPEGs at level 10 in Photoshop (max is 12). It's unlikely you'd ever need or notice the difference. In fact, my print lab specifically requests this.

<comment><USER19> I do always use 12, in fact I generally crop first before reducing the quality. I probably don't notice the difference, but since flickr rescales to make several copies I always felt that uploading at the highest quality was a good idea.

<comment><USER19> My 5D Mk II just shipped. Right around the time I posted this comment. I feel serendipitous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Besides all the other points in favour of S3, I'd like to add one small note: in any business, you want to shift your fixed costs over to variable costs.

</comment><comment><USER21> I use S3 for small things... it can't be beat if you only need to back up a few gigs. I agree, though, that once you scale up it gets pretty expensive. I host my own backups for the heavy stuff. (there are other providers willing to host your backups for cheaper as well, if you are willing to buy in terrabyte- size chunks)

</comment><comment><USER22> That Amazon S3 is cheaper than traditional dedicated servers is a myth that's been spreading for a while now.

You can argue all you want about how reliable and convenient it is. But it's not cheaper. In fact, it can be very expensive especially as you consume more bandwidth and storage.

<comment><USER10> It's not so much arguing that it is cheaper, but that there is still rationale for choosing it even though it's more expensive.

Of course it gets more expensive the more you use it - but so does doing it yourself. And not on a nice smooth scale, either.

<comment><USER22> There are certainly many cases for using S3 even though it is more expensive. There is nothing wrong with that.

It's just that I have met way too many people who after describing my situation, one of the first things they say is "have you tried S3? shouldn't it be cheaper?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You forget management costs -- someone has to deal with this storage, service the computers, replace the drives, add them, add additional computers, etc.

<comment><USER24> Indeed. If your business relies on keeping 1TB of data alive, you're going to have dedicated staff keeping an eye on it.

So now, you're looking at ~$2k hardware + $150k salary for your dedicated box watcher.

Compare that to $3k for S3 where it's their problem to keep your stuff backed up and deal with hardware problems.

It's a no-brainer if you ask me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I haven't looked back on the smugmug case since that came out, but just wanted to note that 600TB would cost $0.12/GB/mo not $0.15.

<comment><USER26> It's a stepped rate. You pay .15 for the first 600, then .12 for all aditional data beyond that.

<comment><USER25> Ah, I forgot about the stepped thing, thanks. It's 0.15 only for the first 50TB though:

$0.150 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used

$0.140 per GB – next 50 TB / month of storage used

$0.130 per GB – next 400 TB /month of storage used

$0.120 per GB – storage used / month over 500 TB</comment></comment></comment>


Chrome React extension that highlights components on the page - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cymen/show-me-the-react <comment><USER2> Mhmm, all it does is to highlight every DOM element that has a reactid. So it does not only highlight the components but every DOM element that was created by react, so for me this is not very helpful.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, I tried it on my React application ([https://partsbox.io/](https://partsbox.io/) demo) and the highlights do not correspond to React components. As an example, table rows are components, which is not visible.

Perhaps this will be improved in the future, but for now it isn't that useful.

<comment><USER4> It's highlighting elements that have the data-reactid attribute. Do the rows not have that attribute? I am also working on a table-based view and all of my rows show up blue.

<comment><USER3> I don't know — everything shows up as blue, some components have a rectangular frame, and some do not. Perhaps the rows are simply not distinguishable from each other because of all the blue around. In any case, it isn't very helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wrote the Chrome extension -- it's just a nicer package on a one line hack someone (Pete Hunt? not sure) tweeted. The one liner modified the current DOM nodes while the extension inserts a stylesheet so it will highlight both current and future nodes.

It doesn't highlight at the component level yet. The React dev tools are good at hooking up to components (but I don't know if they rely on dev builds). It would be fun to try to get it to the component level.

</comment><comment><USER5> For Firefox users (like me), you can copy paste the content of this file [1] in the debugger, it also works.

[1] [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cymen/show-me-the- react/ma...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cymen/show-me-the- react/master/js/highlight.js)

<comment><USER6> Now someone just has to make this into an extension – firefox extensions are just as easy to make as chrome extensions, so it shouldn't be an issue.

<comment><USER7> Just tried this out of curiosity and you're right: [https://github.com/insin/show-me-the-react](https://github.com/insin/show-me- the-react)

      npm install -g jpm
      git clone firstname.lastname@example.com:insin/show-me-the-react.git
      cd show-me-the-react
      jpm run

<comment><USER4> Nice! I wrote the Chrome version -- I'll link the README to your extension for Firefox.

<comment><USER7> Showing/hiding the button or changing its state for the current tab seems so comparatively painful to do with a Firefox addon (versus Chrome's declarativeContent API) that the fork is no better than using the bookmarklet which does this, at the moment.

<comment><USER4> Ah! I was wondering how you did that (and what Firefox supported).

The Chrome page actions are a little buggy in UX -- when you click the icon, sometimes the URL autocomplete comes down. Maybe it is supposed to and you can put something there programmatically but I don't like it when it drops down. So a fixed icon might not be so bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice idea. Would be cool if an element's background-color changes for a second whenever it has been rerendered.

<comment><USER4> I also thought about making it have the elements background-color or some other attribute animate from teal to gray over time so new nodes would be brighter. I haven't had a chance to try it but it would be really cool to see visually how many DOM nodes are getting completely rerendered (in other words, how well one is using React).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How does this differ from the standard react developer plugin from Facebook?

<comment><USER4> \- it shows a page action icon if the page contains elements rendered by React (have data-reactid attribute), the dev plugin does not do that

\- for better or worse, it highlights all of the elements with data-reactid attribute so it is a different view than the developer plugin

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow. Facebook sure uses a lot of react.</comment>