

Tarsnap now available to residents of Canada - ralph
http://www.tarsnap.com/legal.html

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cperciva
So much for my plans of "send an email to tarsnap-announce, write a blog post,
then submit that blog post to Hacker News"...

~~~
ohgodthecat3
I'm surprised no one posted your other emails when you were sending them (the
ones about the outage). Kind of expected here.

~~~
cperciva
I don't mind having information "leak out" -- as far as I'm concerned, it's
public as soon as I hit send. I was just surprised at how fast it arrived
here.

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ralph
Announcement: [http://www.mail-archive.com/tarsnap-
announce@tarsnap.com/msg...](http://www.mail-archive.com/tarsnap-
announce@tarsnap.com/msg00007.html)

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ralph
7(b) is new and 13 has been changed from "You may not use the service if you
are a citizen or resident of Canada".

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comex
Just a general question: why offer a GPG key for download on the same site as
the file to be verified? (If you expect users to download the key once and
then verify multiple releases with it, why rotate the key every year?)

~~~
cperciva
If I did it right, the code signing GPG key is signed by my personal GPG key,
which is signed by the FreeBSD Security Officer GPG key, which is signed by
lots and lots of people. So there's a chain of trust.

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dfc
What was the problem preventing residents of Canada from using tarsnap?

~~~
cperciva
Sales tax paperwork -- Tarsnap is based on Canada, so it has to charge sales
taxes to Canadians.

Oddly enough, the Canada Revenue Agency is a bit unclear on how exactly to
handle picodollars.

~~~
tptacek
_Oddly enough, the Canada Revenue Agency is a bit unclear on how exactly to
handle picodollars._

So are many of your prospective customers! STOP DOING THAT.

~~~
cperciva
Using picodollars attracts exactly the customers I want.

You have absolutely _no idea_ how many people have told me that they started
using Tarsnap because of the picodollars.

~~~
solutionyogi
I think I vouch for Thomas when I say that you have _no idea_ how many more
customers you can get and more importantly how much more money you will be
able to make if you drop your picodollars pricing.

I work for various hedge funds in NYC and none of my clients will ever take
Tarsnap seriously based on your pricing. They equate pricing with quality.

~~~
cperciva
I think you're conflating two different issues here -- advertising prices in
picodollars, and what the price per GB ends up being.

As far as picodollars go, I figured that hedge funds would understand those
perfectly -- after all, they're in the business of shaving microseconds off
their order times so that they can extract a few extra microdollars per share,
right?

~~~
solutionyogi
Colin,

I have a tremendous respect for you and I love your product. But you have to
understand that hedge funds do not care about 'saving money' as much as they
care about 'making money'. So yes, they will go to crazy lengths to shave
microseconds off their order times but they will not try to save a penny while
they are conducting their business.

From their perspective, when they see a product priced in picodollars their
immediate reaction is that this is not a product for them. They want to use
best in class product and they have learned over the years that the best in
class product costs money, lots of it. So even though Tarsnap is best in
class, they will ignore it because it is priced too low. For their back up
service, they want to pay thousands of dollars and get a guarantee from the
vendor that they will be their if shit hits the fan.

~~~
spitfire
The lesson here is to fork a copy of the tarnsap codebase. Then hire a good
designer/marketer to make a corporate-safe image for tarsnap-enterprise.
Pictures of people in business attire smiling at spreadsheets and stuff. Price
it 100x current- It's _military grade encryption!_

Then retire to somewhere arm and have umbrella drinks.

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Jemm
Why charge US dollars for Canadians using a Canadian service? Big turn off for
me as;

a. I incur extra fees converting money b. My sense of privacy is impaired.

~~~
cperciva
Good question. Unfortunately, the Canadian dollar hasn't taken its rightful
place as a pre-eminent world currency yet, so advertising prices in Canadian
dollars would make it difficult for all the Tarsnap users outside of Canada to
figure out what it costs.

I could theoretically take payments in both US and Canadian dollars, but
practically speaking that would be a huge headache for my accounting systems.

