Sean Coates: PHP, Web (+Beer)

This morning, via a colleague, John, I stumbled on a service called gdzlla that allows you to use Flickr as an alternative to the other de facto Twitter media posting services (twitpic, yfrog, etc.), from Tweetie on the iPhone. The idea is great, but unfortunately, the implementation is dangerous.

Intrigued by an integrated media-posting solution, I started browsing the gdzlla site, and one of the first pages I saw grabbed my attention... in the wrong way.

The idea of random web sites asking for credentials is hardly a new concept—especially when it comes to Twitter. Almost a year ago, news broke about a now-defunct site called Twitterank that was created by @brianoberkirch to illustrate the danger of carelessly sharing Twitter credentials with third parties. Since then, Twitter has implemented OAuth to avoid this exact scenario, but uptake has been slow: many third parties who provide a Twitter-related service still require users to submit their Twitter credentials to authenticate.

What struck me about gdzlla's login page was the text at the bottom of the form: "(Your password gets hashed, we won't ever know it)." Thinking about ways to implement this (the password could be hashed in JavaScript, before the form is submitted, for example), I turned on Firebug, and discovered that the value is actually submitted with the form, in plaintext:

I suspected that the gdzlla guys were not actually being malicious here, and would actually hash the value prior to storage on their side, but the text was misleading at best, so I tweeted about it:

http://tr.im/D78s "(Your password gets hashed, we won't ever know it)" <-- misleading at best; lies at worst.

coates

John noticed that I linked to the form processor page, which didn't work properly, so be brought that part to gdzlla's attention:

@gdzl_la link from @coates http://bit.ly/2qVAUb http://bit.ly/2jDBHS gave this page http://bit.ly/3eIvMV Edge case, likely, but undesirable.

JFSIII

This kicked off a conversation with @gdzl_la:

@coates lies? how so? Don't want to pry, but I get the feeling you're making some assumptions.

gdzl_la

@gdzl_la that form submits my password to your server. It's not hashed before it's sent, so it's perfectly possible for you to see it.

coates

@coates We do filter passwords out of the logs, so while possible, yes; we've taken steps to make sure that we don't ever see them.

gdzl_la

@gdzl_la it's still bad form. You may be honest people, but there's no proof (I'm not calling you dishonest; just possible). Use OAuth.

coates

@coates Agreed. The unfortunate truth is that tweetie only sends user/pass, so it's the only option for the time being. http://bit.ly/TZ9EG

gdzl_la

@gdzl_la sadly, you're right. Tweetie is doing it wrong. The text on your sign-in page is still wrong, though (you can see password). )-:

coates

Their reply shed some light on exactly how they're integrating with Tweetie. The iPhone app allows users to supply their own custom image service URL. When submitting media, if this value is filled in, Tweetie sends the raw image data (and other information, see below) to the third-party URL and expects to receive a URL where the media is hosted, in return.

This type of integration is actually a really great idea. More apps should allow customization of third-party services. It's exactly how web services should be used.

Unfortunately, as @gdzl_la pointed out in our conversation, Tweetie's actual implementation of this feature is horribly insecure, and prevents gdzlla from using OAuth—gdzlla doesn't even use your Twitter credentials to post to Twitter, that's Tweetie's job (as indicated in their instructions).

So, why does gdzlla require users to submit their Twitter credentials if they're immediately transforming your password into a hashed form that would prevent them from actually using it to access the Twitter API? The simple answer is that this is the only way for them to integrate with Tweetie's poor implementation of a great feature.

gdzlla presumably collects your Twitter credentials and then has you authenticate against the Flickr API. It then links the accounts to associate your Twitter and Flickr accounts, on the gdzlla side.

The tragic flaw in all of this is that Tweetie uniformly sends the user's Twitter credentials to the custom image URL as part of the image hosting request. There's no other way for gdzlla to associate the incoming data with a particular Flickr account.

Tweetie's instruction page says that it will send the following as POST data:

• username - Twitter username
• password - Twitter password (plain text, thus HTTPS is strongly recommended, and may be required by future versions of Tweetie)
• (other information such as the data for the media)

There's really no good reason for Tweetie to do this. They could just as easily ask the user to supply credentials for the third-party media hosting service. In fact, they absolutely should ask the user to supply this information on the setup page. Providing a user's Twitter credentials to third-parties is irresponsible at the very least, and leaves legitimate third parties in a pinch because there's currently no good way to implement authentication in this system—not even OAuth will save the day. (This also leads to non-security usability problems with services like gdzlla—handling password changes must be a huge headache for them.)

Hopefully the Tweetie developers will recognize this problem and fix it. In the meantime, my suggestion is to avoid using any service that implements the Password Anti-Pattern, even if you trust them.

Tomorrow morning (in a few short hours, but I can never sleep the night before a trip), I will be flying YUL->ATL for the first city of the second leg of Code Works 2009.

I'm really looking forward to this adventure, and the first leg sounded like it was a great time.

We'll be traveling from Atlanta to Miami to the D.C. area and ending up in New York before I head home to Montreal in 8 days.

I'll be speaking on using tokens as a better solution to problems often solved with regex and using Firebug and Selenium to save some sanity.

If you can make it out, it's a great chance at a great price to get a crash course on topics that might not yet grace your developer arsenal. Hope to see you there.

I have a love-hate relationship with Adobe AIR.

On the positive side, AIR allows developers who are primarily experienced in web technologies (such as myself) to apply existing skills to the creation of GUI applications with a minimum of additional deployment-specific competence, and to release those apps on several platforms, in parallel.

This shallow learning curve has facilitated the creation of GUI apps that would never have otherwise graduated beyond a passing thought by their creators.

A good example of this is Spaz, my currently-preferred interface to the Twitter. Ed, its author, and my friend, is well-skilled in web technologies and I suspect that both the application of HTML and JavaScript to GUI deployment, and platform independence, were key factors in choosing AIR as Spaz's platform.

Is platform independence and portability really a good thing? I do think so, but I also think that special care must be taken to conform to the target platform's established conventions. This is where AIR fails (but where other similar—but not the same—platforms such as RealBasic, XUL and (dare I say it?) yes, even Java do a better job).

I've been sitting on this rant for a long time, and it's come up with several people in the past few weeks, so once again, I'm blogging about it as time allows. Sorry if these thoughts seem incomplete. Truth is that some of them are, but I want to get something written down.

Widgets, Controls and Placement

One of the first things you'll notice if you run several AIR apps concurrently is that they all look different. Take a peek at this article on "8 AIR apps that don't suck", for screen shots. All eight of these apps are visually appealing in their own way (this is subjective, of course), but that's the key: in their own way.

A lot of care and money has been spent on research and development of the major GUI interfaces, especially by Microsoft and Apple. With few exceptions where the AIR author has opted to adopt the system's native GUI, at least for the basic window chrome, these applications have reinvented the wheel.

I've read that AIR makes it very hard to emulate the system look and feel for standardized UI widgets. It is especially difficult in HTML-based apps, because the version of webkit they ship will not allow you to modify the look and feel of some form widgets (selects, radio buttons) or the scroll bars. You have to roll your own widgets entirely if you want to change the look of these. Adobe allegedly does this is on purpose. They want apps to look the same on their platform—the Adobe Flash platform—and to look and behave identically on all OSes.

As a user, this is confusing. Not confusing to the point where I don't know how to use the 7 different types of scrollbars displayed in these 8 applications (hint: WebDrive's screenshot doesn't display a scrollbar), but the lack of established convention is visually distracting at the very least.

Buttons, menus (I didn't know that the "Spaz >>" button was actually a button for the first few months I used the app; maybe I'm just an idiot), scroll bars, handles, "grippies", toolbars: these controls have been well-defined by our window managers and operating systems. Is it really worth the inconsistency just so you can be more visually appealing (and often fail at this)? I don't think it is.

(I wrote a short piece on this a while back, and many of the same assertions apply.)

Inter-application Consistency, Established Conventions

The previous point leads directly into this one: AIR apps are generally terribly inconsistent, not only between each other but also with the native toolkit.

Here are some conventions that apply to (almost) every application I currently have open on my Mac, but rarely apply to AIR apps:

• Window close button is at the top left corner of the window
• Toolbar at top of window (if applicable); button at top right of window hides this toolbar
• Scroll bars are clickable outside of the control bar, buttons to increase/decrease scroll are both at the bottom of the scroll bar
• Pressing cmd-, opens the application's preferences dialog
• Double-clicking the application's title bar "minimizes" the application to my dock (I actually dislike this, but at least it's consistent in native apps)
• Pressing cmd-z causes the "undo" event to be fired; this is built in to the toolkit for controls like text boxes

With the exception of cmd-, (which the author has explicitly definied in the code), Spaz does not conform to any of these conventions. Do I think this is Ed Finkler's fault? No, I don't. At least not entirely his fault...

Adobe seems to have adopted a different consistency regime than what I believe to be the right solution. It appears that they're more concerned about AIR apps looking exactly the same on each platform, than for those apps to conform to their platform.

Operating System Conventions

Admittedly, the convention I'm about to mention is only a de facto standard; not officially endorsed by Apple.

I love Growl. It works well, and adds much needed consistency to application notifications. I even use it to tell me the caller ID when my home phone rings. With the possible exception of a recent AS3 Growl library, AIR apps have been painfully unable to easily generate Growl notifications (due to improper application sandboxing, in my opinion), and I know this has been a major point of contention for Spaz's author (we've discussed it several times, and I think I was even tasked with solving it, last summer, but no time... no time).

Worse yet, Adobe has "conveniently" built Notification support into the AIR platform. This sounds good, until one discovers that the notification support has been created from the ground up, and doesn't hook existing conventions. I suppose this was necessary on platforms that don't have a widespread system like Growl, but for us Mac users, it's outright annoying.

Applescript and Accessibility

On to the final point of my rant...

Last weekend, I attempted (and failed for several reasons) to write some AppleScript that would allow automated repsositioning of most of my applications when I change display configurations from laptop to desktop.

I was not surprised to find that Spaz didn't have an AppleScript dictionary (is AppleScript dying? I'm starting to think so...), but worse, it didn't respond to a standard request: tell application "Spaz" to get the bounds of the first window (results in an error). I found a workaround (sort of), but this just illustrates AIR's neglect when it comes to abiding by system conventions.

I can only imagine how badly these things must play with accessibility software. Are visually impaired users able to use screen reading software with AIR apps? Spaz certainly doesn't play well with VoiceOver. Perhaps my colleague and friend Jon Gibbins can shed some light on the accessibility issue.

All this to say: I'm quite fed up with AIR apps. The lack of convention with my regular workflow has gone from annoying to downright disruptive, and I'm on the verge of abandoning them entirely, if something isn't done to promote platform conformance... and I suspect I'm not the only one.

Thanks to Ed Finkler for giving me some feedback on this rant. I greatly respect his opinion in this area, and he gave me some excellent additional points that I need to think about, especially why I think it's OK for web sites to have a more freeform canvas than desktop apps (though I do think that it's even more evil for web sites to reinvent their toolkits). Some thoughts published, yet more filling my head...

I was also going to skip over this Seven Things meme. I actually think the idea is a good one—always fun to learn new and often strange things about friends/colleagues—but I lost patience when I opened up my feed reader one morning and Planet PHP was overrun with Seventy Things about ten people I don't know. So, I'm intentionally not tagging this PHP so it doesn't show up in the feed. Call me a grumpy old man if you like. (-:

I'm also going to forgo tagging seven others. Nearly everyone I'd tag has already been pressured.

• You might know that I'm a bit of a beer aficionado, and that I brew my fair share of malt and hop based beverages (all grain). What you probably don't know is that I never liked beer until I was 22 (legal drinking age in Canada is 19 or 18 depending on province). My gateway libation was Sleeman Honey Brown Lager, which admittedly isn't a great brew, but it still holds a special place in my heart (read: gut).
• I strongly dislike weddings. Mine was very unconventional for a number of reasons. Two of those reasons: it took place on a Thursday night, and I wore a custom tailored suit... with sandals. (I also dislike socks.)
• It seems to be all the rage to share one's first computer, so mine was a Tandy Colour Computer III with Extended Colour Basic. We eventually got a 5.25" disk drive, but the storage medium of choice for a couple years was audio cassette tapes. I wrote a whole address book app at the ripe age of 10, complete with telephone line art and "realistic" ringing sounds that we tuned after dozens of calls to my buddy's phone number so we could hear his phone ring.
• I can read music. I used to be pretty good at it. These days, I can probably still handle treble clef, but bass clef would require some thought, which is a bit ironic since my current instrument of choice is the bass guitar (I'm not terribly good, but not horrible); I play mostly by ear, now. I played trumpet in jr. high, by I didn't like the music teacher at my high school, so I dropped it. I aced the music theory part of my grade 10 music class (100% at mid-term), but ended up with a 79% in the class because the second half of the semester was music history, which is possibly the second most boring subject in existence... right after Canadian history.
• I studied Multimedia and Design after high school, but I'm far too left-brained to be any good at it. As a result, I have a reasonable idea of which designs are good and which are bad (the design theory part was interesting to me: rule of thirds, colour theory, etc.), but if I sit down with an empty canvas, it's likely to be covered in bad ideas. Good thing we have people for that sort of thing, now. I went into multimedia because I didn't want to get stuck writing database applications for the rest of my life. These days, I write database applications.
• I believe there is a God. I don't talk about it much in my professional circles, but it's not something I intentionally hide, either. I mostly keep it to myself because most people who maintain this position on an omnipotent creator are jackasses. Organized religion is usually a big crock. I did, however, help plant a church here in Montreal. It's definitely a much different vibe than the conservative church I grew up in, but that was our intent when planting (most churches = serious fale). I have a fairly scientific approach to my beliefs: I do think we were created, but I also think that the method of creation employed evolution, not 7 literal days; I certainly don't have good answers for the common critiques of Christians; Pascal was a pretty smart guy.
• I moved to Montreal in late 2000 with only two weeks of salary in the bank. I had it in my head to get out of my hometown of Moncton, NB, in pursuit of a real career. This was dotcom boom time, so I interviewed at two places and got two offers. So, I packed all of my stuff into my car (yes, car) and made two trips to good ol' YUL in one week. I told my parents I was moving to another timezone barely two weeks before I left, and I don't think they were terribly surprised. I took one of the offers, and when that company folded in 2001, I took the other offer.

There. Happy? Now leave me alone! (-;

I've got a bunch of stuff that I haven't found/made time to blog about, so just dropping some quick notes here:

• I've been invited to speak at PHP Quebec 2009. I've been to this conference a few times (but not for a couple years, now), and I'm really looking forward to getting back into the conference circuit (as a speaker, not an organizer... think of all the free time I'll have! (-; Anyway, I'll be giving a talk entitled "Stupid Browser Tricks" in which I'll talk (at a high level) about Firebug, and Selenium IDE, and possibly a few other things like granular browser security, komodo macros/extensions (like a browser!) and maybe greasemonkey.
• This year, I was once again invited back to the Microsoft Web Developers Summit (couldn't think of a better URL). This is a yearly event where Microsoft selects members of the PHP community to Redmond to have a discussion on PHP and Microsoft's offerings. This year was definitely the best one yet, as it was better organized, and it felt much less like they were trying to sell us things. Their candor was especially appreciated this year, as I think many of the attendees felt like Microsoft was asking us for our opinions instead of trying to give them to us. I wrote about this last year, and I think what I wrote still rings true, today. Thanks to the organizers... we got some great information, made our opinions clear, and had a LOT of fun (great people!).
• I tweeted about this, but never posted it on my blog. My colleague Luke Welling is a funny guy.
• My nifty pastebin script: http://is.gd/9obe Pipe a file to it; outputs URL of pastebin. Even puts URL on pasteboard if you're on a Mac.

  seancoates
• Over the holiday weekend (I got days off, but in Canadia, we celebrate Thanksgiving in October), I found some time to work on a bunch of pet projects, including fale.ca, which is nothing special, but kind of fun. See?
• Today, I was extended an invitation to join the Habari Cabal, which I quickly accepted. So, if you use Habari and your blog breaks in the future, it's probably my fault.
• ... and last, but not least, Chris and I—with the help of many other people—managed to almost get the 2008 PHP Advent calendar launched in time. Word on the street is that Jon Tan is going to show the design some love, and we have a feed. The 2007 edition was a success, but was a lot of work, so I offered to pitch in this year. Thanks to everyone who's already submitted... and the rest of you slackers: get to it! (-;
S