Some Guy Ranting

There are lots of reasons to use clean, short, readable URIs. Search engines like them. People have some hope of dictating or typing them correctly. Email clients are less likely to mung or truncate them. They give people navigational cues and an extra way to navigate a website. You can even fit them on one billboard (unlike say this one).

One generally ignored advantage is security.

Many phishing, XSS, CSRF and all URI exploits rely at least in part in part on putting stuff the user does not understand in the URI.

Here are a few real URIs from popular websites all found inside a minute within 3 clicks of the home page:

• https://chat.bankofamerica.com/hc/LPBofA2/?visitor=&mse
  ssionkey=&cmd=file&file=chatFrame&site=LPBofA2&channel=
  web&d=1185830684250&referrer=%28engage%29%20https%3A//s
  itekey.bankofamerica.com/sas/signon.do%3F%26detect%3D3&
  sessionkey=H6678674785673531985-3590509392420069059K351
  97612
• https://signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn&UsingSS
  L=1&pUserId=&co_partnerId=2&siteid=0&ru=http%3A%2F%2Fmy
  .ebay.com%3A80%2Fws%2FeBayISAPI.dll%3FMyeBay%26MyEbay%3
  D%26gbh%3D1%26guest%3D1&pageType=1883
• https://www.amazon.com/gp/sign-in.html/103-1490903-7108
  614?ie=UTF8&email=&disableCorpSignUp=&path=%2Fgp%2Fregi
  stry%2Fadd-item.html&redirectProtocol=&mode=&useRedirec
  tOnSuccess=0&query=requestedQty.0%3D1%26asin.0%3DB00067
  L6TQ%26type%3Dwishlist%26id%3D&pageAction=%2Fgp%2Fprodu
  ct%2Fhandle-buy-box
• https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=ma
  il&passive=true&rm=false&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fmail.goo
  gle.com%2Fmail%3Fhl%3Den%26ui%3Dhtml%26zy%3Dl&ltmpl=def
  ault&ltmplcache=2&hl=en

Having let people get used to that sort of garbage from sites that they should be able to trust, you can’t really be surprised that normal people can’t tell the difference between an XSS attack hidden in URL encoded JavaScript and a real, valid, safe URI. Even abnormal people who can decode a few common URL encodings in their heads are not really scrolling across the hidden nine tenths of the address bar to look at that lot.

It won’t help everybody. There are always going to be people who are happy to believe that their bank sends them email from a free address like bank.of.amerika@hotmail.com, and sufficiently sophisticated social engineering is always going to work on some people, some of the time, but the sites that are particularly popular with phishing attacks are making it unnecessarily easy.

If commonly used sites had short, sensible URIs it would not take genius on the part of slightly cynical users to notice that every real bank URI they had seen in the past looked something like https://www.bankofamerica.com/myaccount/login so the 300 character monstrosity full of percent symbols and ampersands that they were being presented with is a little on the fishy side.

Now, go and tidy your room.

Here are the slides for my talk today.

Striving for Less Ugly Charts and Graphs From PHP

eBay amuses me. They sent me a message the other day telling me that in recognition for my sterling efforts in buying other people’s junk and sometimes selling my own junk I could download a certificate. The message said “We’re cheering you on every day” and “We hope you’ll download your Turquoise Star Certificate and display it proudly.”

Presumably, there must be people out there who feel special when they get a form letter or the geniuses that populate big company marketing departments would not send them out all the time, right?

Here’s their message:

Congratulations! You’ve achieved a feedback rating of 100! With a Turquoise Star beside your user name, you are an active and well-established member of the eBay community.

We want to thank you for helping make eBay, The World’s Online Marketplace™, a safe and vibrant place to trade. Your success is our success. We’re cheering you on every day.

We hope you’ll download your Turquoise Star Certificate and display it proudly. You’ve certainly earned it! (You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you don’t have it, get it here.)

Again, congratulations on your success, and keep shooting for the stars!

Meg Whitman
President and CEO, eBay Inc.

Here’s my reply:

Dear eBay,

I recently got a message in my eBay messages signed “Meg Whitman President and CEO, eBay Inc.” congratulating me on getting feedback rating of 100 and being given a turquoise star.

It said “We hope you’ll download your Turquoise Star Certificate and display it proudly.” Naturally, I was very pleased to see this. After all, it is not every day that the CEO of a major internet company personally sends me a message, and not every day I get a certificate to proudly display behind my desk.

Naturally, the first thing I did was bid on a certificate frame in an eBay auction so I would have somewhere to display it proudly as instructed. (Item number 200119977791)

However, after admiring it on my wall for a while I started having nagging doubts. I realised that the message from Meg (I hope she does not mind me calling her Meg, after all, she is sending me messages) does not include my name. It probably was not personally sent by her at all.

Worse yet, my certificate does not have my name on it either. If one of my coworkers steals it, they could easily pretend that they were awarded a Turquoise Star Achievement Award rather than me. Surely eBay has access to the kind of advanced technology required to insert a custom name into a PDF file?

My state of mind only went downhill from there. I realized that anybody can go to http://pages.ebay.com/awards/StarAwardTurquoise.pdf (the URL Meg kindly sent me) and print out a Turquoise Star Achievement Award of their own. The high esteem that my coworkers were holding me in because of my Turquoise Star Achievement Award could be diluted at any moment by somebody else printing an award they did not earn.

The final slap in the face was when I realized that just by guessing file names, I could download better awards.
http://pages.ebay.com/awards/StarAwardPurple.pdf
http://pages.ebay.com/awards/StarAwardGreen.pdf

How am I supposed to take pride in my award when I know that anybody else could simply print out a better one? My coworkers respect and admiration for me could evaporate instantly when somebody else figures out these URLs and prints a better Achievement Award than mine.

Do you think Meg would be happy if her MBA from Harvard Business School was suddenly rendered valueless by a link allowing anybody to print out a DBA from Harvard’s web site?

The seller of the certificate frame does not specify a return policy, so I don’t know if they will accept disillusionment with the award contained in the frame as a valid reason for a refund.

Luke Welling
Turquoise Star Achievement Award holder

Of course, eBay being eBay it is hard to tell if my message went to a person or to a very small script. I did get a reply. They promised to investigate whether the email really came from eBay or whether it was a phishing message.

And, of course USPS being USPS, the frame I ordered on eBay was smashed before it reached me.

Glory is such a fleeting thing.

Listening to James Reinders talk about Intel Open Sourcing their Threading Building Blocks got me thinking about O’Reilly animals.

James seemed kind of underwhelmed at being assigned a canary.

To be honest, I can see why. As mascots go, canaries are not an A-list animal. If half the other mascots would eat yours, and the other half could accidentally step on it and kill it, then you have not been well served.

Sure, there are only so many A-list animals to go around. It is not so surprising that the lions, tigers, elephants are already taken, but B-list can be fine too. Perl has adopted the camel with an enthusiasm far beyond what camels are used to. Hugh and Dave got a good one for their PHP and MySQL book. The platypus is a great animal for PHP. Sure, it looks like it was put together out of parts of other animals, but it is reasonably attractive, and has the kind of street cred you get from being poisonous.

But really, a canary? A scallop? A sand dollar? A moth? A beetle? It is hard to find glamour or prestige in mollusks and other invertebrates that that spend their short lives munching on decomposing waste.

I wonder if many of the people who get an invertebrate or a puny vertebrate ever write a second book for the same publisher, or if they quietly slink away and hide their book inside a Harry Potter dust jacket.

Here are the slides for our talk today.

best_practices.pdf

If this site is slow, you can try http://www.laurathomson.com

Mainstream media are still keen to swallow the line that “real soon now” computer specialists will be redundant because fourth generation languages are so clever that clever people are not needed any more.

This fatuous pap by Neil McBride from De Montfort University (Rated by the Guardian’s University Guide as the 83rd best University in all of England) gives them the sound bites they need.

“Now vastly complex applications for businesses, for science and for leisure can be developed using sophisticated high-level tools and components.” he prattles. “Computer science curricula are old, stale and increasing irrelevant.”

Towards the end of his article it all becomes clear. “Here at De Montfort I run an ICT degree, which does not assume that programming is an essential skill. The degree focuses on delivering IT services in organisations, on taking a holistic view of computing in organisations, and on holistic thinking.”

I have never grasped the point of that kind of course. So you cater to people who want an IT career, but don’t have the core skills of the discipline? Why on earth do these people want to work in IT? Is there not some occupation they could find where they might be capable of grasping the essential skills?

He loves the car/software analogy. “Like cars, a limited number of people are interested in their construction, more live by supporting and maintaining them; most of us accept them as a black box, whose workings are of no interest but which confer status, freedom and convenience.”
Sure, the car industry needs many, many black box buyers, a moderate number of mechanics, a few engineers and designers, and very few theoretical purists. All industries, including computing do.

How many fresh graduates do you think the automotive industry need who take “a holistic view of” cars, but think understanding how an engine works is not “an essential skill”? Not very many I’ll wager.

The death of computer science is not just a fairy tale, it is also an enduring fairy tale. I am in the process of moving house, and cracked opened an old books on its way to the bin. Understanding Computer Science Advanced Concepts by Ray Bradley, Hutchinson Education, 1987 was a high school text book. He refers to the then current computers (late 1980s) as the fourth generation of computers. I don’t think that terminology has endured.

Under a heading “The Future” he writes “The development of the fifth generation machines promises to be the most significant yet. This is because of a fundamental re-think in the basic design of the machine. For example it should be possible to communicate with the machine in a natural language such as English. […] It should be possible for users to define their problems to the machine and for the machine to then develop the programs to solve them.”

That is not exactly how I recall computing in the 1990s panning out.

The death of computer science was a fairy tale in 1987, and 20 years later it is still a fairy tale. More powerful computers are not replacing programmers any more than calculators are replacing accountants or power tools are replacing carpenters.

What is considered a hard problem in computing changes over time but each era still has its hard problems that need smart people with a deep understanding of the fundamentals to solve.

I am aware that there are some things so shocking that you are not supposed to say them in polite company “Hitler had some good ideas”, “Tori Spelling is really pretty” or “I think I look really good in a beret” are all ideas so confronting that they are best kept to yourself regardless of how strongly you believe them.

I have a similarly shocking sentiment that I feel I have to share.

I really like register_globals in PHP.

There, I’ve said it. I can go away and order my I ♥ register_globals shirt now.

Sure, choosing to mingle untrusted user data and internal variables is a bad idea. Sure, if you are too lazy to initialise important variables with a starting value it gives you one extra way to shoot yourself in the foot. Sure, polluting global scope with form variables is going to be a mess in a larger app.

There remains something to be said for simple, elegant, readable ways to shoot yourself in the foot. PHP, like any reasonably complete programming language provides a whole host of other ways, so removing one is not particularly useful.

I used to teach PHP to beginners as a first programming language. I have introduced a few thousand complete novices to programming via PHP.

With register_globals on, this example is a short step from the “Hello World!” example:

<?php
if($name)
{
 echo "Hello $name";
}
else
{
 echo
  '<form>
   Enter your name: <input type="text" name="name">
   <input type="submit">
  </form>';
}
?>

It flows nicely from a “Hello World!” example. It can introduce variables and control structure if you did not provide an even softer introduction to them. It can be turned into an example with a practical use without making the code more complex.

This version may not look very different to you:

<?php
if($_REQUEST['name'])
{
 echo "Hello {$_REQUEST['name']}";
}
else
{
 echo
  '<form>
   Enter your name: <input type="text" name="name">
   <input type="submit">
  </form>';
}
?>
To an experienced eye, the two versions are almost identical. The second requires a little more typing, but nothing to get excited over.

To a complete beginner though, the second is a couple of large leaps away from the first. To understand the second version, somebody has to understand arrays, and PHP string interpolation. Both of these are important topics that they will have to come to in their first few hours of programming, but without register_globals, they stand in the way of even the most trivial dynamic examples.

I miss being able to assume register_globals as default behaviour. It made the initial learning curve far less steep. It made little examples cleaner and more readable. Like most safety measures, it does not really protect people who are determined to get themselves into trouble anyway. People who don’t understand the reasons behind it just run extract() or some code of their own to pull incoming variables out anyway. The user submitted comments in the manual used to be full of sample code for doing exactly that.

Oh, but just a side note to all beret wearing white supremacist Tori spelling fans, just because I am willing to speak up for one unpopular cause does not mean I am interested in yours. Sorry.

On Thursday, I will be speaking at PHP Melbourne. My talk is titled PHP Considered Harmful. In case you are wondering though, it does not mean I have had a falling out with PHP. I have spent 10 years talking about what’s great in PHP and I need to vent occasionally. Come along if you are nearby. If not, and I am not strung up by an angry mob, I might redo the talk in another hemisphere later in the year.

The other speaker is Chris Burgess on Building Secure Web Applications.

His blurb:

This presentation expands on a presentation given at the Open Source Developers’ Conference in December 2006 titled “Web Application Security - Tools, Techniques, Tips and Tricks”. I will explore some of the original material for those who were unable to attend, taking a look at the plethora of Open Source tools that can greatly assist developers and testers of web applications. In addition to this, I will discuss techniques that can be used to harden web applications.

Australians are generally subjected to some degree of price gouging when a product has one official importer. Only the degree of gouging varies. I buy my laptops from Japan, because by the time an ultralight makes it to Australia at least six months later it has lower specs and a much higher price tag.

The PS3 will launch Australia at AU$999 for the 60GB model. That is a significant, but not remarkable premium on the US or Japanese price. For comparison it is about US$700 plus tax. US price is US$600. Japanese price is US$520. So Australians will pay about 17% more than Americans and about 35% more than the Japanese. (at today’s rates from oanda.com).

Sony Computer Entertainment Australia’s Managing Director Michael Ephraim naturally has to claim that the price of the PS3 is justified. To point out that he is also doing it tough, he points out that he pays an obscene premium for his BMW in Australia.

In an interview with Jason Hill, he says “If you look at any other products it’s the same. I drive a BMW and I pay a price that is completely obscene - 80 per cent higher compared to the US.”

When you look at it like that, a 35% premium on the PS3 is quite restrained I suppose. Well at least if you ignore the fact that in Australia cars over $57K are subject to luxury car tax of 25% in addition to normal GST. If his hypothetical BMW cost AU$200K, then about AU$50K would be tax. His 80% premium means it costs the equivalent of AU$111K in the US. The Australian price of AU$150K plus tax is then an “obscene” 35% premium over the US price.

I’m with Michael . I don’t know how BMW Australia can live with themselves.

It reminds me of a speaker I heard once suggesting more people take up polo. “Many people,” he said, “think polo is only a rich man’s sport, but it is no more expensive than many other hobbies like sailing or motor racing”. He did not actually compare the price of polo to playing video games but that was back in the days of the original PlayStation, so it might not have compared so favourably.

I love seeing what people type into search engines. You might need to work at a search engine, or subscribe to some sort of search intelligence service to see the true depth and breadth of what your fellow man is searching the internet for, but if you have some risqué terms in your blog you will get a small taste test if you have any sort of analytics running.

Since I put up my Java Programmers Are The Erotic Furries of Programming hierarchy, my referrer logs have been amusing me a great deal. I can’t help but think that people coming from a google search for “erotic” are in for a letdown when they get here. But some make me wonder even more.

The reason I had to write this post was because I just snorted coffee over my laptop after finding somebody searched for “javascript for furries”. Although some other phrases are intriguing, “geek monkeys”, “erotic java” and “erotic nerds”, did not induce an involuntary snort.

I am tempted to start including deliberate weirdy bait in posts, just so I can see if people are out there searching for “hot girls in hot tinfoil hats” or “Is it wrong to want to have sex with my cousin if she is also my sister”, but taking the randomness out of if would probably spoil the fun.

I have to credit anybody who made it here searching for “erotic” with being dedicated to the cause though. According to Google Webmaster Tools, a page on my site is the 156th result Google presents for that search. Having clicked through 15 pages of results to find this, I really hope some of the other nearby results were more suitable. Though I think dedication is a fine trait in a pervert. I have no time for those fair weather perverts who would have stopped after the 10th page of results.

For future reference, this is a Java Programmer:

(from: http://faq.javaranch.com/view?ActiveStaff)

This is a furry.

(from http://pressedfur.coolfreepages.com/press/sex2k/ [NSFW])

While I will grant you that there are some striking similarities between the two groups, I think given practice you will learn to look for the subtle differences that set them apart and be able to differentiate the two groups.