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OAuth Will Murder Your Children

zachholman.com

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Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#71

Post by pvg »

tptacek wrote: post #14
judofyr wrote: post #6

Even better: Let the application also say why it needs the permission: * Read access We want to analyse your tweets * Read/write Because we want to spam your friends

Both OS X and WinAPI do this now. Users (in general) hate it. You make a good point, but it's going to have little impact in the real world. People livin' in that 21st century do it better'n anybody you ever seen do it and they want their Kanye analysis now; they ain't got nothin' to lose! They rollin'! I am deadly serious.

There is a difference, though, OS X and Win apps ask for things that generally make no sense to a user, even if the app tried to explain them. 'I'd like to send tweets pretending to be you' is at least mildly meaningful unlike 'I'd like to BE you' which is the sort of permission desktop apps are stuck asking for.

Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#72

Post by RickHull »

joshwa wrote: post #60
seiji wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but it works because a.) Zach follows through with the metaphor throughout the article and b.) it isn't slimy self promotion.

"43 Ways OAuth Will Murder Your Children"

Don't forget the tangentially-related-through-twitter https://github.com/lg/murder

Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#73

Post by masklinn »

tptacek wrote: post #14
judofyr wrote: post #6

Even better: Let the application also say why it needs the permission: * Read access We want to analyse your tweets * Read/write Because we want to spam your friends

Both OS X and WinAPI do this now. Users (in general) hate it. You make a good point, but it's going to have little impact in the real world. People livin' in that 21st century do it better'n anybody you ever seen do it and they want their Kanye analysis now; they ain't got nothin' to lose! They rollin'! I am deadly serious.

> Both OS X and WinAPI do this now. Users (in general) hate it

Actually, I rarely see it popping up on OSX so I don't have much of an issue. Win7 on the other hand is downright dreadful: the whole screen flickers (not fades, mind you, you get the impression that the screen just shut down before you see the UAC window pop up) to black (and it manages to lag, which is terrifying), then your content reappears behind a lightbox and you end up with a small UAC window in a random position on one of your n screens (where n > 1 for me), unless somehow an other software has managed to steal focus and then all hell breaks lose (the program which started the UAC prompt will not respond, but I believe it does not focus UAC automatically, so you're left wondering why it's crashed).

And then it manages to not tell you anything useful about why you were prompted. And the window itself sucks: the details are mostly useless (they don't even tell you what the soft is trying to do), there are pointless effects (the zone where you have to enter your password becomes blueish if you hover, half the text of the window changes your mouse pointer to a hand even though they're not clickable, ...) and it pops up every time something tries to fart in Program Files.

OSX at least has the decency to let you drop softs in /Applications without bothering you.

Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#74

Post by StavrosK »

archangel_one wrote: post #70
StavrosK wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point about Android is half correct, yes I like seeing what the app needs to access, but I don't see why . Why does your calculator app need access to the internet? I know the author can just offer some bullshit excuse, but it's better than nothing...

I would very much like the checkboxes in Android too, although obviously they'd place a greater burden on developers. For example, I tried installing the official XBMC remote app a while back; it requested all sorts of crazy permissions ("read SMS" etc) which they were intending to use for debatably useful features but I ended up not installing it because of the privacy concerns. In the end I installed a third-party…

Oh, no, I don't need checkboxes (I realise it would make development hard). I only need a justification under each permission to see if the app has a good reason to want to read my texts, but I'm quite happy denying it as a whole.

Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#75

Post by RossM »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #4

Android needs this too, perhaps even more than OAuth does.

I think that Android needs it to go a bit further by differentiating between required permissions and optional ones. Having them all optional could cause the app to plain not work (no, Handcent can't send messages) or users would just block apps that request internet access for fetching adverts from doing so.

However, I'd welcome annotations for exactly why an app requires each permission.

Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#76

Post by apike »

Due to a long-standing bug in the Twitter API, you can not add write support to an app without deleting it entirely and re-creating the app in their system. It will let you change the flag for future users, but there is no way to request the additional privileges from a user if needed. As such, it unfortunately a "good idea" to always create your Twitter apps as read-write.

Reference: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=669

Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#77

Post by joesb »

lurker17 wrote: post #68
shasta wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's ridiculous. The Unix security model doesn't even address untrusted applications, unless you think auto-downloading and running Unix executables would work out well. The situation with web security is terrible and there aren't any "good old days" we can revert back to -- every mainstream OS has done it wrong. Good security is difficult and influences many parts of a system, but if it were a priority for any of…

An untrusted application is handled in running it as a dedicated user, like 'httpd' or 'nobody'.

Can nobody access "user joe"'s SMS and Email?

A. If it can, then it can send my personal info to outside world. I don't care if it can't gain root access to my phone. My phone's root account is not important, my personal information inside that phone is.

B. If it cannot. Then most of my application is useless because it can't access any information at all. Why don't I add it to "trusted" zone? Because I don't trust it. And I shouldn't have to.

So what do I want? I want it to see my personal data but not being able to send it to anyone.

We're back to permission based system again.

Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#78

Post by milfot »

The problem, as I see it, is over the top access requests to access elevated privileges and personal information is the norm. This is not a user problem.

There must be a way for :

1. third-party developers to use the api to access information for their app in a kind of handshake mode - without the ability to use that information externally - or to access elevated privileges in a kind of sandbox arrangement.

2. for the api developers to use their control of market places and warnings to make these low level access privileges the norm, rather than the exception.

Getting these two things in place would mean developers would have to make a case to you, the user, if they wanted to do something more powerful or dodgy with the api.

Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#80

Post by compay »

jacquesm wrote: post #17
beaumartinez wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be cool. But really, I don't think people will double-guess themselves when QuizMatic3000 doesn't give reasons for it. (An age-old UX myth: users never read dialog boxes, they just click OK.)

One fearless developer I worked with would switch the meaning of the boxes every now and then to 'train' the users not to ignore the texts based on negative feedback. +------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Are you really sure you don't want to format ? | | | | | | | +------------------------------------------------------+ He'd have made a pretty good BOFH I think.

> He'd have made a pretty good BOFH

Or punching bag.

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