This is a continuation of my previous article, “The Weeping Web of January 2017 (Part 1)“.  It describes more frustrating experiences with websites in 2017, a time when websites and web developers should have supposedly reached a certain level of maturity. Some of the entries here were contributed by other people, and others are from my own experiences.

EA Origin Store

When resetting your password on the EA Origin Store, the new password you choose has a maximum length validation. In this particular case, your password cannot be longer than 16 characters.

This is an incredibly stupid practice, for two reasons. First, we should be encouraging people to use longer passwords, because that makes them harder to brute force. Secondly, any system that is properly hashing its passwords (or, even better, using a hash algorithm plus work factor) will know that the result of a hashed password is a fixed length string (regardless of original input length), so this is not subject to any maximum column length in a database.

Untangled Media

If you scroll through the pictures of the team at Untangled Media, you’ll see that the last one is broken. Ironically, it seems that that person is responsible for content.

Needless to say, broken images give a feeling of neglect that is reminiscent of the mythical broken window from The Pragmatic Programmer.

Outlyer on Eventbrite

Another thing that makes sites (and any written content, for that matter) look unprofessional is typos. If you’re sending an SMS to a friend, a typo might be acceptable. If you’re organising an event to launch a product, three typos in the same sentence don’t give a very good impression.

BRND WGN

The first thing you see on the BRND WGN website is an animation taking up the whole screen, switching around frantically like it’s on drugs:

There are only three things you can do to learn more about what the site has to offer: play a video, click on (literally) a hamburger menu, or scroll down.

While I’m not sure this can be reasonably classified as mystery meat navigation, it does no favours to the visitor who has to take additional actions to navigate the site. While the hamburger icon looks like a cutesy joke, it looks silly on what is supposed to be a professional branding website, and hides the site’s navigation behind an additional layer of indirection.

This is a real pity, because if you scroll to the bottom, the site actually does have well laid out navigation links you can use to get around the site! These should really be the first thing a visitor sees; it makes no sense that they are hidden at the bottom of the page.

I also noticed that if you click on that hand in the bottom-right, you get this creepy overlay:

The only reasonable reaction to this is:

Image credit: taken from here.

Daphne Caruana Galizia

The controversial journalist and blogger who frequently clashes with public figures would probably have a bone to pick with her webmaster if she knew that the dashboard header for her WordPress site was visible for not-logged-in users while she was logged in last week:

While this won’t let anyone into the actual administrative facilities (because a login is still requested), there’s no denying that something went horribly wrong to make all this visible, including Daphne’s own username (not shown here for security reasons).

Identity Malta

The Identity Malta website has some real problems with its HTTPS configuration. In fact, Firefox is quick to complain:

This analysis from Chrome, sent in by a friend, shows why:

Ouch. It defeats the whole point of using SSL certificates if they are not trusted. But that’s not all. Running a security scan against the site reveals the following:

Not only is the certificate chain incomplete, but the scan identified a more serious vulnerability (obfuscated here). An institution dealing with identity should be a little more up to speed with modern security requirements than this.

Another (less important) issue is with the site’s rendering. As you load the page the first time or navigate from one page to another, you’ll notice something happening during the refresh, which is pretty much this:

There’s a list of items that gets rendered into a horizontally scrolling marquee-like section:

Unfortunately, this transformation is so slow that it is noticeable, making the page load look jerky at best.

Battle.net

I personally hate ‘security’ questions, because they’re insecure (see OWASP page, engadget summary of Google study, and Wired article). Nowadays, there’s the additional trend of making them mandatory for a password reset, so if you forget the answer (or intentionally provide a bogus one), you’re screwed and have to contact support.

If you don’t know the answer to the silly question, you can use a game’s activation code (haven’t tried that, might work) or contact support. Let’s see what happens when we choose the latter route.

Eventually you end up in a form where you have to fill in the details of your problem, and have to provide a government-issued photo ID (!). If you don’t do that, your ticket gets logged anyway, but ends up in a status of “Need Info”:

The idea is that you need to attach your photo ID to the ticket. However, when you click on the link, you are asked to login:

…and that doesn’t help when the problem was to login in the first place.

It’s really a pain to have to go through all this crap when it’s usually enough to just hit a “Reset Password” button that sends you an email with a time-limited reset link. Your email is something that only you (supposedly) have access to, so it identifies you. If someone else tried to reset your password, you just ignore the email, and your account is still fine. In case your email gets compromised, you typically can use a backup email address or two-factor authentication involving a mobile device to prove it’s really you.

Security questions are bullshit; they provide a weak link in the security chain and screw up user experience. Let’s get rid of them sooner rather than later.

Malta Health Department

It is a real pity when a government department’s website loses the trust supposedly provided by HTTPS just because it uses a few silly images that are delivered over HTTP.

The Economist

Remember how you could read any premium article on The Times of Malta by just going incognito in your browser (see “The Sorry State of the Web in 2016“)? Seems The Economist has the same problem.

Article limit…

…no article limit…

Remember, client-side validation is not enough!

On a Positive Note, Mystery Meat Navigation

I’m quite happy to see that mystery meat navigation (MMN) seems to be on its way out, no doubt due to the relatively recent trend of modern webites with simple and clear navigation. I haven’t been able to find any current examples of MMN in the first five pages of Google results when searching for local web design companies, so it’s clear that the local web design industry has made great strides compared to when I wrote the original MMN article.

Summary

This is the third article in which I’ve been pointing out problems in various websites, both local and international. After so many years of web development, designs might have become prettier but lots of websites are still struggling with fundamental issues that make them look amateurish, dysfunctional or even illegal.

Here are some tips to do things properly:

• If you’re accepting sensitive data such as credit cards of passwords as input, you have to have fully-functional HTTPS.
• Protect yourself against SQL injection by using parameterised queries or a proper ORM.
• Test your website. Check various kinds of inputs, links, and images. Don’t waste people’s time or piss them off.
• Use server-side validation as well as client-side validation.
• Ensure you have proper backup mechanisms. Shit happens.

When I republished my article “Bypassing a Login Form using SQL Injection“, it received a mixed reception. While some applauded the effort to raise awareness on bad coding practices leading to serious security vulnerabilities (which was the intent), others were shocked. Comments on the articles and on Reddit were basically variants of “That code sucks” (of course it sucks, that’s exactly what the article is trying to show) and “No one does these things any more”.

If you’ve had the luxury of believing that everybody writes proper code, then here are a few things (limited to my own personal experience) that I ran into during 2016, and in these first few days of 2017.

SQL Injection

I was filling in a form on the website of a local financial institution a few days ago, when I ran into this:

It was caused by the apostrophe in my surname which caused a syntax error in the SQL INSERT statement. The amateur who developed this website didn’t even bother to do basic validation, let alone parameterised queries which would also have safeguarded against SQL injection.

Airlines and Apostrophes

My experience with airlines is that they tend to go to the other extreme. In order to keep their websites safe, they simply ban apostrophes altogether. This is a pain in the ass when your surname actually has an apostrophe in it, and airlines stress the importance of entering your name and surname exactly as they show on your passport.

United Airlines, for instance, believe that the surname I was born with isn’t valid:

Virgin America, similarly, takes issue with my whole full name:

We’re in 2017. Even shitty Air Malta accepts apostrophes. All you need to do is use parameterised queries or a proper ORM. Using silly and generic error messages doesn’t help avoid customer frustration.

Plagiarism

Speaking of Air Malta, here’s a classic which they ripped off from some other US airline:

US Federal law? In Malta? Go home, Air Malta. You’re drunk.

Don’t Piss People Off

I’ve had a really terrible experience with booking domestic flights with US airlines. There is always some problem when it comes to paying online with a VISA.

United Airlines, for instance, only accepts payments from a specific set of countries. Malta is not on that list, and there is no “Other” option:

Delta gives a variety of billing-address-related errors depending on what you enter.

Southwest provides fields to cater for payments coming from outside the US:

And yet, you need to provide a US State, Zip Code and Billing Phone Number.

The worst offender, though, is Virgin America. While the overall experience of their AngularJS website is quite pleasant, paying online is a hair-ripping experience. If you choose a country where the State field does not apply (such as Malta, or the UK), a validation error fires in JavaScript (it doesn’t appear in the UI) and does not let you proceed:

It’s almost like the developers of this website didn’t quite test their form. Because developers normally do test their code, right? Right?

Well, when I reported the error to Virgin, and offered to provide a screenshot and steps to reproduce, the support representative gave me this canned bullshit:

“So sorry for the web error. Can recommend using one of our compatible browsers chrome or safari. Clearing your cookies and cache.  If no resolve please give reservations a ring [redacted] or international [redacted] you’ll hear a beep then silence while it transfers you to an available agent.  Thanks for reaching out.~”

I had to escalate the issue just so that I could send in the screenshot to forward to their IT department. Similarly, I was advised to complete the booking over the phone.

Over a month later, the issue is still there. It’s no wonder they want people to book via telephone. Aside from the international call rate, they charge a whooping $20 for a sales rep to book you over the phone.

Use SSL for Credit Card And Personal Details

In July 2016, I wanted to book a course from the local Lifelong Learning unit. I found that they were accepting credit card details via insecure HTTP. Ironically, free courses (not needing a credit card) could be booked over an HTTPS channel. When I told them about this, the response excuse was:

“This is the system any Maltese Government Department have been using for the past years.”

It is NOT okay (and it’s probably illegal) to transmit personal information, let alone credit card details, over an insecure channel. That information can be intercepted by unauthorised parties and leaked for the world to see, as has happened many times before thanks to large companies that didn’t take this stuff seriously.

To make matters worse, Lifelong Learning don’t accept cheques by post, so if you’re not comfortable booking online, you have to go medieval and bring yourself to their department to give them a cheque in person.

I couldn’t verify if this problem persists today, as the booking form was completely broken when I tried filling it a few days ago – I couldn’t even get to the payment screen.

Update 8th January 2017: I have now been able to reproduce this issue. The following screenshots are proof, using the Photo Editing course as an example. I nudged the form a little to the right so that it doesn’t get covered by the security popup.

Update 9th January 2017: Someone pointed out that the credit card form is actually an iframe served over HTTPS. That’s a little better, but:

• From a security standpoint, it’s still not secure.
• From a user experience perspective, a user has no way of knowing whether the page is secure, because the iframe’s URL is hidden and the browser does not show a padlock.
• The other personal details (e.g. address, telephone, etc) are still transmitted unencrypted.

Do Server Side Validation

When Times of Malta launched their fancy new CMS-powered website a few years ago, they were the object of much derision. Many “premium” articles which were behind a paywall could be accessed simply by turning off JavaScript.

Nowadays, you can still access premium articles simply by opening an incognito window in your browser.

Let’s take a simple example. Here’s a letter I wrote to The Times a few years ago, which is protected by the paywall:

Back in 2014, I used to be able to access this article simply by opening it in an Incognito window. Let’s see if that still works in 2017:

Whoops, that’s the full text of the article, without paying anything!

Like those critics of my SQL injection article, you’d think that people today know that client-side validation is not enough, and that it is easy to bypass, and that its role is merely to provide better user experience and reduce unnecessary roundtrips to the server. The real validation still needs to be server-side.

Conclusion

Many people think we’re living in a golden age of technology. Web technology in particular is progressing at a breathtaking pace, and we have many more tools nowadays than we could possibly cope with.

And yet, we’re actually living in an age of terrible coding practices and ghastly user experience. With all that we’ve learned in over two decades of web development, we keep making the same silly mistakes over and over again.

I hope that those who bashed my SQL injection article will excuse me if I keep on writing beginner-level articles to raise awareness.