Magic quotes strike again!
I’ve disabled magic_quotes_gpc on our mobile transcoder’s PHP configuration, fixing access to articles with apostrophes or double quotes in their names:
Of course, it should be fixed to detect and undo this data corruption on input. At least this misfeature is finally going to die in PHP 6… :D
Okay folks, as of a couple hours ago unified login is available opt-in for all Wikimedia accounts!
In addition, we’ve enabled the site-wide global session cookies (which have been in testing for the SSL interface on secure.wikimedia.org for a few weeks). Some people may not be able to successfully get that working across domains (we’ve got reports of Norton blocking the login-cookie-fetching images), but it seems to be working for most people so far. :)
This means that not only will your global, unified account have the same password on say English Wikipedia and Commons, but once you’ve logged in on one you’ll be logged in on the other, without having to log in a second time. Handy!
Note that to do this fully automatically, when you visit a new wiki for the first time it will autocreate a local account for you, linked to your global account. Initially this was spamming the Recent Changes lists with account creation logs, but I’ve now pulled that (they’re still logged in Special:Log, however). (This has been disabled for now, as it’s spamming logs and user lists faster than expected, even through “invisible” links like shared JS and CSS. You’ll still get your shiny local accounts by going through the regular login form, and once you’ve done it once your sessions remain shared.)
Big thanks to Tim Starling who’s done a huge amount of work on CentralAuth in the last couple months, as well as Andrew Garrett who’s helped a lot with the cross-domain cookie logins and global Steward group management.
So it turns out that the search function on Wikipedia’s HawHaw-powered mobile gateway hasn’t been working for a long time, not because it wasn’t implemented, but because it was screen-scraping the search results page.
Some little detail of the results layout changed ages ago, breaking it. Nice! Well, I’ve redone it to use the MediaWiki web service API which should be a little more stable.
Search works again, yay!
Even if the correct search result is fifth in the output *cough* :)
Hey, we’re workin’ on it. ;)
Hey, just to give y’all a heads-up… after a couple months of good testing w/ the sysops & power users, we’re going to widen the CentralAuth rollout to allow everybody on Wikimedia sites to opt-in to the system.
We’re going to keep automatic migration off for now to keep the volume down, as we may want to roll out more helper tools in response to new issues people might have.
I don’t usually repost other blogs, but this is a big usability help for our non-Latin wikis… Firefox 3 is joining Safari and Opera 9 in displaying human-legible Unicode URLs in the location bar.
Woohoo!
About to head out to RecentChangesCamp 2008 in Palo Alto, CA… see y’all there!
For a long time we’ve had intermittent problems with diffs displaying incorrectly, with lines on the left side mysteriously repeated:
Reports skyrocketed the other day, when the wikidiff2 extension (our C++ reimplementation of MediaWiki’s diff algorithm, about a billion times faster than the PHP one) was upgraded to match upgrades of PHP on our older, Fedora Core-based servers.
I added in some logging hacks to try to track it down, but didn’t get a lot of data points until I tried the simple expedient of running every diff twice — if the results don’t match, log the error.
With a few hundred instances logged, it became clear that the problem was limited to servers running Fedora 4; even-older Fedora 3 boxes were unaffected, as were all our newer Ubuntu boxes. Mysterious problems caused by C++ run-time library mismatches between different Linux releases are not at all uncommon; it looked like we’d installed an FC3 binary on all the machines, and it was intermittently failing on FC4.
I recompiled the extension, this time with separate builds on FC3 and FC4, and haven’t seen any bad diffs come through my log in the last half hour… so far so good! :)
In en.wikipedia.org’s job queue at the moment, breakdown by job type…
| job_cmd | count(*) |
|---|---|
| htmlCacheUpdate | 31,147 |
| refreshLinks | 10,106,739 |
| renameUser | 119 |
Note that the current system allows for duplicate entries to get put in the queue; the dupes are removed as the first one in the stack gets run. This makes the raw number of refreshLinks entries much higher than it “really” is — [[Wikipedia:Talk:Union Station (Louisville)|Talk:Union Station (Louisville)]] is listed 9 times, presumably once for each template edit that triggered an “update me!” job.
Update: Figured out why the queues were growing so big last few days — system clock was 7 seconds slow on the database master. This made the replication lag detection misread a 7-second minimum lag on every slave. The job queue batch runners were all sitting waiting for the lag to resolve. :)
Resynced the clock (presumably drifted during the period when some IPs were broken), things are moving again.
Another in today’s series of fun feature enablings…
The search boxes on Wikimedia wikis now have an AJAX-powered search suggestion drop-down. This calls our JSON OpenSearch suggestion interface, which has been used for some time by Firefox’s search box and Mac OS X 10.5’s Dictionary application, but is now built-in for your viewing pleasure.
(In MediaWiki 1.13 development trunk, turn on $wgEnableMWSuggest to experience this yourself!)
A similar AJAX-powered search feature has been in MediaWiki for some time, but the user interface for it took over the whole article area, which was a bit distracting, and we never used it ourselves.
Robert Stojnic, the tireless coder who’s put a huge amount of effort into fixing up our Lucene-based search engine over the last months, patched up the front-end to fit more naturally into the existing forms.
The built-in search for suggestions is currently a simple prefix match, so it’ll help you complete words and names, but isn’t smart enough to fill out from a last name or skip “the” etc. Robert’s got a new backend in the works, which will add all those smarts when we’re ready to upgrade the search systems with the new software and a bit beefier hardware.
Prefix matches are a heck of a lot better than nothing, though, and as long as it’s not causing undue server load we’ll keep it on until the new backend’s ready.
(If you don’t like the suggestions widget, you can disable them by checking “Disable AJAX suggestions” in the “Search” tab at Special:Preferences.)
Thanks to Werdna’s implementation of support, and Tim’s mass upgrade of our older PHP installations, I’ve today enabled the use of HttpOnly cookies on the Wikimedia wikis for our login session data.
“What’s that,” I hear you say, “and why do I want it?”
The HttpOnly marker on cookies tells a supporting browser that the cookie will only be used directly by the web server (sent only with the HTTP requests for each page), so it will hide the cookie from any JavaScript client code which asks for it.
This provides protection against certain kinds of security vulnerabilities — namely, XSS attacks which steal authenticated session and long-term login token cookies.
HttpOnly doesn’t fix XSS, not by a long shot, but it does reduce what an attacker can do; particularly nice when we’re soon going to start using global login cookies which will allow a unified account to continue a login session across multiple wikis on different domains.
The same origin policy prevents JavaScript on one subdomain from directly accessing another domain. Keeping the cross-domain session cookies away from compromised JavaScript will help prevent a hypothetical attack on one domain from jumping to other subdomains without the vulnerability.
Unfortunately, this marker isn’t standard; it’s an extension which Microsoft added for Internet Explorer in 6.0 SP1, but support has been slowly creeping into other browsers, finally hitting Firefox somewhere in the 2.0 patch cycle while nobody was looking.
Browsers I tested that currently support HttpOnly cookies:
Other browsers will still expose the cookies to JavaScript, as they always have:
There’s a rumor that some versions of WebTV fail altogether when the cookies are marked this way, but I have no way to confirm or deny that yet.
Update 2008-05-01: Mac IE turns out to eat HttpOnly cookies…. sometimes… when the moon is just right. :) Added a browser blacklist, so we feed Mac IE regular cookies. Other browsers are still given the benefit of the doubt.