Is Google App Engine blocking PayPal?

http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thread/thread/9059b0750c45703b

by ptm • 18 years ago

25 20 18 years ago

groups.google.com

thorax4• 18 years ago

Anyone here independently confirm this yet? Not a good sign from a Google neutrality standpoint.

I'll try it tonight if no one else gets a chance.

thorax4• 18 years ago

I got a chance to try it out just to see if a simple URL fetch was blocked:

http://helloworld-111.appspot.com/

Locally, this code reports 200 OK for all of those except the last reports a 302 redirect (to the https, I presume). As you can see, on Google, they all fail with an internal exception.

Paypal does have a universal Disallow in robots.txt, so I thought I'd setup why.gd to do the same. But it works fine.

Anyone else find any other URLs that are blocked?

thorax4• 18 years ago

Looks fixed now. Very fast turnaround. Nice work, Google.

olefoo• 18 years ago

I notice that noone is even considering the possibility that it's an anti-fraud measure run rampant.

pmjordan4• 18 years ago

That was one of my first thoughts, but I would assume that GAE spam-bot abuse would be smarter than that. If there really was someone doing this kind of stuff, surely they would just block that particular PayPal account (along with banning the GAE user) - AFAIK valid PayPal accounts aren't easy to generate in large quantities. And I can't imagine it's a reaction to a GAE-based DDoS attack, as spotting that kind of pattern ought to be really easy and resorting to blocking URLs wouldn't be necessary.

To be honest, I suspect this to be a bug rather than deliberate, or else you'd have thought that they'd have notified people.

waldrews• 18 years ago

Has anybody tried GAE with Amazon FlexPay or another payment service?

timr4• 18 years ago

Not sure what can be done about this, but the URL matching is missing lots of stuff. Posted this five hours ago, with a 1-character difference in the URL:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=213784

(Ordinarily I wouldn't complain, but it's happened about six times in the last 2-3 days.)

pmjordan4• 18 years ago

In that particular case, stripping off everything after # would have helped. In general, it's practically impossible to defend against dupes because you can just frivolously add query strings, so

http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_threa...

and

http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_threa...

aren't dupes, even though they link to the exact same page. There really isn't anything you can do about this particular case except error-prone heuristics.

timr4• 18 years ago

Yeah, it's a difficult problem. In this case, it was a single character that I didn't notice. I'm not even clear on how it got there (or why it wasn't on the second submission URL).

Perhaps the "solution" is to ignore query strings....how many sites use them to distinguish content anymore? Alternately...compare the content of the <head> tag on the linked page? That wouldn't be a perfect solution, but it would probably go a long way.

icky• 18 years ago

Can anyone confirm that GAE isn't just dropping SSL requests in general?

thorax4• 18 years ago

Yeah, I did a little test above with another https site: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214055

gstar• 18 years ago

Fair play to Google, i think, considering PayPal/eBay block Google Checkout on eBay.

babul• 18 years ago

eBay are very monopolistic

Marzia• 18 years ago

This was a bug with our anti-phishing protections, and we are currently working on a fix: http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_threa...

Thanks, Marzia

ucdaz• 18 years ago

Whew! Thank God! Almost passed out!

blinks• 18 years ago

No. Someone from Google responded to that thread noting that it was a bug, and has since been fixed.

Is Google App Engine blocking PayPal?

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