[Blink] google contacts not working in version 0.8.0

[Dan Pascu]

On 15 Apr 2014, at 12:19, Christoph Papke wrote:

> Hi Dan,
> 
> I have deleted the file and configured my google account again, but I still doesn't work.
> 
> This is the content of the google_contacts file:
> ----------------
> ccopy_reg
> _reconstructor
> p1
> (cblink.contacts
> GoogleContactsList
> p2
> c__builtin__
> object
> p3
> NtRp4
> (dp5
> S'timestamp'
> p6
> NsS'_contact_map'
> p7
> (dp8
> sb.
> ----------------
> 
> Is this the standard layout of this file? Strange.

Yes, the file looks fine (it's stored as a python pickle and that's how they look like). I was able to reproduce this. The reason I didn't see it before was that I already had a google_contacts cache and it was used when it failed to fetch the data.

I found the reason and to be honest I'm both baffled and worried. It seems that Google has finally disabled non-secure (i.e. plain http) access to their platforms when fetching contacts, while their contacts API, was hardcoded to use http. While the API seems to support https too, there is no means for an application using the API to ask the API to use https, other than modifying the API's code to change the hardcoded default. I'm baffled because Google seems to push towards secure connections when accessing their services, yet they provide an API to access their services which is hardcoded to non-secure. Had this incident not happened, it would have never crossed my mind that the Google API we use is hardcoded to be insecure.

I fixed this and we'll make a new release shortly. Thanks for finding and reporting this issue.

--
Dan