flickr upgrade weirdness

[vipul]

I finally decided to take the plunge and get a Flickr pro account for myself. Clicked through their upgrade procedure till the point where it says "Ok! I am ready to pay". Clicking on that took me to the familiar Yahoo "password verification" page. Entered my password and submitted... only to be redirected back to the same page

Comments

[code_martial]

This seems to be one of the cases where the fault really is at the client side and there are no feasible work-arounds. From what I suspect, accommodating for the broken proxy could open up security vulnerabilities in the payment gateway.

Obligatory disclaimer: What I've said it purely speculative and I have no official information or authority to speak on the matter.

[vipul]

Assuming that the supposed fault is at the client proxy, here are some observations and suggestions:

* I know for a fact the my campus uses the ever-popular Squid as the proxy-cache.
* Given the popularity of Squid in campus setups, it should be readily possible to trace the exact configuration element(s) that cause this problem.
* If I knew the exact setting to change, I could take it up with my campus computer center as a fix.
* At least it could be well-documented, and help the client proxies solve the problem at their end.
* I am ready to do contribute some time testing this, but are the techies at Yahoo willing/able to help?
* Gosh I wish all this was opensource... so I could find the bug, fix it and share the fix. At the very least file a detailed bug report!

[code_martial]

You could start with looking at the cache control headers coming in from Yahoo! and verifying whether Squid honours them or not.

[vipul]

Would loved to scratch my itch, but alas, I have no admin access to the proxy or its logs in this case :(

I was hoping that the Yahoos have traced the problem down to a specific setting, given that lot of people are facing this. Maybe I'll open a "Help by email" case, with this discussion.

Darn! I hate it when I am not my own sysad ;-)

that bit about credit cards over open wireless

[anonymous]

you sure don't give out CC info over HTTP connection, do you? If you do - you'll have problems over any network.

If you do use HTTPS - which is end-to-end encrypted, you don't need to worry if the wireless connection is open or not.

I'll probably not be checking for replies, so consider it as food for thought.

--AC(DC).

Re: that bit about credit cards over open wireless

[vipul]

you sure don't give out CC info over HTTP connection, do you? If you do - you'll have problems over any network.
No, of course the protocol being used is HTTPS, I am not worried about credit card theft. The problem is the unreliable connection. I have had a few instances where the network went down during a transaction and I had to resolve the issue over phone with "customer care".

[anonymous]

I'm visiting this post from the future. Mid-August. Same problems. I, too, do not have non-proxy access. What a stupid issue; I let my pro account lapse on purpose because I was doing research for a friend. Now, one day after the expiration of my account, I cannot renew it. Sucks.

But thanks for helping me figure it out. A Google search for "flickr upgrade" returned a first-page link to your entry.

[vipul]

Hello anonymous-visitor-from-the-future,

Glad that this post helped you, in whatever little way. I am wondering what timeline between now and your time would make this page come up on the first page of results on a Google search for "flickr upgrade"; right now it is not part of the first (or second) page.

PS: May I borrow your temporal-shift network connection for a while?

~vipul