Wednesday, 9 September 2015

Integrity, Integrity Plus and Scrutiny - updates to fix recent mysterious crashes

Since earlier in September there has been a number of support requests with the following pattern:

  • Integrity or Scrutiny being run on Yosemite (seems fine on Mavericks or El Capitan)
  • The app quits at a consistent point in the scan
  • The site contains links to "docs.google...." or "drive.google..."
  • The crash report shows that control is with the system rather than Integrity or Scrutiny at the point of the crash
  • Integrity and Scrutiny have been very stable for a long time, this problem will have started recently and without you changing anything

The google links work in a browser without the browser crashing, even with cookies and js switched off (which is how Integrity and Scrutiny generally send their requests).

Having traced this to the Google links, I then narrowed it to the User-Agent string. The problem seems to be with sending an http request to these urls with the default user-agent string for Integrity or Scrutiny. (By default my apps are honest about their identity.)

I have two workarounds. The first is easy - go to Preferences and switch the User Agent string to one of the browsers.

The second is to blacklist these links by setting up two rules saying:

Do not check urls containing docs.google
Do not check urls containing drive.google


I've just released new versions of Integrity and Integrity Plus (v5.4.2) and Scrutiny (v5.9.12) which contain a little hack meaning that you can continue using the default UA string for Integrity or Scrutiny and the scan will complete with these links being tested.

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