Excess nonchalance in VirusTotal failure handler

[actualben]

Right now when the call to the VirusTotal API fails, it does so silently to the user. A log entry does get made, but that's it.

• Users should be told explicitly in the UI that the VT API calls aren't working. The VT scanning is arguably the point of the app.
• You should record it in sentry since you've got that in there.
• It would be great to have a way to see the full request/response when the failure happens so self-helpers can more easily self-help (maybe a debug flag, envvar, or preference item)

//send request
// ->synchronous, so will block
vtData = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:request returningResponse:&httpResponse error:&error];

//sanity check(s)
if( (nil == vtData) ||
    (nil != error) ||
    (200 != (long)[(NSHTTPURLResponse *)httpResponse statusCode]) )
{
    //err msg
    NSLog(@"OBJECTIVE-SEE ERROR: failed to query VirusTotal (%@, %@)", error, httpResponse);
    
    //bail
    goto bail;
}

an example of this log message looks like this:

OBJECTIVE-SEE ERROR: failed to query VirusTotal ((null), <NSHTTPURLResponse: 0x6000036b6f80> { URL: https://www.virustotal.com/partners/sysinternals/file-reports?apikey=233--REDACTED-FOR-GITHUB--5ad } {Status Code: 400, Headers {
    "Content-Length" =     (
        223
    );
    "Content-Type" =     (
        "text/html; charset=UTF-8"
    );
    Date =     (
        "Tue, 24 May 2022 09:38:38 GMT"
    );
    Server =     (
        "Google Frontend"
    );
    "X-Cloud-Trace-Context" =     (
        b8b50fe04729d7855e74760b9ab318d4
    );
} })

Which tells us relatively little about what went wrong:

Bad request. Your request was somehow incorrect. This can be caused by missing arguments or arguments with wrong values.

[zachtu]

Hi @actualben, I know this is quite an old issue but did you ever find a solution to what was causing this error?

[actualben]

@zachtu No. In #18 I experimented with changing the user-agent string, that seemed to work at least for a while, but it wasn't reliably reproducible.

Next I assumed that some kind of abuse-prevention IP or request pattern blocking was in effect on VTs servers, but other macs on my internal network had no issues talking to VT.

When I was working on #18 I did log the VT request errors to the console but the error messages returned by the API weren't helpful.

Finally I turned to this ticket thinking that there should be better logging and also that Patrick would maybe have admin access to a VT API account that would show errors / error rates for VT clients or something like that.