[GNC] Problem getting Finance::Quote working

[Kalpesh Patel]

Having a development and infrastructure background, I would say with high confidence that AV knows about the loophole and is left there on purpose as a silent enticement for their commercial offerings -- come look what is for free and pay us if you want more of same! If I was architect of that system then it would also make the decision logic of the backend system a lot simpler to permit as such, and then just use IP address for accounting purposes if a valid key is not present (OSI level 7 vs 3). I recall Cisco routers did IP accounting natively in IOS back when dot com was taking off which would work very well here.

-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce Schuck <bschuck at asgard-systems.com> 
Sent: Saturday, January 04, 2025 1:57 PM
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Cc: Tomas Volf <~@wolfsden.cz>; David H <hellvee at gmail.com>; Kalpesh Patel <kalpesh.patel at usa.net>
Subject: Re: [GNC] Problem getting Finance::Quote working

On 1/4/25 09:32:28 -0500, Kalpesh wrote:

> You can provide well know api-key of:

> NOTAREALAPIKEY

> as the key for Alphavantage in order to silence that superfluous 
> message being emanated from F::Q to GNC provided that you are NOT 
> using that module to retrieve any quotes. It has been working for 
> yours truly for many many years...

Using a random key for AlphaVantage is something I mentioned a while ago. I reported that AlphaVantage has a bug in their code that accepts any random string (except the "demo" key used for their samples). For Kalpesh that means if any of his F::Q queries require a currency conversion, it will work as long as he hasn't reached the 25/day limit.

I just verified it still works, so AV has not yet discovered or corrected their bug (or as devs would call it, an "undocumented feature").

** Extra Related Content **

When I first discovered this I modified AlphaVantage.pm to create a random string for every lookup. I was hoping to subvert the daily limit. 
Unfortunately, while AV's key authentication allows any string, I discovered that they must also be keeping track of source IP. Testing more than the daily limit with different keys from the same source IP would fail. Even if I spaced queries apart to avoid the throttle limit.

If I recall I helped a GnuCash user figure out that there was another system in his office/home that was making F::Q AlphaVantage queries (appears as same WAN IP to AlphaVantage). These queries caused him to get the AV "over your limit" response while normally using GnuCash.

Bruce S.