File uploads stopped working

Ok, so we have the example code from the docs:

Titanium.Media.openPhotoGallery({
            success:function(event) {
                //success callback fired after media retrieved from gallery 
                var xhr = Titanium.Network.createHTTPClient();
                xhr.onload = function(e) {
                    Ti.UI.createAlertDialog({
                          title:'Success',
                          message:'status code ' + this.status
                    }).show();
                };
                xhr.open('POST',Ti.API.APP_BASE+'/uploadProfileImage.php?');
                xhr.send({
                    theImage:event.media,  //event.media holds blob from gallery
                    username:'foo',
                    password:'bar'
                  });
            }
        });

The php file does this simple thing:

session_start();
 
// Dump files
ob_start();
echo("FILES:");
var_dump($_FILES);
$contents = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
error_log($contents);

The output in the logs are:

mod_fcgid: stderr: FILES:array(0) {
mod_fcgid: stderr: }

file_uploads in our php ini is turned on and max size is set to 16M. The files we are testing with are much smaller.

Anyone have any idea what could be wrong?