Google access update
In Beijing, it’s June 5, but the Google inaccessibility seems to persist. Even more, the unavailability of www.google.com on my DSL connection (and it seems, most CNC connections) has dribbled over to affect Google Mail in secure mode.
To recap – on May 28, I documented how to use Gmail in https secure mode. Then starting just before the fourth of this month, I reported on the widespread outage of www.google.com and a hack to get around it by using the naked IP address of Google’s US servers.
Now, the inaccessibility of www.google.com does not affect accessing Gmail in normal http mode (http://mail.google.com), but it does mess it up in https mode (https://mail.google.com/mail). It seems a redirect or some other URL during secure mode hits www.google.com, and when that’s not accessible, the whole thing fails.
The solution is to employ the hack described in the post on May 31. To recap:
Put an entry like this:
216.239.37.104 www.google.cominto the appropriate place in your operating system. See the following directions: for Windows and Mac.
Since most folks use Windows, edit this file, make the mod above, save, quit:
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
For now, that will work around this problem for Google searches and using Google in secure mode.
June 10th, 2006 19:10
[...] Since many folks have pointed to my early report and workarounds, for completeness I should report that Google is back to “normal” reachability status in Beijing as of a few days ago. And by normal, I mean the normal GFW keyword and URL filtering is still in place. [...]