Dan emailed me this link and told me to open it. He didn’t say much other than it was a forgery site so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It was obviously a link to some sort of Google site but in Firefox 2 I was prompted with this:
I decided to help out by clicking the “This isn’t a web forgery” link so I’m not sure how long this will remain flagged as a forgery. I also tested the link in Internet Explorer but it is okay there. I wonder how this ever happened?
That’s a bit odd – the Mozilla start page is a Google page, maybe the warning comes up because of the .au sub-domain name?
erm… before i clicked the button, i thought, “how do i know there are no non-ascii chars in that name?!”
well, what’s an easy way to check that? i’ve no idea!
this also raises questions about the forgery submission process and management.. hmmm.
That is a test page so people can see that their forgery protection works. If you take off all those variables from the end of the URL it doesn’t give you that warning.
@Anonymous on Oct 19, 2006 at 11:22 AM
i think you’re wrong, this is the default homepage copied from FF2.0 RC2
[en-US.start.mozilla.com]
looks the same to me, except for the region of course.
Smiff is right that this is not a test page. The test page that Google has setup is this one:
[google.com]
It is no longer coming up as forgery, but still what is with the Australian domain?
I’m guessing it’s the Australian version…
look at the address. actually read it this time. its com.au — an isp. someone signed up for google.com.au and put that site up. it IS a forgery, and this is a perfect example of why forgeries are so dangerous. even told explicitly that it is a forgery, you don’t see it/believe it.
Umm…that is still owned by Google. That is just the Australian version of the Google homepage.
Google has already removed the site from being a forgery so this no longer works.