Sidingsound

Many of you who use Google’s various services (Calendar, Reader, Docs, etc.) wll be aware that you can access them over a secure (SSL or “https://”) connection. It’s often a good idea—in fact, I believe that GMail can’t be accessed any other way—and it’s usually quite easy to achieve (often, simply changing the ‘http://’ on the front of the URL to ‘https://’ is enough. I try and use the SSL addresses as a matter of course—certainly when I’m out of the house, and definitely if I’m using public WiFi—as you can never be sure if someone else in range is ’sniffing’ the network traffic.

Recently, however, I’ve been frustrated by my attempts to try and access some Google services via ‘https://’, using my Linux-powered Asus Eee 701 ‘netbook’. Whenever I tried, I would be redirected to the non-secure version of the page, or even the default Google/iGoogle home page—really not what you want, especially if on a public network.

I was stumped by this: was it a problem with the Linux Firefox? The particular version of Firefox I was using at the time (v3.0.1—I have since upgraded)? Something even more sinister…?

Um, no, actually—I have just worked it out, and I really should have thought of it before. Basically, Google usually allows you to access specific services of theirs, via two URL ‘patterns’. For instance, if you want Google Calendar, you can use either www.google.com/calendar or calendar.google.com—either will do.

Or at least, this is the case if you only want to access the non-secure (http://) pages. If you’re looking for the secure (https://) version, you can only use the “www.google.com/[service]” URL pattern—try using “https://[service].google.com”, and you’ll be redirected straight to the insecure pages, with no warning that this is going to occur.

So, if you want to ensure (as far as possible) that you will get through to an encrypted Google service, make sure that you enter the URL in the format https://www.google.com/calendar/ (or whichever service you want), and all should be well. (And while I think of it: at time of writing, I believe that only the “google.com” domain enables “https://” connections, so “google.co.uk” and other national domains won’t give you a secure link either.)

Hope this helps someone else