Google’s “Sorry” Page Shenanigans: When Tor and VPN Users Meet Base64 Befuddlement!
Tor users, meet your new nemesis: Google’s “sorry” page. This page loves to throw shade at your unusual traffic and now sports a cryptic “≠” followed by nonsense bytes, courtesy of your ?q query parameter. While XSS isn’t on the table, you can certainly make it say “hello world” to your heart’s content.
Hot Take:
Google’s “Sorry” page is like a bouncer at a club, always checking IDs and occasionally throwing in some cryptic messages just to keep you on your toes. Who knew that the humble apology page could double as a cryptography puzzle and a potential phishing playground? Welcome to the wild world of accidental cyber-mischief, where even a simple “Oops” from Google can become a hacker’s playground!
Key Points:
– Google’s “Sorry” page now includes a mysterious string of bytes after the client IP address.
– The added bytes are derived from a data structure encoded in the `?q` URL query parameter.
– This change enables users to manipulate the page to display custom plaintext, but HTML or JavaScript injection remains impossible.
– The cryptic bytes are tied to a Protobuf encoding, with lengths over 127 requiring multi-byte encoding.
– Users can experiment with the `?q` parameter to see varying lengths and contents of the byte string displayed.