Huh! Has something happened to google?

[Mark Hobley]

I have been using google for a few years now and have had no problems
with the front page before. However, this afternoon there have suddenly
appeared loads of hex codes on the front page where regular characters
sit. So instead of reading "Web Images News Groups", etc across the top,
it now reads:

Web 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
20 49 60 61 63 65 73 20 56 69 64 65 6F 73 20 40 61 70 73 20 4F 65 77 73 20

The entire front page is scattered with symbols, including the search
button, etc.

The Google website was working fine this morning.

If I switch the stylesheet off, by using Menu> View, Page Style, No
Style, the page appears to be relatively normal (with no hexidecimal
boxes), except for a table of 5 boxes at the top, three of which are empty,
one containing the number 1, and one containing some sort page source in a
scrollable box.

I am using the iceweasel browser, which is a derivative of Mozilla Firefox,
and my system is Debian configured as follows:

Preferred language: English [en]
Character Encoding: Western (ISO8559-1)

I have also tried viewing the page with Unicode (UTF-8)
character encoding, but this does not resolve the problem.

Has anyone else seen this?

--
Mark Hobley
Linux User: #370818 http://markhobley.yi.org/

[Moe Trin]

On Sun, 11 Oct 2009, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.misc, in article
<h8c9q6-...@neptune.markhobley.yi.org>, Mark Hobley wrote:

>However, this afternoon there have suddenly appeared loads of hex codes
>on the front page where regular characters sit. So instead of reading
>"Web Images News Groups", etc across the top, it now reads:
>
>Web 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
> 20 49 60 61 63 65 73 20 56 69 64 65 6F 73 20 40 61 70 73 20 4F 65 77 73 20

sp I ` a c e s sp V i d e o s sp @ a p s sp O e w s sp

ASCII That doesn't decode into what I'd expect though.

>The Google website was working fine this morning.

and seems no worse that usual now. Using lynx:
Google

Web Images Videos Maps News Shopping Gmail more <BB>

iGoogle | Search settings | Sign in

Sun Oct 11 10:55:26 MST 2009 and links:

Google
____________________
Web Images Videos Maps News Shopping Gmail more >>

iGoogle | Search settings | Sign in

Sun Oct 11 10:55:46 MST 2009. Which servers are you connecting to?
I seem to be hitting various addresses in 64.233.169.0/24, and that
doesn't seem like the addresses I normally see.

Old guy