[HTTPS-E Rulesets] rule exception for news.google.com/newspapers

[Seth David Schoen]

Joseph Ishak writes:

> I saved the file and then restarted firefox.  When I tried to visit "
> http://news.google.com/newspapers", I get kicked to "
> https://encrypted.google.com".
> I also tried to remove all references to "news" in the GoogleServices.xml
> file but I still get kicked to "https://encrypted.google.com".  I am
> attaching
> my "GoogleServices.xml" file in case someone can see what is the error.  I
> would be grateful for any help.

Hi,

I think the steps you followed are all correct, but you didn't
delete the original GoogleServices.xml rule from the
chrome\content\rules directory.  In the current version of
HTTPS Everywhere, HTTPSEverywhereUserRules is meant only for
_new_ rules, not for modified versions of existing rules.
When you put a modified version of an existing rule into
HTTPSEverywhereUserRules without deleting the original rule,
HTTPS Everywhere notices the duplication and ignores the
modified one completely.

There is no currently documented way to modify existing rules,
although either deleting or modifying the existing rule should
work in practice (until you upgrade to a new version of HTTPS
Everywhere, which would restore the original contents of
chrome\content\rules).  An alternative that would continue
using your version in preference to our version, even after an
HTTPS Everywhere upgrade, is to disable the "GoogleServices" rule
with the checkbox and make sure that your modified version has a
different name (in the XML code), like

  <ruleset name="MyGoogleServices" match_rule="http:.*google">

We're aware of the problem with http://news.google.com/newspapers
and we'll probably be able to incorporate your fix, which looks
correct to me, into the next released version of HTTPS Everywhere.

(The error messages that you see about "Expected declaration but
found '*'" seem to relate to how Firefox interprets Google's
HTML and probably aren't directly attributable to HTTPS
Everywhere.  At least, other people who are not using HTTPS
Everywhere sometimes see similar messages in their error console
when using popular websites...)

-- 
Seth Schoen
Senior Staff Technologist                         schoen at eff.org
Electronic Frontier Foundation                    https://www.eff.org/
454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA  94110     +1 415 436 9333 x107