A few minutes ago, I went to Google.com and was sent immediately to the German version, Google.de. Nothing I could do could return me to the American version of the search engine. After restarting the computer, the problem persists.
This sort of thing happens if one uses a VPN or a proxy. When you use a VPN (virtual private network), your traffic is routed through another computer. If that computer resides in another country, you will see the Google page serving that country. But: I am not using any kind of VPN right now, and I've never employed one which uses German servers.
Something is rotten with the state of Cannon's computer. Do any tech-heads out there have an idea as to what might be happening? The only program I've installed recently was the updated version of Audacity.
Update: Now it's Latvian Google. I tried running my traffic through a free New York-based VPN service (Spotflux), and still had the problem. But it's a problem only in Firefox! Maybe one of my add-ons has gone haywire?
Update 2: Solved it. There's an add-on called "Stealthy" which can do odd things even when disabled.
Any privacy plugins in Firefox that might be routing Google traffic through a proxy to defeat tracking?
ReplyDeleteI'm glad there is someone who gets weirder computer problems than I do. Oh, what Prop said.
ReplyDeleteWell, it has to be one of the plug-ins for Firefox, because now Firefox isn't working at all. I've got lots of privacy stuff on Firefox, but none of them should be using proxies.
ReplyDeleteWeird!
Windows, Mac, Linux?
ReplyDeletecheck your DNS server in the prefs
ReplyDeleteThat's strange. I normally never get notices from Firefox about updates but a few days ago it posted a page saying nearly all of my plug-ins were out of date and referring me to updates. About the same time I was doing what I thought was a google search and it came up via another search engine I had never heard of (Tech-?-something). I live in Oz so it might be a global NSA-Firefox housekeeping exercise.
ReplyDeleteFirefox contamination, or worse, something evil in the Registry file that points to Firefox.
ReplyDeleteI'm just a dumb Mac guy but the few times I've done battle with Windows PC's, gremlins always seem to lurk in the Registry file.
I can certainly understand why disks get wiped when all else fails.
I should have mentioned that I use Windows.
ReplyDeleteHell, seems to me that the best thing would be to uninstall Firefox using Revo, clean the registry, and then put in Firefox anew. But I thought I would put this problem "on the record" -- as it were -- because it may happen to others.
Incidentally, right now, I'm using another browser.