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So Google made this change to accommodate the schools' inability to filter based on host and https mode. And some of the schools' solution was to block https all together. Basically the schools' filtering is lame, so Google (in the interest of doing things right) solves this by tweaking their side.

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Unfortunately, Google didn't have much of a choice. However incompetent or misguided the schools' reaction to blocking encrypted search, it immediately broke Google Docs (and possibly other resources) for many of them. Google probably can't afford to give up this foothold, or to appear unreliable. The schools aren't upset at the existence of encrypted search, they just want a dead easy way to block it on their networks.

Schools block ALL encrypted traffic. Not to do so makes the firewall almost totally pointless.

Presumably schools whitelisted specific sites to allow https, and google was one of them, until it became a problem.

Not ssh.

  *Dr Evil pinky smile*

Seems like they could have fixed Google Docs then. I thought Docs was at https://docs.google.com/ anyway?

It is, but if you're not logged in, that link goes directly to an https://www.google.com login page.

It does seem pretty weird that Google would make a change like this that effects everyone just to appease some schools that can't figure out how to properly configure their firewalls.

They did it because it was the easiest way for google to make it easy to filter out encrypted search without breaking their other services. A very simple change for google -vs- a very difficult firewall configuration for a network administrator. (You can't just block https://www.google.com/ without breaking a whole bunch of other services you may want to be using) (and you probably don't have the budget & manpower to deploy the type of network you would need to scan & filter HTTPS traffic as an organization if you are a school, either)

Maybe the schools should filter the content instead of the searches.

How exactly would you scan and filter https? It's encrypted.

It's trivial (but evil) for an organization like a school to set up a proxy for https, since they are in a position to install the necessary root certificates in browsers (classic MITM attack). Devices are already on the market to make this easy to deploy (shudder).

Meet the new CISCO MITM 5505, trust CISCO for all your net appliance needs.

And how exactly should they configure their firewalls?

It's not possible to do that. The firewall has no idea what's being communicated because it's encrypted!

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