Hacking Gmail

Chapter 5 — How Gmail Works 65

This page allows you to change the more fundamental browser settings. You need

to change only one. Scroll down to network.http.accept-encodingand click
on the string. By default it reads gzip/deflate. Just delete that, and leave it

blank, as shown in Figure 5-7.

FIGURE5-7: The changed HTTP setting

Empty Firefox’s cache to prevent a strange bug, and restart the browser for good
measure. Now go back to Gmail and watch for the heartbeat. It will now look like

Listing 5-5.

Listing 5-5:Gmail’s Heartbeat, Unencoded

192.168.016.050.59622-216.239.057.107.00080: GET
/gmail?ik=344af70c5d&view=tl&search=inbox&start=0&tlt=1014fb79
f15&fp=54910421598b5190&auto=1&zx=24c4d6962ec6325a216123479
HTTP/1.1
Host: gmail.google.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O;
en-GB; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041110 Firefox/1.0
Accept:
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9
,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,/;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer:
http://gmail.google.com/gmail?ik=344af70c5d&search=inbox&view=
tl&start=0&zx=24c4d6962ec6325a116384500
Cookie: GV=101014fb09ab5-af53c8c5457de50bec33d5d6436e82c6;
PREF=ID=2dfd9a4e4dba3a9f:CR=1:TM=1100698881:LM=1101753089:GM=1
:S=nJnfdWng4uY7FKfO; SID=AcwnzkuZa4aCDnqVeiG6-
pM487sZLlfXBz2JqrHFdjIueLIHjVq_eeHH5s6MYQbPE4wm3vinOWMnavqPWq3
SNNY=; GMAIL_AT=e6980e93d906d564-1014fb09ab7;
S=gmail=h7zPAJFLoyE:gmproxy=bnNkgpqwUAI; TZ=-60

216.239.057.107.00080-192.168.016.050.59622: HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Continued