Still, why would changing one's country make HTTPS available again?
Despite EFF's headline, it doesn't sound like this made HTTPS unavailable, but rather the "always-use-HTTPS" setting.
Why those countries?
Here's a guess: it was a localization issue.
I bet changing your country changes your default language. And I also bet that the availability of localized strings (i.e. "Is string 8230 available in language X?") affects what options are shown to the user. After all, if a descriptive string isn't available in the user's current language, how do you show them the option?
So what exactly happened? I don't know. Maybe they whacked some part of a localization table. Or rolled back to a previous localization table. Or mangled mappings from "language" to "current localization table". Software is complex.
All in all, it really makes them look bad, even if there's an innocent explanation.
The timing certainly invites theories of maliciousness.
While that seems like a plausible explanation, I have a hard time understanding what changed to trigger it. I mean, surely they had it translated beforehand, so what mangled things to make it believe there was no translation?
Also, weirdly enough, the error that got shown was in English. Not that it proves anything, but it makes it seem like the language settings were set to English, in spite of the location.
So, yeah, I'm going to be very curious about the explanation of this one. For the record, I do think that it could be innocent, but this kind of thing really invites people to think the worst.
Still, why would changing one's country make HTTPS available again?
Could also be to do with geographical regions being on different infrastructure, perhaps with slightly different versions of the code deployed to them. Maybe some broken logic in a proxy or something. All it could take is a couple of bits flipped.
There are many, many possible reasons for glitches like this in a system this large.
All in all, it really makes them look bad, even if there's an innocent explanation.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/26/microsoft_https_hotm...