Having problems with this, too

I've been posting a few comments, mostly about email discovery, on James Doleman's excellent Sheridan Trial blog. And I've been getting quite a lot of "414 Request: URI too large to process" responses. It's caused a few issues - nothing serious.

So, this morning, I put up a comment - get an error, and then try to log on to this gmail account.

We've detected evil things happening. Please jump through some fiery hoops to verify ...

Okay - what? Enter my country and my mobile number and I get an unlock code SMS'd to me. Which gets me in to the email (and the blogger account had been locked too.)

Who is this protecting? If I was an evil hacker, spammer or other assorted nefarious toe-rag who had gained illegitimate access to this account, I'm still there and all Google now have is an SMSable number (and I'd have used a free or hacked VOIP account in an irrelevant country to get the code.) Clearly, it doesn't protect the "real" Surreptitious Evil, either.

So, we have a bit of security protocol, triggered by something (quite possibly the stream of 414s) that doesn't appear, at first or second glance, to do anything constructive. I'll have a bit more of a think about it, I suppose.