the man in the middle would have to have a valid mail.google.com certificate for the attack to be seamless.

yes, we know how effective "invalid certificate" prompts are, but this is not a failure of the encryption mechanism.

funny business as in what? have you confused server's address with the reply?

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: slashdot.org
Address: 216.34.181.45

this is a perfectly correct reply: 216.34.181.45 belongs to sourceforge and is the right IP address for slashdot.org

well, actually... i sort of do. look, google has already reported on sorting 1 PB in 6 hours on a 4000 node cluster. their implementation is in C++. yahoo's result is 16.25 hours on a 3800 node cluster and hadoop is written in java. even taking into account the 200 node difference, yahoo's implementation is ~2.6 times slower than google's. it may not all be java's fault, but still.

"04.10.2008 - 10:54 AM" - April 10th.

this is the article mentioned in the original "Hotmail CAPTCHA sucks" slashdot post.