What is the http-header "X-XSS-Protection"?

Question

So I've been toying around with HTTP for fun in telnet now (i.e. just typing in telnet google.com 80 and putting in random GETs and POSTs with different headers and the like) but I've come across something that google.com transmits in it's headers that I don't know.

I've been looking through http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html and have found no definition for this particular http-header that google seems to be spouting out:

GET / HTTP/1.1

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2012 03:42:24 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=6ddbc0a0342e7e63:FF=0:TM=1328067744:LM=1328067744:S=4d4farvCGl5Ww0C3; expires=Fri, 31-Jan-2014 03:42:24 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com
Set-Cookie: NID=56=PgRwCKa8EltKnHS5clbFuhwyWsd3cPXiV1-iXzgyKsiy5RKXEKbg89gWWpjzYZjLPWTKrCWhOUhdInOlYU56LOb2W7XpC7uBnKAjMbxQSBw1UIprzw2BFK5dnaY7PRji; expires=Thu, 02-Aug-2012 03:42:24 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com; HttpOnly
P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 for more info."
Server: gws
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

1000

Anyone know what X-XSS-Protection is?

Answer 1

X-XSS-Protection is a HTTP header understood by Internet Explorer 8 (and newer versions). This header lets domains toggle on and off the "XSS Filter" of IE8, which prevents some categories of XSS attacks. IE8 has the filter activated by default, but servers can switch if off by setting

   X-XSS-Protection: 0

See also http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2011/01/31/controlling-the-internet-explorer-xss-filter-with-the-x-xss-protection-http-header.aspx