[olpc-help] Forums question - HTTP vs HTTPS/security message

[Michael Burns]

On Jan 23, 2008 3:24 PM, KayTi <community-support at lists.laptop.org> wrote:

>
> Sometime about two weeks ago, I started getting the security message on
> these forums. I am using IE 7.0, on an XP machine. The specific message
> that I get is that standard one "This page contains secure and unsecure
> items. Do you want to download the unsecure items?" or something like that.


Yes, this was a silent upgrade the Open Source Lab--the people that host our
forum for free--did. The error is a misnomer, really. Before, none of the
traffic was encrypted, now some of it is. This is only a good thing for you
(though you were never not secure, this is just something we are trying
out). At least in this case, do not be in any way nervous about this message
and accept it with confidence. That is, you DO want to download the
"unsecure" items, which were "unsecure" all along (almost all web traffic
is), but since some traffic is encrypted, Internet Explorer wants to alert
you that not all of it is. Chalk it up to poor error message reporting.


> The URL I use to get here is:
>
> https://olpc.osuosl.org/forum/
>
> If I try to manually remove the "s" in the HTTP line it just refreshes
> back to an https link and again displays the secure/unsecure message.
>

It was implemented by redirecting all "normal" http traffic, which is not
encrypted, to "secure" https traffic, which is encrypted.

I suspect there is some setting I can tweak locally to get this annoying
> pop-up to stop. I realize this has nothing to do with the actual XO, but
> since it's affecting my ability to participate in the forums, and I'm just
> SURE someone here knows the way around this, figured it can't hurt to ask.


Sorry this wasn't officially announced on the forum as it should have been.
Future changes that will be user-noticeable will be. Again, apologies for
the confusion this caused.


-- 
Michael Burns * Student
Open Source {Education} Lab
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