'Not secure' website message now appears
Published in general · 25 March 2024
Chrome started this nonsense and now Opera has followed. A 'Not secure' message now appears in the address bar when using this website on these browsers. This is due to the http protocol being used instead of https, the extra 's' means secure (though many think it could stand for scam). What it really means is that we don't pay for SSL certificatation because we don't need to. To quote our website provider (bananic)....
Unlike many other hosting services, we do not currently provide SSL hosting, it is unnecessary for E-Commerce site owners to purchase their own SSL site as most payment gateway providers will provide their customers with secure SSL payment facilities. It would cost you hundreds of dollars a year to purchase your own SSL site.
The only part of our website where you enter customer data is actually on our fully secure shop on fastspring.com who do our ecommerce. We do not want to handle customer details (or work out which sales tax applies for which state/country); we'd rather pay a fee for giving someone else that hassle. We therefore don't need an SSL certificate because there is no customer or user data on our server for anyone to hack in the first place. An intelligent browser should notice that fact! The 'Not secure' message therefore seems more like a shill for selling SSL certificates which produce a false sense of security for https-based sites and unnecessary expense for smaller enterprises. We added a red disclaimer at the top of the front page to alleviate customer fears but it remains very annoying that we should have to.
Similarly, although you enter your email in the online form for downloading trials, this is not stored on the website; it is just needed to ping back a reply email with the download link. The download is from a secure, virus-checking storage facility called box.com.
A related new problem is that a login screen may appear when typing 'femdesigner' in the address bar of Opera. This is a new bug in Opera whereby it seems to automatically prefix https rather than http. Just click on our website from the search engine instead. Hopefully this will be fixed by them at some point.