warnings when logging in

johnlong

Senior Member
Hi All
As this is the primo tech forum I am getting a warning that this site
potentally not secure when I log in
Is this just hog wash
my heart tells its safe my paranoia tells me get scared
regards
john
 

nekomatic

Member
Web browsers are getting more and more proactive about warning the user of possible security issues. Like most forums, this site does not use a secure connection (https), which means in theory someone could intercept the traffic between your computer and this site.

Unless you use the same username and password on other websites, the worst that I can see happening as a result is that somebody else could post under your name. The kind of person who'd do that would probably post spam and links to malware sites, but hopefully they'd get blocked fairly quickly - so I wouldn't lose sleep over it.

Obviously you shouldn't use the same password here as on other sites, or at least not other important sites.
 

westaust55

Moderator
I have been seeing a similar/same warning for the past week (away from home the prior week) when logging in.
Running Win10Pro 64-bit with Mozilla Firefox 52.0, avast virus software and zonealarm firewall.
 

Jeremy Harris

Senior Member
Firefox started doing this a few weeks ago for me - it was very, very irritating. It seemed to do it for any website that you could interact with that was still using http, rather than https. In the end I binned Firefox and installed Pale Moon. Looks and feels like older versions of Firefox but runs much faster, uses a lot less resources and doesn't flag all these daft warnings about http websites. My view is that a web browser shouldn't behave as Firefox does now, especially as there isn't a significant risk to the user from using a known to be OK http website that they've been using for years. There are still a very large number of websites using http, my own included. Even the BBC are still using http.

If I were cynical I could believe that the Mozilla Foundation had a financial interest in one or more security certificate providers................
 

techElder

Well-known member
Or ... you could just "white list" the known good sites. Jus' sayin' :D

Firefox works. Just learn to use it.
 

Jeremy Harris

Senior Member
Or ... you could just "white list" the known good sites. Jus' sayin' :D

Firefox works. Just learn to use it.
I could have, but I was also getting a bit fed up with the way Firefox has become rather bloated recently, making it use a lot of system resources. On the older PCs I have, Firefox is now very slow, whereas Pale Moon is very much like Firefox used to be, fast and far less resource-intensive. On the fastest machine I have Firefox still works OK, but my everyday machine is usually a small, low power, dual core Atom machine, with 4Gb of RAM, running Linux Mint 18.1, and on that Firefox was annoyingly sluggish. Since switching to Pale Moon I've found that web browsing on that machine has been transformed.
 

Jeremy Harris

Senior Member

The snag for me is the cost of secure certificates, certainly that's the reason my own website is still on http. My website is purely a hobby thing, and whilst I'm OK with paying the modest hosting fee, switching to https would increase that significantly (my hosting company doesn't seem to allow the use of free https certificates that are available, I believe).
 

johnlong

Senior Member
Out of interest which browser and version are you using ?
Hi All
running windows 7 64 bit (horrible prefered vista more stable) with the latest Firefox and Duck Duck go
If I am truly honest prefered windows 3.11 with office 4.2 out of them all only ever had 1 crash
and that was due to excessive use of equation editor
I have the forum in the white list so as you all say seems to be firefox
thanks will put the paranoia to bed and put my happy hat back on
regards
john
 

mikeyBoo

Senior Member
Chrome also reports this site as risky (note the little "i" to left of address bar). Realistically, unless everyone working for the US (sorry guys, & British) intelligence services are honest, there's no real internet security. Best to use Paypal when you purchase. Before I retired, it always bothered me how open Windows PCs were on plant intranets, you could even get into other folks' stuff by accident. Hopefully, security has improved for Windows, but don't bet on it.
Not to be paranoid, but passwords should not be stored on your PCs. I still use an offline PDA for my personal stuff. I don't get the hacker mentality or why some folks think poking around in secured networks is cool. Guess my morality is "antiquated".
 
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