Holy Cow, Firefox is blocking the donation page saying it is not secure and is malicious.
Its all googles fault:
Google just cracked one of the building blocks of web encryption (but dont worry)
Its all over for SHA-1
by Russell Brandom@russellbrandom Feb 23, 2017
https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/23/14712118/google-sha1-collision-broken-web-encryption-shattered
Excerpt:
Google publicly broke one of the major algorithms in web encryption, called SHA-1. The companys researchers showed that with enough computing power roughly 110 years of computing from a single GPU for just one of the phases you can produce a collision, effectively breaking the algorithm. Weve known this was possible for a while, but nobody has done it, in part because of the possible fallout.
We use sha-1 and our certificate is paid-up, still valid, still in force, and our secure server continues to encrypt our transactions as always. Google has decided to flag all sha-1 certificates as not secure even though its not true. And now firefox and others are following googles lead. Our secure server is still secure. That said, we have paid the ransom fee, purchased new certificates and John will upgrade to sha-256 as soon as he can.
I got the same message on Chrome.
Fortunately I always send my donation by check.
It's not Firefox. When I was trying to contribute recently, I got the same message.
Here was Jim R.'s response...
Its secure. We use the industry standard sha-1 encryption method. Google has decided its no longer good enough and has deprecated it, flagging all sha-1 certificates as not secure even if paid-up, and still valid and still in force. Our secure server continues to securely encrypt our donation transactions just as it always has. But to satisfy google (and firefox, et al) we have paid the ransom and purchased sha-256 security certificates. John will upgrade as soon as he gets everything else caught up. If you have the windows 10 default browser (Edge) on your system it handles sha-1 just fine with no warning messages. Or you can click Advanced and proceed to secure.freerepublic.com anyway if you wish. Praying John gets the sha-256 certificate installed soon. Thanks on
I had that...click on "continue" a couple of times to get to a "add this web site to allowed list"....and continue on to make the donation....worked for me a few mins ago.
I got the same error message , might be approaching time to water the tree I suppose