“Just tried to donate.
Will not let me.
“Privacy error”
“Your connection is not private” blah, blah.”
Did you see this, Jim?
Any solutions?
This has been a problem for awhile mostly with google Chrome. We have a valid industry standard SHA-1 security certificate that’s been in place and working perfectly for many years. Google has decided to go for more encryption bits with SHA-2 and they are deprecating the use of SHA-1 in chrome, though it’s still perfectly valid.
So, even though the transactions are validly encrypted by our secure server as they have been for years, google chrome is throwing up a roadblock to our donors. In the past, it was just a cautionary warning, but now they’re actually blocking access. Our users can override the browser block, by clicking “ADVANCED” (at the bottom of the warning message) and then “Proceed to secure.freerepublic.com” and the transaction will be handled fine as always. The secure server does the encryption work, not google chrome.
Or, if the donor has another browser available, Edge for example, go ahead and use that to make the donation. Until recently google chrome was the only browser doing this. But yesterday I learned that firefox now has the same issue.
John will be incorporating the new SHA-2 standard eventually, but he says it’s gonna be a tough job and will require some software rewriting due to an incompatibility with some of our underlying systems software. It’s a job he’s not looking forward to it.