South London Area Quaker Meeting

In at nutshell. When you visit any page in any one of the five domains listed below, your browser will assure you that the connection is secure. If it gives a warning that the page is only partly secure or displays an icon such as near the address bar, please let me know at Q@RHaworth.net or 07788 756 745.

Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) is the set of rules defining how data for a web page is moved from a server to your browser. Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of HTTP. In it the data transfer is encrypted. HTTPS is also referred to as Transport Layer Security (TLS) or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).

Drawbacks of the use of HTTP are:

• Some people are unduly worried by the warnings their browser gives when they access a site that uses HTTP. I know two memebers of a drama group who both refused to look at the group’s website because it used HTTP.
• Google and other search engines give a lower ranking to HTTP as against HTTPS.

To implement HTTPS you need a certificate. When I looked at this matter a year or two ago I saw prices for a certificate of the order of £30 per domain name per annum. Given that we need to buy certificates for each of the domains hosted by UK Cheapest:

• croydonquakers.org.uk
• epsomquakers.org.uk
• purleyquakers.org.uk
• slaqm.org.uk
• southlondonquakers.org.uk

the certificates would have cost a lot more that the hosting itself. (suttonquakers.org.uk is hosted elsewhere and has been using HTTPS since it moved to a new host. Streatham & Brixton are the poor relation: they do not have a website.)

But when I looked recently, I found that UK Cheapest will now give us certificates free of charge and provide automatic redirection from http: to https:  So I implemented it promptly. This means that if, for example, you try to go to http://epsomquakers.org.uk, you will find that you actually land up at https://epsomquakers.org.uk.

The basic ‘prompt implementation’ was literally a matter of a few minutes but it did not end there. Some pages were still being reported as having some insecure content. (Typically they contained images with sources specified as http://…. I have created this page as an example.) The only way to find these was to visit each page in turn. I think I have now found most of them but if you spot any more, please let me know.