This week on FilkCast

[ericcoleman]

Jen Midkiff, Meg Davis, Alexander James Adams, Cathy McManamon, Lambda Miners, Heather Alexander, Chris Weber, Daniel Kelly, Randy Farran, Rebecca Haden, Suzette Haden Elgin, Sunnie Larsen, Chuck and Brenda Shiring, Larry Warner, Leigh Ann Hussey, Valentine Wolfe, Clearly Guilty, John Anealio, Heather Dale, Cheshire Moon

Available on iTunes, Google Play and most other places you can get podcasts. We can be heard Wednesday at 6am and 9pm Central on scifi.radio.

filkcast.com

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Hi, Eric, continuing a discussion we started on Bluesky. Summarizing: You had a link to Filkcast . com. Clicking the link got me a warning from Firefox: "The certificate is not trusted because it is self-signed." You replied that you didn't get that error, and also mentioned that "There is no actual filkcast . com" and said you didn't get the message. But there is a legitimate problem, and here's what's happening.

There is an actual filkcast . com; that is, you've registered the domain and have it set up as a redirect. But for it to work properly, you need an SSL certificate (technically a TLS certificate, but everyone still uses the older term). Someone, probably your domain parking host, set it up with the bare minimum, a self-signed certificate. That enables an encrypted connection but provides no assurance it's really you, so browsers dislike it.

If I enter https://filkcast.com in Firefox, Brave, or Safari, I get the error, as will most people. If you enter simply filkcast.com, it depends on what happens to it after that. On all three of those browsers, if I just type in filkcast.com, it uses http://filkcast.com, which doesn't pretend to be secure, and it redirects to https://filkcast.blogspot.com without complaining. But Bluesky turns the implied URL into an HTTPS link, the browser sees it uses a self-signed certificate, and for me it complains. It might not be complaining for you because you have different security settings in Firefox.

The bottom line is that when you reference filkcast.com, you risk its being interpreted as an insecure link. The solution if you want to keep using it is to set up a free certificate, such as one from Let's Encrypt. That may or may not be easy, depending on where you've parked filkcast.com. The simpler solution is to always point people at filkcast.blogspot.com. They've set up the needed certificate for you, and it just works.

I hope this helps and you don't mind the techno-dump. Let me know if anything I said is confusing.

[ericcoleman]

Sorry, Lizzie has not had time to look into this, she's the tech. We should be able to get this settled one way or the other bu the next regular show.