Site Security

Summary

  • It is possible to connect to this site using HTTPS, which ensures that the connection between your browser and the site is encrypted. See the technical details below if you encounter an problems with this.
  • All pages related to financial transactions (e.g. purchasing merchandise, making a donation, paying membership) redirect to a secure https page.
  • Although you can make credit card payments, this site itself does not accept or store credit card details for financial transactions. If you choose to pay by credit card (i.e. you do not choose the "pay later" option) then you will be redirected to PayPal to enter your credit card details. Those details are not transmitted back to this site - we do not need them.
  • If you choose the "pay later" option then we record the details of the transaction, including your contact details, and ask you pay by bank transfer or cheque.

Technical Details of HTTPS implementation

... or "Why doesn't it work for me?"

We use a 2048 bit Industry Standard SSL Certificate issued by Comodo's InstantSSL organisation. Your browser should trust this certificate. This certificate was updated on 2011-07-17 to a new certificate that expires on 2014-10-13.

Due to the way that the site is hosted we use a feature called SNI to get our certificate to your browser. SNI is supported by all modern browsers.

Unfortunately SNI is not supported by Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). Other browsers running on Windows XP might also have problems. Note that IE6 is generally deemed to be quite insecure. The governments of various countries have issued warnings about Internet Explorer. If you are still using IE6 then you should seriously consider upgrading!

If you have no choice but to use a browser that does not support SNI then you will probably get a warning that the certificate is for the wrong site. In this case the certificate that you get will be for ozlabs.org. You may also get a warning that the certificate isn't issued/signed by a known trusted organisation. This certificate is issued by a free community-based organisation called CAcert. Given that you won't be entering any credit card or banking information into our site, you may choose to trust this certificate...

If you have any questions please contact admin@members.fosterdogs.org.