We've Made Our Site More Secure

Today we have upgraded our web site so that all of the pages are now being served over HTTPS/SSL. That is to say they are being sent over the Internet encrypted.

We have done this for two reasons:

1. As I have discussed here before we are now selling the PDF versions of our walks and the GPX routes for them and although the payment part, which is handled for us by PayPal, was already done via HTTPS/SSL the initial processing our side before we took payment wasn't. Although this probably wasn't a risk we just didn't feel very comfortable about it.
2. In order to use many parts of our site you need to log in and that means entering your username and password. These were previously being transmitted over the Internet unencrypted. This probably didn't matter that much if the password you used for WalkLakes wasn't used anywhere else but we know that many people use the same passwords on many sites, so we feel we should help protect our users by not exposing their passwords.

So, what do you have to do now to cope with the change? Well, hopefully absolutely nothing as we've done it all for you. If you visit our site using HTTP rather than HTTPS then we will silently switch you to HTTPS. So when you look in the address bar of your web browser you'll see something like this:

I've underlined the "https" but note also the padlock symbol which most browsers will show. The content and functionality should be exactly the same apart from that.

In closing I should note that you may notice that some pages will not be perfectly encrypted and when this is the case your browser may alert you to this (for example Firefox, which is the browser I used above, shows a grey triangle with an exclamation mark in it over the green padlock). This is because some of the images on that page are coming from a different server which uses HTTP rather than HTTPS. Examples include the GPS mapping application and all our walks (again because of the main map). We hope to reduce the number pages like this over time but in some cases it does rely on the co-operation of our partners.

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