With internet privacy imperiled by Congress in the US, the major browsers have been encouraging web site owners to move to entirely secure sites — and following recent updates, most of the popular browsers will flag regular HTTP links as “not secure.” After a brief scramble, we have updated the entire PublishersMarketplace.com site to secure HTTPS protocols. (Our login and billing pages and other sensitive portions of the site were always secure.) For efficiency, please update any of your PM bookmarks to begin with https://… instead of http://…, and do the same when sharing links like your PM Member Pages.
And for our friends across the publishing world, you would be well advised to ask your IT people about your own migration to HTTPS before your visitors get concerned. (From a quick survey, only one of the five largest trade houses has made this transition, for example.)
As the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains: “The web is in the middle of a massive change from non-secure HTTP to the more secure HTTPS protocol. All web servers use one of these two protocols to get web pages from the server to your browser. HTTP has serious problems that make it vulnerable to eavesdropping and content hijacking. HTTPS fixes most of these problems…. If a website or service offers a secure connection, then the ISP is generally not able to see what exactly you’re doing on the service.”