New web browser security and your AAVirtual experience

[Michael Blakely]

Chrome and Firefox are making many security improvements to their browsers to protect us users. As a result, you may see some questionable things here at AAVirtual. This post is to help you understand what you might see.

1. "Not Secure" (HTTPS vs. HTTP)
AAVirtual now uses HTTPS for greater security. Your web browser authenticates the HTTPS site and encrypts the data sent and received to our HTTPS site. For security reasons, browsers are less tolerant of mixing HTTPS and HTTP content. If an AAVirtual webpage has content, such as an image hosted from a different website, that has HTTP in the link, then the page will be flagged as "Not Secure" by your browser. If you host your forum images, avatars, or signature blocks on other websites, try to use the HTTPS link to these items to avoid the "Not Secure" notice on your post.

2. Great Circle Mapper broken images
Many of us put our latest FREQ into Great Circle Mapper to show a map of our bid (I do). However, Great Circle Mapper requires the browser to execute code on the Great Circle Mapper website to generate the image. Great Circle Mapper has not moved to HTTPS, and Chrome will no longer allows this code to run when referred from the HTTPS. Firefox will still run the HTTP code (as of Dec 31, 2020), but I expect Firefox will increase security soon and block this as well. Because Great Circle Mapper doesn't seem to have very active maintenance these days, I don't expect them to move the HTTPS anytime soon. One workaround I now use, is I go to the Great Circle Mapper website, generate my FREQ map, save this as an image, and then host the image at a secure HTTPS site and load the image in my signature. It's a few extra steps, but it's the only way I know to show the Great Circle Mapper images in Chrome now.

[Omar Campanalunga]

That's precisely what I did on the Tour with the legs, I copied them in Imgur and published the map without any problem. Here an example:



Thank you very much for your work.

[Michael Blakely]

The FSACARS files are available on our download site here.

I made this change yesterday and I updated the FSACARS instructions here yesterday as well.

[Hebert Augusto Africano Linares]

Thanks, Mr. Michael for the valuable information. We will be aware of any strange ...