There was a big push -- several years back now -- to encourage all web
sites to change all pages to force access via https to make it much more
difficult to perform man-in-the-middle phishing or data modification
attacks, since it is difficult to get valid security certificates for a
website domain name you don't control. The purpose of https is not just
to encrypt data transferred, but to guarantee that all data you see is
actually coming from the party that owns the certificates for the domain
name you expect to be sending you data.
I'm amazed IBM doesn't yet automatically convert http protocol to https
on all their websites, and hasn't yet changed all published links from
http to https.
Just out of curiosity I tried
https://service.software.ibm.com/holdata/390holddata.html ,
and it does actually work (good), but in Firefox you have to override an
invalid security certificate (bad), because the certificate at the
service.software.ibm.com website server is apparently only valid for
domains www.aix.software.ibm.com and aix.software.ibm.com, not for
service.software.ibm.com . Upon inspection, the certificate is
obviously owned by IBM, so if you understand certificates you can feel
confident that in this case a bad-certificate override is safe, but one
should not be required to override security warnings.
Maybe there are some obscure reasons IBM has to keep allowing http
access, but an explicit https access should at least be correctly
supported for all web content -- and that means having the proper
security certificates in place.
Joel C Ewing
On 11/7/21 11:36, Paul Gilmartin wrote:
On Mon, 11 Jan 2021 06:02:47 -0600, Barbara Nitz wrote:
my employer has decided that ftp is not allowed anymore anywhere. Today I tried
to download the newest holddata from
http://service.software.ibm.com/holdata/390holddata.html. The file I'm
interested in (full data, plain text) is a link to
ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/s390/holddata/full.txt. This is an ftp-Link, and ftp
is not allowed anywhere. I get a connection failed error, purely on our side.
So no holddata :-(
Does anybody a link where these holddata are downloadable via http/s?
I notice these are now available from:
<http://service.software.ibm.com/holdata/390holddata.html>
Last-Modified: Fri, 23 Jul 2021 13:10:34 GMT^M
-- gil
--
Joel C. Ewing
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
