GeoTrust SSL RapidSSL a negative experience

April 17th, 2012 by hamlesh No comments »

Recently I ordered another SSL certificate, issued via GeoTrust / RapidSSL.  I’ve never had any issues before, and the provisioning, authorisation and issuing of the certificate is usually pretty much instantaneous.

HOWEVER, it looks like somethings gone very wrong at GeoTrust / RapidSSL, or perhaps they are having an off day?

I placed my order as usual through the provisioning portal.  Go through the usual verification and authorisation processes, all seems fine.  I wait all day, send in support tickets to find out what’s going on, no reply.

Then in the afternoon I use the live chat to chase, and I am told the order has been stopped for security reasons and that I need to put a site up on the address I’m trying to buy the cert for.

I explain that it’s for autodiscover on an exchange server, not for a website, so they wouldn’t be able to verify the contents of the site anyway.  I just get sent in a loop over and over again, need to put a site up.  I provide links to what autodiscover does, its a Microsoft requirement after all, still stuck in the same loop.  A simple Google search would have shown them that it’s a genuine requirement.  I then put up a redirect to the main website, so there’s at least some content there, that’s not good enough and the security check fails, and the order is cancelled.

The suggested solution is to place the order again, as the probability of being caught out by the random security check again is slim.  Seriously, that was the suggestion, so I placed the order again, and everything worked fine, and the certificate was issued.

Talk about ridiculous, retarded, stupid, moronic, and generally badly designed policy.

My suggestion to GeoTrust / RapidSSL would be to;

  1. Redesign your processes – having content on a site is a very bad way of checking if something is legit – what stops someone putting a spam site up later on?
  2. An additional hole in the process is that I was able to simply place the order again after security validation had failed the first time – eh, what?
  3. Train your staff to think for themselves – anyone technical could tell you that needing autodiscover.domain.com is a legitimate requirement

No one from GeoTrust.com / RapidSSL.com has been in touch to comment.

picx.me – new project idea

April 13th, 2012 by hamlesh No comments »

A few nights ago I kept running into the same problem, over and over again when trying to do something online.  What the something is, I won’t go into just yet, but suffice it to say there are lots of services out there, offering the same thing, but all of them restrict a few key areas of functionality.   These restricted things are actually what most of us want to use them for in the first place.

So the idea of picx.me was conceived, and after an all night coding session I had a working set of functionality.  The day after that, another evening/all night coding session and I had a working (and documented) API as well as browser plug-ins for Chrome and Firefox built off of the back of the API.

When I can go into more detail, this will make sense, honest!

For now a few people are privy to what I’m building, I need to make sure this project doesn’t run away with me, and get a BETA launched soon.   I keep getting ideas for new features which I want to build in before launching, but need to actually map out a roadmap (*sigh* this was supposed to be a very simple thing).

Its not a commercial endeavour, and I have no revenue model for it – which is very surprising for me!

I must say though, its nice to build cool techy things again, which aren’t predominately infrastructure/datacenter orientated.

For now, you can keep an eye on picx.me, and @hamlesh as always.

 

Boxee for Windows download

April 7th, 2012 by hamlesh No comments »

 

A while ago Boxee pulled their support and releases of the installable version of their media center software.

I have mirrored an older release which I still use on my media stations at home.

Download: Boxee for Windows – 0.9.23.15885.exe [41 Mb]

If you have the installer for a newer version than this, please let me know :)

Full Control – excellent motorbike guide, a must read

March 28th, 2012 by hamlesh No comments »

This is a great and essential read for bikers, whether you are a seasoned rider or a newbie.

I tend to reread it every year as spring kicks in.

Download the PDF from here: http://zxv.me/GSVeJH

100k twitter milestone

March 21st, 2012 by hamlesh No comments »

Quick little post to mark another twitter milestone.  Sometime today I passed 100k followers :)

Thanks to everyone for their continued support and continuing to interact.

If you’re on twitter, come say hi! – @hamlesh

Stats courtesy of twittercounter.com.