'Your connection is not private' rubbish from Chrome.

googler

[Deleted User] said:

...... it is because website security certificates have to have a finite lifespan and it is not just the ten year old software itself being an issue - it is the way the internet works now compared to 10 years ago. The root certificates in question here had a 20 year lifespan so it is a fairly rare event that you have been caught up in and it will happen again in 20 years.

Fair enough, but what rankles with me is that the browser doesn't give a coherent error message relating to the problem. 

It could spit out a message saying "Your certificate DSG Root X3 has expired", but it does not. Instead, I got the message "Your clock is ahead" and Rainbows got another. Neither of which state explicitly what has gone wrong.

Pretty much all the online help I found did not have a meaningful solution to the problem, largely due to the misleading error message..... 

googler

RainbowsInTheSpray said:

Apologies but I find that, as a seventy yr-old, anything but 'easy' 

I'm over 60, and I managed it, so ..... to borrow a phrase from (I think) the movies .....

"Buck up, Soldier!"

RainbowsInTheSpray

I have, literally, dozens of things in my home which are five, ten and more years old which work just fine and just as they did when bought. Unlike some here, apparently, I do not belong happily to the built-in obsolescence consumer society, frothing wide-eyed over anything new because it is new and induced to do so by packaging, marketing and hype.

There is a very basic issue at stake here, which is that tech manufacturers are trying to absolve themselves of the obligation which all other concerns have to address: 'it does what it says on the can'. Once that genie is out of the bottle, it's only a matter of what they think they can get away with. Before long, OSs will no longer be 'supported' after 3 years, then two...  ...

I'm genuinely grateful to those who tried to point out what they thought to be 'easy' solutions. My whole point is: there should not have to be a solution to a problem which is not of my making.

giraffe69

Hard to understand the ranting here. There are some easy cost free solutions if you don't have the time or inclination to understand anything about root certificates(wouldn't blame you for that).
1. Upgrade for free to Windows 10. Problem resolved
2. Use Firefox as a way round the message as Firefox, as you've been told has its own certificate store.

If you insist on using an out of date and insecure operating system which no longer gets security fixes then expect some problems.
Technology moves on and, for sure, it is sometimes made more difficult than it need be. 

CoastingHatbox

RainbowsInTheSpray said:

Apologies but I find that, as a seventy yr-old, anything but 'easy' and object to the whole concept of firms being allowed to sell software which then becomes unusable. If it worked ten years ago, it should work NOW. End of.

My life is now literally too short to be learning humungous amounts of in-house coolspeak jargon which I don't need.

The situation is basically this: I have a PC, an operating system and a browser, all bought in good faith as being fit for purpose. In effect, I'm now being told: 'oh, no, sorry... our tech products are different from anything else you buy. We can set our own rules to suit our own financial gain needs, thank you very much.'

Sadly, the irony here is that what has happened is the result of an organisation trying to do something good, for free.

The Internet relies on secure communication in order to protect everyones privacy. Without secure communication, people would not be able to protect their identities or make financial transactions online without being subject to fraud, as any data transmitted along a wire in clear text (without encryption) can be snooped upon and even changed in flight. Would you be comfortable sharing information over the Internet without encryption?

Let's Encrypt set out to make it possible for anyone to encrypt traffic flowing over the Internet free-of-charge. That is without spending ££ each year to obtain a TLS certificate (or SSL certificate) for each website on the Internet, allowing information to be transmitted with reliable and secure encryption.

The problem is, Let's Encrypt in the beginning as an unknown entity could not issue certificates for web sites and have them automatically trusted by peoples browsers and computers. They had to get their certificates signed by another root Certificate Authority that people's browsers and computers already knew about and would trust.

Let's Encrypt have been telling people for a long time that they had set up their own root Certificate Authority, which has gradually been distributed to peoples browsers and computers, and when the root Certificate Authority certificate originally used to cross-sign Lets Encrypt certificates used by websites etc.. expires, browsers and computers would have to use the new Lets Encrypt Certificate Authority to establish trust.

There is a good reason that Certificate Authority's root certificates don't last forever. You simply cannot trust an organisation forever. Organisations change owners and they get dissolved. The expiry on any certificate is there to ensure, from time to time, trust relationships are vetted by whatever mechanism and renewed.

The reality is a bit more complicated than I explained, but I've tried to keep this explanation simple.

Now, you might own your computer. You bought that outright. But you don't own the operating system. That is subject to an End User License Agreement that you agreed to when you first installed the operating system. That agreement would have had clauses in it limiting the liability of the product etc.. The agreement would also limit the supported lifetime of the software product.

That's not to say it is rubbish. But it is difficult for any organisation to maintain a version of software indefinitely - there is, for one reason or another, simply too much change required to keep an operating system stable and secure. Very clever people with nefarious intentions invent new ways of exploiting old technology all the time, and there are only so many times you can patch changes into pieces of software to prevent that software from being exploited, until it becomes unpatchable. It is almost impossible to make an operating system for a computer which is attached to the Internet secure for periods much more than ten years, and with each added year the costs of doing so increase exponentially.

So software has a shelf life.

There are a lot of people on this forum willing to provide help and advice in order to help you cope with the challenges that technology can present.

You are right, 'easy' is a very subjective term and what one person finds easy, another will not. Sometimes with these things it is best to consult a family member who knows a bit about technology for help/advice - they at least will be able to show you what to do.

I'd be more than happy to try and help you solve this problem - need to know what operating system you are using, and then I should be able to give you very simple and specific instructions.

tempus_fugit

RainbowsInTheSpray said:

I have, literally, dozens of things in my home which are five, ten and more years old which work just fine and just as they did when bought. Unlike some here, apparently, I do not belong happily to the built-in obsolescence consumer society, frothing wide-eyed over anything new because it is new and induced to do so by packaging, marketing and hype.

You're comparing apples with pears though. Most other things in your house won't be connected to a system (the internet) that is constantly evolving and having to evolve to improve security etc. The internet is a completely different animal to whatever those other things in your home need in order to run, and it requires you to constantly upgrade, otherwise your stuff won't work with it. It's not "built-in obsolescence", it's progress, and as others have said, you DON'T actually have to buy a new computer, there are solutions that you could use but you don't seem to want to. There's an old adage that you might recognise that is appropriate here: "sink or swim!".

OnlyTheBestWillDo

RainbowsInTheSpray said:

Apologies but I find that, as a seventy yr-old, anything but 'easy' and object to the whole concept of firms being allowed to sell software which then becomes unusable. If it worked ten years ago, it should work NOW. End of.

My life is now literally too short to be learning humungous amounts of in-house coolspeak jargon which I don't need.

The situation is basically this: I have a PC, an operating system and a browser, all bought in good faith as being fit for purpose. In effect, I'm now being told: 'oh, no, sorry... our tech products are different from anything else you buy. We can set our own rules to suit our own financial gain needs, thank you very much.'

It is easy; don't make drama out of it.

When you click on https://letsencrypt.org/certificates/ scroll down the page to;



and Right Click on the 'der' writing and choose 'save linked content as' from the right click menu; saving the content to your Desktop. 
Locate the file that you just saved to your Desktop and double click on it; following the prompts until the certificate is installed. That's it.

Jenni_D

CoastingHatbox said:

I'd be more than happy to try and help you solve this problem - need to know what operating system you are using, and then I should be able to give you very simple and specific instructions.

............................................

RainbowsInTheSpray said:

I have chrome version 94.0.4606.61 running on Windows 7 Pro.
Time and date appear correct.

cx6

"I have, literally, dozens of things in my home which are five, ten and more years old which work just fine...:


but there are other things that don't stay the same, and perfectly working devices need to be changed.

Radio was LW, then FM and now DAB. FM still works, but for how much longer.

TV was b&w, then colour, then digital not analogue.TVs has to be replaced. Even now digital freeview needs retuning every so often.

mobile phones were analogue, now only digital ones work

your camera was film, now digital.

phones were rotary dials now they are tone generating push buttons.

PCs were windows 7, then 8, then 10 and soon 11

debitcardmayhem

cx6 said:

PCs were windows 7, then 8, then 10 and soon 11

but don’t have to be replaced