[Purebiblesearch-release] PureBibleSearch Improved Website Security

[Pure B. S. R. N. L. <pur...@li...>]

To All King James Pure Bible Search Users:

About five years ago, when the Let's Encrypt initiative (https://letsencrypt.org/) was launched and in its beta phase and website encryption certificates were finally freely available, I began reworking the Pure Bible Search websites to use encryption and make it more secure for all users.  Unfortunately at that time, I ran into some technical challenges due to the way things work on the remote cloud computing environment that made it very difficult to implement.  And before I could figure those out and get it resolved, I got busy with other things and somewhat forgot about it.

However, this past weekend, I revisited it and after a bit of frustration working through those technical difficulties, I am happy to announce that the Pure Bible Search website (https://www.PureBibleSearch.com/) and all of its companion websites are now fully SSL/TLS encryption compliant throughout.

This means when you visit https://www.PureBibleSearch.com/ you can use "https" (secure) instead of "http" connections.  And you should see the padlock icon on your web browser, indicating you have a secure connection to the Pure Bible Search servers, along with the encryption certificate details to validate its authenticity.

To the average user, this is all somewhat transparent and goes unnoticed.  But what it's providing is keeping others in the chain from your computer or device to the Pure Bible Search servers from spying on what you are doing online or altering the content that you receive.  Without encryption, anyone who can sniff your network connection, such as your internet service provider or internet backbone routers, could see exactly what you are searching for in the online Bible or what you are browsing on the website or even modify it on you.

My prayer is that this will help those in persecuted countries by encrypting all software downloads and online search traffic on PureBibleSearch.com and its interrelated sites.  And I set up the server to automatically redirect insecure connections to the secure connection so that you won't accidentally go to the wrong site or navigate away from the secure one.

Sorry for any instability on the webservers you might have experienced this past weekend while I was setting this up, particularly those using the online WebChannel search.  I tried to keep server restarts to a minimum, but some, like when I accidentally deleted my administration key and had to generate a new key, were inevitable.

Also, sorry that it has taken so long to get this implemented.  I had intended it to be functional five years ago.

God Bless,
Donna

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