Chrome Update Affecting Access to FYI

Some of our colleagues have noticed that parts of the FYI site aren’t working as expected. Unfortunately, Marketing and Communication probably can’t fix this. Here’s what we believe is happening.

FYI uses an unencrypted connection to its host server. In a nutshell, website encryption is a security measure that scrambles information to make it harder to access without authorization. You know if a website is encrypted if its URL begins with “https.” In fact, the “s” stands for “secure.”

The pioneering tech company Netscape Communications Corp. — you might remember the Netscape Navigator browser — developed the https protocol in the 1990s to protect banking and commercial transactions from the prying eyes of ne’er-do-wells. Wide adoption of https across website properties began around 2014, and it’s now considered a baseline for security.

The image above is a recent screenshot of the FYI URL loaded by Chrome. You’ll see that there’s no “s” following “http.” Chrome also has marked the site “Not Secure” to let users know that accessing it might pose a risk.

Google released a version of Chrome that will not run some code from http sites. As a result, some FYI features, pages, and functions may no longer be inaccessible. Marketing and Communication cannot remedy this because Chrome is working as intended.

For now, FYI might work as it always has if you use a web browser other than Chrome. However, it is likely that other software companies’ developers will follow Google’s lead and release versions of their browsers that limit their support of unsecure websites.