Our sites www.genenames.org and vertebrate.genenames.org are now HTTPS compliant at the request of many of our users and will redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS. Our REST (rest.genenames.org) and BioMart (biomart.genenames.org) services are also HTTPS compliant however; we have decided that these services should also continue to serve via HTTP. To use our REST or BioMart services choose your protocol by placing either http:// or https:// in front of the url address.
If you are have any issues accessing either www.genenames.org or vertebrate.genenames.org we suggest that you clear your browser cache. For help on removing the cache see our browser help page.
A little about HTTPS
What is HTTPS?
The “s” within https stands for “SSL” (Secure Sockets Layer). This technology encrypts your connection to our website, so that hackers can’t intercept any of your data.
Why have we moved to HTTPS?
- Many search engine services such as Google and Bing are pushing for everyone to move over to HTTPS by weighting HTTPS sites within the search engine higher than HTTP sites.
- HTTPS sites are faster than HTTP. You can test this out yourselves at http://www.httpvshttps.com/.
- Sites that are loaded over HTTPS couldn’t make an AJAX request to our HTTP REST service as browsers now stop calls to HTTP from within an HTTPS page with a “Mixed content” error. This stopped many clinical services from easily getting the data needed from us. Our REST and BioMart services now support both HTTP and HTTPS.
If you would like more information about HTTPS and for many more reasons why HTTPS as been adopted by default please read the TechWyse blog “Out With The HTTP, In With the HTTPS, in 2017”