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Technical Support
(Historical information only. We hope you find it to be a beneficial resource)

What is the "Secure Process"?

Secure transactions protect your sensitive information from being intercepted by encrypting the data. This means that the individual letters and numbers are scrambled by running them through an "algorithm" or a list of instructions. A algorithm can be as simple as "shift each character by 1". This would take the letters and numbers in the data and change a's into b's, b's into c's, 2's into 3's and so on.
This message:      Hi Bob     then becomes:      Ij Cpc       
Our servers use Veri-sign certificates that include extremely complicated algorithms consisting of hundreds of instructions. When you request a page with a URL or link that starts with:  https:// rather than http:// ,   you are telling your browser that you want an encrypted page. Your browser then asks our server for the certificate or list of instructions that it will use to un-encrypt the page. You will not actually see the certificate, the browser will place it in a special folder behind the scenes. Then the browser asks for the actual page. As the information leaves the server, it passes through the list of encryption instructions included in the certificate and is unintelligible to anyone who sees it as it crosses the Internet. As the information comes into the browser, it passes through the list of instructions in the browser's copy of the certificate (only in reverse) and displays the result in the browser window. 

So the encrypted info:    Ij Cpc      becomes:   Hi Bob

If the page includes a form, the information you type into the form (like credit card numbers) is sent through the list of encryption instructions in the certificate when you hit the submit button and is sent back to the server. The server then decrypts it and and passes it to a program (commonly called a Common Gateway Interface or cgi). The CGI can email the info to you or place it in a text file or even pass it to a database. The pre-configured CGI programs we supply, webform.cgi and cgiemail, send the info by email to you. Follow either of these links for complete instructions on their use:
cgiemail                            webform.cgi
 
 
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