Secure Connections and Parental Controls
The problem that I'm experiencing is that when I try to connect to some secure sites, sometimes Safari complains:
Safari can’t open the page "..." because it couldn’t establish a secure connection to the server “...”.
With Amazon, it partially connects. In the Allow list, I've got all the entries I could add for Amazon, such as http://*.amazon.com, https://*.amazon.com, and (where their secure images seem to come from) https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com.
However, the secure connection breaks down somewhere and I get a partial page with a lot of broken images. It is hard to click on a button when the image for it is missing.
To troubleshoot this problem, I turned off Parental Controls, and Amazon.com works great on a secure connection. Then, to rule out the possibility that my login is corrupt, I created a brand-new user account and it has the same problem with Amazon once I turn on the Parental Controls.
Amazon is just one example of this problem. I see it on other sites when I try to get to a secure page. But in all cases the problem seems to have to do with some component that is not working when a secure connection (HTTPS) and Parental Controls are both involved.
I've tried looking through all the system logs with no luck. I don't see any clues there. I even tried running tcpdump from the terminal to grab all the packet data, but I don't see anything obvious there either.
I like the filtering that Parental Controls provides. So what I really want to do is find a way to solve the conflict between HTTPS and Parental Controls.
The error that Safari gives is similar to the error given when an SSL certificate has expired. So maybe Parental Controls is somehow blocking a certificate from being validated and breaking the validation chain?
Thanks for reading this far,
JDetwiler
iMac Intel Core Duo, Mac OS X (10.5.4)