MMM-Lunartic

Mykle1

I also do not know the technical terms to express to them. Maybe someone else here can visit the site and describe what the problem is.

I wrote this email to them

Hello,

I am a 60 year old computer hobbyist. I have been using your API to get images and data about the moon and sun. (https://api.usno.navy.mil). Just recently I am receiving an error message when trying to access the API.

This is the error message reported by my browser.

“The owner of api.usno.navy.mil http://api.usno.navy.mil has configured their website improperly. To protect your information from being stolen, Firefox has not connected to this website.”

Yesterday, the site couldn’t even be reached at all. I’m hoping that you’re doing some maintenance and that this will be resolved soon.

Please advise, and thank you for this wonderful site.

And this was their response

All of the USNO’s web sites have recently been upgraded to https:// protocol,
i.e. https://www.usno.navy.mil. While the transition was not smooth, all of
the links should be working again. Depending on your browser, you may get some
warnings about our certificates. If so, you will need to accept them as valid
manually. You may also wish to install the most recent U.S. Government
Certificate Authorities. Here’s a link to a website that can guide you
through the process:

https://knowledge.digicert.com/solution/SO5198.html.

If you continue to have trouble, please let us know.

Thank you for your interest in our data services.

Regards,

Geoff Chester
Public Affairs Officer
U.S. Naval Observatory
3450 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20392
geoff.chester@navy.mil

yawns

Well, the main problem is that the authority which issued and signed the certificate is untrusted. Therefore browsers block access to this site showing a warning

Mykle1

@yawns

Thank you for that info. Please allow me to ask 2 more questions.

Is that something that the owners of the API have to correct?
If they can’t, or won’t, is there a way to have electron accept the untrusted certificate or disregard the warning?

sdetweil

@mykle1 they should have used a proper certificate authority.
there is no way to do it ‘automatically’.

As their note suggests, you will have to do it manually…
what a pain in the rear!..

Mykle1

@sdetweil

Ahh, what terrible news. I’m going to write back to them.

Mykle1

@sdetweil said in MMM-Lunartic:

they should have used a proper certificate authority.
there is no way to do it ‘automatically’.

I found this in a readme of another module here on the forum. I tried to add it to my config.js (in a few places) without success. It would error the config, or not work, depending. I was hoping something like this might work for me for even though you stated there is no way to do it ‘automatically’.

Readme quote:

This module requires an extra step to work:

“If you don’t already have one, add a electronOptions object with the following options in your MagicMirror config.js file.”

and

electronOptions: {
    webPreferences: {
        webSecurity: false
    }
}

I also found this online regarding electronOptions.

allowDisplayingInsecureContent: true,

Is there any hope?

EDIT

Ok, never mind. This didn’t work

Mykle1

I have written to the US Naval Observatory again, pointing out that their use of an improper certificate authority has sidelined my Lunartic and SunRiseSet modules. I don’t hold out much hope of action on their part.

Mykle1

I’ll see what I can do with this

Event: ‘certificate-error’
Returns:

event Event
webContents WebContents
url String
error String - The error code
certificate Certificate
callback Function

isTrusted Boolean - Whether to consider the certificate as trusted
Emitted when failed to verify the certificate for url, to trust the certificate you should prevent the default behavior with event.preventDefault() and call callback(true).

const {app} = require('electron')

app.on('certificate-error', (event, webContents, url, error, certificate, callback) => {
  if (url === 'https://github.com') {
    // Verification logic.
    event.preventDefault()
    callback(true)
  } else {
    callback(false)
  }
})

Mykle1

Well, the closest I could get with the above event handler is an error stating that I could only use the callback once and some foreboding warnings in the dev console about exposing the user to security risks. BLEH!

Mykle1

@mykle1 said in MMM-Lunartic:

I have written to the US Naval Observatory again, pointing out that their use of an improper certificate authority has sidelined my Lunartic and SunRiseSet modules. I don’t hold out much hope of action on their part.

Their reply to my 2nd email:

**Mr. Lange:

I’m afraid this is a problem that goes well beyond the USNO. Over the course of the past few month ALL DoD websites have been reconfigured to “https”, resulting in certificate errors to non-DoD users. I came across this site today which has another way to correct the issue, as well as an explanation of why the problem is occurring. Evidently it’s the browser providers that seem to be on the hook to update their certificate stores.

https://mrmc.amedd.army.mil/index.cfm?pageid=ssl

Interestingly I had to manually accept the site certificate for this page, despite the fact that I’m coming in from a .mil domain!

https://mrmc.amedd.army.mil/index.cfm?pageid=ssl

Regards,

Geoff Chester
Public Affairs Officer
U.S. Naval Observatory
3450 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20392
geoff.chester@navy.mil
**