Technical Tips

PayPal Problem

(continued)

We ran into an interesting problem with a customer trying to use PayPal.  They kept being stopped by an error message that said:

www.paypalobjects.com:443 uses an invalid security certificate.  The certificate will not be valid until 2/9/2009 11:23 AM.

(Error code: sec_error_expired_certificate)

The customer tried Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome, but to no avail.  A call to PayPal and many option selections led to a human being that could not solve the problem.  The PayPal person elevated the problem to their security expert who claimed (wrongly) that the customer should look at the security settings of their Firewall set by AVG.  This did no good either.

So how to research this problem?  The first thing to do is to see if another computer in your business has the same problem.  This proved to be negative.

The very next thing to do is to put the error message or a small part of it into Google and see what the net says about it.

When this was done with the error, hundreds of users have had a similar problem.  They all ask for solutions and you have to take many of them with a grain of salt.  These start out something like this.  "Why don't you try rebooting" or ... "make sure you have not set security too high" etc, etc....

(next column)

02/05/2009 09:03 AM

Don't try fancy things that you don't understand like typing in strange commands under RUN or something.  Unless you're an expert, you'll get into real trouble.  Also, remember that some pranksters put false solutions to real problems on the Internet to cause you to ruin your computer.

So what's the solution to the problem?  The customer had an invalid date on their machine.... some date from January.  All sorts of programs depend upon your computer keeping good time.  The customer changed the date to May 1 and after 3 days of trying to find a solution, things worked fine. 

So here's a summary:

1.  Don't panic

2.  Test your problem on other computers.

3.  Look up your problem on the Internet on a machine that works.

4.  Ignore complicated solutions.

5.  If 1 to 4 fails, consult an expert.