When you enter certain parts of the Knight Funding Site the software may offer the use of a secure server using a Secure Socket Layer (SSL). Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is the standard technique for protecting Web communications. SSL is the technology used to encrypt and decrypt messages sent between your browser and our server. By encrypting the data, you protect messages from being read while they are transferred across the Internet. SSL encrypts a message from the browser, then sends it to the server. When the message is received by the server, SSL decrypts it and verifies that it came from the correct sender (a process known as authentication). SSL consists of software installed on both the browser and our server. If you are using a recent version of any of the major browsers, support for SSL is built into the browser. Several companies, including Verisign, Thawte, SSL.com, and Equifax offer SSL encryption and authentication tools. Thawte's digital certificates, for example, are already installed in most recent versions of the major browsers. This site uses Thawte as the certificate authority and 128 bit encryption. For more information on SSL and certificates visit the Microsoft website: Microsoft Article: About SSL
Some of the features of our site require that we launch a new browser window to host a third party service. Unfortunately many advertisers have hijacked the use of pop-ups so they can deliver an advertisement to a user's desktop. This causes considerable nuisance when you are browsing the internet and to solve the problem many users install an "Ad-blocker". If you have clicked on a link and a second window did not open then it is likely that an ad-blocker has stopped the action.
The latest version of Windows has an ad-blocker installed into Internet Explorer. If this has detected a pop-up it will show a bar just under the address bar as shown here:
Users of Microsoft Network applications, such as messenger, will often install the MSN toolbar into Internet Explorer. This will look something like the following:
This has a button that is intended to show the user the status of the ad blocker option:
(the number in brackets is the number of times MSN has blocked a pop-up). You will see this number increase each time you try to click on the link. If you click the down arrow at the end of the button the following menu will appear:
Yahoo provide a toolbar plug-in for Internet Explorer that contains an ad-blocker. The toolbar looks like the following:
If you click on the link and the blocker is triggered the button normally shown on the Yahoo toolbar ( ) will change to ( ). If you click on the down-arrow on this button then you will see a drop-down menu like the following:
If you select the option for "Allow pop-Ups from?" this form will be displayed. You will need to highlight the page URL shown in the top panel and click on the allow button.
You will then need to click on the link on our site again to launch the new window.