certificate problem for *.github.com

Hello Git community! Here is my question: until a few days ago I used to be able to point to a certain file in my git repository with the following url: http://github.com/percolator/percolator/raw/xml-1-1/src/xml/percolator_in.xsd Now this gets redirected to an https address. No problem opening it with the browser; but I do get an error with, for instance, wget (...and, more important, with a program that attempts to use that file as a schema against which some xml code is validated...) I get: certificate common name `*.github.com' doesn't match requested host name `github.com'

wget --no-check-certificate works...

Thank you! Mattia

On Thu, Nov 04, 2010 at 04:21:35PM +0100, Mattia Tomasoni wrote:

The problem is that wildcard names in certificates are not well-specified. RFC 2818 leaves this particular case (matching "*.domain" to "domain") ambiguous:

  Names may contain the wildcard character * which is considered to
  match any single domain name component or component fragment. E.g.,
  *.a.com matches foo.a.com but not bar.foo.a.com. f*.com matches
  foo.com but not bar.com.

RFC 2595 specifically outlaws it, but is talking about other non-HTTP protocols (it is for TLS with IMAP, POP, and ACAP):

  A "*" wildcard character MAY be used as the left-most name component
  in the certificate.  For example, *.example.com would match
  a.example.com, foo.example.com, etc. but would not match example.com.

So you can either send a bug report to wget to handle this case better, or you can complain to github not to use wildcard certificates in this way.

-Peff