Hi!
Some days ago we installed Ferret for windows by downloading the version 2.1 from your web site.
Our PC fully met the minimum requirements to run Ferret and the software was successfully installed but it was unable to retrieve any data; an error window pops up showing the text "ERROR: Ferret was unable to retrieve any genes" and the same errors are present for variants.

Looking at your suggestion, we verified external connection with 1000 Genomes and it was running. Conversely, NCBI showed an alert about external connection that "to improve security and privacy, and by Federal government mandate, NCBI moved its Web sites to HTTPS only" ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/home/develop/https-guidance.shtml ).

After the switchover date, applications that still try to access NCBI via HTTP (i.e., on port 80) may fail for a few possible reasons:

Your programming environment's HTTP facility does not automatically follow redirects from HTTP to HTTPS. Some libraries follow redirections from HTTP to HTTPS; others do not. Java's URLConnection, for example, does not automatically follow HTTP-to-HTTPS redirects by design, even for safe methods like GET and HEAD.

I looked at the source code and I noticed that all the connections to NCBI are made over plain http.

Unfortunately I am not a Java expert and I do not know how to "recompile" the code to verify if my issue is linked to the http to https transition of NCBI web site.

I was wondering if you could verify that the software is still running fine after the NCBI switchover to https.

Thanks,
Roberto