ugly login warning message in IE7

i'm pretty surprised that nobody has brought up this issue yet.

to my knowledge, most sites out there are using .htaccess "Basic Authentication" to protect their members' areas.

if you try to login to one of these areas using IE7, you will get this ugly message:

"Warning: This server is requesting that your username and password be sent in an insecure manner (basic authentication without a secure connection)."

pretty scary for the customer, if you ask me!!

anybody have a fix for this? i know you can move your members area to https:// and SSL, but that is a pain. you can also use DIGEST authentication instead of Basic, but those who are using mod_auth_mySQL will find that it doesn't support DIGEST authentication.

am i the only nerd that even cares about this or has an idea what this all means?

http://www.4webhelp.net/tutorials/misc/errors.php

those errors aren't the same thing. those are apache error codes. this has to do with something different.

Unfortunately as part of their "embrace, extend, extinguish" policy Microsoft still
refuses to support standard Digest authentication and instead has their own version,
so if you go to Digest you have to choose between serving IE users versus everyone else.
Digest wasn't really designed to be all that secure, anyway, though, so I don't it's
not somethign I'd choose for a modern site anyway. You'll notice your bank, PayPal, and
otbher secure sites use neither Basic nor Digest. Take a look at Strongbox or another
modern security system.