Government websites are untrusted now?

Question

The situation with the untrusted websites error message is getting ridiculous. I am using a computer in a library today. hundreds of people a day use the computers here. This is not just a problem manifesting on one individual's personal computer at home, but is affecting thousands of public computer users just in the city where I live EVERY DAY and Mozilla is giving advice to check settings, try changing this or that etc. NO, this THIS PROBLEM NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED AT THE DEVELOPMENT LEVEL.
The fact that government websites such as www.irs.gov are bringing up this warning in places where computers are made available as a public service is a PROBLEM, and it is one that the individual users can do absolutely nothing about. This isn't just the IRS website, but almost EVERY government website, local or federal, brings up this warning. The time and date on all the computers here at the library appear to be correct. Most public computers operate according to out-of-the-box defaults and don't give users access to change anything.
There is SOMETHING WRONG with the mechanism that causes this error message to be displayed. It is not protecting anyone when they can't get information about laws, ordinances, business development, and government programs. something here needs to be re-thought. Government websites have certificates, just like all websites. It is hard to believe they would all come up as untrusted. I have seen myself many websites come up with this warning and then another message saying that an exception isn't needed because the website HAS A TRUSTED CERTIFICATE... so what gives? Please have the devs take a serious look into the matter.
Troubleshooting information is not available. Users have very limited access to controls.

Answer 1

The www.irs.gov website doesn't seem to have a valid certificate installed
<pre><nowiki>
Technical Details
www.irs.gov uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is only valid for the following names:
*.akamaihd.net , *.akamaihd-staging.net , a248.e.akamai.net
(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)</nowiki></pre>
Websites need to make sure to send a full certificate chain to avoid getting an untrusted error message.
*http://www.networking4all.com/en/support/tools/site+check/
Note that Firefox may prefer a secure connection if you have ever visited a secure page on that domain.
You can remove all data stored in Firefox from a specific domain via "Forget About This Site" in the right-click context menu of an history entry ("History > Show All History" or "View > Sidebar > History") or via the about:permissions page.
Using "Forget About This Site" will remove all data stored in Firefox from that domain like bookmarks, cookies, passwords, cache, history, and exceptions, so be cautious and if you have a password or other data from that domain that you do not want to lose then make a note of those passwords and bookmarks.
You can't recover from this 'forget' unless you have a backup of the involved files.
It doesn't have any lasting effect, so if you revisit such a 'forgotten' website then data from that website will be saved once again.