I went to register for the Challenge Tour (the 134km ride on 25 January 2008) today.

I clicked on a link from an email from the South Australian Tourism Commission that goes to this site - http://www.bizgate.sa.gov.au/shop/tdu/site/page.cfm?CONTENT=shop%5Ffront.

Fine.

I pick the correct event to pay for, add it to my cart, enter my details, then go to checkout. I then get a popup window asking for my contact details again (didn't they already know that?), and then the next page asks for my credit card info.

Whoa!

Hang on!

We're still on a HTTP page - no lock icon, no coloured address/location bar, nothing, just plain text sailing off into the Internet for anyone to snoop!

So I rang up the SA Tourism people, and the lady tried to reassure me - "yes, our online payment system is secure".

I was not reassured.

"Funny, we had someone else contact us with a similar query 10 minutes ago" - what a surprise.

I finally got her to find someone else who looks after the Tour down under website - a guy by the name of Darrenn. I spoke to him and explained the problem. I don't think he quite understood my concerns (not being an IT person apparently). Anyway, he gave me his email address and promised to look into it. I fired off an email to him.

Not content with that, I then thought I'd try and find someone who actually runs the BizGate site. Their top-level web page says they're run by the Department for Transport, Energy and Infrastructure. Fine. I rang DTEI and was given another phone number. I rang that and left a message.

Why do I feel a bit pessimistic that anything will get done :-(

The solution by the way, is to use this link instead:

https://www.bizgate.sa.gov.au/shop/tdu/site/page.cfm?content=search_results.cfm&mode=browse

Marvelous what a difference an 's' makes.

Update late Friday afternoon: The link has been fixed now