The other day, I was trying to update the driver for my EVGA GeForce GTX460 Video Card, but the download kept stopping at 180MB out of 271MB. After re-starting the download a few times, realized that my ISP or firewall was flagging something malicious and interrupting the download. I figured I had 4 options:
- Download the driver on my server, and then download it to my PC using SFTP.
- Download it over a VPN. Being limited to 300kb/s bandwidth on the free ProXPN VPN didn’t seem like a good option either.
- Download it over public Wi-Fi. Just annoying.
- Download it over https.
Assuming it worked, I figured option 4 would be the easiest. The default download link too me to http://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows.... By changing the link to https://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows..., I received a certificate mismatch message, but the download worked when I overrode the warning. A closer look at the warning, shows the https certificate is for the domain name a248.e.akamai.net. This seems safe to me, since Akamai is a CDN, so it makes sense that NVIDIA could be using Akamai to distribute their drivers. I would be more cautious if the certificate was not issued to a CDN or NVIDIA itself. Remember to check that the installer was signed by the appropriate company (NVIDIA in this case).
I haven’t tried this on other downloads, but I think it should work on a fair percentage of them.