To improve end user security and privacy, and by Federal government mandate OMB memo M-08-023, NCBI will be moving all web services to HTTPS-only on or before December 31, 2016.

Looking over the biojava source code, I notice that the eutilities base URL starts with http://
https://github.com/biojava/biojava/blob/master/biojava-core/src/main/java/org/biojava/nbio/core/sequence/loader/GenbankProxySequenceReader.java#L59

It needs to be updated to use https:// URLs instead. While we intend to provide redirects for GET and HEAD, POST and other non-safe methods will likely not be redirected; in particular, epost will cease to function over http when we move to https.

For more information:

• http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/news/06-10-2016-ncbi-https/
• https://https.cio.gov/
• subscribe to the utilities-announce mailing list at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mailman/listinfo/utilities-announce