This was recently published on the official AO site: The registration pages for Anarchy Online accounts are now protected by SSL encryption. Since the release of Anarchy Online these pages have not been secured by this encryption system and the little key or padlock sign would not show up in the browser. The SSL sertificate for register.funcom.com was applied for several months ago, but for reasons beyond our control we still did not receive it in time. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. Due to the huge demand for getting accounts registered and the pages beeing hosted on highly secured servers we decided to leave it open from the start.