This is a bug fix release of the Term and Category based Posts Widget plugin intended to solve license activation issues that several people were experiencing.
Before this version we were doing all the licensing and upgrade related communication between the plugin and our server by using the HTTPS protocol for security and privacy reasons. We assumed that since all core, plugin and theme upgrades from the wordpress.org repository are done via HTTPS it is a safe thing to do, but it turns out we were wrong.
HTTPS is a somewhat complex protocol with several versions of the protocol itself and the encryption it uses. We don’t have enough understanding of all the relevant factores but it seems like our server uses encryption methods that are not supported by older servers or versions of php/curl. This mismatch cause the communication to totally fail.
As we got about 15% of the people complaining about that we have decided with an heavy heart to drop the use of HTTPS in favor of plain HTTP.
We are going to investigate what is the best way to let users that desire to use HTTPS to do that, but this is unlikely to happen very soon.