<p>The issue with the captcha should be fixed already, as of a few hours after this question was posted. </p>

<p>As for the rest of your question... check out our developer Nick Craver's <a href="http://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/04/23/stackoverflow-com-the-road-to-ssl/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">excellent blog post</a> on Stack Exchange's road to SSL for full details. The long and the short of it is that child metas do not support SSL yet due to certification problems with our subdomains. (The URL formats <code>*.*.stackexchange.com</code> or <code>meta.*.stackexchange.com</code> are what specifically is giving us trouble.) The eventual goal, if we go full SSL, will be to move child metas to <code>*.meta.stackexchange.com</code> to get around this problem (as mentioned <a href="https://gaming.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8099/11014">here</a>). (Read Nick's blog post - it's interesting and more informative than this answer.)</p>

<p>Also, it is worth mentioning that the whole "password is being sent in plain text" is misleading. When you're logging in through the openid provider either no passwords are sent at all, or, if you're using Stack Exchange's openid, all traffic is via SSL.</p>

<p>tl;dr: SSL is a work in progress, and you've hit a kink that hasn't been worked out yet. </p>
