Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
As of today, Google begins shipping Chrome 68 which flags all sites served over the HTTP scheme as being "not secure". This is because the connection is, well, not secure so it seems like a fairly reasonable thing to say! We've known this has been coming for a long time now both through observing the changes in the industry and Google specifically saying "this is coming". Yet somehow, we've arrived at today with a sizable chunk of the web still serving traffic insecurely:
The majority of the Internet’s top 1M most popular sites will show up as “Not Secure” in @GoogleChrome starting July 24th. Make sure your site redirects to #HTTPS, so you don’t have the same problem. @Cloudflare makes it easy! #SecureOnChrome https://t.co/G2a0gi2aM8 pic.twitter.com/r2HWkfRofW
— Cloudflare (@Cloudflare) July 23, 2018
Who are these people?! After all the advanced warnings combined with all we know to be bad about serving even static sites over HTTP, what sort of sites are left that are neglecting such a fundamental security and privacy basic? I wanted to find out which is why today, in conjunction with Scott Helme, we're launching Why No HTTPS? You can find it over at WhyNoHTTPS.com (served over HTTPS, of course), and it's a who's who of the world's biggest websites not redirecting insecure traffic to the secure scheme:
The article continues with a list of "The World's Most Popular Websites Loaded Insecurely", tools and techniques used to gather the data, different responses based on the version of curl, differences accessing the bare domain name versus with the "www." prefix, and asks for any corrections. One can also access the aforementioned website set up specifically for tracking these results: https://whynohttps.com/.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @07:41AM (1 child)
This shows that HTTPS is, at least on the mass-deployment scale, secure enough to prevent "them" from reading and modifying your web traffic. Not the NSA's secret-agent type, but the casual, everyday "I'll trample everybody's privacy simply because I damn well can".
Now just imagine: what would happen to those save-the-children snakeoil peddlers if the whole web were indeed on HTTPS ?
:-o
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:04PM
They would direct you to a captive portal offering you their "app" to permit access. It would gimp your browser's certificate store to let them see your traffic. And since people want the access they would install it. Game over.