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from the wasn't-worth-the-work...-until-now? dept.
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:36PM (1 child)
HTTPS is cool, but the only thing sending unsecure HTTP redirects to HTTPS does is make your site less interoperable for no actual security benefit.
While most UAs support HTTPS to some description, HTTPS has a lot of different modes and most of them are completely broken from a security perspective. In many cases such modes have to be disabled on the server side. This means HTTPS won't work in anything but the latest browsers, so you need to leave HTTP working.
Browsers should just change it so when you type 'mycoolsite.example.org' in the address bar it connects with HTTPS by default. But maybe even this doesn't matter because most people don't enter domain names directly and just type 'mycoolsite' into a web search.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:17PM
"Anything but the latest browsers" is an invitation to some fullscreen goatse screensaver anyway. And that's best case scenario.