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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: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:55PM (2 children)
The problem with this is that it imposes a real-world cost on anyone who wants to create their own little website. Certificates are not free, unless you get one from Let's Encrypt, but LE certs don't work on most of the lowest-cost hosting providers. So basically, this whole "let's go HTTPS everywhere!" trend is simply making it so that small-time website operators are going to disappear and it'll make having a website more expensive. Great job for democratization, guys.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 25 2018, @10:58PM
I'm hosting with Bluehost for a couple of hobby websites. In the light of the "HTTPS everywhere" they offered SSL certificates with no modifications in the price of hosting - see for yourself [bluehost.com] all their plans have "SSL certificate included".
I have no doubts that Bluehost is not the only hosting service to do it.
I'm repeating my question: what has Google done wrong in signalling the connection to a site in insecure?
They don't lie about it, just notify the visitors. The access to the site is not blocked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday July 26 2018, @04:03PM
What exactly do you mean that LE certs won't work on low cost hosting providers? You can get a .key and .crt file from LE and deploy those exactly the same way you'd deploy any other SSL cert. There might be some truly bottom end hosts that don't support HTTPS in any way, but that's hardly something to blame on LE alone. And there's plenty of cheap or even free hosting options that do support SSL. Might take a bit of time to get it set up, but that should be expected on a bottom tier host. EVERYTHING is going to take a bit of time to get set up on one of those services. And if you really have NO IDEA what you're doing, you should be using a more basic service like Wordpress.com -- it's free, they set up SSL automatically, and they won't let you disable it even if you wanted to.
I can understand that not every single site necessarily needs to be secure, and not every webmaster is going to want to spend the time to set that up...and if that's the case, if they intentionally want their site to be insecure, then that's fine. But let the users know so people aren't putting their credit cards or other sensitive information into that site. But "I can't afford it" or "my host doesn't support it" really isn't a valid excuse anymore.