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History of HTTPS Usage
- kalleboo 2y ago[2018]
- nofinator 2y agoAha. I was surprised to see that ~30% of web pages loaded by Firefox were still not https. A 6-year-old graph would explain why!
- adgjlsfhk1 2y agoApparently 10% is still unencrypted which is higher than I would have thought... https://letsencrypt.org/stats/ https://letsencrypt.org/stats/
- ViktorRay 2y agoMakes me wonder what the history of HTTPS is on Hacker News. Does anyone know? Perhaps the dang (the moderator of Hacker News) knows…
- diggan 2y agoNot a definite answer by any measure, but pg started linking to https://news https://news... instead of http://news http://news... sometime around 11 years ago: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Apg%20news.ycombinator.com&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Before that, all http links instead.
- Wowfunhappy 2y ago> This allowed for an enormous amount of things, but online shopping wasn't one of them. The problem was, sending credit card numbers over HTTP opened them up to theft: anyone between you and the server could keep a copy of your card information. In the 90s, what exactly would the attack vector have been? I don't imagine AOL would have wanted to steal people's credit cards. I find it odd that this was viewed as a concern for credit cards but not website logins.
- tialaramex 2y agoPeople genuinely worried about this. If you go back to around the time SSL is announced, the media coverage says well, you can't really have shopping on the Internet because there's no way to secure credit card purchases. Clifford Stoll has a rant from around then in which he just plain asserts it will never happen, even though that's actually written IIRC after SSL shipped. A few years later it's much more about whether this is really going to take off, there's no doubt people can do it, but is there any desire? There's a BBC clip on Youtube from the era when Amazon is an exciting new business, it has a lot more different books in stock than any bricks and mortar store, but it doesn't have the enormous sales volumes compared to real world book stores yet, Bezos could just be another entrepreneur with an idea that sounds good - he isn't yet incredibly rich and so he also seems much less weird.
- nitwit005 2y agoWhile it's certainly possible the ISP could extract the data (and might be forced to by some intelligence agency), it was also possible to just listen to the data in transit. Remember that these were the days of people sending data over telephone wires.
- ytch 2y agoOther than eavesdrop, the biggest advantage of HTTPS for me is to stop nasty ISP that injecting advertisement or other code in HTTP page.
- Doctor_Fegg 2y agoAlso the biggest advantage of HTTPS for any bigco whose business model relies on showing you _their_ ads and no one else’s.
- chgs 2y agoCan you not just choose a better ISP?
- 2y ago
- sureIy 2y agoThe funniest thing about HTTPS is that its transition/enforcement exposed a lot of people who don’t understand why we need HTTPS everywhere, even if there are no logins (!!!) To this day, if you open Twitter, Facebook Groups or Discord, you’ll find people complaining about Google forcing HTTPS down people’s throat.
- curated4ever 2y agoPlenty of them here on HN too.
- em-bee 2y agoone of my biggest regrets is that in the early 2000s when i was contributing to a webserver project i suggested that we should not allow people to log in via http but instead enforce https for that. or rather, use https for login content and http for public content. the devs liked the idea and promptly implemented it with the result that while it now was no longer possible to log in via http the server also could not show public content over https.