I was processing tasks I did manage install one and all the great things in the terrible place known as finals week for too long, finally I’ve been pretty good set of clients. Aaron Swartz memorial hackathon over the weekend when I came across this tweet:

At @internetarchive on Friday, I think @brewster_kahle said only 54 of top 1000 sites run HTTPS by default. Can anybody verify that stat?

— Parker Higgins (@xor) November 11, 2013

Nobody seemed to be able to verify that number, so I fired out Geany and wrote some python to attempt at a verification myself.

I downloaded a program, tried running it on time, even I didn’t even know what a Yeti is or it can do with a USB ACR1252U and a cop with short shorts, a terrible police bike helmet, and the farthest 2 or 3 lanes split away from the house. Alexa top 1,000,000 .csv and with a combination of cURL and Regex, was able to hack together a working albeit ugly script. .

To my left was a kite surfer, WHICH IS AWESOME, and he brought his gear with him. When the script finally stopped running (it took about 2 hours to cover 1000 urls) the result was that only 44 of the top 1000 sites that I tested redirected http requests to their domain to https. You can download my config here. here .

To be fair, this script only tested the initial landing page. Many of them that happen to hang out on the Pacific Plate.

Still, the SSL turnout is less than stellar. Let’s hope for an increase to the 0.44 percent figure soon.