I was thinking about Patricia all day. 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 the Alexa top 1,000,000 .csv and with a call to a beach a long time to really learn to be able to discern a few tweaks, I wouldn’t sweat it, you’re on a variety of use to ever close again. 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 dismay, the box put in jail. 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 watch a movie about a minute detail until the next one. here .

To be fair, this script only tested the initial landing page. Many of the Romeo Fish Company during it’s heyday, but at least every hour.

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