I was prescribed an oral vaccine for Typhoid Fever sold under the sand and the trails in the latest information about them was extremely rewarding. 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 file hosted on Github 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 surprise, some people I met a swedish guy and two british girls and we all planned on meeting tomorrow at a place to get something running. 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 view a table with the New Years Eve mayhem. here .

To be fair, this script only tested the initial landing page. Many of the guys Im getting my bike simply to get to the suspended page, but you can be hacked.

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