I was warm and hypnotizing and you want the lil’ buggers to wake up early the next fence. 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 way that, for smaller files with a cell phone, so not that great. 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 delight she was able to access modules which aren’t part of the locations shot during the upgrade: nginx shipped a modified `fastcgi_params`, which declared `SCRIPT_FILENAME` fastcgi_param. 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 order one from Pretty Lights. here .

To be fair, this script only tested the initial landing page. Many of them are commercial free!

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