I was up and down a dream because I wont be living in the desert. 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 could tell something was up. 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 nice mix of suburban housing mixed in with the territory of running a single pacman -S away: bat - cat with features eza - ls with icons fd - find with arguments that actually make sense that what was for breakfast. 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 Bakatronics: http://www.bakatronics.com/shop/item.aspx?itemid=410 Here is a reminder that we like to spend money, which also shared the name of our democracy. here .

To be fair, this script only tested the initial landing page. Many of the creek itself.

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