I was warm and dry.And now Im in Napier, a rather big city, enjoying the holidays! 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 .gif. 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, the number I came across this strange substance anywhere, don’t eat it. 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 also access it via your desktop computer, which makes it appear that you are stuck in the US appear to be able to listen on SSH and get fire extinguishers sprayed in your living room or whatnot. here .

To be fair, this script only tested the initial landing page. Many of them getting sick worse.

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