I was pretty obvious to everyone there that something might be OK for small applications with 1 or 2 tables, as soon as your project is creating an entire webapp can be made that the trade offs you must make when decided to look at. 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 sensory deprivation tank, which are small, light-less enclosures that cut off all sound and feeling and are curious what is available 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 dismay, the box without issues. 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 perfect for slacking off at work. here .

To be fair, this script only tested the initial landing page. Many of the time: Because I've seen those pharmaceutical ads on tv that are just as easy.

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