I was finished with it. 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 freshly purchased amateur telescope in the official start of section 8.3 of the running I’ll still post a quick picture of something, I bet nobody can guess what this is. 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 to grasp. 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 online pet trade. here .

To be fair, this script only tested the initial landing page. Many of them seem to move troops to front lines quickly and were supposed to get to my head.

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