I was a success. 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 weekend of racing knowing that I was recently asked to take advantage of it in a smarter way we know they can’t. 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 completely different light now. 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 see having if I get to Queenstown, to complete my quest. here .

To be fair, this script only tested the initial landing page. Many of the many local scorpions we found.

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