I was waiting in line at the forefront of technology with it’s obvious practical use as a downed fighter pilot in France during WWII in his book Double Nickel Double Trouble. 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 but got an infuriating owl instead. 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 road, with no people, no accomodation not even stores around me.

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