Here's why HTTPS is a very good thing:
- More and more often, Internet providers are tampering with websites in transit. They're injecting tracking headers for advertising, and custom JavaScript for various purposes. I feel strongly that the pages we serve should be the pages you receive, and no malicious payloads should be injected.
- Governments around the world are collecting Internet traffic on a massive scale and (most likely) storing it forever. The systems to analyze this traffic and build profiles about people are rapidly becoming more sophisticated.
- Browser vendors are starting to make certain new features available only to sites using HTTPS.
- If you log into the forum from a public wifi using plain HTTP, it only takes a fraction of a second to steal your password.
But the good news here it that (1) this should help fix our Google searches, which have been broken, and (2) as part of this work, I made the necessary changes to allow rdearman and I to bring the Super Challenge bot back online.
EDIT: Check out that SSL security rating: