[HN Gopher] History of HTTPS Usage
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       History of HTTPS Usage
        
       Author : wpapper
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2024-08-09 00:19 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.jefftk.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.jefftk.com)
        
       | kalleboo wrote:
       | [2018]
        
         | nofinator wrote:
         | Aha. I was surprised to see that ~30% of web pages loaded by
         | Firefox were still not https. A 6-year-old graph would explain
         | why!
        
       | ViktorRay wrote:
       | Makes me wonder what the history of HTTPS is on Hacker News. Does
       | anyone know?
       | 
       | Perhaps the dang (the moderator of Hacker News) knows...
        
       | Wowfunhappy wrote:
       | > This allowed for an enormous amount of things, but online
       | shopping wasn't one of them. The problem was, sending credit card
       | numbers over HTTP opened them up to theft: anyone between you and
       | the server could keep a copy of your card information.
       | 
       | In the 90s, what exactly would the attack vector have been? I
       | don't imagine AOL would have wanted to steal people's credit
       | cards. I find it odd that this was viewed as a concern for credit
       | cards but not website logins.
        
         | tialaramex wrote:
         | People genuinely worried about this. If you go back to around
         | the time SSL is announced, the media coverage says well, you
         | can't really have shopping on the Internet because there's no
         | way to secure credit card purchases. Clifford Stoll has a rant
         | from around then in which he just plain asserts it will never
         | happen, even though that's actually written IIRC after SSL
         | shipped.
         | 
         | A few years later it's much more about whether this is _really_
         | going to take off, there 's no doubt people can do it, but is
         | there any desire? There's a BBC clip on Youtube from the era
         | when Amazon is an exciting new business, it has a lot more
         | different books in stock than any bricks and mortar store, but
         | it doesn't have the enormous sales volumes compared to real
         | world book stores yet, Bezos could just be another entrepreneur
         | with an idea that sounds good - he isn't yet incredibly rich
         | and so he also seems much less weird.
        
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       (page generated 2024-08-12 23:01 UTC)