{"id":232,"date":"2014-09-30T10:19:06","date_gmt":"2014-09-30T14:19:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/?p=232"},"modified":"2014-09-30T10:24:03","modified_gmt":"2014-09-30T14:24:03","slug":"web-encryption-its-not-just-for-e-commerce-anymore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/2014\/09\/web-encryption-its-not-just-for-e-commerce-anymore\/","title":{"rendered":"Web encryption — it’s not just for e-commerce, anymore."},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I re-tweeted <\/a>Cloudflare’s announcement that they are providing universal SSL for their customers. [1]\u00a0\u00a0 I believe the announcement is a valuable one for the state of the open Internet for a couple of reasons:<\/p>\n

First, there is the obvious — they are doubling the number of websites on the Internet that support encrypted connections.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And, hopefully, that will prompt even more sites\/hosting providers\/CDNs to get serious about supporting encryption, too.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Web encryption — it’s not just for e-commerce, anymore.<\/p>\n

Second, and no less important, is the way that the announcement articulates and shares their organizational thought processes.\u00a0 They are pretty clear that this is not a decision made to immediately and positively impact their bottom line of business.\u00a0 It’s about better browsing, and a better Internet in the long run is better business.\u00a0 And, they are also pretty open about the challenges they face, operationally, to achieve this.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That’s another thing that can be helpful to other organizations contemplating the plunge to support SSL.<\/p>\n

So, go ahead and have a read of their detailed announcement — and please forget to come back and check if this website supports encrypted connections.\u00a0\u00a0 It does not :-\/\u00a0\u00a0 (yet).\u00a0 I’ve added it to my IT todo list — right after dealing with some issues in my e-mail infrastructure.\u00a0 I asked the head of IT for a timeline on that, and she just gave me a tail-flick and a paw-wash in response.\u00a0 Life as a micro-enterprise.<\/p>\n

More substantially, I could easily become a Cloudflare customer and thus enable encryption up to the Cloudflare servers.\u00a0 But, proper end-to-end encryption requires my site to have a certificate, based on a unique IP address for this website and the going rate for that, given where my site is, is $6\/mo.\u00a0\u00a0 That adds, substantially, to the cost of supporting a website, especially when you might have several of them kicking around for different purposes.<\/p>\n

There’s work to be done yet in the whole security system (economics) model, it seems to me.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Open discussion of practical issues and eventual work arounds does seem like a good starting place, though.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1] http:\/\/blog.cloudflare.com\/introducing-universal-ssl\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I re-tweeted Cloudflare’s announcement that they are providing universal SSL for their customers. [1]\u00a0\u00a0 I believe the announcement is a valuable one for the state of the open Internet for a couple of reasons: First, there is the obvious — they are doubling the number of websites on the Internet that support encrypted connections.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[22,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-innovation","category-internet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbjRsG-3K","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":238,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232\/revisions\/238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkingcat.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}