The whole HTTPS push is a cynical and perfidious effort by Google (Alphabet) and Mozilla. Here’s why.

I wonder if they’ve even tried to quantify the outages they’ll cause. So many sites are simply residing on a hard disk somewhere, served by an ancient version of some unknown and not maintained server software, chugging along as someone keeps paying the electric bill, and replaces a broken hardware component when needed. The people who created the site might not have understood HTTPS or how to deploy it, and many are long gone. Some of course are dead. We are certainly not all sitting around doing nothing waiting for a handful of programmers on a mail list to make us perform a ridiculous act of security theater for our blog posts written in 2002.

Most of these sites do not need HTTPS. It isn’t an issue for my ancient blog posts. Or yours.

Even those who style themselves as guardians of the web seem intent on destroying it with no lack of celerity. Mozilla, having turned its back on allowing the user control (one of the core tenets of the early web), is also on the side of evil with this push to HTTPS which just throws so much of what made the web great in the garbage.

Dave Winer is one of the few who actually understands the issues at play here and hasn’t been infected by propaganda.

None of my active sites will ever move to HTTPS. If that is ever required of me, they will all be shuttered.