HackMake

Why We Encrypt

Knowledgeable and respectable expert in digital security, Bruce Schneier:

Encryption should be enabled for everything by default, not a feature you turn on only if you’re doing something you consider worth protecting.

This is important. If we only use encryption when we’re working with important data, then encryption signals that data’s importance.

HTTPS encrypts the internet traffic between your browser and the server hosting the website.

Hack/Make now runs in HTTPS solely. Encryption has often been used to secure pages where passwords or credit card information is transmitted. Beyond changing the signal-to-noise ratio if everyone uses HTTPS, as Schneier suggests, there is a simple benefit to running encryption on a humble blog: trust.

When a website is HTTPS, the page that you are reading in the browser is truly the content that is being transmitted by the server. Other people can see that you are requesting a page from hackmake.org but you can trust that no one is intercepting the page and modifying or censoring the contents of the page.

If you run a website, it can be a simple and inexpensive change that I encourage you to do.