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@Velocio
Has anyone been following the British and US government desires to monitor all web traffic? It's something out of a scary future, but the problem is that it is technically feasible and to some extent it's here already if not coming very soon.
I'm rather protective of personal privacy, and I don't subscribe to the view that "If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide."... that I think is one of the most logically flawed arguments of our time [Scribd, 2, 3].
Anyhow, as such policy becomes reality, and the web and everything that passes over it really is logged and analysed... I'm becoming of the opinion that if we can't trust our governments to allow us our open communication safe in the knowledge that we're not being spied upon, that perhaps the response to such things is that the web should be encrypted, and that the implicit capability to observe what is going on should be removed.
What I mean by this is simple, it used to be the case that techies would say that you have to use SSL encryption technology ( https:// ) over plain text ( http:// ) if you were sending passwords or credit cards over the internet. Now what I am considering is that any plain text should be sent over SSL.
So what could this mean? It means I'm actually considering taking a political stance and enforcing that stance upon this web site and all other websites I run. The stance is that all web sites I work on will go to https:// by default, and http:// would be unavailable.
I might still serve javascript, css, images, etc from http:// (so they can cache and the pages load faster, etc) ... but all web pages would go over https://
The question I have for you lot, is as this is one of the busiest sites I run... would this impact you? Do you have trouble accessing the SSL version of this site? Do you access the site from a phone that would have trouble with this?
Basically... what's the impact on you of such a change?
And the only way I can know this is for you guys to try the SSL version of the site and to let me know if you have any problems with it.
The SSL version is the same as this version, just that it's URL starts https:// rather than http://