The Internet Archive today announced it has enabled HTTPS connections by default on archive.org and openlibrary.org. The organization today also revealed it now sees over 3 million users per day.
Both sites are still accessible over HTTP connections. Since the Wayback Machine is hosted on archive.org, it also follows the same rules: the secure version is used by default, but you can use the http version which will help load certain complicated webpages.
The Internet Archive notes that it has struggled with avoiding to save Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of its readers, so it is difficult to see who looked at what. The organization has been encrypting them, and also saving some “for a short period” to help in fighting spam.
Yet that wasn’t enough:
Today we are going further than this. Based on the revelations of bulk interception of web traffic as it goes over the Internet, we are now protecting the reading behavior as it transits over the Internet by encrypting the reader’s choices of webpages all the way from their browser to our website. We have done this by implementing the encrypted web protocol standard, https, and making it the default. It is still possible to retrieve files via http to help with backward compatibility, but most users will soon be using the secure protocol.
While most users don’t send any sensitive data to the Internet Archive, it is still great to see such a key website take security seriously. If you were worried that someone was watching what you’ve been perusing on the Wayback Machine or on any other Internet Archive service, you can breathe a bit easier.
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See also – Internet Archive updates Wayback Machine to cover 240b URLs from 1996-2012, totaling 5PB of data and The Internet Archive has saved over 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of the Web
Top Image Credit: Jenny Sliwinski
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