Slashdot Mirror
The Internet Archive Switches To HTTPS Connections By Default
An anonymous reader writes "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 main thing holding back HTTPS is advertisements. Browsers (especially IE) complain if your encrypted page includes unencrypted content (like iframes served from a a third party ad server) and rightly so. Google can get away with it because they serve their own ads, and Wikipedia doesn't have any ads. Arstechnica ran an article a few years back describing the reasons why they couldn't switch to HTTPS by default, but most of it boils down the fact that they can't get rid of the third party content in their pages.
I refreshed the page like 5 times and got a different block cipher and key exchange protocol each time, from crappy rsa-rc4 to a mighty ecdhe-aes128-gcm. Also some dhe-Camellia256 and and rsa-aes-cbc in the meantime.
There seem to be a whole farm of servers with heterogeneous configurations back there, someone should look into it.
While i could understand this is some "bright" new idea to mitigate the impact of one protocol being broken (not putting all eggs in the same basket), i say with confidence that AES-CBC prior to TLS1.1 and all variants of RC4 are irremediably broken. Broken like in "you can recover the plain-text in a handful of minutes using python on a 300$ netbook with only half a brain".