Unfortunately there are a lot of websites that still aren’t utilizing HTTPS to ensure confidential and unaltered communications between them and their users. One of the excuses often given by website administrators for not using HTTPS is that certificates cost money. Another excuse is that managing certificates is a huge pain in the ass.
StartSSL has been providing free certificates for years but administrators still have to manually manage them. A while ago a group of people decided to kill both birds with a single stone and began work on Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority and software package that work together to provide automatically managed certificate to websites. It’s been in closed beta for a while and starting December 3rd it will be making the beta test available to the public.
This means anybody wanting a certificate will be able to request one. It also means there will no longer be any excuses for websites not to implement HTTPS. And with the ever more pervasive surveillance state it’s absolutely necessary to make HTTPS the default.