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History of HTTPS Usage

"What should I use HTTPS for?" is a question whose answer has changed over the years. Here's an attempt to piece the history together. The web started off as just HTTP. This allowed for an enormous amount of things, but online shopping wasn't one of them. The problem was, sending credit card numbers over HTTP opened them up to theft: anyone between you and the server could keep a copy of your ca

— The New Watchdogs of Digital Commerce, October 1995 History from the late 1990s and early 2000s is hard to dig up, with so many dead sites and broken urls, but one place I looked to see things changing was old software manuals. Most message boards and other sites that have membership options do not handle your login information through a secure layer, which means it is unencrypted, and anyone who manages to intercept data packets can read it. Although the data is encrypted once the user hits the "Sign In" button, the practice runs counter to years of customer conditioning, as well as the goals of the browser makers.

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