14 DAY TRIAL // Despite some serious problems that are beginning to surface, the DigiNotar hack is a great example, switching to encrypted web connections, via HTTPS is a great idea for any website. Google, Facebook, Twitter and others have led the way, but more are following.
Wikimedia, the organization behind the massively popular Wikipedia, is working on enabling HTTPS connections for Wikipedia and related sites.
But, as with everything Wikipedia does, things move slow. Now, it's announcing that it's enabled Protocol-relative URLs on all Wikimedia sites, a precursory step to rolling out HTTPS support.
"In July we enabled protocol-relative URLs on testwiki, and asked for bug reports. We did this in preparation for native HTTPS support for the sites," Ryan Lane, operations engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote.
"We received and fixed a number of protocol-relative related bugs, and then tested on a few of the larger wikis. We are now at a point where protocol-relative URL support is stable enough to enable it on all wikis, so today we’ve enabled it," he announced.
Protocol-relative URLs are a must if Wikipedia is to start supporting HTTPS. This will ensure that all links on the site will work over both regular HTTP and encrypted HTTPS.
Considering the sheer amount of links in any Wikipedia article, the testing phase was highly critical. Wikimedia is now satisfied with the results and has enabled protocol-relative URLs across all related sites.
Apart from ensuring that internal links work properly and don't ferry visitors from HTTP pages to HTTPS pages and back again, the move also puts a lower strain on Wikimedia's infrastructure.
"All requests are served by our caching layer (squid or varnish)," Wikimedia explained in an earlier blog post.
"If you are browsing the site in HTTPS mode, and another user is browsing the same pages in HTTP mode, two versions of those pages will be stored in our cache, as the links are different between the two modes," it said.
However, this doesn't mean that HTTPS support is landing any day now, Wikimedia still has some testing to do. But if everything goes smooth, you should be able to browse Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons via a secured connection.