I read a Charles Stross novel a while ago called Glasshouse. Set in the future, a passage in the book stayed with me. Looking back at the historical record and how much information has been stored, saved or lost, he described how a switch to digital storage had caused a big hole in the record because at some point, "for no obvious reason" everything had started to be encrypted. And that's what I thought: for no obvious reason. Why bother encrypting these blog posts?

For the last year or two, a big push has been made by some tech companies, concerned about privacy mainly, to move to securing and encrypting web sites: this uses the HTTPS protocol rather than plain unencrypted HTTP. Google have even gone as far as saying they would favour HTTPS sites over HTTP only, and start pushing in other ways as well.

This web site does not "need" encryption and contains no private or sensitive information, and for this reason I've held back and wondered what all the fuss is about. However, implementing the tech is now a lot less hassle than it used to be, particularly using something like Let's Encrypt, and I've now gone ahead and done it.

Now, when browsing the Sherringham Blog you can rest easy that the little green lock icon means it is much harder for anyone to intercept and change the web pages as they flow to your web browser over the internet.