Because Drummer and FeedLand now do their own identity via email, I had to switch them to HTTPS last year. And I’ve pretty much been converting anything that builds on those apps to HTTPS as well. I had to convert the image URLs in Scripting News, which is served by HTTP, to HTTPS so they wouldn’t show up as broken images in FeedLand. They almost certainly have been showing up broken in other feed reading software, for years. Anyway, even though it would be relatively easy to convert scripting.com to HTTPS, I will never do it for the simple reason that this site goes back to 1994, and if I switched to HTTPS now, well what about all the other sites of its era that are breaking due to this really ill-conceived corner-turn. Also the uncountable myriad of subdomains of scripting.com started over 30 years and left standing, and all the HTTP urls hanging off them. You don’t accumulate 30 years of archives thinking someday you’re going to convert every page and fixing all the broken images. I can’t imagine a change that could more totally break the web. And yet somehow we’ve let that happen. Scripting News is one of the foundation sites of the open web, it goes back much further than probably anything that’s still updating. The roots of this site are firmly planted in its foundation, and its opinion of Google is who the fuck do they think they are. Scripting News is angry, even though Dave the system developer would rather just go ahead and switch. Google is playing mass psychology on us, getting us all to believe that giving them full control to evolve the web is somehow a smart thing. It won’t happen here. It may be the last continuously updating site that runs in black and white, but it will always do so. #