K.Q. Dreger, with another take the recent push to encrypt the web:

Unfortunately, the world wide landscape today desperately calls for us to encrypt what we can. We, as creators on the web, are obliged to help protect the privacy and security of our readers. Enabling HTTPS on a domain doesn’t hurt existing content, but it does provide your visitors with a little more protection, and — critically — it doesn’t require a change in their behavior. They get to keep just using the web.

There’s no easy solution to this. Encrypting the web is almost certainly better than not, but it does introduce an additional barrier to entry for new creators. And, as I said when I linked to Dave Winer’s piece last week, it would be a very bad idea to dismiss unencrypted webpages as a byproduct of encouraging developers to move to HTTPS. To put it another way, it’s okay to move forward, but that doesn’t mean we should destroy everything behind us in our quest for progress.