Why you should give a fuck take it seriously

Let's think what's happening when you make a request to visit your favorite website, that request must pass through many different networks — any of which could be used to potentially eavesdrop or tamper with your connection.

From your own computer to other machines on your local network, to the access point itself, through routers and switches all the way to the ISP and through the backbone providers, there are a lot of different organizations who ferry a request along. If a malicious user got into any one of those systems, then they have the potential to see what’s traveling through the wire.

Normally, web requests are sent over regular HTTP, where a client’s request and the server’s response are both sent as plain text. There are lots of good reasons why HTTP doesn’t use secure encryption by default:

• Security requires more computation power
• Security requires more bandwidth
• Security breaks caching

But sometimes, as the developer of a web application, you know that sensitive information like passwords or credit card data will be going over the connection, so it’s necessary to take extra precautions against snooping on those pages.