The National Security Agency (NSA) was recently reported to be spying on Wikipedia users on a regular basis, keeping track of what is being read on the site. Speaking on the topic, Wikimedia Foundation has stated on its blog that NSA has been employing an XKeyscore program tool for this purpose, which is why the company has quickened the process of switching to HTTPS wherein ‘S’ stands for security.
Despite the fact the their current architecture doesn’t support HTTPS by default, the company claims to be making changes to materialize this goal. It has outlined a number of objectives, one of the most significant alterations being the roll-out of these changes to logged-in users. This is bound to take place on August 21 at four o’clock as per UTC.
The foundation eventually will be pushing these changes to the fore for others across the globe, although it hasn’t divulged an exact date. So as to not impose the changes on its users, it is considering beginning with soft-enabling HTTPS. The main idea behind this is to allow search engines to offer results employing the secure protocol instead of HTTP.
On the other hand, hard-enabling which forces people to enter HTTPS-secured portals, is difficult to achieve. There are nations including China that have blocked such pages to the Internet encyclopedia’s projects. Co-founder, Jimmy Wales’ tweet which states that a few bugs have caused the delay in the switch, is the latest status update on this news.
As a precautionary measure, the company has counseled users to utilize HTTPS Everywhere, which is a Chrome and Firefox extension aiming to make browsing more secure by encrypting communications.