Google Wakes Up – Https by Default for all Gmail Users

http://www.kitnakuch.com
There is certain amount of laxity when it comes to completeness or readiness of a product or a service. I am talking about Google, the big daddy of Internet. Be it Feedburner or Google wave or even Orkut, Google seems to be lethargic in fixing the bugs. Same with Gmail as well. All these are high quality products, mind you – leaders in their area of use, but still far from being perfect.
Especially Gmail, possibly the most popular free email solution on the web currently, has had lots of complaints with respect to security. Let us get it straight, no product is fool-proof, no email solution is hack-proof, but I simply fail to understand why it took so much time for Google to enable https by default to all Gmail users? It’s been more than 20 months since we wrote a post tipping our readers to Always Use HTTPS to make Gmail more secure. A month later Mike Perry demoed a utility called Gmail Hacking tool which showed how easy it is to break Gmail’s security.

Better late than never. Google is now rolling out default HTTPS for everyone. The total HTTPS connection will just ensure that none of the conversation between the GMail servers and your PC will be unencrypted. It must be understood that HTTP is not a secured protocol in its own. But HTTPS which is a Secured form of HTTP protocol encrypts your Data while it is transferred from your Client Machine to the Web Server. So if any Third-party malicious user interrupts in your connection then the encrypted data remains secure and cannot be recovered.
The whole thing is a direct result of the attempted hacking of some Gmail accounts in China. It’s good that Google takes its security seriously, and they’ve made that more clear by announcing that all Gmail accounts will now default to the encrypted version of the service.