Google in July will start inserting a ‘not secure’ label in the address bar of every website that uses HTTP connections between its servers and users.

Source: Chrome 68 to condemn all unencrypted sites by summer | Computerworld

Initially Chrome will say “Not secure” but will later add a red danger icon. (There is nothing dangerous about looking at an unencrypted web site about cats.)

Google previously announced that it down ranks unecrypted web sites in search results.

Just as Youtube is killingly off new Youtube channels (to qualify for advertising, new channels must have at least 1,000 subscribers and an even tougher, 4,000 measured hours of views during preceding 12 month), Google is now working to kill off small personal web sites where many find implementing https is more trouble than its worth.

In effect, the distributed content of the original web (personal blogs, web sites, and RSS feeds) is largely pushed to migrate to Google and Facebook platforms, where Google and Facebook control everything.

My coldstreams.com web site now uses an annually purchased digital certificate, and 3d.coldstreams.com uses a “free” digital certificate for security. Unfortunately, the free certificates expire every 90 days, must be renewed and re-installed manually. For small and personal web sites, this is a bit of bother. My ISP can also issue a self signed digital certificate but that results in a different error message presented to the web visitor – not an improvement.

Related: Twitter and Facebook are increasingly trying to clamp down on fake news, conspiracy theories, hate speech, and who knows what else using many methods. One method, obviously, is to simply make it more difficult for individuals to place their own content online. No idea if this is what is happening but it is a potential side effect of the changes that are underway.

Related: I originally moved my coldstreams.com blog to coldstreams.wordpress.com to use their https services, their faster servers, and to let them do the frequent software updates. A side effect is it looks like Google down ranks searches for content hosted on *.wordpress.com web sites – by a lot. Consequently, I am considering moving this blog back to coldstreams.com. Truth is, I had – and still have – far more readers on the old blog than the *.wordpress.com blogs have ever gotten. Search traffic barely ever reaches the *.wordpress.com web sites whereas I still get lots of search traffic, every day, to my original and dated web sites. For that reason, I am giving serious though to moving back.

Coldstreams