Remember the furore over Firesheep? It made it easy to hack into other people’s Facebook accounts from Internet cafes. That’s just one example of why it is important that all traffic between a web application and the browser is encrypted. So we’re setting up our digger with an alarm system and steering lock.

We’ve just rolled out secure HTTP across ScraperWiki. You now have to access the website, APIs and views using https:// URLs. You will be able to tell from the corner of your browser, for example on Chrome it looks green with a padlock like this.

Let us know if you have any problems with the new setup – particularly from tools that use the API. We’ve set up redirects and done some testing, so everything should be fine. But there are sure to be niggles – do tell us.

P.S. This is all in preparation towards making private scrapers more generally available.