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May 31, 2018 Comments closed

Thanks for making our “Solo: A Star Wars Story” Event a huge success!

in Industry Lowdown

The SSL Store™ would like to thank everyone that attended

The SSL Store™ hosted a premiere showing of Solo: A Star Wars Story last Thursday night. Over 50 business leaders from around the Tampa Bay area showed up on a rainy night to watch the newest entry in the Star Wars film universe.

“With all of the industry changes including Google Chrome beginning to more prominently alert visitors when browsing a non-secure site, we wanted to take an opportunity to share with our local community the importance of having an SSL certificate,” said Michael Ward, the EVP of Business Development for The SSL Store™. “Now more than ever all websites need an SSL certificate to encrypt data.”

In addition to a premiere screening of the new Solo film, attendees were given a free Solo t-shirt and a free Extended Validation SSL certificate, courtesy of our partner Comodo.

The goal of the evening was to educate local businesses about the HTTPS mandate that is coming with the release of Google 68. As you are likely aware, Google (and the rest of the browsers) have been pushing for the entire internet to migrate to HTTPS for the past several years.

For our purposes, we consider Google’s 2014 announcement that HTTPS would become an SEO ranking signal as the start of the effort, but since then the browsers have continued the push in subtle ways like restricting access to advance browser features.

They’ve also changed their UI.  Google has introduced negative visual indicators for HTTP websites and sites with SSL certificate errors and a “Secure” indicator for sites with SSL. In July, with the release of Chrome 68 to stable, Google will stop rewarding for HTTPS and start penalizing for HTTP. This is a major paradigm shift.

To bolster this push, Google will be removing the “Secure” UI and escalating its negative indicators. Starting with the release of Chrome 69 and culminating sometime in the future with the removal the padlock icon and the protocol at the start of the URL.

HTTPS will be the web’s default state.

Unfortunately, this hasn’t been communicated very well by Google or the other browsers. Part of this is owed to the fact that SSL/TLS is not a subject the average business owner has much interest in. For SMBs, and even some larger companies, SSL is something that gets purchased once every year or so and then forgotten until it’s time to renew. After all, these people don’t have time to keep up with the comings and goings of the SSL industry—they’re running a business.

So, last Thursday night, before the film, we gave a brief 10 minute presentation, humorously titled “Episode LXVIII: A New Chrome,” explaining the upcoming challenges and addressing some common problems that companies and organizations run into when purchasing and managing SSL certificates. It wasn’t a sales pitch, it was strictly informational.

“We want to thank everyone who attended for braving the weather and coming to our event,” said Ward.

This is just the first event of its kind for The SSL Store™, with many more to follow. If you’re interested in an event in your own area, feel free to contact Michael.

And once again, thanks to everyone that attended, as well as the partners that helped facilitate it, including AMC, Disney and the Star Wars 501^st Legion for tempting us to turn to the dark side.

As always, leave any comments or questions below.

• #HTTPS
• #SSL/TLS