EFF Partners With DuckDuckGo

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today announced it has enhanced its groundbreaking HTTPS Everywhere browser extension by incorporating rulesets from DuckDuckGo Smarter Encryption. According to the digital rights group's press release, HTTPS Everywhere is 'a collaboration with The Tor Project and a key component of EFF's effort to encrypt the web and make the Internet ecosystem safe for users and website owners.' From the press release: 'DuckDuckGo Smarter Encryption has a list of millions of HTTPS-encrypted websites, generated by continually crawling the web instead of through crowdsourcing, which will give HTTPS Everywhere users more coverage for secure browsing,' said Alexis Hancock, EFF Director of Engineering and manager of HTTPS Everywhere and Certbot web encrypting projects. 'We're thrilled to be partnering with DuckDuckGo as we see HTTPS become the default protocol on the net and contemplate HTTPS Everywhere's future.'

EFF began building and maintaining a crowd-sourced list of encrypted HTTPS versions of websites for a free browser extension -- HTTPS Everywhere -- which automatically takes users to them. That keeps users' web searching, pages visited, and other private information encrypted and safe from trackers and data thieves that try to intercept and steal personal information in transit from their browser. DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, also joined the effort with Smarter Encryption to help users browse securely by detecting unencrypted, non-secure HTTP connections to websites and automatically upgrading them to encrypted connections. With more domain coverage in Smarter Encryption, HTTPS Everywhere users are provided even more protection. HTTPS Everywhere rulesets will continue to be hosted through this year, giving our partners who use them time to adjust. We will stop taking new requests for domains to be added at the end of May.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.