We've made a huge change here at WIRED. We're now encrypting everything that moves between our servers and your browser. Stories. Videos. Ads. Everything. That means no one can tinker with our content before it reaches you.

Take a look at the address bar of your browser. You should see a little green padlock icon. You may also see that our URL has the letters "https" in front of it, instead of the usual "http." This means that your connection to our site is encrypted. If you've been playing close attention, you may have seen this on certain parts of our site before. We started protecting connections to our Security section last April, but now every single page on Wired.com should be delivered to your browser over an encrypted connection now.

That's bigger than it sounds. Encryption makes it harder for someone to "impersonate" our site by forwarding you to a fake version of Wired.com, whether the attacker is a cybercriminal or a repressive government. With HTTPS enabled, you can be sure that you're visiting the real Wired.com, and you're seeing our articles exactly as we intended them. Many big sites now offer HTTPS, including Google Search and Facebook.

But if HTTPS is so great, why didn't we do this sooner? Because, frankly, it's pretty hard for a site like ours, which has been around for 23 years, to implement. We hope to make it easier for other media organizations to make the change, so we've published a technical article outlining what we did and the challenges we faced. But if you want a less technical explanation of what we did and why, then read on.

Stealth Mode

Website encryption isn't new. HTTPS depends on an encryption protocol called Transport Layer Security, or TLS, which has been around since 1999 and essentially replaced an earlier standard called Secure Socket Layer, or SSL, which was first released in 1995. SSL made it possible for websites to collect credit card information over the web by encrypting the data as it traveled over the web so someone snooping on your connection couldn't intercept your details, and by using cryptographic certificates to ensure that you were handing over your info to the right website. But in the early days, these standards were primarily used only to protect credit card transactions online, not entire websites. After all, blogs and wikis and band and restaurant websites were available to the public, so why encrypt them?