The memorandum is available here.Following the lead of many major Web services, the White House on Monday announced that it would move all of the federal government’s public sites and services to HTTPS-only.
Tony Scott, the federal CIO, has issued a memorandum to all federal agencies and departments instructing them to move all of their publicly accessible Web sites and services to HTTPS-only by the end of 2016.
What it means for weather enthusiasts running software that access US Government resources (NWS, USGS, etc.) is:
- [li]All of the PHP scripts using http:// would have to change to use https:// and that is non-trivial. The scripts using FetchUrlWithoutHanging() routines would have to be updated with the functionality replaced (and I'll do that for my scripts). [/li]
[li]Native weather software (Weather-Display, etc) would have to change to support https:// for data from US Government sites if they use them. [/li]
This is just the first 'heads-up' that the change is coming, and the coding is more complex to do -- likely many of my scripts will switch to use cURL or file_get_contents() with a context as the way of adapting to use native PHP instead of the low-level fconnect()/fget() with metrics for diagnostics timings.
More as I find out the details for specific site's plans.
Best regards,
Ken