From here I can not make a SSL connection to computer hope.
I mistyped, has to be
https://www.computerhope.com/forum/ without the www redirects to the http site.
I'm going to disagree. While I would certainly agree that things like E-mail, banks, or online stores like say Amazon benefit far more to the consumer by using SSL/HTTPS, sites like these still benefit because login details are not communicated in plaintext- not to mention the other advantages.
Logging in to CH via a http connection means that your username password could be compromised by a MITM attack. Also, many trojans and other malware that sit in the background watch for logins by snooping network traffic, HTTPS can still keep login details safe. It also means you cannot be "watched" while changing the password.
The idea behind it is that it is no longer up to the judgement of website creators what user information is actually sensitive. It prevents not only your information (as a user of the site) from being inspected, but it prevents it from being changed on it's way to you; adware can sometimes inject advertisements or links inside of pages viewed in the browser, such things would cause SSL Certificate failures which would prevent the page from loading and instantly allow users to know something is amiss.
But the great danger to privacy/security are not technological. The real problem is about morality, the law and respect for other people.
I'd argue the opposite. I'd say the greatest danger to security and privacy on the Internet are overly optimistic firms who follow that credo.
Microsoft followed that with ActiveX. ActiveX components on the web provided unparalleled power to web developers. In their optimism they didn't consider that maybe providing web developers with the ability to run arbitrary, unsandboxed binary code on the local machine was a bad idea.
It's sort of the Internet version of "Oh, I remember back in the day things were different, nobody ever locked their doors and we didn't live in constant fear", which is complete bollocks as well anyway for reasons not worth going into here.
