On Tuesday, Google released version 68 of its Chrome browser. The new version has added capabilities for payments, styles, and resource management, but the biggest change is warning users when your connection to a website isn’t secure.
Websites like the NHL’s stat site.
Once you have the new version of Chrome and visit nhl.com/stats, you’ll see a “Not Secure” label at top left.
Google explains secure and insecure connections better than I can:
When you load a website over plain HTTP, your connection to the site is not encrypted. This means anyone on the network can look at any information going back and forth, or even modify the contents of the site before it gets to you. With HTTPS, your connection to the site is encrypted, so eavesdroppers are locked out, and information (like passwords or credit card info) will be private when sent to the site.
So when you hit up a Not Secure site on a coffeeshop wifi or something, that means some random dude on the same network will know that you looked up Brooks Orpik’s “enhanced” stats yet again, plus he could he tamper with the data before you saw it, so it might look like Orpik is bad.
A dumb diagram I made:
The NHL’s stat site was launched in early 2015. The rollout came with fanfare, but the site does not appear to have been materially updated in the last three years. The algorithm absurdly purported to predict playoff series victors with 85 percent accuracy never surfaced. Some obvious bugs were fixed in the first year, but more remain, and usability has not been improved in three years. Simple data-collection tweaks that have been public knowledge for five years have not been employed. Its tables don’t even use HTML tables.
At some point, the SAP co-branding was removed from the page.
The NHL.com stat site has been a disaster since the start. At least now folks will also know it’s not secure.
Hockey stat sites we recommend are Corsica, Natural Stat Trick, and Hockeyviz. Consider joining RMNB in supporting them on Patreon: Corsica, NST, Hockeyviz.
