Just because it serves HTTPS on port :443 doesn't mean you should be using it. 'HTTPS Everywhere' style plugins are a broken concept.

In what way are they a broken concept? What justification is there for serving HTTPS in a way users can't expect to consume?

> In what way are they a broken concept?

Because it's blindly following an inadequate heuristic, and not gracefully degrading if it fails - instead, you get comments like these blaming the author. Even though the author never wanted you to use HTTPS in the first place.

> What justification is there for serving HTTPS in a way users can't expect to consume?

Plenty of technical reasons (eg. what the sibling comments mentioned), but most importantly: there's no Internet/Web standard that I'm aware of which would prohibit me from doing so.

If you don't serve the same content on :80 and :443.

For example, you might be running a Tor relay node which would serve the node directory list on :443 to help people bypass firewalls, but also be using it as a useful and legitimate web server in order to prevent organizations from blocking it wholesale.

Somebody might prefer using http for public stuff (reading blog posts), https for private (editing them).

HTTPS Everywhere works based on rules as to which sites support https. It does not blindly redirect every request to port 443.

cool. i like fried cheese, too.

But the author was following convention: serving HTTP on traffic :80, and linking to that explicitly. It's you, the user, who for some reason decided to switch to a different protocol on a different port, and expected it to work even though there was no guarantee or indication that it would.

Could be a new hobby for the author. Like https://xkcd.com/148/

There isn't a HTTPS version of the site so you get dropped into the default vhost for their hosting provider, DreamHost.

DreamHost could automatically issue LE certs for their customers but that's not how they do things and don't enable it without customer approval.

It is impossible for DreamHost to not give you an error in this case. You connected directly to port 443 with a name that they don't have a certificate for. They could just close the connection but I don't think that would be an improvement on the situation.

EDIT: Ok then, looks like default port conventions don't really mean anything. Sorry I brought it up.