Why would HTTPS necessarily cause more CO2 emissions? Wikipedia might be headqua... | Hacker News

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freehunter on Aug 2, 2013 | parent | context | favorite | on: After NSA's XKeyscore, Wikipedia Switches to HTTPS

Why would HTTPS necessarily cause more CO2 emissions? Wikipedia might be headquartered in San Francisco, but their data centers are not. For example, their European data center is CO2-neutral. [1]

[1] http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/evoswitch-hosts-the-...

toomuchtodo on Aug 2, 2013 | [–]

Their US datacenter is in Florida.

EDIT: My info is out of date. Their Florida datacenter has become the backup, with the primary being Equinix in Ashburn, Virginia:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/01/14/its-o...

codex on Aug 2, 2013 | [–]

More computational load = more CO2. Even if they offset CO2 emissions, that money could have been spent more efficiently by not running HTTPS.

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