29 September
What happened on this date in privacy, anonymity networks and censorship. Every year on the same date we add a new look back and keep the earlier ones as they were.
2026
The site name the padlock does not hide
If you browse with Safari on an iPhone, your internet provider can still see which site you are visiting, and in August 2026 a developer reported on Apple's developer forums that Safari still sends the site name unencrypted. The padlock in the address bar only means the page content is encrypted, and the site name sent at the start of each connection needs a separate technology, Encrypted Client Hello (ECH). On 29 September 2023, Cloudflare made ECH available to sites on all of its plans, and as of 1 October 2026 Chrome uses it by default on desktop and Android. China blocked an earlier version of ECH in July 2020, according to researchers from Geneva, GFW Report and iYouPort, and Russia's telecom regulator has blocked ECH connections since November 2024. To see whether your browser encrypts the site name, open Cloudflare's Browser Check page.
Also on this day
- Myanmar's military government cut the country's internet connections to the outside world. Source: OpenNet Initiative