Can they even Web? A look at presidential candidates’ online platforms

Hillary Clinton's entry into the 2016 Presidential race via social media provides a hint of what's to come as the technological portion of the campaign trail begins to scale up. And Paul Schreiber, a former IT staffer for President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign and the founding chief technology officer for the nonprofit Democracy Works, has already started to handicap the race by taking stock of the biggest early indicator of the candidates' technical prowess: how they put together their campaign sites. "So, you want to run a country," Schreiber wrote. "Can you hire someone who can run a website?"

Schreiber looked at a number of factors to determine how well the sites implemented best practices for secure HTTP and domain configuration, and he considered aspects such as their content delivery network and server platform choices. For instance, the Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) campaign got some early (unwanted) attention for a hiccup during the candidate's website launch. Since no certificate had been provided to CloudFlare, he was randomly assigned a certificate that was shared with nigerian-prince.com. The site now has a valid "wildcard" certificate for tedcruz.org, but users only get SSL protection when they visit the donation page. Trying to go to https://tedcruz.org or https://www.tedcruz.org redirects to the unprotected home page. One thing that all the candidates can agree on so far: they're all using Gmail as their e-mail platform.