Yeah they don't understand this stuff. They don't even know what a VPN is they're just angry about it.

Actually doing this would be devastating to the economy, and anyway they still need to justify their actions. They can't be openly dictatorial just yet.

There's lots of things that transport using HTTPS that aren't websites in browsers.

HTTPS may be the official designation for the port, but it is the de facto standard port for TLS. Whatever you want to send over TLS, doesn't really matter.

HTTPS is just HTTP served over TLS (originally SSL).

Step by step, if you were to analyze a web connection over port 443, you would see that the client first negotiates the TCP connection (via three-way handshake), then TLS, and it's not till after TLS is established that HTTPS is negotiated.

In that way, it's kinda wrong to say it's the HTTPS port. It's really, nowadays, the TLS port. HTTP is just one of many protocols that can ride on top of it, and when we do that, we call it HTTPS.

websockets

VPNs, DNS over https (DoH), load balancers via DHCP, encrypted remote procedure calls, TCP pipes via gsocket.

I could go on.

Pass thoses firewalls and other corporates proxy/VPN/… that block most ports. If what you build is at least partly used where user have internet access, you know this port is open. Even if 22, 8080 and all the others are closed.

Sometimes mandatory web proxies still allow direct connections to port 443 so as to not break https, which in return means as long as your connection is to port 443, that proxy will pass it through without interfering.

I used to run sshd on port 443 for this reason back when I regularly had to work from client networks.

To not get blocked by the great firewall

Some ISPs block other ports, so if you want to host something, that might be your best option.

Happy cake day!

Hmmmm I should join Piefed.

This is related to China how?

How many games use HTTPS?

More. I play in oceania and the cheaters are always english speakers.

Edit: the things you get downvoted for here. should've checked the instance before I commented.

Or a test run to check reactions

Of the Orwell Plagiarism System...

Don’t a lot of websites enforce https at this point?

Also isn't there plenty of ways of using the internet that don't use either HTTP or HTTPS?

.ml is blocked in China not surprisingly.