Over the weekend, the world wide web became a lot more secure. That’s because a San Francisco started called CloudFlare turned on a free service that will let its 2 million customers add SSL encryption to their websites. SSL—short for “secure sockets layer”—makes it harder for criminals to spoof sites, and it encodes site traffic as it travels across the net, hiding your web browsing history from spy agencies and the like. Cloudflare started enabling its free SSL encryption a few days ago and expects that most customers should be able to use the option by Tuesday. “We’ve doubled the size of the encrypted universe,” says CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince, estimating that only about 2 million sites already used SSL. At the moment, the majority of web traffic (including WIRED’s) is unencrypted, but Prince believes that we’re fast approaching the era of an encrypted web.