Why does http://ubuntu-mate.org/ not redirect to https://ubuntu-mate.org/?

[lah7]

This is the answer:

Make ubuntu-mate.org HTTPS-only

As @lah7 says this community, which handles authentication credentials, is only available via https. Originally the main ubuntu-mate.org site was also https only too, but Windows XP user (Yes, I know) couldn’t download the iso images etc. So the main site can be accessed via http too. But I’m going to be switching back to https only for all sites in a couple of months. Just wanted to give some XP hold outs time to download and migrate to Ubuntu MATE ️

We are planning to switch to HTTPS only in future.

However, if you are to download the desktop ISOs of any flavour of Ubuntu, which are hosted by Canonical, their server only supports HTTP: Index of /ubuntu-mate/releases. This is out of our control.

It would be wise to securely get the SHA256SUM (checksum) of the file and compare it when downloading over HTTP.