The attached patches adjust glibc to prefer https: in URLs for gnu.org and 
fsf.org. FTP is being decommissioned soon for gnu.org, and although the GNU 
project files are not secret, plain HTTP is vulnerable to malicious routers that 
intercept responses from GNU servers, and this sort of thing is all too common 
when people in some other countries browse US-based websites. See, for example:

Aceto G, Botta A, Pescapé A, Awan MF, Ahmad T, Qaisar S. Analyzing internet 
censorship in Pakistan. RTSI 2016. https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/RTSI.2016.7740626

Although https: is not a complete solution here, it can be a significant help, 
and other GNU projects such as Coreutils, Emacs, and Gnulib have already 
switched to using https: URLs.

The first attachment is a standin for a purely mechanical replacement (explained 
in the attachment), which is over 5 MB and so a bit long for this email. The 
second attachment is a patch that merely updates some files from upstream 
sources that have already switched to https:.

As this is all fairly routine I plan to install it soon unless there's objection.