A few months ago, I posted information about Apple ios 10 blocking access to websites without a secure connection, if you wanted to tell a website your GPS location. I use that capability in the “show me radio/TV stations near me” thingy up above. The browser will only tell the server your location if you click OK to disclosing your location to the server. You never know – I might show up someday and steal all your 25-year supply of gourmet macaroni and cheese. If that doesn’t scare you, you can assume the risk that I am actually a spy for Russia and/or the illuminati.
So now you can access the near me thing in Secure mode (https:). You might get a warning telling you that the security certificate for the server is self-signed – meaning that no government agency has vouched for me because I did not provide them with my private encryption key, birth certifucate, DNA sample and biometric data. You either trust me or you don’t.
If you prefer, you can do everything on the website in the secure mode just by adding the S after http. I will add a link to the menus to make that easier, but I have no plans to require you to use secure connections. Older browsers may not work correctly. If the NSA wants to look at your favorite radio stations list, they have too much time and money on their hands
As an experiment, I directed the incoming links to a secure blog, which gave the chairman some issues. I turned that off – hopefully that’s the extent of the problems. Holler if you’re having issues
Streamingradioguide@gmail.com
Here is what I think is going on. Because the blog software (word press) notices that I turned on the secure capabilities, it automatically forces the login screen to be secure. That is not a bad idea, as long as it actually works.
I think my firewall was blocking y’all from accessing the login page. I think I fixed that so I’m keeping my fingers crossed
I blamed my VPN, L_O_L
the VPN routes me to Canada and back down to the U.S.
You can never be to secure against fake news and trolls.
parrott
Countess is having issues – I was not able to back out what I did. WordPress will not let you login without a secure connection and Google is intervening to block the connection. If anyone is able to read this please try to post a comment to see if I am totally out of the water. When the Chairman resurfaces, he probably knows more about this stuff than I do. I would rather be a programming than being a sysadmin.
Okay America, let’s play everyone’s favorite game: “Browser Gauntlet!”
(cue studio audience applause)
Yes, the game where everyone gets to experience the virtual thrill of weaving through URL intercept hooks hidden in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Google Chrome!
Ready contestants? Let’s test your mettle, and mental health.
Today’s bonus round is: Self-signed certificates (cue cheering and booing)
That’s the attitude!
I am going to guess that at least one browser was able to work.
Firefox (ESR) 45.3.0 I had to manually invoke the certificate exception. Won’t save login user/pass, but that could be my particular configuration & plug-ins.
Will test with other browsers later today (Saturday).
BTW, I never send data/reports to MS, Google, etc.
Google is especially nasty, because they’ll blacklist a site and can trigger all sorts of scrutiny and gov’t attention.
I think I have reported maybe three radio stations to Google, where I was alerted to the presence of malware, and independently confirmed that they had scripts doing bad things. In those situations, I tried to write the radio station – I’ve even tried to call one on the telephone – but almost all contact information for Radio stations is bogus. Alerting the station also runs the risk that they may be totally clueless and think that I am a hacker trying to break into their website. In general, I avoid all contact with radio stations. That’s surprises some people, because they think radio station people are cool and want to be groupies. The more I learn, the further away I stare
I have reproduced what countess is seeing. If you use Chrome (written by Google) – they are very risk averse, and with good reason. Lawyers expect Google to catch every bad thing that might possibly happen to you and prevent it.
When you try to use the secure connection, chrome intervenes to tell you that I may be a hacker! Or the NSA may be snooping on our conversation! This is the consequence of having a self signed certificate. You are presented with three options, one of which is very dangerous and unpleasant which is “Report this to Google!” Please do not do that.
Option number two is to cower in fear and return to your safe space. Feel free to do that however you won’t be able to post on the blog.
The third option, which is not obvious by design – there is text in the lower left in almost invisible Gray that says advanced. When you click on that it offers you the option to continue on to streamingradioguide even though you cannot be sure that the connection is really private. Since I don’t do things like ask for credit card payments, there really is no reason for this level of paranoia by Google – but they make the rules. If you ignore their advice and come here anyhow, Chrome will constantly remind you that the NSA maybe listening in and see your password for the blog.
It is worth repeating the advice that as much as possible, you should use a different password on each website. That is especially true for Financial websites and important government employees. Do not follow John Podesta’s iexample and do use a password of password or 123456
Chrome should remember your decision to trust streaming radio guide and not pester you again, but anything is possible.
it’s working again! i did what you said to do, fred — clicked on that tiny “advanced” sign and told the machne to go back to streamingradioguide.com. and that’s what it did. all this happened at such an inopportune time — just when i was reading about the chinese doing bad things in africa. it was like reading a novel and then losing the book on the train. i was engrossed. now i can read the rest of the story. . . tomorrow. ‘night, all.
p.s. to parrott: love the spork poll you suggested and all the funny answers. and the cute spork art at the top. who knew eating utensils could be the source of such levity?
Don’t you people ever sleep !!!
i dozed off earlier tonight while watching chariots of fire on dvd and that screwed up my sleep cycle. movie trivia: the guy who produced that movie was dodie fayoud, princess diana’s paramour. they both died in that famous car crash in paris.
The correct response was to ask me why I was still awake ?
The hours that I spend awake are very erratic. Four hours is about the maximum I can sleep before mother nature insists that I wake up and take care of business. It is not a pleasant development, but when you hit 60, stuff happens.
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.”
The longest journey begins with a single eggroll
excellent comment, chairman. most excellent indeed.
It refers to the movie ‘Telefon’… lifted from Robert Frost.
My interest in China getting involved in Africa goes back quite a ways. Fairly early on President Obama took his family on a learning trip to west Africa to “learn about slavery” – translation “show my contempt for white people, even though none of my ancestors were slaves”
Many Americans don’t understand that most of the slaves were taken out of west Africa and sent to the Caribbean and South America. None of the African slaves brought to the Americas came from Kenya and none of them spoke Swahili. Most of them had been slaves in Africa for 400 years, held in captivity by muslim slave traders
So while getting familiar with the countries of west Africa, I noticed a British colonial era narrow gauge railroad in absolutely horrendous condition. It turned out that the Chinese were rebuilding the railroad to standard gauge in order to reach the natural resources in the interior. Coincidental to that effort, China was building huge cities of empty buildings to consume all of the excess concrete and steel capacity back in China. Nobody in Africa can actually afford the cost to live in the houses, and they are totally uninhabitable pieces of crap
Over in the former Italian colony of Eritrea, they recognized the trap of the Chinese loaning the money to rebuild their railroad and refused rhe offer. They decided to gather up all of the rails that had been borrowed for other purposes and reconstruct the original narrow gauge railroad. There were still one or two people around who had worked for the railroad in the 1960s and have a little bit of knowledge about the locomotives have such things. Their effort did not go particularly well and realistically will never be useful in a commercial sense.
So I had to do some searching – my how time flies. President Obama went to Ghana in 2009
http://www.politico.com/story/2009/07/tour-of-slave-port-emotional-for-obama-024808
Here was my write up about the railroads in Ghana – it is in the prior blog called unintended consequences
http://streamingradioguide.com/notintended/?p=803
Enjoy!
So in the eight years since Barack Obama went to Ghana, how is the rebuilding of the railroads coming?
http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/Railway-sector-has-collapsed-266615
The answer is that not a damn thing that has been built. There was friction between the Chinese and the people in Ghana – more recent stories indicate that in 2015, the government was preparing to sign a $30 billion contract with China. Ghana is an incredibly poor country, but it does have undeveloped offshore oil deposits. With the collapse of oil prices, that makes the whole deal makes no economic sense. Likewise, Nigberia got suckered into building a multi billion dollar standard gauge railroad financed with debt. These projects typically also have funding from the World Bank to do infrastructure development
The main menu has the link now to toggle secure mode on and off. The “what’s on page” Will tell you that your browser is in secure mode, even though that’s all of no real significance. The only reason it is there was for me to check my work!
Better late than never – I get a certificate warning in IE. Chrome did ask me to okay the “unsafe” connection. Regardless what they try, I can still get through 🙂