Railfan Technology > Risk in opening railroadradio.net

When attempting to log onto www.railroadradio.net, I get this messageThe connection to www.railroadradio.net is not secureYou are seeing this warning because this site does not support HTTPS. Learn more

Is this message one that come up on certain sites and others not?
What is the risk I'd take in opening it?  For those not familiar, railroadradio streams
broadcasts from railfan scanners and features some locations that are not on Broadcastify.
Thanks
Andy

twropr Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> When attempting to log onto www.railroadradio.net,
> I get this messageThe connection to
> www.railroadradio.net is not secureYou are seeing
> this warning because this site does not support
> HTTPS. Learn more
>
> Is this message one that come up on certain sites
> and others not?
> What is the risk I'd take in opening it?  For
> those not familiar, railroadradio streams
> broadcasts from railfan scanners and features some
> locations that are not on Broadcastify.
> Thanks
> Andy

If you are using Chrome they are starting to remind you that sites that aren't using HTTPS aren't....if it's site you visit, or have no reason to worry about just click past the notice and go on to the site. 

In short the HTTPS adds encryption and verification the traffic between your computer and the website.   For a site like railroadradio.net there is probably not much point to encryption and verification.   If you doing a online shopping or banking I'd don't think I'd use a site that didn't encrypt the network traffic (use HTTPS).   

Stephen

Google, has decided that they want all internet traffic encrypted. I have heard both sides of the argument. Certainly passwords need to be encrypted but otherwise I wouldn't be worried too much about this on that website. 


 

Personally, I would just skip the site, hate to say it, but I have had problems,Charlie 

Charles Rice
Saint Louis, MO

twropr Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> What is the risk I'd take in opening it?  For
> those not familiar, railroadradio streams
> broadcasts from railfan scanners and features some
> locations that are not on Broadcastify.
> Thanks
> Andy

The risk is not much different from opening any other site, encrypted or not. There is no login + password when you visit railroadradio.net, so no personal information that can be compromised. Echoing the comments above, there's not much to worry about.

"HTTPS" or encrypted connections have become quite the hassle - it's a bit involved explaining TLS (Transport Layer Security), but older standards (TLS 1.1 and earlier) have security vulnerabilities so majority of web sites around the world had to upgrade to support newer TLS standards few years ago (1.2 and beyond) including right here on TO. That broke a lot of older browsers.

The few web sites that are not encrypted (plain HTTP instead of HTTPS), including railroadradio.net, soldiered on without the hassles of upgrading TLS.

Before I posted this reply, I used my retro-computing experience and installed RealPlayer 8 on a 25 year old iBook G3 running MacOS 8.6 with Internet Explorer 4.5. Railroadradio.net worked on my first try, and I'm listening to the radio feed from California's Central Valley right now (heard a UP 9635 at Citrus Heights, ex-SP 8171). Maybe someone here can track down this train (with a freshly painted C44ACM leader?) to prove that I'm not fibbing here. :-)

Even if the data is encrypted (or data is meaningless to those who are trying to violate your privacy), your ISP, or anyone doing surveillance on you will know which sites you have visited. You can make their jobs tougher by using VPN (Virtual Private Network), but I'm going too off topic here. Just throwing out some keywords when you're ready to understand the issues in depth.

Anyway, I thank the web site owners who have stuck to HTTP to prevent older computers and software to be thrown away, but instead still be useful, like what I just did for this topic.

---

just use the telephone option

cchan006 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Before I posted this reply, I used my retro-computing experience and installed
> RealPlayer 8 on a 25 year old iBook G3 running MacOS 8.6 with Internet Explorer 4.5.
> Railroadradio.net worked on my first try, and I'm listening to the radio feed from California's
> Central Valley right now (heard a UP 9635 at Citrus Heights, ex-SP 8171). Maybe someone here
> can track down this train (with a freshly painted C44ACM leader?) to prove that I'm not fibbing
> here. :-)

I saw it sitting in Roseville last night. First UP C44-9W to C44ACM rebuild I've seen.