I will review this scenario. On more recent OS versions, Awesome Miner can successfully connect to and get the details from Nicehash without this error.
When you load this link with Chrome, can you please press F12 to open the Developer Tools? Go to the Security tab and see the "Connection" section. This one will state the TLS version. It could however be that Google tries to connect with QUIC.
You are correct, it was showing QUIC. I review the log file again to look for other such errors, and noticed it would not connect to prohashing (
https://prohashing.com/api/v1/status) either, with the same error. checked in developer tools and it is connecting there with TLS 1.3.
I ran both sites (prohashing.com and api2.nicehash.com) through Qualys SSL (
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/) test just to be sure they support TLS 1.2, which they do.
I have since upgraded the OS to 2019 and the problem seems to be resolved, which is strange, since 2019 only supports up to tls 1.2, same as 2012r2. Could be a user agent string problem perhaps. Thanks again for your help, problem solved for now!