July 11, 2020

AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Voting Paper ballots, Electronic voting, Anti-Virus and Cutting the cord

14 minutes

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on with Steve Forni who was sitting in for the vacationing Jim Polito. We discussed voting methods (electronic, mail-in, and via an app), Anti-virus and cutting the cord. Here we go with Steve.

For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Think of what happened in 2004 with hanging chads, you had a Republican, you had a Democrat, you had various attorneys at each table who were examining the ballots. At least they had ballots to examine. Well, Mr. Polito was out for the week. So Steve Fourni and I got into a number of different topics.

I also found out his name is actually not French. It's Italian. So I guess I just mispronounced it again.

Steve Fourni: All right. Yeah. We'll get back to the show. Steve Fourni here in for Jim Polito this morning. Every week at this hour we're joined by Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru.

Good morning, Craig. How are you, sir?

Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning, Steve. Yeah, I sent you a couple emails over the last couple of weeks and never heard back from you. Busy times over there. Were you like vacationing last week or something?

Steve Fourni: No. Although I did see that you, that you tried to send to, Stefan Ford, the EA, Oh, that must be my French, my French Canadian, cousin,

[00:01:00] I'll have to dig. I'll tell you when I lived up in Northern Vermont, every place I'd go out on the lawn, like Forney they're like, Oh, F O U R N I E R. I'm like, no, no, I Italian Forni, Forni.

Hey, Craig can we talk about, I know you do have a list of things we want to talk about, but I've been talking about the voting, the mail, and voting, and I don't understand why we can. pick our winner of American idol via our cell phones, but we can't pick the next President via our cell phones. What are some of the maybe concerns that you would have if we were to go to electronic voting?

Craig Peterson: Well, I heard Bayback trying to straighten you out on this morning. So I, hopefully, this isn't a lost cause, but here's the problem. When we're talking about American idol voting and putting in more votes for their winner, then the President gets. It's just such a difference. From saying it, who cares if somebody wins American Idol or not. In fact, they even

[00:02:00] admit that they allow you to vote 10 times when we're talking about the President of the United States or Congress critters, et cetera, we really do want to have a reasonable accounting of what's happened and what's happening. So we let's start with a mail-in ballot. How do we know the mail-in ballots are legitimate?

We, we already had an arrest a week and a half ago from somebody that printed up ballots themselves and sent them in. Now it's obviously what we're talking about here. This person was indeed caught, but the problem you have with the mail-in ballots is they. Personally, I think it was a guy is an idiot, but if China or Russia really wanted to influence our campaigns or our elections, I should say, well, how better to do it than to inject thousands of fake ballots. But even then we don't need

[00:03:00] thousands, look at the election for Senate that happened up in New Hampshire a few years ago. Kelly Ayotte lost by literally a hand full of votes. That's where you can really topple an election and to having some extra votes in your hip pocket there that you can throw in at the last minute that aren't necessarily trackable.

Is a problem. So how about trackable? Oh, if you're going to be able to track these votes, you now have to identify the person that sent in the ballot. And in some States, they even have different colored envelopes for these mail-in ballots. So the clerk, when they receive the ballot can automatically, let's see, we've got one Republican, one Democrat, one, two Republican two Democrat to one, right.

And start throwing away ballots based on their colors. Or there are others that say, well, let's put a bar code on it so that we know it's a legitimate

[00:04:00] ballot. All right. So the barcode let's say has a checksum on it, or it's actually registered in the database as something that was sent to a person and an individual home.

So we now know that this is John Bayback's vote. And even though he may not care how you vote, Steve people might care how John votes, and we can now take John's and throw it away or know exactly how John voted and use it for extortion. Or all we need to do is hack the computer that has the database throw in a few thousand extra ballots that weren't legitimate or reverse engineer the software.

When we get into what let's vote via an app, let's do the American idol thing. Well now, the flood gates for fraud are completely wide open. The flood Gates for fraud have already been shown to be, to be wide open in the testing that's been done.

[00:05:00] We've talked before on my show about some of them, some of these applications that were looked at by third parties, these applications are that they were trying to sell to various States and, and even look what happened with the DNC, with their electronic voting.

Out in Iowa for the primaries, the whole thing could fall apart very, very quickly. And there's no way to have a real audit of what happened. It's not like you've got a card. And you filled in the blank. So the little circles and you handed it to the machine that counted it. And now we're questioning, wait a minute.

Why this machine gets so many votes, this doesn't seem right. Or we spot check a machine. We can go grab those original ballots and. If worst came to worse, we can have an army of people counting them. Think of what happened in 2000 in Florida with a hanging CHADS, you had a Republican, you had a Democrat, you had various attorneys

[00:06:00] at each table who were examining the ballots.

At least they had ballots to examine. None of that can be true here. And that's what gets me concerned. Steve.

Steve Fourni: Well it's fair enough. I mean, you were the guy to ask, so I, if anybody's going to, you know, poopoo the idea, it'd be you. That's fine with me I suppose. But, no, but it's insightful. And I mean, I, you know, again, I know, I know it's so much easier obviously to just do the American Idol thing, but even like, it's funny when I log on, if I want to log into, see my VPN at home, I have to go through all these steps and I have to send a notification to my phone to verify and.

You know, I have all these channels that I have to go through in order to have some sort of security. And I didn't know if there's anything we could do, but I wish we were ahead of places like Russia and China, but I guess we're not, we're not technologically,

Craig Peterson: We are ahead. In Russia and China, your vote doesn't count. At least in the US, we're trying to make your vote count, right? You get 99.8% voting for the guy or gal that's at the head.

[00:07:00] Yes. It probably wasn't a legitimate vote. Right. And it's much easier if you want to be a socialist country to just have an electronic ballot where. There's no way to tell that all of these virtual ballot boxes were stuffed boxes. So this is not an easy problem to solve the technology can't solve it.

And I, I am for 100%, those heavy papers with very little felt pen where you fill in the oval a hundred percent for those.

Steve Fourni: Interesting. All right. Fair enough. We're talking with Craig Peterson our tech talk guru. And I'm moving off from that. one of the things you want to talk about was antivirus software, which I think we all get the ads for the free ones from companies we've probably never heard of.

And the best thing to do really is to just pay for them. But, but what are some of the processes that we should take, and how do we sort of know which ones to choose?

[00:08:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, that's a difficult position, right? To be in nowadays. It's like a submarine. You have to have multiple compartments and having some of this antivirus software on your computer will.

The fight with each other. So you've gotta be a little bit careful. So let me just tell you what I think people should probably be looking at. you mentioned paying for them versus the free version. Absolutely. You get more flexibility. You get more good stuff and ease of use and support and a little bit of a better cover for business.

As long as you're not a regulated business, you can just use the basic stuff, but here's what I recommend people do. If you're using windows and you cannot change to something more secure, then here's, there's the basics use, Microsoft windows defender. It comes with Microsoft windows, make sure that you have that properly enabled and brought up [00:09:00] a date.

The second thing to do turn on automatic updates. If you have professional versions of windows, you can tell it to wait a week before it installs them. I absolutely advise you to wait a week because Microsoft is well known to mess up these things and cause problems on your computer. Okay. Then. As third party software, it goes right now.

I am recommending people use Bitdefender for their antivirus. Plus it works on windows. It also works on Mac. It's 30 bucks. It's very, very cheap that's per year. if you are a regulated industry, then you've got to get into the professional software and you should be expecting to pay about $50 a month per computer in order to help keep them safe. That's my.advice.

Bit defender, the windows software, avoid Kaspersky, like the plague. It is right up there with these other Chinese companies.

[00:10:00] In this case, it's Russian and we just don't know how good it is. The Norton three 60. I'm not a fan of and trend micro. I have avast, I'm not a fan of any of those. They are not great.

And none of the antivirus software, except for. To varying degrees, except for a bit defender, none of the antivirus software actually protects you from modern threats. So be very careful out there. Everybody, the bad guys are up to their activities up over 300%. They really are coming for us, but pay at least to pay the bit defender guys.

And if there's something else you've been using for the last 20, 30 years, while maybe you should pay for that too.

Steve Fourni: We're talking with the good stuff we're talking with. and, just one other thing that you had in here that I thought it was important to get to is somebody who would love to cut the cable.

But I also don't want to have to describe the 15 different things. it looks like YouTube TV just got a little bit more expensive, but it also looks like it suddenly got more options now, too. Right?

[00:11:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, it did. They've added CBS, Viacom, the family of cable TV networks, but here's what we're talking about, YouTube, which initially was free.

Right? Hey, I get 30 days free. It's wonderful. You get all your local TV, et cetera. It is now $65 a month for the service. So compare that to what your basic cable used to cost you. Okay. It's we're at the point. Now, if you want to get your Disney plus you want to get YouTube for instance for television.

Maybe you want HBO or Showtime or some of these others, Netflix, because they've all got their own original series. Now about the Peacock, NBCs is coming out soon. It is way more expensive than cable. So yeah, there you go. Higher prices, basically all the way around.

Steve Fourni: That's disappointing. I mean, I'd like to do something and again, I am, you know, I'm paying for Disney plus I think my Hulu comes through my Spotify.

[00:12:00] Like that's part of the issue I'm having is it's also, it's, it's all just, so confusing. I, you know, if all I want to watch is jeopardy and sports and let my wife get her trash TV, I should find a cheaper way to do it, but it's, and then it always changes Netflix every month I add this, take this away.

And it's like, you never know what you're paying for. I guess.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely true. It's very, very frustrating. I don't know if it's going to get much better. You know, I remember when cable TV was first introduced really back in the early eighties and how frustrating it was, then you had to buy packages and you couldn't Ala cart. Now, what is this today? 40 years later. And we've still got these same problems.

Steve Fourni: And then, of course, I think to myself, well, what if all these companies just got together and made one platform? Well, then they would be Comcast.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. Well, there's the opposite is happening. You know, we Disney just pulled all of their Marvel stuff from other networks.

[00:13:00] So it's, it's getting even more divided than it was before I think unless you can get it through your cable company at a reasonable. Price is going to just keep adding up. Cause you're talking 10, $15 a month for each one of these premium services. And then on top of it, there's 65 that YouTube wants to charge you or there's Sling.

There are dish networks. Those satellite service providers are getting nailed A T and T the losing subscribers like crazy, but it's, unfortunately, Steve, it's just not clear yet.

Steve Fourni: Yeah, that's a, it's interesting. Well, something to follow, Craig, we appreciate the time again, if you want information like this from Craig, all kinds of good stuff.

you can, text, well, I guess you could text my name right Steve to this number

Craig Peterson: (855) 385-5553. So just text Steve to (855) [00:14:00] 385-5553, or send an email to me. [email protected].

Steve Fourni: That is the best email address in the world. [email protected]. You can't, can't screw that one. I probably can't hack it either a certain even try Craig Peterson.

Thanks for the time today. We appreciate it and we'll catch up next week.

Craig Peterson: Take care, Steve. Bye-bye.

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