Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

Welcome!

Good snowy, snowy, snowy, snowy morning everybody! You know, I can't remember too many snowstorms we've had up here that we're this bad. It's kind of crazy. Anyhow, come as it may. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning. We had a chance to talk about two big items in the news. We discussed how cybercriminals using an old tactic and what will happen to businesses in January when the Massachusetts updated privacy law goes into effect. Believe me, guys, this is coming your way. We expect in 2020 to have the majority of states, if not the federal government, forcing these types of laws down our throats. They are reasonable, in some ways, for consumers but are totally destructive to businesses. So here we go with Mr. Polito,

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

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Related articles:

Cybercriminals return to old-school ID theft tactics

Upping your Incident Response Game -- New Regulations coming

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson
Good morning everybody is snowy, snowy, snowy, snowy morning here. You know, I can't remember too many snowstorms we've had up here that we're this bad. It's kind of crazy. Anyhow, as it may. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning. We had a chance to talk about two big items in the news. Now we talked about the Massachusetts updated privacy law. Believe me, guys, this is coming your way. We expect in 2020 to have the majority of states, if not the federal government, forcing these types of laws down our throats, which are reasonable in some ways for consumers but are totally destructive to businesses. So here we go with Mr. Polito,

Jim Polito
Our tech guru Craig Peters on Good Morning, Sir

Craig Peterson
Hey, good morning. What you made it to the news again? Did you see on the weather channel? They said there was a little bit of snow.

Jim Polito
Oh, yeah, we did, they didn't show Springfield they showed us. So cool. How do you like that? That's pretty good. That's if it has to be for something you know, as opposed to like a murder or something, you know, we'd rather it not be that. Hey, yeah, I read your stuff. I mean, this is fascinating. We got two things we've got to try to focus on today. The bad guys are going back to snail mail. I love that ID. That's the ingenuity of criminals. Then the amended data breach law in Massachusetts, and so we got to get into that, but This fascinates me. Tony and I were talking earlier. You know, we're all sitting here worried about our identity being stolen somebody getting our credit card information or social security number hacking into our phone. But the bad guy says, oh, nobody's paying attention to their mail anymore. Let's, let's rip them off with snail mail. I mean, you gotta, you have to respect the genius of that criminal mind right. Now, how many times have we heard it said. Man, if these guys just put their mind to it?

Craig Peterson
Right if they put their minds good, they're like the real business people because business people always look for opportunities for markets that are underserved and things like that. However, nobody's paying attention to snail mail anymore. Let's rip people off there.

Jim Polito
However, nobody's paying attention to snail mail anymore. Let's rip people off there.

Craig Peterson
So here's how this whole thing works. Jim, you have your information online, and it's you know, starting Everywhere this public records that show the home you own how much you paid for your signature, right? So now they've got pretty much everything they need to fake your identity. You know the mind that was Equifax, right, and everybody else. If they go ahead now and they open a credit card, buy a car, buy a house, they do whatever. Ultimately they know that you're going to end up getting a letter, a US mail saying, which is a statement. It's a statement on that car that you bought it, you know that you have to pay for that house, it's for that loan. So what they're doing is they're saying, well, we got to cover our tracks a little bit better here. So they are filing with the United States Postal Services, mail forwarding notices. Wow, that you're here. The mail that you get sent because they opened the fake credit card in your name or real credit card, I should say your name. That statement is not going to end up at your house, that car mortgage, all of those things are not going to end up at your home. And so what happens now is about three months later, a tow truck shows up in your driveway, ready to pick up that brand new Porsche, whatever it is that you supposedly bought. And that's the first time you even hear about it. Oh, boy,

Jim Polito
It is not good. So that's genius. Because they go out, get a loan on the car, take possession of the car, and then the repo man says, okay, hey, they're not paying their loan. I mean, the repo man gets hired by the creditor and goes out to your house, and it's like, there's you beat up old Chevy. Right in the driveway. Yeah.

Craig Peterson
So they're knocking on your door. What a feeling in your gut, right? With those yellow lights flashing outside, you're trying to figure out what the heck is going on. So the cybercriminals have focused like a laser now on ID theft and Financial Times. We know now that business email compromise is over $20 billion. These guys have stolen cash from businesses. Now, they realize that the consumers who are out there are just not paying attention. It is true for most of these businesses, too, because it's not going to happen to me. I've got this crappy old car in my driveway. Who's going to do anything here? We've heard about some of the scams regarding our homes because so many states have our homes, mortgage information listed on public websites. And so now what they're doing is they know who owns it etc., etc. So they will file paperwork with the county saying, hey, this house is just sold they send in fake paperwork now and instead of your credit bit, you know, maybe you and I, we could buy a $5,000 car, right? If you count the home that so many of us have worked so hard for so many years, think of our senior population in our homes Now, that might be worth a half a million dollars that you know, we paid a lot less than that back in the day. Now all of a sudden, this paperwork gets filed with the county shame that you sold your house for X dollars, and now they have access to hundreds of thousands of dollars of credit in your name secured by your home, and then the sheriff shows up for that one. So this is this has been a real problem.

Jim Polito
We must keep an eye on the second you notice, Hey, I got an email in a couple of days. Yeah, you might want to pay attention.

Craig Peterson
And keep an eye on your credit. Now, every credit card that I have has a free service where they will update at least monthly your credit score. You don't have to do anything more than that. So you checked your credit score with your credit card company. It does not hurt your credit rating to check it with your credit card company because they want to check that, anyway, right? So keep an eye on that, and your credit score changes. Make sure it's for a good reason because if these guys take out a loan in your name, it is going to show a hard hit on your credit score, and it's going to show a new loan, and you got to start handling this immediately.

Jim Polito
We're talking with our good friend Craig Peterson our tech chalk guru. At the end of this segment, we're going to explain to you how you can get your hands on this information from Craig free, no-obligation, he will not annoy you. BTW, it's nice to have him on your side, because when there's a significant data breach, he's always got the answers on what to do. And speaking of data breaches. So in the Commonwealth, I guess we have a law addressing how companies should deal with a data breach. And that law has been amended, correct?

Craig Peterson
Yeah, we are seeing these data privacy laws getting put in place all over the world. Now, of course, you probably heard about the GDPR, which is the one over in Europe, and California just came out with theirs, and it's going into effect next month. That is almost the same as the European law, and the Commonwealth decided they would update their le to be as draconian as possible. Now, what's going to hurt everybody here, frankly, is the businesses, and it could hurt them in a very, very big way. Because most companies are not handling data appropriately. Here's what that all means. There's an update to the law here in Mass, and they are trying to highlight the importance of having a documented process surrounding all the aspects of security and risk mitigation. What to do after a breach. You're supposed to take reasonable steps to notify people of the attack, and this is already in the law. We've got to have something they call a WISP, which is a comprehensive written information security program. And they have updated the notification process in there as well. Now what is quite scary to me about this is that seventy-seven percent (77%), according to IBM Security, of business organizations do not have a company-wide cybersecurity incident response plan. So that means, as of day one, seventy-seven percent (77%) of organizations here in the Commonwealth will be out of compliance with that law. It is a very, very big deal, okay. And this is the kind of the LeapFrog problem we've had forever with technology. Technology goes ahead, and the laws lag. Then laws get put in place, you know, with all kinds of stupid requirements that aren't necessary, but you know, it's a knee jerk lawmakers trying to do something. Then technology tries to catch up. As consumers, there are a lot of good things that this law does. Do I want to have businesses that contain all my information to know about? So what we did, Jim, about a year ago, I offered a cyber health assessment to companies for free. We had, like, 1000 of our listeners apply for these things, it took a few months to get them all done. Yeah, it was phenomenal. I will extend that offer again if there is a company, a small business out there that wants us to do one for free for them. I will tell you, everyone I did showed significant issues. I expect that to be the case, you know, 77% by this IBM study, I can see, okay, because they're going to cross the board. If we get into the Small Business space, like less than 10-15 people, forget about it. There is no way they can comply with this law. They don't even know what to do. They don't know what they have. And they're going to get nailed. The smaller companies, who have been hammered by this so far, have been put out of business. Bye-Bye. All right.

Jim Polito
It is a huge issue, and all of this information is available. All you need to do is text My name, Jim to this number

Craig Peterson
855-385-5553. So. just text and JIM if you want to get on my list or if you're interested in one of these cyber health assessments, text CSAAP at 855-385-5553

Jim Polito
Standard data and tax rates apply as usual. You're like, you know what you're like Santa Claus coming with a big sack full of all of that vital information to protect us, Craig, and we appreciate it. Thanks, Jim. All right. Talk to you next week. Craig Peters on everybody. Don't forget the standard data and tax rates apply. But you should do that. He will not hound you. He will not hack you. He will not sell your information. Okay. Very important. Final Word.

Craig Peterson
Thanks, Jim. All right. Talk to you next week. Craig Peters on everybody. Don't forget the standard data and tax rates apply. But you should do that. He will not hound you. He will not hack you. He will not sell your information. Okay. Very important. Final Word.

Jim Polito
All right. Talk to you next week. Craig Peterson, everybody. Don't forget the standard data and tax rates apply. But you should do that. He will not hound you. He will not hack you. He will not sell your information. Okay. Very important. Final Word.

Craig Peterson
All right, everybody. Here's what I want you to do. Now. If you are a business owner, if you work at a business, double-check with the boss. Maybe the IT people, but I'd say the boss. Ask them, "Do we have a comprehensive incident security plan for our business?" Because if you don't, then you're in big trouble. It isn't just what we're talking about here, which is governmental regulation and oversight. No, no, no. We're also talking about your insurance companies who now require one of these company-wide cybersecurity incident response plans and comprehensive written information security programs in place to pay out the insurance claims. Make sure you have these in place. Hey, I can help you with those. I got tons of stuff, and I am thinking about putting together a course on how to do it. Let me know if you think it might be worthwhile. Just send an email to me at Craig peterson.com. Alright, everybody, thanks for being with us. Take care. Bye-bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

Good morning, everybody.  I hope that everyone had a blessed Thanksgiving with their families.  Unfortunately, on Friday I received some news that a member of our IHeart Media family and one of my weekend radio show producers, Erin Boss passed away unexpectedly.  She will be missed greatly and I wish her parents and family peace as they grieve. I was on this morning with Jack Heath and we were talking about some of the deals that can be found today on Cyber Monday but also tomorrow on Travel Tuesday. Here we go with Mr. Jack Heath.

I will be do some Facebook Lives during the holiday season, so watch out for them.

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

--- 

Related articles:

Cybercriminals return to old-school ID theft tactics

--- 

Automated Machine Transcript:

Craig Peterson
Hey, I hope you guys are all doing well. I had a great Thanksgiving with your families. I had almost all of my kids were home. One of our daughters and granddaughters wasn't able to make it, but they'll make it up for Christmas. Thanksgiving was a wonderful time for all. We enjoyed a visit with my daughter and son in law who are in Norway now while she's working on an awesome engineering ship project. They flew over, so we got to see them at Thanksgiving too. So it was a great time. Unfortunately, we had a member of our team passed away here on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, and I mentioned it here on the air with Mr. Jack Heath. You might not be as familiar with her. She never had anything really to do with our podcast, but she was the person behind All of my radio broadcasts in the New Hampshire area. And she was there for me when I did live shows, remotes, and everything. Just the most amazing young lady passed at much too young and age. It's just crazy. You know, I think of her as a kid, but I did a little math, and she was probably about 35, which I know some of you are saying, yeah, that is a kid. But man, it sheds light here on the holidays. My heart goes out to all of you guys and gals as well, who have lost a loved one during these holidays. Anyhow, a couple of tips, gave some websites that I recommend to Mr. Heath, and we also got into this whole travel Tuesday thing a bit. So here we go with Mr. Jack Heath.

Jack Heath
Speaking of cyber Monday, we have our tech talk guy, Craig Peterson joining us now. Good morning, Craig.Good morning. Man. How quite a shocker. I got a note from Tim. The weekend about Aaron and my heart goes out to her family, and the whole WGIR family, of course, the entire IHeart family. I've known her for man. She must have been, what 15 years or so. Yeah. And of course

Craig
Man, quite a shocker. I got a note from Tim on Friday about Erin, and my heart goes out to her, and the whole we're family, of course, the whole IHeart family. I've known her for man. She must have been, what 15 years or so. Yeah.

Jack Heath
And of course on your weekend show Tech Talk. She would do all the weekend shows with people like you, our movers and shakers. The weekend news, of course, in the Mark Hebert show, you know, she worked during the week to get all these shows, put together.

Craig Peterson
Yeah, absolutely. And she would be there too on the weekend. If I was doing a live show and the board OP wouldn't show up. It was Erin who was there. Man, just a shocker. My heart goes out to everybody. Well, hey, listen, today is a big day. It is Cyber Monday, but I want to point out something else that I recently learned about myself. That is Travel Tuesday, and it is tomorrow. We're expecting the best rates of the year for airline flights, coming up tomorrow. We're expecting to see some of the best deals of the year come tomorrow. If you're looking to fly, basically, anytime after the first of the year or the first six months. Come tomorrow pretty much the airlines out there, so take a look at those if you are looking to travel. You're also if you're going to be shopping not just today but over the next few weeks and during the holidays. There are some sites you probably want to pay attention to price grabber.com is a good one. Bizrate.com as well PriceGrabber, so check those out. And even if you're not buying on Amazon and by the way, Amazon does not necessarily have the best deals out there. Walmart has been very competitive, but check out the products on Amazon. So you can look at some of the reviews. And if you're somebody who wants to get into this, you might want to check out slick deals.net slick deals.net has a very active community online forums devoted to one thing, getting deals, or deals excuse me, whether it's a retail store or online. One more that I had on my show before used to be called eBay to it's now called Rakuten (R-A-K-U-T-E-N). If you sign up with Rakuten, they will pay you cashback every time you shop online through participating retailers, and that's places like Amazon, Walmart, Macy's, eBay, Kohls.

Jack Heath
You're right, by the way. Rakuten has a ring to it because when Justin used to professional wrestle, they called him Rasputin.

Craig Peterson
Okay, that's right. He's the old man with a beard. And he can't kill him pretty much from the top. I saw that Disney movie I know what it's all about.

Jack Heath
If you get like 100 bucks on Rakuten, what do you get? You get like five dollars for shopping. Is that what they are saying?

Craig Peterson
What they do is every quarter, they will send you either a check cashback once every three months. Or, you know, if you're spending 100 bucks, you might get $5 back. It varies based on the site that you're purchasing from, but you'll start getting that cash right away. And they'll also be deposited for you if you don't want to check if you're one of these newfangled kids. You can get deposited right into a PayPal account.

Jack Heath
That's like, oh, when you hear someone. Oh, I went to this sale, and I made money. No, you spent money. Alright, thanks. Thank you guess how much money I saved. Thanks, Craig Peterson, thank you again.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Message Input:

Message #techtalk

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning, everybody.  I hope that everyone had a blessed Thanksgiving with their families.  Unfortunately, on Friday I received some news that a member of our IHeart Media family and one of my weekend radio show producers, Erin Boss passed away unexpectedly.  She will be missed greatly and I wish her parents and family peace as they grieve. I was on this morning with Jack Heath and we were talking about some of the deals that can be found today on Cyber Monday but also tomorrow on Travel Tuesday. Here we go with Mr. Jack Heath.

I will be do some Facebook Lives during the holiday season, so watch out for them.

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

--- 

Related articles:

Cybercriminals return to old-school ID theft tactics

--- 

Automated Machine Transcript:

Craig Peterson
Hey, I hope you guys are all doing well. I had a great Thanksgiving with your families. I had almost all of my kids were home. One of our daughters and granddaughters wasn't able to make it, but they'll make it up for Christmas. Thanksgiving was a wonderful time for all. We enjoyed a visit with my daughter and son in law who are in Norway now while she's working on an awesome engineering ship project. They flew over, so we got to see them at Thanksgiving too. So it was a great time. Unfortunately, we had a member of our team passed away here on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, and I mentioned it here on the air with Mr. Jack Heath. You might not be as familiar with her. She never had anything really to do with our podcast, but she was the person behind All of my radio broadcasts in the New Hampshire area. And she was there for me when I did live shows, remotes, and everything. Just the most amazing young lady passed at much too young and age. It's just crazy. You know, I think of her as a kid, but I did a little math, and she was probably about 35, which I know some of you are saying, yeah, that is a kid. But man, it sheds light here on the holidays. My heart goes out to all of you guys and gals as well, who have lost a loved one during these holidays. Anyhow, a couple of tips, gave some websites that I recommend to Mr. Heath, and we also got into this whole travel Tuesday thing a bit. So here we go with Mr. Jack Heath.

Jack Heath
Speaking of cyber Monday, we have our tech talk guy, Craig Peterson joining us now. Good morning, Craig.Good morning. Man. How quite a shocker. I got a note from Tim. The weekend about Aaron and my heart goes out to her family, and the whole WGIR family, of course, the entire IHeart family. I've known her for man. She must have been, what 15 years or so. Yeah. And of course

Craig
Man, quite a shocker. I got a note from Tim on Friday about Erin, and my heart goes out to her, and the whole we're family, of course, the whole IHeart family. I've known her for man. She must have been, what 15 years or so. Yeah.

Jack Heath
And of course on your weekend show Tech Talk. She would do all the weekend shows with people like you, our movers and shakers. The weekend news, of course, in the Mark Hebert show, you know, she worked during the week to get all these shows, put together.

Craig Peterson
Yeah, absolutely. And she would be there too on the weekend. If I was doing a live show and the board OP wouldn't show up. It was Erin who was there. Man, just a shocker. My heart goes out to everybody. Well, hey, listen, today is a big day. It is Cyber Monday, but I want to point out something else that I recently learned about myself. That is Travel Tuesday, and it is tomorrow. We're expecting the best rates of the year for airline flights, coming up tomorrow. We're expecting to see some of the best deals of the year come tomorrow. If you're looking to fly, basically, anytime after the first of the year or the first six months. Come tomorrow pretty much the airlines out there, so take a look at those if you are looking to travel. You're also if you're going to be shopping not just today but over the next few weeks and during the holidays. There are some sites you probably want to pay attention to price grabber.com is a good one. Bizrate.com as well PriceGrabber, so check those out. And even if you're not buying on Amazon and by the way, Amazon does not necessarily have the best deals out there. Walmart has been very competitive, but check out the products on Amazon. So you can look at some of the reviews. And if you're somebody who wants to get into this, you might want to check out slick deals.net slick deals.net has a very active community online forums devoted to one thing, getting deals, or deals excuse me, whether it's a retail store or online. One more that I had on my show before used to be called eBay to it's now called Rakuten (R-A-K-U-T-E-N). If you sign up with Rakuten, they will pay you cashback every time you shop online through participating retailers, and that's places like Amazon, Walmart, Macy's, eBay, Kohls.

Jack Heath
You're right, by the way. Rakuten has a ring to it because when Justin used to professional wrestle, they called him Rasputin.

Craig Peterson
Okay, that's right. He's the old man with a beard. And he can't kill him pretty much from the top. I saw that Disney movie I know what it's all about.

Jack Heath
If you get like 100 bucks on Rakuten, what do you get? You get like five dollars for shopping. Is that what they are saying?

Craig Peterson
What they do is every quarter, they will send you either a check cashback once every three months. Or, you know, if you're spending 100 bucks, you might get $5 back. It varies based on the site that you're purchasing from, but you'll start getting that cash right away. And they'll also be deposited for you if you don't want to check if you're one of these newfangled kids. You can get deposited right into a PayPal account.

Jack Heath
That's like, oh, when you hear someone. Oh, I went to this sale, and I made money. No, you spent money. Alright, thanks. Thank you guess how much money I saved. Thanks, Craig Peterson, thank you again.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Message Input:

Message #techtalk

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning, everybody.  I hope that everyone had a blessed Thanksgiving with their families.  Unfortunately, on Friday I received some news that a member of our IHeart Media family and one of my weekend radio show producers, Erin Boss passed away unexpectedly.  She will be missed greatly and I wish her parents and family peace as they grieve. I was on this morning with Jack Heath and we were talking about some of the deals that can be found today on Cyber Monday but also tomorrow on Travel Tuesday. Here we go with Mr. Jack Heath.

I will be do some Facebook Lives during the holiday season, so watch out for them.

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

--- 

Related articles:

Cybercriminals return to old-school ID theft tactics

--- 

Automated Machine Transcript:

Craig Peterson
Hey, I hope you guys are all doing well. I had a great Thanksgiving with your families. I had almost all of my kids were home. One of our daughters and granddaughters wasn't able to make it, but they'll make it up for Christmas. Thanksgiving was a wonderful time for all. We enjoyed a visit with my daughter and son in law who are in Norway now while she's working on an awesome engineering ship project. They flew over, so we got to see them at Thanksgiving too. So it was a great time. Unfortunately, we had a member of our team passed away here on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, and I mentioned it here on the air with Mr. Jack Heath. You might not be as familiar with her. She never had anything really to do with our podcast, but she was the person behind All of my radio broadcasts in the New Hampshire area. And she was there for me when I did live shows, remotes, and everything. Just the most amazing young lady passed at much too young and age. It's just crazy. You know, I think of her as a kid, but I did a little math, and she was probably about 35, which I know some of you are saying, yeah, that is a kid. But man, it sheds light here on the holidays. My heart goes out to all of you guys and gals as well, who have lost a loved one during these holidays. Anyhow, a couple of tips, gave some websites that I recommend to Mr. Heath, and we also got into this whole travel Tuesday thing a bit. So here we go with Mr. Jack Heath.

Jack Heath
Speaking of cyber Monday, we have our tech talk guy, Craig Peterson joining us now. Good morning, Craig.Good morning. Man. How quite a shocker. I got a note from Tim. The weekend about Aaron and my heart goes out to her family, and the whole WGIR family, of course, the entire IHeart family. I've known her for man. She must have been, what 15 years or so. Yeah. And of course

Craig
Man, quite a shocker. I got a note from Tim on Friday about Erin, and my heart goes out to her, and the whole we're family, of course, the whole IHeart family. I've known her for man. She must have been, what 15 years or so. Yeah.

Jack Heath
And of course on your weekend show Tech Talk. She would do all the weekend shows with people like you, our movers and shakers. The weekend news, of course, in the Mark Hebert show, you know, she worked during the week to get all these shows, put together.

Craig Peterson
Yeah, absolutely. And she would be there too on the weekend. If I was doing a live show and the board OP wouldn't show up. It was Erin who was there. Man, just a shocker. My heart goes out to everybody. Well, hey, listen, today is a big day. It is Cyber Monday, but I want to point out something else that I recently learned about myself. That is Travel Tuesday, and it is tomorrow. We're expecting the best rates of the year for airline flights, coming up tomorrow. We're expecting to see some of the best deals of the year come tomorrow. If you're looking to fly, basically, anytime after the first of the year or the first six months. Come tomorrow pretty much the airlines out there, so take a look at those if you are looking to travel. You're also if you're going to be shopping not just today but over the next few weeks and during the holidays. There are some sites you probably want to pay attention to price grabber.com is a good one. Bizrate.com as well PriceGrabber, so check those out. And even if you're not buying on Amazon and by the way, Amazon does not necessarily have the best deals out there. Walmart has been very competitive, but check out the products on Amazon. So you can look at some of the reviews. And if you're somebody who wants to get into this, you might want to check out slick deals.net slick deals.net has a very active community online forums devoted to one thing, getting deals, or deals excuse me, whether it's a retail store or online. One more that I had on my show before used to be called eBay to it's now called Rakuten (R-A-K-U-T-E-N). If you sign up with Rakuten, they will pay you cashback every time you shop online through participating retailers, and that's places like Amazon, Walmart, Macy's, eBay, Kohls.

Jack Heath
You're right, by the way. Rakuten has a ring to it because when Justin used to professional wrestle, they called him Rasputin.

Craig Peterson
Okay, that's right. He's the old man with a beard. And he can't kill him pretty much from the top. I saw that Disney movie I know what it's all about.

Jack Heath
If you get like 100 bucks on Rakuten, what do you get? You get like five dollars for shopping. Is that what they are saying?

Craig Peterson
What they do is every quarter, they will send you either a check cashback once every three months. Or, you know, if you're spending 100 bucks, you might get $5 back. It varies based on the site that you're purchasing from, but you'll start getting that cash right away. And they'll also be deposited for you if you don't want to check if you're one of these newfangled kids. You can get deposited right into a PayPal account.

Jack Heath
That's like, oh, when you hear someone. Oh, I went to this sale, and I made money. No, you spent money. Alright, thanks. Thank you guess how much money I saved. Thanks, Craig Peterson, thank you again.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Message Input:

Message #techtalk

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Ken and Matt. We talked about 

Keep an eye out for my Facebook Lives - free information for you and your families.

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

---

Related Articles:

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey everybody, Welcome. Hey, its Craig Petersson here. I am so excited about Thanksgiving. We've got some family in town going out to breakfast today together, which is going to be fun and then we got a great Thanksgiving day tomorrow all planned out smoked turkeys that we're making today. This is really going to be something my wife was up making some baking some pies, including a very cool one that she saw on I guess on the British baking show or maybe it's a Paul Hollywood pie, but it's like a three-layer pie. I'm so excited. You guess it, I am not doing keto tomorrow. And I won't be doing a whole lot of fasting tomorrow either. So I'm breaking a couple of my normal things here to really celebrate the time together with family and I hope you guys can too. All right, I'm going now to WGAN by the way this weekend's radio show is going to be "A best of Show" So, you know, no calls please they say. Here we go talking about Thanksgiving type stuff with our friends can and Matt.

Ken Altschuler
All right, it is the day before Thanksgiving ladies, gentlemen, or the day after the day before the big day and Craig Peterson joins us on this fine Wednesday to tell us all about what's happening in the world of technology, including a lot of Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Holiday related topics, perhaps even

Matt Gagnon
Craig, how are you this morning.

Craig Peterson
Yeah. Hey, good morning, gentlemen. You're right. The big days coming up only What now? two more days. Black Friday.

Matt Gagnon
Are you talking about Black Friday?

Craig Peterson
Yes, I am. Then we have Cyber Monday. Did you know that there's a day and I didn't even know about this. It's called Travel Tuesday. No, you haven't heard about this? No, well apparently over the last couple of years and this is supposed to be true this year is Well, the airlines have the best deals of the year coming up this Tuesday. So most of the really good deals are only starting January 1, but you have to buy them on Tuesday. So get online, poke around. And if you're planning on flying down to Florida or someplace slightly warmer than Maine in January in February, you should really look on Tuesday. Now, there are some great tools you can use for airlines as well. I think you guys have like a favorite site or a tool you use for finding and booking airfare.

Matt Gagnon 
The site that I use to find in book airfare is the one I can find the cheapest possible. I go to Hopper to compare them, right? I hate to be cliche, but I'm, I'm Expedia or Travelocity if I want to book it but then I kind of go the look at the deals then I go the airlines themselves because the problem is of the airlines and The flight gets messed up and Travelocity won't really help you out there.

Craig Peterson
Yeah, Boy it is going to be really bad this Thanksgiving as far as flights go because of all these storms. Well, I'm glad you use Hopper. That was my recommendation last year and is again this year. Hopper is an app that you can get for your smartphone or tablet. And what it does is it allows you to track the prices on airline flights and hotels now as well. It looks at all of this historical data. So examining hundreds of million prices here over the last, I think there's about five years worth of data right now. And so they can kind of predict when the best time to book is and it'll pop a little message up on your smartphone, saying hey, you know that trip that you wanted to make to Naples, Florida, the best time to buy it is right now and then it tells you, hey, coming up in two or three days, the price is going to go up by $30. It's a good one. Can I think you're right about that? Another one you guys might want to check out. And our listeners, of course, as well, is Google has Google flights that have been out there now for a good couple of years. And Google won't show you some of the really inexpensive airlines. Like, for instance, Southwest Airlines is one of the leading in the price category plus you get free luggage. But with Google flights, you can tell it I want to take so many bags are so many people. Here's where I want to go. And it will compare all of the major airlines. It's tied right into their databases. So those are good ones. And then you guys mentioned like, Matt, I think you mentioned Expedia and some others. They are not bad at all. But I'll tell you my big secret to save money on these things. I do use hopper for the airline flight And then I'll double-check on Google and make sure everything looks legit. And I'll go to the airline flight, I tend to buy it right from the airline flight not from Hopper or not through Google either. I'll get my airline flight and I will not book a hotel. Now, the exception to booking a hotel is if I'm going to a conference or something, right, but if I'm going out to visit friends or families, I will not book a hotel. And then when I get there, I use hotwire. And hotwire has this feature where you don't know what hotel you're getting. But you do know that that particular hotel that is offering to you, you do know what the ratings are of the people that have been there. And I felt the ratings on hotwire to be way more accurate than those on Travelocity or Expedia or most of the other sites. So I'll show up and I'll be saving 50% or more on the hotel price, the best price I could find anywhere. So I'll try to book at two or three in the afternoon. So if you don't mind a little, a little uncertainty in your travel, you don't necessarily you don't know what hotel it really is, you know the area it is going to be in, generally speaking, it's usually a few miles by a couple of miles. So, if you don't have a car might be a problem, but today with Uber and lift, what the heck. And you also don't know exactly which hotel it's going to be, but that's what I do. I booked them. It's been kind of fun. I used it in Europe as well. When we traveled around, we just decided where do you want to go today? And we went on hotwire. It worked in France. It was really kind of cool. So those there's a couple of techie travel tips for everybody. Or there you go.

Matt Gagnon
Craig Peterson joins us as he always does on Wednesdays to go over what's happening in the world of technology. And speaking of that world of technology. How scary can it be Craig, we've got lots of scams, probably that are related jams, all the deals that are out there, you've got Black Friday. You know, sales like $11 for a DVD player or whatever and a lot of places and you can I'm sure sees a lot of stuff online. So how do you kind of judge the garbage and the scams and the lies and the whatever from the real stuff? Like what should I be looking for this Black Friday to protect myself if nothing else?

Craig Peterson
Well, the best tip I think for everybody you mentioned, like the $11 DVD players, is Matt, who uses  DVD players anymore. It's a good point.

Matt Gagnon 
It's a good point. That is a good point.

Craig Peterson
But you're right on there because the number one thing is: if the deal is too good to be true if you're seeing just the most fantastic deal being offered. That's really kind of the number one thing and it is the easiest to look for. But right now we've got these types of squatting domains. Those of us with fat fingers, domain names, be where, because there are about 110,000 typo-squatting domains. So that means if you type in something incorrectly like if you type out orifice instead of office when you're trying to go to the Microsoft site, there's 110,000 of those. There are four times as many fake domain cybersquatting domains as real retailers that are out there. So this is kind of hard to figure out what valid or not, and you cannot rely on that little lock up in the corner right there on the left of the URL bar, that lock, you cannot depend on that, meaning that this site is legitimate or really secure. So use some common sense if you're on a website, and you're on a big-box retailer or one of your favorite places to shop online. And you see ads on there from other sites. So let's just say you're on the Walmart site, and you're seeing ads from Amazon. Hey, it ain't the Walmart site. All right? So things like that there are these clues that go back and forth. But Matt, I would suggest you just double check your spelling type in the URL directly. Because I've also found that there is there's something called Google poisoning. And what that is, is the bad guys, go ahead and make it so that when you are typing something in the Google results that start coming up, are in fact, the fake sites that type of squatting sites on Google knows this. So they have people who are watching for that to happen this time of year. So bottom line, if you stick with the real big guys that are out there, the names we all know. And if you spell them right, even if you look them up in Google, you're probably going to be arriving at the right website. Now that doesn't mean the way that the data is absolutely Be safe, but you'll probably be on the right website. So you know, be careful of sites that are asking you to download their apps, a lot of sites have those nowadays. Bottom line, it doesn't matter, you're almost always better off just using the website as opposed to using their app in almost every case. Be careful of some of the bargains bait and switch is a big problem this time of year with some of the smaller retailers. bait and switch have also been a problem with some of these short term rental places like the Airbnb is out there, where they call you up the day before your booking for the house or the room and they say yeah, we had a flood, a water pipe broke, etc, etc. We've got another place for you, so don't worry about it. They do this the day before you're supposed to arrive. Also, be very careful of those discount cards. Be careful of that as well. But if you Want to find good discounts online, there's a plugin that I use when I'm shopping called Honey. If you use honey online, it's absolutely amazing. Honey is a coupon finder, and you can find that online as well. Obviously a join honey.com then when you visit a shopping site, it will automatically try, well you actually have to click on it, but it'll try a bunch of discount coupon codes that are known to work and they can save you a whole bunch of money online. Honey dot com is something else that you might want to look for. Bottom line, be cautious pay attention. And everybody have a great great Thanksgiving. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and airline Tuesday this week.

Ken Altschuler
Good. Our tech guru joins us every Wednesday at 738 have a great Turkey day we will see Talk to you next Wednesday, Craig.

Craig Peterson
All right, gentlemen, take care.

Matt Gagnon
Thank you, Craig. All right. So with that, we're going to take a quick break here. We're gonna go into the newsroom and get once again,

Craig Peterson
Hey, everybody, have a great Thanksgiving. And we will be back of course next week. I think Monday is when I'm hitting it again. Take care. Bye-bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Ken and Matt. We talked about 

Keep an eye out for my Facebook Lives - free information for you and your families.

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

---

Related Articles:

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey everybody, Welcome. Hey, its Craig Petersson here. I am so excited about Thanksgiving. We've got some family in town going out to breakfast today together, which is going to be fun and then we got a great Thanksgiving day tomorrow all planned out smoked turkeys that we're making today. This is really going to be something my wife was up making some baking some pies, including a very cool one that she saw on I guess on the British baking show or maybe it's a Paul Hollywood pie, but it's like a three-layer pie. I'm so excited. You guess it, I am not doing keto tomorrow. And I won't be doing a whole lot of fasting tomorrow either. So I'm breaking a couple of my normal things here to really celebrate the time together with family and I hope you guys can too. All right, I'm going now to WGAN by the way this weekend's radio show is going to be "A best of Show" So, you know, no calls please they say. Here we go talking about Thanksgiving type stuff with our friends can and Matt.

Ken Altschuler
All right, it is the day before Thanksgiving ladies, gentlemen, or the day after the day before the big day and Craig Peterson joins us on this fine Wednesday to tell us all about what's happening in the world of technology, including a lot of Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Holiday related topics, perhaps even

Matt Gagnon
Craig, how are you this morning.

Craig Peterson
Yeah. Hey, good morning, gentlemen. You're right. The big days coming up only What now? two more days. Black Friday.

Matt Gagnon
Are you talking about Black Friday?

Craig Peterson
Yes, I am. Then we have Cyber Monday. Did you know that there's a day and I didn't even know about this. It's called Travel Tuesday. No, you haven't heard about this? No, well apparently over the last couple of years and this is supposed to be true this year is Well, the airlines have the best deals of the year coming up this Tuesday. So most of the really good deals are only starting January 1, but you have to buy them on Tuesday. So get online, poke around. And if you're planning on flying down to Florida or someplace slightly warmer than Maine in January in February, you should really look on Tuesday. Now, there are some great tools you can use for airlines as well. I think you guys have like a favorite site or a tool you use for finding and booking airfare.

Matt Gagnon 
The site that I use to find in book airfare is the one I can find the cheapest possible. I go to Hopper to compare them, right? I hate to be cliche, but I'm, I'm Expedia or Travelocity if I want to book it but then I kind of go the look at the deals then I go the airlines themselves because the problem is of the airlines and The flight gets messed up and Travelocity won't really help you out there.

Craig Peterson
Yeah, Boy it is going to be really bad this Thanksgiving as far as flights go because of all these storms. Well, I'm glad you use Hopper. That was my recommendation last year and is again this year. Hopper is an app that you can get for your smartphone or tablet. And what it does is it allows you to track the prices on airline flights and hotels now as well. It looks at all of this historical data. So examining hundreds of million prices here over the last, I think there's about five years worth of data right now. And so they can kind of predict when the best time to book is and it'll pop a little message up on your smartphone, saying hey, you know that trip that you wanted to make to Naples, Florida, the best time to buy it is right now and then it tells you, hey, coming up in two or three days, the price is going to go up by $30. It's a good one. Can I think you're right about that? Another one you guys might want to check out. And our listeners, of course, as well, is Google has Google flights that have been out there now for a good couple of years. And Google won't show you some of the really inexpensive airlines. Like, for instance, Southwest Airlines is one of the leading in the price category plus you get free luggage. But with Google flights, you can tell it I want to take so many bags are so many people. Here's where I want to go. And it will compare all of the major airlines. It's tied right into their databases. So those are good ones. And then you guys mentioned like, Matt, I think you mentioned Expedia and some others. They are not bad at all. But I'll tell you my big secret to save money on these things. I do use hopper for the airline flight And then I'll double-check on Google and make sure everything looks legit. And I'll go to the airline flight, I tend to buy it right from the airline flight not from Hopper or not through Google either. I'll get my airline flight and I will not book a hotel. Now, the exception to booking a hotel is if I'm going to a conference or something, right, but if I'm going out to visit friends or families, I will not book a hotel. And then when I get there, I use hotwire. And hotwire has this feature where you don't know what hotel you're getting. But you do know that that particular hotel that is offering to you, you do know what the ratings are of the people that have been there. And I felt the ratings on hotwire to be way more accurate than those on Travelocity or Expedia or most of the other sites. So I'll show up and I'll be saving 50% or more on the hotel price, the best price I could find anywhere. So I'll try to book at two or three in the afternoon. So if you don't mind a little, a little uncertainty in your travel, you don't necessarily you don't know what hotel it really is, you know the area it is going to be in, generally speaking, it's usually a few miles by a couple of miles. So, if you don't have a car might be a problem, but today with Uber and lift, what the heck. And you also don't know exactly which hotel it's going to be, but that's what I do. I booked them. It's been kind of fun. I used it in Europe as well. When we traveled around, we just decided where do you want to go today? And we went on hotwire. It worked in France. It was really kind of cool. So those there's a couple of techie travel tips for everybody. Or there you go.

Matt Gagnon
Craig Peterson joins us as he always does on Wednesdays to go over what's happening in the world of technology. And speaking of that world of technology. How scary can it be Craig, we've got lots of scams, probably that are related jams, all the deals that are out there, you've got Black Friday. You know, sales like $11 for a DVD player or whatever and a lot of places and you can I'm sure sees a lot of stuff online. So how do you kind of judge the garbage and the scams and the lies and the whatever from the real stuff? Like what should I be looking for this Black Friday to protect myself if nothing else?

Craig Peterson
Well, the best tip I think for everybody you mentioned, like the $11 DVD players, is Matt, who uses  DVD players anymore. It's a good point.

Matt Gagnon 
It's a good point. That is a good point.

Craig Peterson
But you're right on there because the number one thing is: if the deal is too good to be true if you're seeing just the most fantastic deal being offered. That's really kind of the number one thing and it is the easiest to look for. But right now we've got these types of squatting domains. Those of us with fat fingers, domain names, be where, because there are about 110,000 typo-squatting domains. So that means if you type in something incorrectly like if you type out orifice instead of office when you're trying to go to the Microsoft site, there's 110,000 of those. There are four times as many fake domain cybersquatting domains as real retailers that are out there. So this is kind of hard to figure out what valid or not, and you cannot rely on that little lock up in the corner right there on the left of the URL bar, that lock, you cannot depend on that, meaning that this site is legitimate or really secure. So use some common sense if you're on a website, and you're on a big-box retailer or one of your favorite places to shop online. And you see ads on there from other sites. So let's just say you're on the Walmart site, and you're seeing ads from Amazon. Hey, it ain't the Walmart site. All right? So things like that there are these clues that go back and forth. But Matt, I would suggest you just double check your spelling type in the URL directly. Because I've also found that there is there's something called Google poisoning. And what that is, is the bad guys, go ahead and make it so that when you are typing something in the Google results that start coming up, are in fact, the fake sites that type of squatting sites on Google knows this. So they have people who are watching for that to happen this time of year. So bottom line, if you stick with the real big guys that are out there, the names we all know. And if you spell them right, even if you look them up in Google, you're probably going to be arriving at the right website. Now that doesn't mean the way that the data is absolutely Be safe, but you'll probably be on the right website. So you know, be careful of sites that are asking you to download their apps, a lot of sites have those nowadays. Bottom line, it doesn't matter, you're almost always better off just using the website as opposed to using their app in almost every case. Be careful of some of the bargains bait and switch is a big problem this time of year with some of the smaller retailers. bait and switch have also been a problem with some of these short term rental places like the Airbnb is out there, where they call you up the day before your booking for the house or the room and they say yeah, we had a flood, a water pipe broke, etc, etc. We've got another place for you, so don't worry about it. They do this the day before you're supposed to arrive. Also, be very careful of those discount cards. Be careful of that as well. But if you Want to find good discounts online, there's a plugin that I use when I'm shopping called Honey. If you use honey online, it's absolutely amazing. Honey is a coupon finder, and you can find that online as well. Obviously a join honey.com then when you visit a shopping site, it will automatically try, well you actually have to click on it, but it'll try a bunch of discount coupon codes that are known to work and they can save you a whole bunch of money online. Honey dot com is something else that you might want to look for. Bottom line, be cautious pay attention. And everybody have a great great Thanksgiving. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and airline Tuesday this week.

Ken Altschuler
Good. Our tech guru joins us every Wednesday at 738 have a great Turkey day we will see Talk to you next Wednesday, Craig.

Craig Peterson
All right, gentlemen, take care.

Matt Gagnon
Thank you, Craig. All right. So with that, we're going to take a quick break here. We're gonna go into the newsroom and get once again,

Craig Peterson
Hey, everybody, have a great Thanksgiving. And we will be back of course next week. I think Monday is when I'm hitting it again. Take care. Bye-bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Ken and Matt. We talked about 

Keep an eye out for my Facebook Lives - free information for you and your families.

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

---

Related Articles:

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey everybody, Welcome. Hey, its Craig Petersson here. I am so excited about Thanksgiving. We've got some family in town going out to breakfast today together, which is going to be fun and then we got a great Thanksgiving day tomorrow all planned out smoked turkeys that we're making today. This is really going to be something my wife was up making some baking some pies, including a very cool one that she saw on I guess on the British baking show or maybe it's a Paul Hollywood pie, but it's like a three-layer pie. I'm so excited. You guess it, I am not doing keto tomorrow. And I won't be doing a whole lot of fasting tomorrow either. So I'm breaking a couple of my normal things here to really celebrate the time together with family and I hope you guys can too. All right, I'm going now to WGAN by the way this weekend's radio show is going to be "A best of Show" So, you know, no calls please they say. Here we go talking about Thanksgiving type stuff with our friends can and Matt.

Ken Altschuler
All right, it is the day before Thanksgiving ladies, gentlemen, or the day after the day before the big day and Craig Peterson joins us on this fine Wednesday to tell us all about what's happening in the world of technology, including a lot of Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Holiday related topics, perhaps even

Matt Gagnon
Craig, how are you this morning.

Craig Peterson
Yeah. Hey, good morning, gentlemen. You're right. The big days coming up only What now? two more days. Black Friday.

Matt Gagnon
Are you talking about Black Friday?

Craig Peterson
Yes, I am. Then we have Cyber Monday. Did you know that there's a day and I didn't even know about this. It's called Travel Tuesday. No, you haven't heard about this? No, well apparently over the last couple of years and this is supposed to be true this year is Well, the airlines have the best deals of the year coming up this Tuesday. So most of the really good deals are only starting January 1, but you have to buy them on Tuesday. So get online, poke around. And if you're planning on flying down to Florida or someplace slightly warmer than Maine in January in February, you should really look on Tuesday. Now, there are some great tools you can use for airlines as well. I think you guys have like a favorite site or a tool you use for finding and booking airfare.

Matt Gagnon 
The site that I use to find in book airfare is the one I can find the cheapest possible. I go to Hopper to compare them, right? I hate to be cliche, but I'm, I'm Expedia or Travelocity if I want to book it but then I kind of go the look at the deals then I go the airlines themselves because the problem is of the airlines and The flight gets messed up and Travelocity won't really help you out there.

Craig Peterson
Yeah, Boy it is going to be really bad this Thanksgiving as far as flights go because of all these storms. Well, I'm glad you use Hopper. That was my recommendation last year and is again this year. Hopper is an app that you can get for your smartphone or tablet. And what it does is it allows you to track the prices on airline flights and hotels now as well. It looks at all of this historical data. So examining hundreds of million prices here over the last, I think there's about five years worth of data right now. And so they can kind of predict when the best time to book is and it'll pop a little message up on your smartphone, saying hey, you know that trip that you wanted to make to Naples, Florida, the best time to buy it is right now and then it tells you, hey, coming up in two or three days, the price is going to go up by $30. It's a good one. Can I think you're right about that? Another one you guys might want to check out. And our listeners, of course, as well, is Google has Google flights that have been out there now for a good couple of years. And Google won't show you some of the really inexpensive airlines. Like, for instance, Southwest Airlines is one of the leading in the price category plus you get free luggage. But with Google flights, you can tell it I want to take so many bags are so many people. Here's where I want to go. And it will compare all of the major airlines. It's tied right into their databases. So those are good ones. And then you guys mentioned like, Matt, I think you mentioned Expedia and some others. They are not bad at all. But I'll tell you my big secret to save money on these things. I do use hopper for the airline flight And then I'll double-check on Google and make sure everything looks legit. And I'll go to the airline flight, I tend to buy it right from the airline flight not from Hopper or not through Google either. I'll get my airline flight and I will not book a hotel. Now, the exception to booking a hotel is if I'm going to a conference or something, right, but if I'm going out to visit friends or families, I will not book a hotel. And then when I get there, I use hotwire. And hotwire has this feature where you don't know what hotel you're getting. But you do know that that particular hotel that is offering to you, you do know what the ratings are of the people that have been there. And I felt the ratings on hotwire to be way more accurate than those on Travelocity or Expedia or most of the other sites. So I'll show up and I'll be saving 50% or more on the hotel price, the best price I could find anywhere. So I'll try to book at two or three in the afternoon. So if you don't mind a little, a little uncertainty in your travel, you don't necessarily you don't know what hotel it really is, you know the area it is going to be in, generally speaking, it's usually a few miles by a couple of miles. So, if you don't have a car might be a problem, but today with Uber and lift, what the heck. And you also don't know exactly which hotel it's going to be, but that's what I do. I booked them. It's been kind of fun. I used it in Europe as well. When we traveled around, we just decided where do you want to go today? And we went on hotwire. It worked in France. It was really kind of cool. So those there's a couple of techie travel tips for everybody. Or there you go.

Matt Gagnon
Craig Peterson joins us as he always does on Wednesdays to go over what's happening in the world of technology. And speaking of that world of technology. How scary can it be Craig, we've got lots of scams, probably that are related jams, all the deals that are out there, you've got Black Friday. You know, sales like $11 for a DVD player or whatever and a lot of places and you can I'm sure sees a lot of stuff online. So how do you kind of judge the garbage and the scams and the lies and the whatever from the real stuff? Like what should I be looking for this Black Friday to protect myself if nothing else?

Craig Peterson
Well, the best tip I think for everybody you mentioned, like the $11 DVD players, is Matt, who uses  DVD players anymore. It's a good point.

Matt Gagnon 
It's a good point. That is a good point.

Craig Peterson
But you're right on there because the number one thing is: if the deal is too good to be true if you're seeing just the most fantastic deal being offered. That's really kind of the number one thing and it is the easiest to look for. But right now we've got these types of squatting domains. Those of us with fat fingers, domain names, be where, because there are about 110,000 typo-squatting domains. So that means if you type in something incorrectly like if you type out orifice instead of office when you're trying to go to the Microsoft site, there's 110,000 of those. There are four times as many fake domain cybersquatting domains as real retailers that are out there. So this is kind of hard to figure out what valid or not, and you cannot rely on that little lock up in the corner right there on the left of the URL bar, that lock, you cannot depend on that, meaning that this site is legitimate or really secure. So use some common sense if you're on a website, and you're on a big-box retailer or one of your favorite places to shop online. And you see ads on there from other sites. So let's just say you're on the Walmart site, and you're seeing ads from Amazon. Hey, it ain't the Walmart site. All right? So things like that there are these clues that go back and forth. But Matt, I would suggest you just double check your spelling type in the URL directly. Because I've also found that there is there's something called Google poisoning. And what that is, is the bad guys, go ahead and make it so that when you are typing something in the Google results that start coming up, are in fact, the fake sites that type of squatting sites on Google knows this. So they have people who are watching for that to happen this time of year. So bottom line, if you stick with the real big guys that are out there, the names we all know. And if you spell them right, even if you look them up in Google, you're probably going to be arriving at the right website. Now that doesn't mean the way that the data is absolutely Be safe, but you'll probably be on the right website. So you know, be careful of sites that are asking you to download their apps, a lot of sites have those nowadays. Bottom line, it doesn't matter, you're almost always better off just using the website as opposed to using their app in almost every case. Be careful of some of the bargains bait and switch is a big problem this time of year with some of the smaller retailers. bait and switch have also been a problem with some of these short term rental places like the Airbnb is out there, where they call you up the day before your booking for the house or the room and they say yeah, we had a flood, a water pipe broke, etc, etc. We've got another place for you, so don't worry about it. They do this the day before you're supposed to arrive. Also, be very careful of those discount cards. Be careful of that as well. But if you Want to find good discounts online, there's a plugin that I use when I'm shopping called Honey. If you use honey online, it's absolutely amazing. Honey is a coupon finder, and you can find that online as well. Obviously a join honey.com then when you visit a shopping site, it will automatically try, well you actually have to click on it, but it'll try a bunch of discount coupon codes that are known to work and they can save you a whole bunch of money online. Honey dot com is something else that you might want to look for. Bottom line, be cautious pay attention. And everybody have a great great Thanksgiving. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and airline Tuesday this week.

Ken Altschuler
Good. Our tech guru joins us every Wednesday at 738 have a great Turkey day we will see Talk to you next Wednesday, Craig.

Craig Peterson
All right, gentlemen, take care.

Matt Gagnon
Thank you, Craig. All right. So with that, we're going to take a quick break here. We're gonna go into the newsroom and get once again,

Craig Peterson
Hey, everybody, have a great Thanksgiving. And we will be back of course next week. I think Monday is when I'm hitting it again. Take care. Bye-bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning and we discussed a new technology fraud that you need to be aware of and also some other dangers that you may find yourself exposed to this holiday season. So, here we go with Mr. Polito.

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

--- 

Related articles:

Hand in Hand On Black Friday --- Shopping and Privacy

Imposter Retailers Outnumber Legitimate Ones

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson
Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I had a lot of fun this morning with Mr. Polito. It's nice having somebody who's quick on the draw on the other side and get to figure out why. Or I know why there's a delay sometimes between me speaking and him speaking. But their equipment isn't compatible with my equipment. And so we're going to figure that out. So we've got a note with the engineers over the radio stations to after the first of the year to see if we can't figure out a better way to get me chatting with, Jim but you are going to like it. We had a lot of fun anyway, and we talked about the fake retailer sites. I'm going into quite a bit of detail with them, too. I had a little walk along this morning with Mr. Jim Polito. Hey, Happy Thanksgiving to everybody. Hope you are going to have a great time we've as always we invite a friend over who doesn't have local family and maybe if you are a friend like that, you will be able to enjoy it with another family or with your own or Even by yourself but you know, my heart goes out to everybody. Take care of everybody and here we go with Jim Polito

Jim Polito
Here he is the man the myth, the legend. I'm talking about our good friend and thanksgiving Tech Talk Guru, Craig Peterson let me be the first sir to say I want to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving

Jim Polito
Happy late Thanksgiving, I appreciate that sir. I

Craig Peterson
 I thought you were gonna say Jim you missed the Canadian Thanksgiving or you know you did you said Happy Thanksgiving that that

Jim Polito
When is the Canadain Thanksgiving? I always forget.

Craig Peterson
It's about a month earlier. You know, because in Canada, we live in Igloos. So it is in October, you know.

Jim Polito 
I love that. But Thanksgiving in Canada is more of a is a recognition of the harvest and not a historical event, right?

Craig Peterson
That's absolutely true. It has nothing to do with the Commonwealth and people starving to death. And then that celebration, celebration of the harvest, like so many of them are worldwide. Well, as you mentioned earlier on your show, a lot of cultures have things and that's what it is in Canada as well.

Jim Polito 
Yeah. And you know, the thing is, it's more likely that the Thanksgiving in Plymouth, the first which as we know it was Plymouth, not Jamestown, because Plymouth we actually have a document to prove it was the first but it was likely how late September early October also, just like the Canadian would be right about now you wouldn't be having any harvest festival down in Plymouth.

Craig Peterson 
No, no, you probably wouldn't. Yeah, it's harvest time for sure. I got all the honey from my bees. I got about 100 pounds of honey this year. That's all done. They were really productive.

Jim Polito 
Yeah, pretty earthy-crunchy for a for a guy who's a tech talk guru.

Craig Peterson 
Yeah, exactly. It is. You know, I've got chickens and we still have horses, cats, and dogs. We've got rescue Great Dane here. Wow.

Jim Polito 
I love Great Danes. Oh, they're so nice. And they keep the revenuers away.

Craig Peterson
They do. 

Jim Polito 
You and Burt Ward you know, Robin from the old Batman series and his wife. They do Great Dane rescue because people get a Great Dane and then realize, Hey, this is like having a pony.

Craig Peterson 
We've had those small horses too and they are actually horses not ponies. We've had for four Dane rescues and it's kind of a shame. But you're right, a lot of people can handle them. But it is not the kind of dog that you can't train. You have to train them. There is no option. But to train them.

Jim Polito 
Yeah, you have to train because they can do whatever they want, but they are very gentle and loving dogs.

Craig Peterson
You know, our Great Dane, well she identifies as a Chihuahua.

Jim Polito 
That means jumping up in Craig's lap.

Craig Peterson 
Yeah. She stands there with these sad eyes. You know, her eyes say there's room on that couch and I could fit just because it's made for three people and there are three people on it already doesn't mean a little Chihuahua. Like me can fit.

Jim Polito
They're just so big. They are just so powerful. That's right. Well, there we go. This Thanksgiving we've had our animal rescue pitch. Now, let's get into this. We need to talk about Black Friday scams from a tech perspective because that's what folks are looking forward and thinking about right now.

Craig Peterson 
Oh, and this year is worse than most well, almost any other one prior, frankly. We've had I think it's first off I think the first point is something called typosquatting domains. Now, do you know what typo-squatting is? We all make typing errors especially on our smart devices, right? Make them all the time. Yes, a typing mistake or you know, you're thinking about something else while you're typing until you typed in something else. My wife was trying to go to a Microsoft Office site the other day and she kept typing orifice. You know, sticking in an "R" in there. And you know, we do this all the time. So Wow, Right now a company called the Venafi went and they grabbed the names of the biggest retailers that they could find online. And basically, they found them all. But, here's what they found their statistics, they found that there were almost 25,000 authentic retail sites online. At least think about that number for a minute. You compare that to five or 10 years ago. 20,000 authentic retail sites online. Yeah. But they found 110 thousand fake sites that looked like the retail site. So you know, 20,000 to 110,000, over four times as many fake sites that look legitimate retail sites, legitimate retail sites that are out there, and they also found 15,000 paid pal certificates issued in 20. 17 first I choose for fishing. So we've gone from about, you know, 15,000 in 2017 of the PayPal ones to now 110,000. So rule number one while you're shopping, this whole holiday season is all about certificates. Now, you have to be good to figure this out. And maybe what I should do is put together a little paper and I'll send it out to everybody that wants it. That explains it. But if you go on if you're sitting in front of your computer right now, Jim, I know you are Yep. And you go to the URL bar, that's the bar word has the website address. And on the left side, it usually has a little lock icon. And if you hover over that, it says View site information. Yeah, click on that. Yeah. It will come up and say the connection is secure. That Is test number one. Yeah, that's not the ultimate test. Okay. In a little bit, you'll see it says the certificate is valid.

Jim Polito
I'm on Facebook and it says certificate says valid.

Craig Peterson
All right, and it'll tell you if you click on down below where it says View certificate. If you click on that, it'll tell you who the issuer is.

Jim Polito
certificate information. Details Wait a minute. The certificate is intended for the following purposes. issued to Facebook com. It is issued in California.

Craig Peterson
They are one of the biggest and most legitimate and the fact it says it was issued to facebook.com. Okay. That's what you want to look for Jim, right. And what that tells you is they, they went to the trouble to verify that this really was Facebook. So these more expensive certificates like all of these retail sites likely to have these more expensive certificates, they go to the trouble to verify. So they check with the state to make sure that the company's properly registered, who the appropriate people are within the company to can make these decisions and buying the company. And then they'll issue their certificate. So what you're looking at is a legitimate certificate for Facebook.

Jim Polito 
Got it? Interesting. So yeah, like if you go to amazon.com, you know, yeah, you know, or Amazon, whatever, you missed it, and then they have a site that mimics the other side. That makes sense. You got to go over there and make sure all this isn't now, just sites like that. Get certificates. Can it can a site if I put up Amazon, Amazon com? And then I have a site that looks an awful lot like Amazon, can I get a certificate? Or will they say not a chance, buddy?

Craig Peterson
You can. There is the technology out there. I sometimes use these guys to do it. And the whole idea is to make it so that all of the data on the internet is encrypted. There's a site or certificate issued by Let's Encrypt. So if you go to my website, for instance, so if you were to go right now to Craig peterson.com. Yep, you'll see I'm Craig peterson.com. On the left, it's got the little lock, and you can click on that lock and it's going to come up with a connection is secure. If you look at the certificate, You'll see that it's issued by Let's Encrypt. Yeah. Okay. It doesn't have much information about me. It doesn't have the company name who would tissue to or anything else. So in this case, I could get a certificate for amazom.com. Let's encrypt the letters. So this is where it starts getting really confusing to people. Okay? You notice the details on my site are different than they were on Facebook. My site hasn't been authenticated. Is it really Craig Peterson or someone else. All they've done now is it made it so that if you're browsing on my website, it is encrypted. So people can't spy on you when you're on my website. This is a technology problem that we're actually working on for the internet right now. And we've got a few potential solutions impact. It's funny you brought it up because this week, finally Microsoft said, that they may, eventually, absolutely are going to next week, or by 2030.  They sre going to start to use those very solid, very good newer standards that are out there. But this is one of the big weaknesses of the internet. And unfortunately, Black Friday, you're going to hit this one. So what to do here, let's really correct it only, we only got like a minute left here. And all of this stuff is up on my website. Craig Peterson dot com.  If any website is insisting that you download their application run away! Everybody has an app and frankly, most apps can be a little dangerous, okay? If they keep pressuring you for the app, forget about it. If the website has a lot of advertising on it, especially if it's not for their stuff, be leery. If you're on a website, you went to Amazon. And it was not just advertising Amazon stuff, but was advertising a whole bunch of other stuff. That's a really big giveaway. As always, if the price is too good to be true, it's a true bait and switch a very big thing this time of year. And be careful with you're going to one of these sites to rent a house for the holidays. Yeah, careful of bait and switch. There are some studies out there and Airbnb has been trying to crack down. But studies showing the better than 20% on some of these sites of the listings are fake. So you sign up for a house and what will happen is like the day before, you'll get an email from the owner of the house or the just a room even saying we had a flood we had a pipe break and toilet breaks, etc. I'm going to move you to another house. It's just as nice you're going along. 

Jim Polito
Okay. This is all good stuff. Now, if people text My name to this number

Craig Peterson
855-385-2553. That's 855-385-5553 standard

Jim Polito
Standard data and tax rates apply and Craig Peterson will provide you with this information. He'll provide you weekly with this information and won't bother you and you will be ahead of the curve. Craig, I can't thank you enough. Happy belated Canadian Thanksgiving. Happy American Thanksgiving. And we look forward to talking with you next week.

Craig Peterson 14:42
All right, and we can discuss when Canadian Christmas is on the same day.  

Jim Polito 
Festivous is the 23rd. Thanks, Craig. Bye-bye. All right, we're gonna let Billy get on board with whoo socks. 

Craig Peterson
Hey again. My friends, Happy Thanksgiving and I'll be on tomorrow. I expect I'll be on WGAN and up in Maine tomorrow too. So I'll be back then. Take care. Bye-bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning and we discussed a new technology fraud that you need to be aware of and also some other dangers that you may find yourself exposed to this holiday season. So, here we go with Mr. Polito.

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

--- 

Related articles:

Hand in Hand On Black Friday --- Shopping and Privacy

Imposter Retailers Outnumber Legitimate Ones

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson
Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I had a lot of fun this morning with Mr. Polito. It's nice having somebody who's quick on the draw on the other side and get to figure out why. Or I know why there's a delay sometimes between me speaking and him speaking. But their equipment isn't compatible with my equipment. And so we're going to figure that out. So we've got a note with the engineers over the radio stations to after the first of the year to see if we can't figure out a better way to get me chatting with, Jim but you are going to like it. We had a lot of fun anyway, and we talked about the fake retailer sites. I'm going into quite a bit of detail with them, too. I had a little walk along this morning with Mr. Jim Polito. Hey, Happy Thanksgiving to everybody. Hope you are going to have a great time we've as always we invite a friend over who doesn't have local family and maybe if you are a friend like that, you will be able to enjoy it with another family or with your own or Even by yourself but you know, my heart goes out to everybody. Take care of everybody and here we go with Jim Polito

Jim Polito
Here he is the man the myth, the legend. I'm talking about our good friend and thanksgiving Tech Talk Guru, Craig Peterson let me be the first sir to say I want to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving

Jim Polito
Happy late Thanksgiving, I appreciate that sir. I

Craig Peterson
 I thought you were gonna say Jim you missed the Canadian Thanksgiving or you know you did you said Happy Thanksgiving that that

Jim Polito
When is the Canadain Thanksgiving? I always forget.

Craig Peterson
It's about a month earlier. You know, because in Canada, we live in Igloos. So it is in October, you know.

Jim Polito 
I love that. But Thanksgiving in Canada is more of a is a recognition of the harvest and not a historical event, right?

Craig Peterson
That's absolutely true. It has nothing to do with the Commonwealth and people starving to death. And then that celebration, celebration of the harvest, like so many of them are worldwide. Well, as you mentioned earlier on your show, a lot of cultures have things and that's what it is in Canada as well.

Jim Polito 
Yeah. And you know, the thing is, it's more likely that the Thanksgiving in Plymouth, the first which as we know it was Plymouth, not Jamestown, because Plymouth we actually have a document to prove it was the first but it was likely how late September early October also, just like the Canadian would be right about now you wouldn't be having any harvest festival down in Plymouth.

Craig Peterson 
No, no, you probably wouldn't. Yeah, it's harvest time for sure. I got all the honey from my bees. I got about 100 pounds of honey this year. That's all done. They were really productive.

Jim Polito 
Yeah, pretty earthy-crunchy for a for a guy who's a tech talk guru.

Craig Peterson 
Yeah, exactly. It is. You know, I've got chickens and we still have horses, cats, and dogs. We've got rescue Great Dane here. Wow.

Jim Polito 
I love Great Danes. Oh, they're so nice. And they keep the revenuers away.

Craig Peterson
They do. 

Jim Polito 
You and Burt Ward you know, Robin from the old Batman series and his wife. They do Great Dane rescue because people get a Great Dane and then realize, Hey, this is like having a pony.

Craig Peterson 
We've had those small horses too and they are actually horses not ponies. We've had for four Dane rescues and it's kind of a shame. But you're right, a lot of people can handle them. But it is not the kind of dog that you can't train. You have to train them. There is no option. But to train them.

Jim Polito 
Yeah, you have to train because they can do whatever they want, but they are very gentle and loving dogs.

Craig Peterson
You know, our Great Dane, well she identifies as a Chihuahua.

Jim Polito 
That means jumping up in Craig's lap.

Craig Peterson 
Yeah. She stands there with these sad eyes. You know, her eyes say there's room on that couch and I could fit just because it's made for three people and there are three people on it already doesn't mean a little Chihuahua. Like me can fit.

Jim Polito
They're just so big. They are just so powerful. That's right. Well, there we go. This Thanksgiving we've had our animal rescue pitch. Now, let's get into this. We need to talk about Black Friday scams from a tech perspective because that's what folks are looking forward and thinking about right now.

Craig Peterson 
Oh, and this year is worse than most well, almost any other one prior, frankly. We've had I think it's first off I think the first point is something called typosquatting domains. Now, do you know what typo-squatting is? We all make typing errors especially on our smart devices, right? Make them all the time. Yes, a typing mistake or you know, you're thinking about something else while you're typing until you typed in something else. My wife was trying to go to a Microsoft Office site the other day and she kept typing orifice. You know, sticking in an "R" in there. And you know, we do this all the time. So Wow, Right now a company called the Venafi went and they grabbed the names of the biggest retailers that they could find online. And basically, they found them all. But, here's what they found their statistics, they found that there were almost 25,000 authentic retail sites online. At least think about that number for a minute. You compare that to five or 10 years ago. 20,000 authentic retail sites online. Yeah. But they found 110 thousand fake sites that looked like the retail site. So you know, 20,000 to 110,000, over four times as many fake sites that look legitimate retail sites, legitimate retail sites that are out there, and they also found 15,000 paid pal certificates issued in 20. 17 first I choose for fishing. So we've gone from about, you know, 15,000 in 2017 of the PayPal ones to now 110,000. So rule number one while you're shopping, this whole holiday season is all about certificates. Now, you have to be good to figure this out. And maybe what I should do is put together a little paper and I'll send it out to everybody that wants it. That explains it. But if you go on if you're sitting in front of your computer right now, Jim, I know you are Yep. And you go to the URL bar, that's the bar word has the website address. And on the left side, it usually has a little lock icon. And if you hover over that, it says View site information. Yeah, click on that. Yeah. It will come up and say the connection is secure. That Is test number one. Yeah, that's not the ultimate test. Okay. In a little bit, you'll see it says the certificate is valid.

Jim Polito
I'm on Facebook and it says certificate says valid.

Craig Peterson
All right, and it'll tell you if you click on down below where it says View certificate. If you click on that, it'll tell you who the issuer is.

Jim Polito
certificate information. Details Wait a minute. The certificate is intended for the following purposes. issued to Facebook com. It is issued in California.

Craig Peterson
They are one of the biggest and most legitimate and the fact it says it was issued to facebook.com. Okay. That's what you want to look for Jim, right. And what that tells you is they, they went to the trouble to verify that this really was Facebook. So these more expensive certificates like all of these retail sites likely to have these more expensive certificates, they go to the trouble to verify. So they check with the state to make sure that the company's properly registered, who the appropriate people are within the company to can make these decisions and buying the company. And then they'll issue their certificate. So what you're looking at is a legitimate certificate for Facebook.

Jim Polito 
Got it? Interesting. So yeah, like if you go to amazon.com, you know, yeah, you know, or Amazon, whatever, you missed it, and then they have a site that mimics the other side. That makes sense. You got to go over there and make sure all this isn't now, just sites like that. Get certificates. Can it can a site if I put up Amazon, Amazon com? And then I have a site that looks an awful lot like Amazon, can I get a certificate? Or will they say not a chance, buddy?

Craig Peterson
You can. There is the technology out there. I sometimes use these guys to do it. And the whole idea is to make it so that all of the data on the internet is encrypted. There's a site or certificate issued by Let's Encrypt. So if you go to my website, for instance, so if you were to go right now to Craig peterson.com. Yep, you'll see I'm Craig peterson.com. On the left, it's got the little lock, and you can click on that lock and it's going to come up with a connection is secure. If you look at the certificate, You'll see that it's issued by Let's Encrypt. Yeah. Okay. It doesn't have much information about me. It doesn't have the company name who would tissue to or anything else. So in this case, I could get a certificate for amazom.com. Let's encrypt the letters. So this is where it starts getting really confusing to people. Okay? You notice the details on my site are different than they were on Facebook. My site hasn't been authenticated. Is it really Craig Peterson or someone else. All they've done now is it made it so that if you're browsing on my website, it is encrypted. So people can't spy on you when you're on my website. This is a technology problem that we're actually working on for the internet right now. And we've got a few potential solutions impact. It's funny you brought it up because this week, finally Microsoft said, that they may, eventually, absolutely are going to next week, or by 2030.  They sre going to start to use those very solid, very good newer standards that are out there. But this is one of the big weaknesses of the internet. And unfortunately, Black Friday, you're going to hit this one. So what to do here, let's really correct it only, we only got like a minute left here. And all of this stuff is up on my website. Craig Peterson dot com.  If any website is insisting that you download their application run away! Everybody has an app and frankly, most apps can be a little dangerous, okay? If they keep pressuring you for the app, forget about it. If the website has a lot of advertising on it, especially if it's not for their stuff, be leery. If you're on a website, you went to Amazon. And it was not just advertising Amazon stuff, but was advertising a whole bunch of other stuff. That's a really big giveaway. As always, if the price is too good to be true, it's a true bait and switch a very big thing this time of year. And be careful with you're going to one of these sites to rent a house for the holidays. Yeah, careful of bait and switch. There are some studies out there and Airbnb has been trying to crack down. But studies showing the better than 20% on some of these sites of the listings are fake. So you sign up for a house and what will happen is like the day before, you'll get an email from the owner of the house or the just a room even saying we had a flood we had a pipe break and toilet breaks, etc. I'm going to move you to another house. It's just as nice you're going along. 

Jim Polito
Okay. This is all good stuff. Now, if people text My name to this number

Craig Peterson
855-385-2553. That's 855-385-5553 standard

Jim Polito
Standard data and tax rates apply and Craig Peterson will provide you with this information. He'll provide you weekly with this information and won't bother you and you will be ahead of the curve. Craig, I can't thank you enough. Happy belated Canadian Thanksgiving. Happy American Thanksgiving. And we look forward to talking with you next week.

Craig Peterson 14:42
All right, and we can discuss when Canadian Christmas is on the same day.  

Jim Polito 
Festivous is the 23rd. Thanks, Craig. Bye-bye. All right, we're gonna let Billy get on board with whoo socks. 

Craig Peterson
Hey again. My friends, Happy Thanksgiving and I'll be on tomorrow. I expect I'll be on WGAN and up in Maine tomorrow too. So I'll be back then. Take care. Bye-bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning and we discussed a new technology fraud that you need to be aware of and also some other dangers that you may find yourself exposed to this holiday season. So, here we go with Mr. Polito.

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

--- 

Related articles:

Hand in Hand On Black Friday --- Shopping and Privacy

Imposter Retailers Outnumber Legitimate Ones

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson
Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I had a lot of fun this morning with Mr. Polito. It's nice having somebody who's quick on the draw on the other side and get to figure out why. Or I know why there's a delay sometimes between me speaking and him speaking. But their equipment isn't compatible with my equipment. And so we're going to figure that out. So we've got a note with the engineers over the radio stations to after the first of the year to see if we can't figure out a better way to get me chatting with, Jim but you are going to like it. We had a lot of fun anyway, and we talked about the fake retailer sites. I'm going into quite a bit of detail with them, too. I had a little walk along this morning with Mr. Jim Polito. Hey, Happy Thanksgiving to everybody. Hope you are going to have a great time we've as always we invite a friend over who doesn't have local family and maybe if you are a friend like that, you will be able to enjoy it with another family or with your own or Even by yourself but you know, my heart goes out to everybody. Take care of everybody and here we go with Jim Polito

Jim Polito
Here he is the man the myth, the legend. I'm talking about our good friend and thanksgiving Tech Talk Guru, Craig Peterson let me be the first sir to say I want to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving

Jim Polito
Happy late Thanksgiving, I appreciate that sir. I

Craig Peterson
 I thought you were gonna say Jim you missed the Canadian Thanksgiving or you know you did you said Happy Thanksgiving that that

Jim Polito
When is the Canadain Thanksgiving? I always forget.

Craig Peterson
It's about a month earlier. You know, because in Canada, we live in Igloos. So it is in October, you know.

Jim Polito 
I love that. But Thanksgiving in Canada is more of a is a recognition of the harvest and not a historical event, right?

Craig Peterson
That's absolutely true. It has nothing to do with the Commonwealth and people starving to death. And then that celebration, celebration of the harvest, like so many of them are worldwide. Well, as you mentioned earlier on your show, a lot of cultures have things and that's what it is in Canada as well.

Jim Polito 
Yeah. And you know, the thing is, it's more likely that the Thanksgiving in Plymouth, the first which as we know it was Plymouth, not Jamestown, because Plymouth we actually have a document to prove it was the first but it was likely how late September early October also, just like the Canadian would be right about now you wouldn't be having any harvest festival down in Plymouth.

Craig Peterson 
No, no, you probably wouldn't. Yeah, it's harvest time for sure. I got all the honey from my bees. I got about 100 pounds of honey this year. That's all done. They were really productive.

Jim Polito 
Yeah, pretty earthy-crunchy for a for a guy who's a tech talk guru.

Craig Peterson 
Yeah, exactly. It is. You know, I've got chickens and we still have horses, cats, and dogs. We've got rescue Great Dane here. Wow.

Jim Polito 
I love Great Danes. Oh, they're so nice. And they keep the revenuers away.

Craig Peterson
They do. 

Jim Polito 
You and Burt Ward you know, Robin from the old Batman series and his wife. They do Great Dane rescue because people get a Great Dane and then realize, Hey, this is like having a pony.

Craig Peterson 
We've had those small horses too and they are actually horses not ponies. We've had for four Dane rescues and it's kind of a shame. But you're right, a lot of people can handle them. But it is not the kind of dog that you can't train. You have to train them. There is no option. But to train them.

Jim Polito 
Yeah, you have to train because they can do whatever they want, but they are very gentle and loving dogs.

Craig Peterson
You know, our Great Dane, well she identifies as a Chihuahua.

Jim Polito 
That means jumping up in Craig's lap.

Craig Peterson 
Yeah. She stands there with these sad eyes. You know, her eyes say there's room on that couch and I could fit just because it's made for three people and there are three people on it already doesn't mean a little Chihuahua. Like me can fit.

Jim Polito
They're just so big. They are just so powerful. That's right. Well, there we go. This Thanksgiving we've had our animal rescue pitch. Now, let's get into this. We need to talk about Black Friday scams from a tech perspective because that's what folks are looking forward and thinking about right now.

Craig Peterson 
Oh, and this year is worse than most well, almost any other one prior, frankly. We've had I think it's first off I think the first point is something called typosquatting domains. Now, do you know what typo-squatting is? We all make typing errors especially on our smart devices, right? Make them all the time. Yes, a typing mistake or you know, you're thinking about something else while you're typing until you typed in something else. My wife was trying to go to a Microsoft Office site the other day and she kept typing orifice. You know, sticking in an "R" in there. And you know, we do this all the time. So Wow, Right now a company called the Venafi went and they grabbed the names of the biggest retailers that they could find online. And basically, they found them all. But, here's what they found their statistics, they found that there were almost 25,000 authentic retail sites online. At least think about that number for a minute. You compare that to five or 10 years ago. 20,000 authentic retail sites online. Yeah. But they found 110 thousand fake sites that looked like the retail site. So you know, 20,000 to 110,000, over four times as many fake sites that look legitimate retail sites, legitimate retail sites that are out there, and they also found 15,000 paid pal certificates issued in 20. 17 first I choose for fishing. So we've gone from about, you know, 15,000 in 2017 of the PayPal ones to now 110,000. So rule number one while you're shopping, this whole holiday season is all about certificates. Now, you have to be good to figure this out. And maybe what I should do is put together a little paper and I'll send it out to everybody that wants it. That explains it. But if you go on if you're sitting in front of your computer right now, Jim, I know you are Yep. And you go to the URL bar, that's the bar word has the website address. And on the left side, it usually has a little lock icon. And if you hover over that, it says View site information. Yeah, click on that. Yeah. It will come up and say the connection is secure. That Is test number one. Yeah, that's not the ultimate test. Okay. In a little bit, you'll see it says the certificate is valid.

Jim Polito
I'm on Facebook and it says certificate says valid.

Craig Peterson
All right, and it'll tell you if you click on down below where it says View certificate. If you click on that, it'll tell you who the issuer is.

Jim Polito
certificate information. Details Wait a minute. The certificate is intended for the following purposes. issued to Facebook com. It is issued in California.

Craig Peterson
They are one of the biggest and most legitimate and the fact it says it was issued to facebook.com. Okay. That's what you want to look for Jim, right. And what that tells you is they, they went to the trouble to verify that this really was Facebook. So these more expensive certificates like all of these retail sites likely to have these more expensive certificates, they go to the trouble to verify. So they check with the state to make sure that the company's properly registered, who the appropriate people are within the company to can make these decisions and buying the company. And then they'll issue their certificate. So what you're looking at is a legitimate certificate for Facebook.

Jim Polito 
Got it? Interesting. So yeah, like if you go to amazon.com, you know, yeah, you know, or Amazon, whatever, you missed it, and then they have a site that mimics the other side. That makes sense. You got to go over there and make sure all this isn't now, just sites like that. Get certificates. Can it can a site if I put up Amazon, Amazon com? And then I have a site that looks an awful lot like Amazon, can I get a certificate? Or will they say not a chance, buddy?

Craig Peterson
You can. There is the technology out there. I sometimes use these guys to do it. And the whole idea is to make it so that all of the data on the internet is encrypted. There's a site or certificate issued by Let's Encrypt. So if you go to my website, for instance, so if you were to go right now to Craig peterson.com. Yep, you'll see I'm Craig peterson.com. On the left, it's got the little lock, and you can click on that lock and it's going to come up with a connection is secure. If you look at the certificate, You'll see that it's issued by Let's Encrypt. Yeah. Okay. It doesn't have much information about me. It doesn't have the company name who would tissue to or anything else. So in this case, I could get a certificate for amazom.com. Let's encrypt the letters. So this is where it starts getting really confusing to people. Okay? You notice the details on my site are different than they were on Facebook. My site hasn't been authenticated. Is it really Craig Peterson or someone else. All they've done now is it made it so that if you're browsing on my website, it is encrypted. So people can't spy on you when you're on my website. This is a technology problem that we're actually working on for the internet right now. And we've got a few potential solutions impact. It's funny you brought it up because this week, finally Microsoft said, that they may, eventually, absolutely are going to next week, or by 2030.  They sre going to start to use those very solid, very good newer standards that are out there. But this is one of the big weaknesses of the internet. And unfortunately, Black Friday, you're going to hit this one. So what to do here, let's really correct it only, we only got like a minute left here. And all of this stuff is up on my website. Craig Peterson dot com.  If any website is insisting that you download their application run away! Everybody has an app and frankly, most apps can be a little dangerous, okay? If they keep pressuring you for the app, forget about it. If the website has a lot of advertising on it, especially if it's not for their stuff, be leery. If you're on a website, you went to Amazon. And it was not just advertising Amazon stuff, but was advertising a whole bunch of other stuff. That's a really big giveaway. As always, if the price is too good to be true, it's a true bait and switch a very big thing this time of year. And be careful with you're going to one of these sites to rent a house for the holidays. Yeah, careful of bait and switch. There are some studies out there and Airbnb has been trying to crack down. But studies showing the better than 20% on some of these sites of the listings are fake. So you sign up for a house and what will happen is like the day before, you'll get an email from the owner of the house or the just a room even saying we had a flood we had a pipe break and toilet breaks, etc. I'm going to move you to another house. It's just as nice you're going along. 

Jim Polito
Okay. This is all good stuff. Now, if people text My name to this number

Craig Peterson
855-385-2553. That's 855-385-5553 standard

Jim Polito
Standard data and tax rates apply and Craig Peterson will provide you with this information. He'll provide you weekly with this information and won't bother you and you will be ahead of the curve. Craig, I can't thank you enough. Happy belated Canadian Thanksgiving. Happy American Thanksgiving. And we look forward to talking with you next week.

Craig Peterson 14:42
All right, and we can discuss when Canadian Christmas is on the same day.  

Jim Polito 
Festivous is the 23rd. Thanks, Craig. Bye-bye. All right, we're gonna let Billy get on board with whoo socks. 

Craig Peterson
Hey again. My friends, Happy Thanksgiving and I'll be on tomorrow. I expect I'll be on WGAN and up in Maine tomorrow too. So I'll be back then. Take care. Bye-bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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