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

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody! It is a start to another week. I'm going to be very busy for the next two weeks. In fact, I'm going to be at a conference next week, all week. This week, I've got two new clients where we're visiting, we're setting up their businesses with compliance, security. You know, most businesses have compliance issues if they don't know it yet. I was on with Mr. Heath again this morning per usual and we talked about some of the technology behind this Al Baghadhi raid over in the sandbox, that of course, happened over the weekend. So here we go with Mr. Heath.

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

--- 

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson 
Good morning, everybody! It is a start to another week. I'm going to be very busy for the next two weeks. In fact, I'm going to be at a conference next week, all week. This week, I've got two new clients where we're visiting, we're setting up their businesses with compliance, security. You know, most businesses have compliance issues if they don't know it yet. Oh my gosh. So it is going to be absolutely crazy. And I'm planning on doing some Facebook Lives this week, we'll see how this all works out. And I'm hoping to be able to do this master class on Friday about mobile device security. We'll see how this goes I imagine, I'll be able to get at least that done this week, as well as everything else I have to do like, put together the radio shows the guest appearances and take care of existing customers, right, man one of those weeks also putting up a new little website and just, you know, doing all kinds of stuff with my cybersecurity company anyways. And that's what that is. This morning I chatted with Mr. Jack Heath about some of the technology behind this Al Baghadhi raid over in the sandbox, that of course, happened over the weekend.

Jack Heath
All right. Joining us with some tech talk, I believe is Craig Peterson his show airs Saturday on these Iheart news-talk talk stations. Good morning, correct.

Craig Peterson 
It is. Hey, good morning. Did you hear about the technology tie into this al Baghdadi death this weekend?

Jack Heath 
No. But I imagine there's so much incredible technology. It's available to our military today. And it was an It was a very successful operation very, five months and planning. I think they tried it. They were going to go twice before and they went this time that one American soldier injured or hurt but tell us about the technology side because it was quite an operation of Rangers and Delta Force.

Craig Peterson
It really was and then as you pointed out to us Special Operations Command is had some standing plans and some of them called for the use of drones which the CIA and military have already used, of course, over there in Iraq and in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. But the other plans relied more heavily on certain armed forces. And in fact, that's exactly what they ended up doing. Now, there is a big difference in the how they were tracked down and in this case bag Daya he, there you go. He completely avoided the use of technology. They have gotten rid of the cell phones, the smartphones that have been used so many times in the past to track down his lieutenants as well and killed them. So apparently what happened here was that we got a tip from the wife of an Al Baghdadi aide, and one of the couriers as well that he employed. He was a long ways away from where the caliphate was, where he was guiding his troops, if you will, and that was a big surprise. So he Handy use more couriers. He had to have people going back and forth. Now, of course, those people are a lot easier to track than someone that is not using any technology. And then during the raid, or before the raid, actually, we had spies on the ground, checking things out. We of course had high altitude drones that were taking detailed pictures. And apparently, when we came in, of course, we had the gunships above the helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft that soften the target substantially. We tried to get them to come out. Have you seen this? You seen the video of the softening of the target, say that he really did soften the ground down there.

Jack Heath
Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

Craig Peterson

No, they really did. And they flew 70 miles all the way from this village, up to where he was his bodyguards, his love his children were spending the night and we did it at low altitude. Of course, our helicopters are able to make very, very little noise. If they Wearing on those special mufflers.

Jack Heath

Yeah, the stuff it's what they use in the in Pakistan when they went in and it's interesting Craig Peterson the Osama bin Laden raid in Pakistan same kind of low stealth-type chopper approach to choppers, in that case, the seals, they also the intelligence that went to that, because they did the same thing there were through careers. They were tracking the careers.

Craig Peterson 
Yes. Yeah. That makes a whole lot of sense. Because these guys are smart enough that if you go back to Iraq, and of course the you're the head of Iraq back at the time, it was no longer around. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's little spider hole. But in that particular case, we were tracking him and his sons, because they were using these smart encrypted phones that we they didn't know but we had back doors to those phones using a Jupyter chip. And so we were able to track him down. We know exactly where he was what was going on. Which was what shocking all was really all about. We thought we had taken him out. Saddam Hussein and his sons right away, but we hadn't. So they have been learning over the years and they have been advancing some of their technology and and this tik tok app that's in the news right now, because it is owned by a Chinese company and apparently, tik tok, which our kids are using is being monitored by the Chinese is all kinds of problems there. But apparently, the terrorists are now using Tick Tock because of its ability to easily send messages and have them encrypted.

Jack Heath
Yeah, good stuff. Technology. Certainly in the military side, a lot of pieces have to come together for a raid like that to be successful. Thank you, Craig Peterson, enjoy your Monday. Hope you have a good one. Craig. com. Thank you, Craig.

Craig 5:52
Hey, by the way, if you want to sign up for these masterclasses, the easiest way is just go to Craig Peterson dot com slash master class. Do put it up on my homepage sometimes by click Craig Peterson dot com slash masterclass. These are the free classes that I'm putting on. They last a couple hours. Usually we get into a bit of a deeper dive, and I make sure I answer every one of your questions. None of these are available in replay. My goal here is to turn them into some paid courses, add some more content to them and things but you can attend for free if you are there for the live portion of the classes, and I think it's going to be Friday. But make sure you sign up you'll know more about it will be talking all about how to secure your mobile devices. Have a great day. We'll be back tomorrow. 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

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

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody! It is a start to another week. I'm going to be very busy for the next two weeks. In fact, I'm going to be at a conference next week, all week. This week, I've got two new clients where we're visiting, we're setting up their businesses with compliance, security. You know, most businesses have compliance issues if they don't know it yet. I was on with Mr. Heath again this morning per usual and we talked about some of the technology behind this Al Baghadhi raid over in the sandbox, that of course, happened over the weekend. So here we go with Mr. Heath.

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

--- 

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson 
Good morning, everybody! It is a start to another week. I'm going to be very busy for the next two weeks. In fact, I'm going to be at a conference next week, all week. This week, I've got two new clients where we're visiting, we're setting up their businesses with compliance, security. You know, most businesses have compliance issues if they don't know it yet. Oh my gosh. So it is going to be absolutely crazy. And I'm planning on doing some Facebook Lives this week, we'll see how this all works out. And I'm hoping to be able to do this master class on Friday about mobile device security. We'll see how this goes I imagine, I'll be able to get at least that done this week, as well as everything else I have to do like, put together the radio shows the guest appearances and take care of existing customers, right, man one of those weeks also putting up a new little website and just, you know, doing all kinds of stuff with my cybersecurity company anyways. And that's what that is. This morning I chatted with Mr. Jack Heath about some of the technology behind this Al Baghadhi raid over in the sandbox, that of course, happened over the weekend.

Jack Heath
All right. Joining us with some tech talk, I believe is Craig Peterson his show airs Saturday on these Iheart news-talk talk stations. Good morning, correct.

Craig Peterson 
It is. Hey, good morning. Did you hear about the technology tie into this al Baghdadi death this weekend?

Jack Heath 
No. But I imagine there's so much incredible technology. It's available to our military today. And it was an It was a very successful operation very, five months and planning. I think they tried it. They were going to go twice before and they went this time that one American soldier injured or hurt but tell us about the technology side because it was quite an operation of Rangers and Delta Force.

Craig Peterson
It really was and then as you pointed out to us Special Operations Command is had some standing plans and some of them called for the use of drones which the CIA and military have already used, of course, over there in Iraq and in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. But the other plans relied more heavily on certain armed forces. And in fact, that's exactly what they ended up doing. Now, there is a big difference in the how they were tracked down and in this case bag Daya he, there you go. He completely avoided the use of technology. They have gotten rid of the cell phones, the smartphones that have been used so many times in the past to track down his lieutenants as well and killed them. So apparently what happened here was that we got a tip from the wife of an Al Baghdadi aide, and one of the couriers as well that he employed. He was a long ways away from where the caliphate was, where he was guiding his troops, if you will, and that was a big surprise. So he Handy use more couriers. He had to have people going back and forth. Now, of course, those people are a lot easier to track than someone that is not using any technology. And then during the raid, or before the raid, actually, we had spies on the ground, checking things out. We of course had high altitude drones that were taking detailed pictures. And apparently, when we came in, of course, we had the gunships above the helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft that soften the target substantially. We tried to get them to come out. Have you seen this? You seen the video of the softening of the target, say that he really did soften the ground down there.

Jack Heath
Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

Craig Peterson

No, they really did. And they flew 70 miles all the way from this village, up to where he was his bodyguards, his love his children were spending the night and we did it at low altitude. Of course, our helicopters are able to make very, very little noise. If they Wearing on those special mufflers.

Jack Heath

Yeah, the stuff it's what they use in the in Pakistan when they went in and it's interesting Craig Peterson the Osama bin Laden raid in Pakistan same kind of low stealth-type chopper approach to choppers, in that case, the seals, they also the intelligence that went to that, because they did the same thing there were through careers. They were tracking the careers.

Craig Peterson 
Yes. Yeah. That makes a whole lot of sense. Because these guys are smart enough that if you go back to Iraq, and of course the you're the head of Iraq back at the time, it was no longer around. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's little spider hole. But in that particular case, we were tracking him and his sons, because they were using these smart encrypted phones that we they didn't know but we had back doors to those phones using a Jupyter chip. And so we were able to track him down. We know exactly where he was what was going on. Which was what shocking all was really all about. We thought we had taken him out. Saddam Hussein and his sons right away, but we hadn't. So they have been learning over the years and they have been advancing some of their technology and and this tik tok app that's in the news right now, because it is owned by a Chinese company and apparently, tik tok, which our kids are using is being monitored by the Chinese is all kinds of problems there. But apparently, the terrorists are now using Tick Tock because of its ability to easily send messages and have them encrypted.

Jack Heath
Yeah, good stuff. Technology. Certainly in the military side, a lot of pieces have to come together for a raid like that to be successful. Thank you, Craig Peterson, enjoy your Monday. Hope you have a good one. Craig. com. Thank you, Craig.

Craig 5:52
Hey, by the way, if you want to sign up for these masterclasses, the easiest way is just go to Craig Peterson dot com slash master class. Do put it up on my homepage sometimes by click Craig Peterson dot com slash masterclass. These are the free classes that I'm putting on. They last a couple hours. Usually we get into a bit of a deeper dive, and I make sure I answer every one of your questions. None of these are available in replay. My goal here is to turn them into some paid courses, add some more content to them and things but you can attend for free if you are there for the live portion of the classes, and I think it's going to be Friday. But make sure you sign up you'll know more about it will be talking all about how to secure your mobile devices. Have a great day. We'll be back tomorrow. 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

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

Welcome!  

Today we are going to discuss a new battery technology and what it may mean to our electronics

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

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig 0:06
Hey, good morning everybody. Good afternoon actually. I love Good morning though it's such a nice way to greet people. Of course, this is Craig Peterson I am here with you and we are also on video now you'll find me up on Facebook and on YouTube. We're doing a few different things to little Instagram, Pinterest and some other things out there as well. And of course right here we are on a Volvo radio. So welcome, welcome. So today as usual, we got a lot to cover. And you might notice if you're watching on video right now, I want to show these to you. These came this week. This is a company called pale blue. And they have the coolest batteries. I'm going to show the Yeah, you can see these. I've got them in the camera right now. These are there. triple-A batteries. I'm going to do an unboxing here so you can see what they look like a little bit later not during the show today. And we'll be looking at the double A's but these are called the light pOH technology. These are designed to charge extremely fast. And you see the red here around them around the top. That means they are charging it comes with this little USB charger just plugging into USB plug and it gives me four micro USB cables, they only are carrying power. And I have these four of these triple-A batteries plugged into it. So they will charge to 100% in about two hours, which is just wow. And you can't really see but all the way around. It's got a little bit of red you see how it's not as red on that side. So that's indicating how much it's charged. Now, part of the beauty of this isn't just how fast these things charge. But these little batteries here will actually replace thousands of dollars worth of regular alkaline batteries, the nonreusable batteries that you might buy. And look at how easy this is it I'm going to hold this right up to the camera you see this little micro USB port on it. Well that micro USB port is what you use to charge it. And then it's just a regular this, in this case, triple-A battery. And it's the same thing with the double A's it's got this little micro USB port so nowadays, we can go from almost anything to a micro USB now it comes with this plug here. Let me just unplug this from my little tabletop USB port. But it comes with this little plug that's just a regular USB, a two mini or micro I should say USB for these things. And what this means is you can take this with you you don't need the charging cable. You can use these batteries and when they need to be charged, you can plug them into another Battery, if you're like me, and you carry on these massive batteries for USB to charge up your phone and your iPad and your computer and whatever, you just plug these little puppies in. And within two hours, they'll be fully charged. And I, from what I can tell it's like 20 minutes or so to get to almost a full charge, you know enough of a charge to make them useful only takes a few minutes. It's kind of like those little USB helicopter things you've ever seen those charge up, and it'll charge up the helicopter in a matter of just a few seconds really less than a minute. It's a similar technology access the same basic technology, which is a new one. So it's a new type of lithium battery. And I'm going to see if I can't get these guys on the show. It's called Pale Blue Earth and you will find them online Pale Blue Earth and it builds itself as the world's best lithium rechargeable batteries. And so far and I've just started playing with them, but so far I have to say that they really are absolutely amazing. And they also were using a hashtag of ditch disposables so you can check that online too if you want to. So this is very very promising I love this idea. Because I have been using rechargeable batteries now for very, very long time. You know way back when you know nickel-metal hydride and 99 cats before that right? And the lithium ions and now this is like whoa which is really kind of cool. So, I'll let you know how this goes. We'll try and get them on the show to talk about but they're saying that one pack of these things can save you 3000 bucks in buying just regular throw-away batteries. And they're almost as convenient. I mean like almost it this is just incredible. So I'm so glad they reached out to me and they sent me a few of these to play with and let you know how it goes. So there you go. There's a little bit right there, I got a bit of loose earphone wire. You can see my studio for those of you who are watching on video. So today we have Google Home eavesdropping. We're going to start with who got Tesla's door handles, I want to talk about their technology in general. Because if if you've been listening to me for a while, you know that I've been involved in emergency medical services, right that I spent 10 years as a volunteer, and I want to talk about some of the dangers of these types of cars, not just Tesla, and some poor guy burned it f basically, in his Tesla because of some of these deficiencies that we'll talk about that Chinese nationals this again, another FBI story

I had this week and my gosh, all you guys that attended you know, I love the questions and I love the internet. action I always love the interaction and answering everybody's questions. So if you missed it, you missed it. I might put it up for sale on the website but I in this is the sort of thing I don't do replays on the Facebook Lives YouTube lives those go up on replay, but these master classes I do like the master class on VPN, where we talked about them and the recommendations and what you should be doing and how you should be doing it. Those I do not put up on replay because I want people to attend right you have to attend you have to register so you missed it this week. Next week, we're going to be having a master class on mobile device security. So make sure you don't miss that. We're planning that for Thursday afternoon at 4pm. Those types of things can change so keep an eye on your email. But you can go to Craig Peterson comm slash masterclass to sign up. Then as always, these masterclasses are free. They are jam-packed with information and very frequently I have really kind of cool little gifts that we're going to be giving out here in the future. I said very frequently. I haven't been doing a lot of other people do. I am going to start doing that most of the time, but not right yet. So anyhow, you missed the VPN clot master class. Well, next week, we're going to do one on mobile devices. And we're going to kind of do one a week-ish, sort of a thing, where we do a deeper dive into the top topics you guys have. And they are a minimum of an hour-long, and they can go three or more hours long as well because I want to get through everybody's questions. But we got an article we're going to talk about today. And you can see me holding it up in the camera here. Nord VPN, and major security issue with them. And you know, if you're on my master class this week, what I think about Nordic VPN, Robo tank This is kind of cool. I don't know if you knew it, but our friends from Russia, we're using robotic tanks over in Syria. Just this last week, and they had a major fail fail because of it, they weren't able to control them. They weren't doing what they had expected them to do. So we're going to talk a little bit about the whole automated mechanical warfare side of things. Today in the show, we'll talk about that a little bit. Anyways, obviously, this isn't a 10 hour show just on the military, Facebook. This is a huge lawsuit that they are having to face here and article from Ars Technica, Microsoft's dream Walker VR, this is going to be cool. This is what the future looks like guys. And it looks like the iPhone 12 is going to have some of this technology. So we'll talk about that. And, you know, we are all worried about vulnerabilities in our apps and our programs that we as businesses put together to make our lives easier. Did you know there are more apps used Internally inside of companies that are available on the App Store, so we're building these things for us, for our employees, we're also building them so that our, our clients can use them, you know, for just in time ordering and all that wonderful stuff. But we're not keeping the security up today, we're paying closer attention to the newest vulnerabilities. And unfortunately, we're leaving the most important ones, frankly, which are the ones that have been out the longest, we're leaving those on the table. We're not taking care of those older vulnerabilities, which is a very, very big deal, frankly. So that's what we're going to be covering today. And I want to make sure that you don't miss out on any of these other trainings. You know what we did the whole security summer this this last summer. We're probably going to do something in the spring, maybe early spring, late winter, but in the security summer, I had 20 The eight cheat sheets that I gave out. So what we're thinking about doing is we're going to take those cheat sheets, we're going to update them, we're going to make them a little better. That, by the way, was over 150 pages of just cheat information on keeping your business in your home safe. Okay, crazy amounts. We had hundreds of people who signed up for that and got all those cheat sheets. So we're thinking in the springtime, we're going to do this again. But maybe what we'll do is we'll have some master classes tied into it or might be part of a bigger course that I offer. We are definitely going to be offering my big course coming up in December. So that's coming up pretty December, I mean November, so that's coming up pretty soon as well. And that's my my signature course, where I go into all of the details. So the people that are the de facto it people, you are somebody interested in computers you pretty good at computers. And the boss said, Hey, you get to take care of all of our computers. And not only that, but you get to take care of all of the security. If that describes you, or maybe you're the boss. This course is for you. So the only way you're going to find out about my free master classes, the whole free, spring security spring thing. And my master courses is if you're on my mailing list, so make sure you sign up Craig Peterson, calm. And right now I think there's a sign up for the next master class Coming up on Mobile Security. It might be the old one. I'm not sure if we got it up yet. But check it out online. Craig Peterson calm. So stick around. We'll be right back. We'll be talking about some of the Google Home and Alexa eavesdropping. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN

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!  

Today we are going to discuss a new battery technology and what it may mean to our electronics

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

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig 0:06
Hey, good morning everybody. Good afternoon actually. I love Good morning though it's such a nice way to greet people. Of course, this is Craig Peterson I am here with you and we are also on video now you'll find me up on Facebook and on YouTube. We're doing a few different things to little Instagram, Pinterest and some other things out there as well. And of course right here we are on a Volvo radio. So welcome, welcome. So today as usual, we got a lot to cover. And you might notice if you're watching on video right now, I want to show these to you. These came this week. This is a company called pale blue. And they have the coolest batteries. I'm going to show the Yeah, you can see these. I've got them in the camera right now. These are there. triple-A batteries. I'm going to do an unboxing here so you can see what they look like a little bit later not during the show today. And we'll be looking at the double A's but these are called the light pOH technology. These are designed to charge extremely fast. And you see the red here around them around the top. That means they are charging it comes with this little USB charger just plugging into USB plug and it gives me four micro USB cables, they only are carrying power. And I have these four of these triple-A batteries plugged into it. So they will charge to 100% in about two hours, which is just wow. And you can't really see but all the way around. It's got a little bit of red you see how it's not as red on that side. So that's indicating how much it's charged. Now, part of the beauty of this isn't just how fast these things charge. But these little batteries here will actually replace thousands of dollars worth of regular alkaline batteries, the nonreusable batteries that you might buy. And look at how easy this is it I'm going to hold this right up to the camera you see this little micro USB port on it. Well that micro USB port is what you use to charge it. And then it's just a regular this, in this case, triple-A battery. And it's the same thing with the double A's it's got this little micro USB port so nowadays, we can go from almost anything to a micro USB now it comes with this plug here. Let me just unplug this from my little tabletop USB port. But it comes with this little plug that's just a regular USB, a two mini or micro I should say USB for these things. And what this means is you can take this with you you don't need the charging cable. You can use these batteries and when they need to be charged, you can plug them into another Battery, if you're like me, and you carry on these massive batteries for USB to charge up your phone and your iPad and your computer and whatever, you just plug these little puppies in. And within two hours, they'll be fully charged. And I, from what I can tell it's like 20 minutes or so to get to almost a full charge, you know enough of a charge to make them useful only takes a few minutes. It's kind of like those little USB helicopter things you've ever seen those charge up, and it'll charge up the helicopter in a matter of just a few seconds really less than a minute. It's a similar technology access the same basic technology, which is a new one. So it's a new type of lithium battery. And I'm going to see if I can't get these guys on the show. It's called Pale Blue Earth and you will find them online Pale Blue Earth and it builds itself as the world's best lithium rechargeable batteries. And so far and I've just started playing with them, but so far I have to say that they really are absolutely amazing. And they also were using a hashtag of ditch disposables so you can check that online too if you want to. So this is very very promising I love this idea. Because I have been using rechargeable batteries now for very, very long time. You know way back when you know nickel-metal hydride and 99 cats before that right? And the lithium ions and now this is like whoa which is really kind of cool. So, I'll let you know how this goes. We'll try and get them on the show to talk about but they're saying that one pack of these things can save you 3000 bucks in buying just regular throw-away batteries. And they're almost as convenient. I mean like almost it this is just incredible. So I'm so glad they reached out to me and they sent me a few of these to play with and let you know how it goes. So there you go. There's a little bit right there, I got a bit of loose earphone wire. You can see my studio for those of you who are watching on video. So today we have Google Home eavesdropping. We're going to start with who got Tesla's door handles, I want to talk about their technology in general. Because if if you've been listening to me for a while, you know that I've been involved in emergency medical services, right that I spent 10 years as a volunteer, and I want to talk about some of the dangers of these types of cars, not just Tesla, and some poor guy burned it f basically, in his Tesla because of some of these deficiencies that we'll talk about that Chinese nationals this again, another FBI story

I had this week and my gosh, all you guys that attended you know, I love the questions and I love the internet. action I always love the interaction and answering everybody's questions. So if you missed it, you missed it. I might put it up for sale on the website but I in this is the sort of thing I don't do replays on the Facebook Lives YouTube lives those go up on replay, but these master classes I do like the master class on VPN, where we talked about them and the recommendations and what you should be doing and how you should be doing it. Those I do not put up on replay because I want people to attend right you have to attend you have to register so you missed it this week. Next week, we're going to be having a master class on mobile device security. So make sure you don't miss that. We're planning that for Thursday afternoon at 4pm. Those types of things can change so keep an eye on your email. But you can go to Craig Peterson comm slash masterclass to sign up. Then as always, these masterclasses are free. They are jam-packed with information and very frequently I have really kind of cool little gifts that we're going to be giving out here in the future. I said very frequently. I haven't been doing a lot of other people do. I am going to start doing that most of the time, but not right yet. So anyhow, you missed the VPN clot master class. Well, next week, we're going to do one on mobile devices. And we're going to kind of do one a week-ish, sort of a thing, where we do a deeper dive into the top topics you guys have. And they are a minimum of an hour-long, and they can go three or more hours long as well because I want to get through everybody's questions. But we got an article we're going to talk about today. And you can see me holding it up in the camera here. Nord VPN, and major security issue with them. And you know, if you're on my master class this week, what I think about Nordic VPN, Robo tank This is kind of cool. I don't know if you knew it, but our friends from Russia, we're using robotic tanks over in Syria. Just this last week, and they had a major fail fail because of it, they weren't able to control them. They weren't doing what they had expected them to do. So we're going to talk a little bit about the whole automated mechanical warfare side of things. Today in the show, we'll talk about that a little bit. Anyways, obviously, this isn't a 10 hour show just on the military, Facebook. This is a huge lawsuit that they are having to face here and article from Ars Technica, Microsoft's dream Walker VR, this is going to be cool. This is what the future looks like guys. And it looks like the iPhone 12 is going to have some of this technology. So we'll talk about that. And, you know, we are all worried about vulnerabilities in our apps and our programs that we as businesses put together to make our lives easier. Did you know there are more apps used Internally inside of companies that are available on the App Store, so we're building these things for us, for our employees, we're also building them so that our, our clients can use them, you know, for just in time ordering and all that wonderful stuff. But we're not keeping the security up today, we're paying closer attention to the newest vulnerabilities. And unfortunately, we're leaving the most important ones, frankly, which are the ones that have been out the longest, we're leaving those on the table. We're not taking care of those older vulnerabilities, which is a very, very big deal, frankly. So that's what we're going to be covering today. And I want to make sure that you don't miss out on any of these other trainings. You know what we did the whole security summer this this last summer. We're probably going to do something in the spring, maybe early spring, late winter, but in the security summer, I had 20 The eight cheat sheets that I gave out. So what we're thinking about doing is we're going to take those cheat sheets, we're going to update them, we're going to make them a little better. That, by the way, was over 150 pages of just cheat information on keeping your business in your home safe. Okay, crazy amounts. We had hundreds of people who signed up for that and got all those cheat sheets. So we're thinking in the springtime, we're going to do this again. But maybe what we'll do is we'll have some master classes tied into it or might be part of a bigger course that I offer. We are definitely going to be offering my big course coming up in December. So that's coming up pretty December, I mean November, so that's coming up pretty soon as well. And that's my my signature course, where I go into all of the details. So the people that are the de facto it people, you are somebody interested in computers you pretty good at computers. And the boss said, Hey, you get to take care of all of our computers. And not only that, but you get to take care of all of the security. If that describes you, or maybe you're the boss. This course is for you. So the only way you're going to find out about my free master classes, the whole free, spring security spring thing. And my master courses is if you're on my mailing list, so make sure you sign up Craig Peterson, calm. And right now I think there's a sign up for the next master class Coming up on Mobile Security. It might be the old one. I'm not sure if we got it up yet. But check it out online. Craig Peterson calm. So stick around. We'll be right back. We'll be talking about some of the Google Home and Alexa eavesdropping. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN

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

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!  

Today we are going to discuss a new battery technology and what it may mean to our electronics

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

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig 0:06
Hey, good morning everybody. Good afternoon actually. I love Good morning though it's such a nice way to greet people. Of course, this is Craig Peterson I am here with you and we are also on video now you'll find me up on Facebook and on YouTube. We're doing a few different things to little Instagram, Pinterest and some other things out there as well. And of course right here we are on a Volvo radio. So welcome, welcome. So today as usual, we got a lot to cover. And you might notice if you're watching on video right now, I want to show these to you. These came this week. This is a company called pale blue. And they have the coolest batteries. I'm going to show the Yeah, you can see these. I've got them in the camera right now. These are there. triple-A batteries. I'm going to do an unboxing here so you can see what they look like a little bit later not during the show today. And we'll be looking at the double A's but these are called the light pOH technology. These are designed to charge extremely fast. And you see the red here around them around the top. That means they are charging it comes with this little USB charger just plugging into USB plug and it gives me four micro USB cables, they only are carrying power. And I have these four of these triple-A batteries plugged into it. So they will charge to 100% in about two hours, which is just wow. And you can't really see but all the way around. It's got a little bit of red you see how it's not as red on that side. So that's indicating how much it's charged. Now, part of the beauty of this isn't just how fast these things charge. But these little batteries here will actually replace thousands of dollars worth of regular alkaline batteries, the nonreusable batteries that you might buy. And look at how easy this is it I'm going to hold this right up to the camera you see this little micro USB port on it. Well that micro USB port is what you use to charge it. And then it's just a regular this, in this case, triple-A battery. And it's the same thing with the double A's it's got this little micro USB port so nowadays, we can go from almost anything to a micro USB now it comes with this plug here. Let me just unplug this from my little tabletop USB port. But it comes with this little plug that's just a regular USB, a two mini or micro I should say USB for these things. And what this means is you can take this with you you don't need the charging cable. You can use these batteries and when they need to be charged, you can plug them into another Battery, if you're like me, and you carry on these massive batteries for USB to charge up your phone and your iPad and your computer and whatever, you just plug these little puppies in. And within two hours, they'll be fully charged. And I, from what I can tell it's like 20 minutes or so to get to almost a full charge, you know enough of a charge to make them useful only takes a few minutes. It's kind of like those little USB helicopter things you've ever seen those charge up, and it'll charge up the helicopter in a matter of just a few seconds really less than a minute. It's a similar technology access the same basic technology, which is a new one. So it's a new type of lithium battery. And I'm going to see if I can't get these guys on the show. It's called Pale Blue Earth and you will find them online Pale Blue Earth and it builds itself as the world's best lithium rechargeable batteries. And so far and I've just started playing with them, but so far I have to say that they really are absolutely amazing. And they also were using a hashtag of ditch disposables so you can check that online too if you want to. So this is very very promising I love this idea. Because I have been using rechargeable batteries now for very, very long time. You know way back when you know nickel-metal hydride and 99 cats before that right? And the lithium ions and now this is like whoa which is really kind of cool. So, I'll let you know how this goes. We'll try and get them on the show to talk about but they're saying that one pack of these things can save you 3000 bucks in buying just regular throw-away batteries. And they're almost as convenient. I mean like almost it this is just incredible. So I'm so glad they reached out to me and they sent me a few of these to play with and let you know how it goes. So there you go. There's a little bit right there, I got a bit of loose earphone wire. You can see my studio for those of you who are watching on video. So today we have Google Home eavesdropping. We're going to start with who got Tesla's door handles, I want to talk about their technology in general. Because if if you've been listening to me for a while, you know that I've been involved in emergency medical services, right that I spent 10 years as a volunteer, and I want to talk about some of the dangers of these types of cars, not just Tesla, and some poor guy burned it f basically, in his Tesla because of some of these deficiencies that we'll talk about that Chinese nationals this again, another FBI story

I had this week and my gosh, all you guys that attended you know, I love the questions and I love the internet. action I always love the interaction and answering everybody's questions. So if you missed it, you missed it. I might put it up for sale on the website but I in this is the sort of thing I don't do replays on the Facebook Lives YouTube lives those go up on replay, but these master classes I do like the master class on VPN, where we talked about them and the recommendations and what you should be doing and how you should be doing it. Those I do not put up on replay because I want people to attend right you have to attend you have to register so you missed it this week. Next week, we're going to be having a master class on mobile device security. So make sure you don't miss that. We're planning that for Thursday afternoon at 4pm. Those types of things can change so keep an eye on your email. But you can go to Craig Peterson comm slash masterclass to sign up. Then as always, these masterclasses are free. They are jam-packed with information and very frequently I have really kind of cool little gifts that we're going to be giving out here in the future. I said very frequently. I haven't been doing a lot of other people do. I am going to start doing that most of the time, but not right yet. So anyhow, you missed the VPN clot master class. Well, next week, we're going to do one on mobile devices. And we're going to kind of do one a week-ish, sort of a thing, where we do a deeper dive into the top topics you guys have. And they are a minimum of an hour-long, and they can go three or more hours long as well because I want to get through everybody's questions. But we got an article we're going to talk about today. And you can see me holding it up in the camera here. Nord VPN, and major security issue with them. And you know, if you're on my master class this week, what I think about Nordic VPN, Robo tank This is kind of cool. I don't know if you knew it, but our friends from Russia, we're using robotic tanks over in Syria. Just this last week, and they had a major fail fail because of it, they weren't able to control them. They weren't doing what they had expected them to do. So we're going to talk a little bit about the whole automated mechanical warfare side of things. Today in the show, we'll talk about that a little bit. Anyways, obviously, this isn't a 10 hour show just on the military, Facebook. This is a huge lawsuit that they are having to face here and article from Ars Technica, Microsoft's dream Walker VR, this is going to be cool. This is what the future looks like guys. And it looks like the iPhone 12 is going to have some of this technology. So we'll talk about that. And, you know, we are all worried about vulnerabilities in our apps and our programs that we as businesses put together to make our lives easier. Did you know there are more apps used Internally inside of companies that are available on the App Store, so we're building these things for us, for our employees, we're also building them so that our, our clients can use them, you know, for just in time ordering and all that wonderful stuff. But we're not keeping the security up today, we're paying closer attention to the newest vulnerabilities. And unfortunately, we're leaving the most important ones, frankly, which are the ones that have been out the longest, we're leaving those on the table. We're not taking care of those older vulnerabilities, which is a very, very big deal, frankly. So that's what we're going to be covering today. And I want to make sure that you don't miss out on any of these other trainings. You know what we did the whole security summer this this last summer. We're probably going to do something in the spring, maybe early spring, late winter, but in the security summer, I had 20 The eight cheat sheets that I gave out. So what we're thinking about doing is we're going to take those cheat sheets, we're going to update them, we're going to make them a little better. That, by the way, was over 150 pages of just cheat information on keeping your business in your home safe. Okay, crazy amounts. We had hundreds of people who signed up for that and got all those cheat sheets. So we're thinking in the springtime, we're going to do this again. But maybe what we'll do is we'll have some master classes tied into it or might be part of a bigger course that I offer. We are definitely going to be offering my big course coming up in December. So that's coming up pretty December, I mean November, so that's coming up pretty soon as well. And that's my my signature course, where I go into all of the details. So the people that are the de facto it people, you are somebody interested in computers you pretty good at computers. And the boss said, Hey, you get to take care of all of our computers. And not only that, but you get to take care of all of the security. If that describes you, or maybe you're the boss. This course is for you. So the only way you're going to find out about my free master classes, the whole free, spring security spring thing. And my master courses is if you're on my mailing list, so make sure you sign up Craig Peterson, calm. And right now I think there's a sign up for the next master class Coming up on Mobile Security. It might be the old one. I'm not sure if we got it up yet. But check it out online. Craig Peterson calm. So stick around. We'll be right back. We'll be talking about some of the Google Home and Alexa eavesdropping. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN

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!  

Today, we are going to discuss Smart Speakers and how hackers are able to eavesdrop into your home using them to phish for information.

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

---

Related Articles:

Is someone eavesdropping on your Smart Speaker?

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson
Hey, welcome back, Craig Peterson here on WGAN. And online at Craig Peterson calm. Now, you might be wondering about these pale blue batteries. If you do a search for them, you'll find them on Kickstarter. They may be out in the market now but they're about $30 for a box of four of them. And they are going I think they're going to just go like crazy. It's out of Hong Kong near as I can tell. Some really good, very cool stuff. You might look them up lithium polymer type batteries. Okay, moving on here. Let's talk about Google Home. This is absolutely fascinating. And I'm glad that digital trends.com put an article up on this which I have at my website, of course at Craig Peterson dot com but we've all been concerned about Amazon Lexile listening to us and maybe Google Home listening to us. And, you know, there's pros and cons to all of this. I'll be obviously you want an assistant and that's why the assistant is in your house in the first place, right? Oh look, one of these little batteries just turned green. That means it's fully charged up to three of them fully charged, they have only been charging for a short while so that's kind of cool. Anyhow, for those people who are watching right now, but these pale blue batteries as in the Blue Earth, right. So we have them because we want them and we want them to be helping us out a little bit. So what Amazon does is on the Alexa as they have a light, they might have a light ring as they have on the echo. And Amazon's been very, very good about making sure that it can't record for more than 30 seconds. And also that it does the processing of your voice for the initial wake up command on the device. And that light has to be on physically on the echo in order for that microphone to be working in recording right in basic recording mode. So it's listening all the time. But it's not recording. It's not sending anything up to the internet. That's obviously a good thing, right? So what happens here now with Google Home is they don't have the same restrictions in place the same safety features that Amazon has. And what they're talking about here is a company called SR Labs. And I'm familiar with them. We've quoted them on the show here before. And SR Labs did some tests and they did some tests looking for what they expected to be vulnerabilities. What are the vulnerabilities of these devices as Google closes The holes, you know, where does this all set? Now they were able to collect personal data, including user passwords and eavesdrop on users. Now, I don't want to just poke here at Google Home. Because this could be similar things could happen on your Alexa or your other smart device that's out there. So for instance, all of these devices have basically apps that you can download and use. And they're called different things on the different platforms. But for instance, on my Alexa, I have it so I can say red alert and it'll play like from the original Star Trek, you know, the light so flash will go red, it's really kind of cool. And you can develop those many people have many businesses have and they made it available for you. And now, you know, that's kind of cool.

But the problem with these is that sometimes the developers have snuck bad stuff into them. And specifically, one of the things they've snuck into some of the Alexa apps, if you will, is that they are asking for more information than they need. So they, they'll ask for the password. So you can say, Okay, well in order to not change your password, and people are giving the password and now remember, here's the biggest problem with people giving the password if it was one password, and it was only ever used for that one app. Great, right? Who cares? So the app already has my password, who cares if they get my password because they already have my password. But the problem is, so many people use the same password over and over again. So that's Problem number one, these apps get your password because you just gave it to them. And Problem number two is they're asking you for a password. And if they say oh, you know that's incorrect, please try again. You're going to give basically, let's see, I have three passwords. So I'm going to give them all three passwords and they now have it. So that is a problem. But these trigger words that you used to feel like so which can be Alexa can be a computer, there's a third one that eludes me right now. And it will respond. But those are trigger words. But with the Google Home, that's not the case. As long as the device hears someone talking, it can and will keep voice recording going possibly infinite infinitely. So if if you have it in your kitchen, and there's a conversation going on the radios playing in the background, which I'm sure a lot of you guys have going on right all of the time. And you have the Google Home in there, and there is an app running. It's going to be streaming the data up to the app. This is a real real problem. And according to what SRL lab Found in digital trends.com is reporting the safety checks that are run by Amazon and Google are part of the problem that allows these types of vulnerabilities to exist. And in fact they're saying SR Labs also found that even if Google or Amazon reviews a third-party app and or skill which is what they're called over on the Alexa for safety in the past is the app can be changed after the say to review and can be used at that point to fish you or to eavesdrop on users kind of think about the Boeing the max eight jet right? That whole jet has not been type-accepted certified as an entire unit since that what the 60s 70s and they just made incremental changes slowly incremental changes. Yeah, yeah. incremental change, the world changes. And then you end up with the problem they have now which is the max eight jet. has an issue because they made yet another incremental change. And it wasn't tested overall, as well as maybe it should be. So it's the same type of thing here looks like, which is Google and Amazon, they review it. And then the app developer, the developer comes out with a slightly different version. It's just a bug fix or whatever. Google and Amazon cannot spend the time to constantly review and, and fix these things. So then you end up with some serious problems. Okay. So here you go. The best strategy to avoid the hackers eavesdropping on your data. Number one, don't have these devices, period, right. If your device asks you for a password, don't answer. Now we're saying app and skill. These are things that run essentially on The Alexa or on the Google Home device. And with the Alexa and this is true for home as well. You can control and configure the devices and log into them using the app. So Google has its own little app for the Google Home stuff that I've used that before. And Amazon has its own little Alexa app to control the Alexa that's where you should be putting your information in. And you should not be giving it to the device itself when it asks most Yeah, exactly the same most require you to go to the app link your accounts.

There you go. And there's a smart speaker the Google Home the Alexa, they're not going to ask you for a password so they can do updates, okay. And then don't say sensitive information out loud. There are people in government who are saying that since these devices are always listening, they should listen for potential arguments. Be That might be happening in the home. That's a different thing. Now we're going down a whole other path, very political, something, obviously, I'm not very fond of that path because it just leads to, you know, crazy government control so many times. So just be careful what you say around them. And in many cases, it's easier just to unplug it when you're not using it. But it'll get safer as time goes on. All right, when we get back, we're going to talk about these futuristic cars. You're already talking about these pale blue, futuristic batteries. Well, what are the problems that we're seeing already? With these electric cars, including the Tesla just this week? A 48-year-old anesthesiologist died? will tell you why and how and what some of the dangers are you listening to Craig Peterson, of course right here on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson, calm. That's Peters on SOM stick around. We'll be right back.

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!  

Today, we are going to discuss Smart Speakers and how hackers are able to eavesdrop into your home using them to phish for information.

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

---

Related Articles:

Is someone eavesdropping on your Smart Speaker?

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson
Hey, welcome back, Craig Peterson here on WGAN. And online at Craig Peterson calm. Now, you might be wondering about these pale blue batteries. If you do a search for them, you'll find them on Kickstarter. They may be out in the market now but they're about $30 for a box of four of them. And they are going I think they're going to just go like crazy. It's out of Hong Kong near as I can tell. Some really good, very cool stuff. You might look them up lithium polymer type batteries. Okay, moving on here. Let's talk about Google Home. This is absolutely fascinating. And I'm glad that digital trends.com put an article up on this which I have at my website, of course at Craig Peterson dot com but we've all been concerned about Amazon Lexile listening to us and maybe Google Home listening to us. And, you know, there's pros and cons to all of this. I'll be obviously you want an assistant and that's why the assistant is in your house in the first place, right? Oh look, one of these little batteries just turned green. That means it's fully charged up to three of them fully charged, they have only been charging for a short while so that's kind of cool. Anyhow, for those people who are watching right now, but these pale blue batteries as in the Blue Earth, right. So we have them because we want them and we want them to be helping us out a little bit. So what Amazon does is on the Alexa as they have a light, they might have a light ring as they have on the echo. And Amazon's been very, very good about making sure that it can't record for more than 30 seconds. And also that it does the processing of your voice for the initial wake up command on the device. And that light has to be on physically on the echo in order for that microphone to be working in recording right in basic recording mode. So it's listening all the time. But it's not recording. It's not sending anything up to the internet. That's obviously a good thing, right? So what happens here now with Google Home is they don't have the same restrictions in place the same safety features that Amazon has. And what they're talking about here is a company called SR Labs. And I'm familiar with them. We've quoted them on the show here before. And SR Labs did some tests and they did some tests looking for what they expected to be vulnerabilities. What are the vulnerabilities of these devices as Google closes The holes, you know, where does this all set? Now they were able to collect personal data, including user passwords and eavesdrop on users. Now, I don't want to just poke here at Google Home. Because this could be similar things could happen on your Alexa or your other smart device that's out there. So for instance, all of these devices have basically apps that you can download and use. And they're called different things on the different platforms. But for instance, on my Alexa, I have it so I can say red alert and it'll play like from the original Star Trek, you know, the light so flash will go red, it's really kind of cool. And you can develop those many people have many businesses have and they made it available for you. And now, you know, that's kind of cool.

But the problem with these is that sometimes the developers have snuck bad stuff into them. And specifically, one of the things they've snuck into some of the Alexa apps, if you will, is that they are asking for more information than they need. So they, they'll ask for the password. So you can say, Okay, well in order to not change your password, and people are giving the password and now remember, here's the biggest problem with people giving the password if it was one password, and it was only ever used for that one app. Great, right? Who cares? So the app already has my password, who cares if they get my password because they already have my password. But the problem is, so many people use the same password over and over again. So that's Problem number one, these apps get your password because you just gave it to them. And Problem number two is they're asking you for a password. And if they say oh, you know that's incorrect, please try again. You're going to give basically, let's see, I have three passwords. So I'm going to give them all three passwords and they now have it. So that is a problem. But these trigger words that you used to feel like so which can be Alexa can be a computer, there's a third one that eludes me right now. And it will respond. But those are trigger words. But with the Google Home, that's not the case. As long as the device hears someone talking, it can and will keep voice recording going possibly infinite infinitely. So if if you have it in your kitchen, and there's a conversation going on the radios playing in the background, which I'm sure a lot of you guys have going on right all of the time. And you have the Google Home in there, and there is an app running. It's going to be streaming the data up to the app. This is a real real problem. And according to what SRL lab Found in digital trends.com is reporting the safety checks that are run by Amazon and Google are part of the problem that allows these types of vulnerabilities to exist. And in fact they're saying SR Labs also found that even if Google or Amazon reviews a third-party app and or skill which is what they're called over on the Alexa for safety in the past is the app can be changed after the say to review and can be used at that point to fish you or to eavesdrop on users kind of think about the Boeing the max eight jet right? That whole jet has not been type-accepted certified as an entire unit since that what the 60s 70s and they just made incremental changes slowly incremental changes. Yeah, yeah. incremental change, the world changes. And then you end up with the problem they have now which is the max eight jet. has an issue because they made yet another incremental change. And it wasn't tested overall, as well as maybe it should be. So it's the same type of thing here looks like, which is Google and Amazon, they review it. And then the app developer, the developer comes out with a slightly different version. It's just a bug fix or whatever. Google and Amazon cannot spend the time to constantly review and, and fix these things. So then you end up with some serious problems. Okay. So here you go. The best strategy to avoid the hackers eavesdropping on your data. Number one, don't have these devices, period, right. If your device asks you for a password, don't answer. Now we're saying app and skill. These are things that run essentially on The Alexa or on the Google Home device. And with the Alexa and this is true for home as well. You can control and configure the devices and log into them using the app. So Google has its own little app for the Google Home stuff that I've used that before. And Amazon has its own little Alexa app to control the Alexa that's where you should be putting your information in. And you should not be giving it to the device itself when it asks most Yeah, exactly the same most require you to go to the app link your accounts.

There you go. And there's a smart speaker the Google Home the Alexa, they're not going to ask you for a password so they can do updates, okay. And then don't say sensitive information out loud. There are people in government who are saying that since these devices are always listening, they should listen for potential arguments. Be That might be happening in the home. That's a different thing. Now we're going down a whole other path, very political, something, obviously, I'm not very fond of that path because it just leads to, you know, crazy government control so many times. So just be careful what you say around them. And in many cases, it's easier just to unplug it when you're not using it. But it'll get safer as time goes on. All right, when we get back, we're going to talk about these futuristic cars. You're already talking about these pale blue, futuristic batteries. Well, what are the problems that we're seeing already? With these electric cars, including the Tesla just this week? A 48-year-old anesthesiologist died? will tell you why and how and what some of the dangers are you listening to Craig Peterson, of course right here on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson, calm. That's Peters on SOM stick around. We'll be right back.

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!  

Today, we are going to discuss Smart Speakers and how hackers are able to eavesdrop into your home using them to phish for information.

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

---

Related Articles:

Is someone eavesdropping on your Smart Speaker?

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson
Hey, welcome back, Craig Peterson here on WGAN. And online at Craig Peterson calm. Now, you might be wondering about these pale blue batteries. If you do a search for them, you'll find them on Kickstarter. They may be out in the market now but they're about $30 for a box of four of them. And they are going I think they're going to just go like crazy. It's out of Hong Kong near as I can tell. Some really good, very cool stuff. You might look them up lithium polymer type batteries. Okay, moving on here. Let's talk about Google Home. This is absolutely fascinating. And I'm glad that digital trends.com put an article up on this which I have at my website, of course at Craig Peterson dot com but we've all been concerned about Amazon Lexile listening to us and maybe Google Home listening to us. And, you know, there's pros and cons to all of this. I'll be obviously you want an assistant and that's why the assistant is in your house in the first place, right? Oh look, one of these little batteries just turned green. That means it's fully charged up to three of them fully charged, they have only been charging for a short while so that's kind of cool. Anyhow, for those people who are watching right now, but these pale blue batteries as in the Blue Earth, right. So we have them because we want them and we want them to be helping us out a little bit. So what Amazon does is on the Alexa as they have a light, they might have a light ring as they have on the echo. And Amazon's been very, very good about making sure that it can't record for more than 30 seconds. And also that it does the processing of your voice for the initial wake up command on the device. And that light has to be on physically on the echo in order for that microphone to be working in recording right in basic recording mode. So it's listening all the time. But it's not recording. It's not sending anything up to the internet. That's obviously a good thing, right? So what happens here now with Google Home is they don't have the same restrictions in place the same safety features that Amazon has. And what they're talking about here is a company called SR Labs. And I'm familiar with them. We've quoted them on the show here before. And SR Labs did some tests and they did some tests looking for what they expected to be vulnerabilities. What are the vulnerabilities of these devices as Google closes The holes, you know, where does this all set? Now they were able to collect personal data, including user passwords and eavesdrop on users. Now, I don't want to just poke here at Google Home. Because this could be similar things could happen on your Alexa or your other smart device that's out there. So for instance, all of these devices have basically apps that you can download and use. And they're called different things on the different platforms. But for instance, on my Alexa, I have it so I can say red alert and it'll play like from the original Star Trek, you know, the light so flash will go red, it's really kind of cool. And you can develop those many people have many businesses have and they made it available for you. And now, you know, that's kind of cool.

But the problem with these is that sometimes the developers have snuck bad stuff into them. And specifically, one of the things they've snuck into some of the Alexa apps, if you will, is that they are asking for more information than they need. So they, they'll ask for the password. So you can say, Okay, well in order to not change your password, and people are giving the password and now remember, here's the biggest problem with people giving the password if it was one password, and it was only ever used for that one app. Great, right? Who cares? So the app already has my password, who cares if they get my password because they already have my password. But the problem is, so many people use the same password over and over again. So that's Problem number one, these apps get your password because you just gave it to them. And Problem number two is they're asking you for a password. And if they say oh, you know that's incorrect, please try again. You're going to give basically, let's see, I have three passwords. So I'm going to give them all three passwords and they now have it. So that is a problem. But these trigger words that you used to feel like so which can be Alexa can be a computer, there's a third one that eludes me right now. And it will respond. But those are trigger words. But with the Google Home, that's not the case. As long as the device hears someone talking, it can and will keep voice recording going possibly infinite infinitely. So if if you have it in your kitchen, and there's a conversation going on the radios playing in the background, which I'm sure a lot of you guys have going on right all of the time. And you have the Google Home in there, and there is an app running. It's going to be streaming the data up to the app. This is a real real problem. And according to what SRL lab Found in digital trends.com is reporting the safety checks that are run by Amazon and Google are part of the problem that allows these types of vulnerabilities to exist. And in fact they're saying SR Labs also found that even if Google or Amazon reviews a third-party app and or skill which is what they're called over on the Alexa for safety in the past is the app can be changed after the say to review and can be used at that point to fish you or to eavesdrop on users kind of think about the Boeing the max eight jet right? That whole jet has not been type-accepted certified as an entire unit since that what the 60s 70s and they just made incremental changes slowly incremental changes. Yeah, yeah. incremental change, the world changes. And then you end up with the problem they have now which is the max eight jet. has an issue because they made yet another incremental change. And it wasn't tested overall, as well as maybe it should be. So it's the same type of thing here looks like, which is Google and Amazon, they review it. And then the app developer, the developer comes out with a slightly different version. It's just a bug fix or whatever. Google and Amazon cannot spend the time to constantly review and, and fix these things. So then you end up with some serious problems. Okay. So here you go. The best strategy to avoid the hackers eavesdropping on your data. Number one, don't have these devices, period, right. If your device asks you for a password, don't answer. Now we're saying app and skill. These are things that run essentially on The Alexa or on the Google Home device. And with the Alexa and this is true for home as well. You can control and configure the devices and log into them using the app. So Google has its own little app for the Google Home stuff that I've used that before. And Amazon has its own little Alexa app to control the Alexa that's where you should be putting your information in. And you should not be giving it to the device itself when it asks most Yeah, exactly the same most require you to go to the app link your accounts.

There you go. And there's a smart speaker the Google Home the Alexa, they're not going to ask you for a password so they can do updates, okay. And then don't say sensitive information out loud. There are people in government who are saying that since these devices are always listening, they should listen for potential arguments. Be That might be happening in the home. That's a different thing. Now we're going down a whole other path, very political, something, obviously, I'm not very fond of that path because it just leads to, you know, crazy government control so many times. So just be careful what you say around them. And in many cases, it's easier just to unplug it when you're not using it. But it'll get safer as time goes on. All right, when we get back, we're going to talk about these futuristic cars. You're already talking about these pale blue, futuristic batteries. Well, what are the problems that we're seeing already? With these electric cars, including the Tesla just this week? A 48-year-old anesthesiologist died? will tell you why and how and what some of the dangers are you listening to Craig Peterson, of course right here on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson, calm. That's Peters on SOM stick around. We'll be right back.

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

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome Back!  

We are going to discuss how you can tell if Lithium-ion batteries are about to catch fire.

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

---

Related Articles:

They Look Cool but How Safe Are They?

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson
Hello, welcome back. Craig Peterson here, you're listening to me on WGAN. And of course online as well at Craig Peterson dot com. We're going to get into these electric vehicles right now. And I can remember when they first came out, and what Lou, you know, rumors and things. And I was very involved with emergency services back then. And what I thought was just fascinating. When we started delving into some of this stuff was that wait a minute, we've got a lot of batteries in the car, which means we have a whole lot of electric potential electricity sitting there, right. And then we have to route that power to the electric motors that are either one on every wheel or maybe there's a central motor with some form of a transmission that takes it out to all of the other wheels. That is a true hazard to first responders. Because we would get on the scene many times you'd have to cut people out of a vehicle, which is obviously a bit of a problem if you're cutting into the vehicle, and there is a power cord there. And then, of course, cars in an accident, sometimes they will kind of break apart and then you have exposed wires that could cause electric shocks and burns to the occupants of the vehicles. It was very concerning and so a lot of the electric vehicle manufacturers came out with guides that they would give to the emergency medical responders to police departments, fire departments, you know, the people who are likely to kind of be first ish on the scene. And we would have to know Okay, wait a minute. Now this manufacturer that model so we have to Worry about the power is right over here. And if I want to disconnect it for this particular car, we're gonna have to disconnect there. Because time was batteries were always under the hood of the car in a pretty specific place either the right or the left who could just pop the hood and then cut the wires one of the very first things you do on this scene, you just pop the hood cut the wires on the battery tena, guess what you're not going to get a shock because the battery is completely disconnected. And now in some cars, as you looked at some of the BMW where they were trying to do and even weight distribution, they would have the battery in the under the backseat or sometimes in the trunk. But we knew which cars were which because there just weren't that many of them out there that you had to worry about how you know, lots of different things started getting very confusing and then now you've got all these electric cars with different types of batteries and different ways to route the power. Well, now we have all kinds of These cars out there, including Tesla. And what Tesla is doing for their battery power is basically they're using laptop batteries. They're using lithium ion batteries, which are phenomenal batteries. And they don't get the memory that all of the previous generations used to get. In fact, did you see the guy that invented lithium ion batteries, he just got the Nobel Prize this year and the guy is pretty old. We talked about him last year too because he came up with the new technology. He called it lithium glass and it got rid of almost all of the problems that lithium-ion has. But we're still using lithium ion battery. So let's get into the problems. You probably know that I had a laptop because I've talked about it on my show before but my laptop, I would put it on the table. And have you noticed that all four corners sit nicely, right and if they don't, it's usually because of You've got a foot missing. So you find okay the feet fell off so you find another foot that fits and you put it on and hopefully the laptop balances on the table.

Well, I had all four feet on my laptop and I looked at it I said wait a minute now and I called over my son I said, Hey Steve, come over here. Have a look at this. And we put it on another flat surface and we got down low and we looked and sure enough, there was a bulge pretty much in the middle of the bottom of my laptop. Well, that was a very big sign to me that it's ball Jean because the battery is swollen. That is one of the problems of the lithium-ion batteries. Now this has been true with nickel-metal hydride and I kept before it but when that battery swells in the lithium-ion battery, it gets very, very, very dangerous. This is where you start seeing fires. Where the lithium ion batteries Because they're swelling up, and they have layers inside, that when some of these layers come in contact with each other, you now have a short inside the battery. Now think how long your device last, my laptop can last seven hours on a chart, depending on what I'm doing right if I'm doing video editing, I'm down to about an hour. But if I'm doing some writing a little bit of research online and stuff at six or seven hours pretty consistently, that is a lot of power, even only for the one hour words running eight cores, and a GPU trying to do the video editing and if you're watching online, you can see some of my video stuff on this computer behind me This is an iMac five k that I use for some of my video editing and recording of the show so you can see this if you're watching me on YouTube or on Facebook. But this becomes a bit of an issue for people. Frankly, because all of that power that's going to charge, or excuse me, run my computer for the next six or seven hours is now shorted out. Now have you ever been working on a car and you're under the hood, and you've got a wrench in your hand or a spanner for those of you from the UK in your hand, and you get near the battery, maybe you're trying to disconnect the battery and you accidentally short circuit between the positive terminal on the battery and the ground. Almost all cars worldwide use a negative ground nowadays. didn't use to be that way. So you accidentally shorted out to ground. Have you seen what happens? It goes zap there are sparks flying everywhere. And there's now a chunk missing out of your wrench. Right? Maybe Maybe not a huge trunk depends on the battery. But you have melted that part of the wrench. That is a lot of power that's in there. Well, it's a different amount of power in one of these lithium-ion batteries that we have, but it is still a lot of power. And so when it shorts out, it starts fires. Now we've seen that with Samsung phones have been famous for that, certain models of their phones. And that wasn't really the model of the phone that was as much of a problem as a manufacturer, the battery sometimes it is the model of the phone because it's putting pressure on the battery and sponsors shouldn't put the pressure on. Again, if you're watching on video, you can see me doing this what happens if you put pressure on the wrong spot as part of the battery. It'll show that again. Okay, so there are real potential problems here. So I knew that my laptop because that battery was swollen That I could have serious problems, I could have a fire on my laptop. Now I took it back to the manufacturer, which was Apple because of course, that's who I use mostly and then actually wasn't even made by Apple was made by contract, right. And they come they replaced it entirely and they fix the swelling and everything. And then they eventually ended up recalling all of those laptops. And it was a 15 inch MacBook Pro from one was I think it was a 2017 model.

And that, that I think was a good thing because they thought Well, they've seen a few of these. And you've seen pictures of these phones beyond people's nightstand. So you have your phone and your phone is, of course, a device running off a battery and most likely a lithium-ion battery. So that lithium-ion battery is there in the phone. If it starts to fail, usually the phone will swell. So if you have any devices that are starting to swell, any battery power devices starting to swell, it's time to get very concerned and take it back to the place you bought it from or take it back to the manufacturer. Because when it swells, it can easily start a very smoky, nasty fire. And we've all probably seen videos of this happening in airplanes. So when we get back we're going to talk about this poor man who died this 48-year-old and the news that came out of California, just this week about his Tesla, and the batteries. You're listening to course to Craig Peterson, right here on WGAN. And also online, Craig peterson.com. Stick around, because we'll be right back

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 Back!  

We are going to discuss how you can tell if Lithium-ion batteries are about to catch fire.

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

---

Related Articles:

They Look Cool but How Safe Are They?

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson
Hello, welcome back. Craig Peterson here, you're listening to me on WGAN. And of course online as well at Craig Peterson dot com. We're going to get into these electric vehicles right now. And I can remember when they first came out, and what Lou, you know, rumors and things. And I was very involved with emergency services back then. And what I thought was just fascinating. When we started delving into some of this stuff was that wait a minute, we've got a lot of batteries in the car, which means we have a whole lot of electric potential electricity sitting there, right. And then we have to route that power to the electric motors that are either one on every wheel or maybe there's a central motor with some form of a transmission that takes it out to all of the other wheels. That is a true hazard to first responders. Because we would get on the scene many times you'd have to cut people out of a vehicle, which is obviously a bit of a problem if you're cutting into the vehicle, and there is a power cord there. And then, of course, cars in an accident, sometimes they will kind of break apart and then you have exposed wires that could cause electric shocks and burns to the occupants of the vehicles. It was very concerning and so a lot of the electric vehicle manufacturers came out with guides that they would give to the emergency medical responders to police departments, fire departments, you know, the people who are likely to kind of be first ish on the scene. And we would have to know Okay, wait a minute. Now this manufacturer that model so we have to Worry about the power is right over here. And if I want to disconnect it for this particular car, we're gonna have to disconnect there. Because time was batteries were always under the hood of the car in a pretty specific place either the right or the left who could just pop the hood and then cut the wires one of the very first things you do on this scene, you just pop the hood cut the wires on the battery tena, guess what you're not going to get a shock because the battery is completely disconnected. And now in some cars, as you looked at some of the BMW where they were trying to do and even weight distribution, they would have the battery in the under the backseat or sometimes in the trunk. But we knew which cars were which because there just weren't that many of them out there that you had to worry about how you know, lots of different things started getting very confusing and then now you've got all these electric cars with different types of batteries and different ways to route the power. Well, now we have all kinds of These cars out there, including Tesla. And what Tesla is doing for their battery power is basically they're using laptop batteries. They're using lithium ion batteries, which are phenomenal batteries. And they don't get the memory that all of the previous generations used to get. In fact, did you see the guy that invented lithium ion batteries, he just got the Nobel Prize this year and the guy is pretty old. We talked about him last year too because he came up with the new technology. He called it lithium glass and it got rid of almost all of the problems that lithium-ion has. But we're still using lithium ion battery. So let's get into the problems. You probably know that I had a laptop because I've talked about it on my show before but my laptop, I would put it on the table. And have you noticed that all four corners sit nicely, right and if they don't, it's usually because of You've got a foot missing. So you find okay the feet fell off so you find another foot that fits and you put it on and hopefully the laptop balances on the table.

Well, I had all four feet on my laptop and I looked at it I said wait a minute now and I called over my son I said, Hey Steve, come over here. Have a look at this. And we put it on another flat surface and we got down low and we looked and sure enough, there was a bulge pretty much in the middle of the bottom of my laptop. Well, that was a very big sign to me that it's ball Jean because the battery is swollen. That is one of the problems of the lithium-ion batteries. Now this has been true with nickel-metal hydride and I kept before it but when that battery swells in the lithium-ion battery, it gets very, very, very dangerous. This is where you start seeing fires. Where the lithium ion batteries Because they're swelling up, and they have layers inside, that when some of these layers come in contact with each other, you now have a short inside the battery. Now think how long your device last, my laptop can last seven hours on a chart, depending on what I'm doing right if I'm doing video editing, I'm down to about an hour. But if I'm doing some writing a little bit of research online and stuff at six or seven hours pretty consistently, that is a lot of power, even only for the one hour words running eight cores, and a GPU trying to do the video editing and if you're watching online, you can see some of my video stuff on this computer behind me This is an iMac five k that I use for some of my video editing and recording of the show so you can see this if you're watching me on YouTube or on Facebook. But this becomes a bit of an issue for people. Frankly, because all of that power that's going to charge, or excuse me, run my computer for the next six or seven hours is now shorted out. Now have you ever been working on a car and you're under the hood, and you've got a wrench in your hand or a spanner for those of you from the UK in your hand, and you get near the battery, maybe you're trying to disconnect the battery and you accidentally short circuit between the positive terminal on the battery and the ground. Almost all cars worldwide use a negative ground nowadays. didn't use to be that way. So you accidentally shorted out to ground. Have you seen what happens? It goes zap there are sparks flying everywhere. And there's now a chunk missing out of your wrench. Right? Maybe Maybe not a huge trunk depends on the battery. But you have melted that part of the wrench. That is a lot of power that's in there. Well, it's a different amount of power in one of these lithium-ion batteries that we have, but it is still a lot of power. And so when it shorts out, it starts fires. Now we've seen that with Samsung phones have been famous for that, certain models of their phones. And that wasn't really the model of the phone that was as much of a problem as a manufacturer, the battery sometimes it is the model of the phone because it's putting pressure on the battery and sponsors shouldn't put the pressure on. Again, if you're watching on video, you can see me doing this what happens if you put pressure on the wrong spot as part of the battery. It'll show that again. Okay, so there are real potential problems here. So I knew that my laptop because that battery was swollen That I could have serious problems, I could have a fire on my laptop. Now I took it back to the manufacturer, which was Apple because of course, that's who I use mostly and then actually wasn't even made by Apple was made by contract, right. And they come they replaced it entirely and they fix the swelling and everything. And then they eventually ended up recalling all of those laptops. And it was a 15 inch MacBook Pro from one was I think it was a 2017 model.

And that, that I think was a good thing because they thought Well, they've seen a few of these. And you've seen pictures of these phones beyond people's nightstand. So you have your phone and your phone is, of course, a device running off a battery and most likely a lithium-ion battery. So that lithium-ion battery is there in the phone. If it starts to fail, usually the phone will swell. So if you have any devices that are starting to swell, any battery power devices starting to swell, it's time to get very concerned and take it back to the place you bought it from or take it back to the manufacturer. Because when it swells, it can easily start a very smoky, nasty fire. And we've all probably seen videos of this happening in airplanes. So when we get back we're going to talk about this poor man who died this 48-year-old and the news that came out of California, just this week about his Tesla, and the batteries. You're listening to course to Craig Peterson, right here on WGAN. And also online, Craig peterson.com. Stick around, because we'll be right back

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