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

It's Wednesday morning. Time for the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. Today they talked about the Samsung Galaxy Fold, the fake 5-star reviews on Amazon, and how much your tax info is worth on the dark web.

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

---

Related Articles:

5-Star Phonies: Inside The Fake Amazon Review Complex

Here’s How Much Your Tax Info Is Worth On The Dark Web

---

Transcript:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 04/24/2019

Samsung Fold Problem - How Much Your Tax Info Sells For - Matt's Bad Amazon Headphones

Craig Peterson  0:00
Hey, everybody, we talked this morning about the Samsung fold problem, how much your tax and photos worth on the dark web and Matt bought some headphones online on Amazon based on the star ratings. And guess what? They aren't so good. So we talked about that as well. So here we go Craig Peterson with Ken and Matt in Maine, this morning.

Matt Gagnon0:26
WGAN Wednesday morning, that time and that day means Craig Peterson, man about town and tech guru joins us as he does now. What's going on, Craig?

Craig 0:37
Hey, good morning. Caribou still has snow on the ground. But that's a shocker. 

Ken Altshuler 0:45
Which is why we should annex it to Canada. It doesn't belong in America, get rid of it.

So I didn't see this on your, we're not going, I'm sure you've talked about the Samson folding tablet fiasco. And since I love to talk about how Samsung sucks. Any comment on Samsung?

Craig 1:09
You summed it up there in one word.

Ken 1:11
Well, thank you for joining us.

Matt 1:16
Oh, you fanboys.

Ken 1:17
I haven't had that with my iPhone, Matt.

Matt 1:19
At least they're trying to develop something new.

Craig 1:22
It's a problem. And of course, we're talking about these folding things. With the Galaxy Fold. The screens are breaking and people are kind of getting upset. But it's a cool new technology. Matt's right for once, Ken. You know.

Ken 1:37
Matt's never right. Ever.

Craig 1:40
Ever? Oh, come on. I was trying to give you one Matt. So here's a problem. It's, how do I even explain this? Okay, here we go. I've got one Matt. The Apple MacBook Pro has a similar problem. And that is that when you're bending these things, sometimes those cables are, and the conductors are extremely, extremely small. And when you bend them a lot, of course you get mechanical breakdowns and that's what's happening right now with the galaxy fold and with the MacBook Pro, in fact, both companies are scrambling Apple's scrambling to get a new MacBook Pro out this September. And it looks like they're kind of pushing it up a little sooner than they had wanted to. Because of the two big problems with the MacBook Pro. One is the keyboard is still an issue for a lot of people. I just I don't like the feel of it. I don't. Ken, you like the feel your MacBook Pro keyboard right?

Ken 2:42
I do. Well, I kind of like the raised a little better. I've got a use of this. But that when I was raised lettering, I liked it a little better.

Craig 2:52
Yeah, I'd like to the old one little bit better. And then there's some problems with the cables in the screen there. And then the Galaxy Fold from Samsung is incredibly new technology. No one's really tried to do this quite this way before. And so it's it's kind of falling on its face. But also Samsung doesn't have the profit margin Apple does to invest in some of this stuff. So it's impressive what they did. But I'm not sure it'll ever be, well ever is a long time. Right. But anytime soon? 

Matt 3:22
I don't know, I guess I don't understand. And I'm a Samsung aficionado, if you will. So I don't get why you'd want it. I don't want to fold my phone. Is it just because you want to get a bigger screen? I guess. And so you can fold it that way? I don't care that much. Yeah, I mean, where is the demand for this? That I mean, I want to have a tablet, but I wanted the size of a phone. I really don't a tablet the size of my phone.

Craig 3:47
Well, it's the phablet thing, right? But let's go back again to Apple as an example, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Henry Ford, let's go way back to Henry Ford. He said if we had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. And Steve Jobs said of you know, we came up with the with the iPod and then the iPhone. And it, nobody was asking for it. And then when they came up with these bigger ones, like the one I have sitting right in front of me right now, they came up with a bigger screens and displays people were not asking for that either. And yet, in all of those cases, they became very, very popular. So as a business person, I've got to say, you, you have to what's the word cannibalize your own business, even if you have a business model and your business is doing well, if you don't compete against yourself with some new innovations, someone else is going to compete against yourself with that same innovation that you didn't bother doing. So I've got to in this case, praise Samsung for trying it. And I also agree with both you guys, I don't really want one that big. I have an iPad, if I need it, you know something that's bigger, but you know, having it in my pocket is going to be is going to be problematic. So I think that's why. So good, good on them for trying something new. But they definitely did not pull it off.

Matt 5:10
Talking to Craig Peterson our tech guru joins us at this time, every Wednesday to go over the world of technology. Craig, when I buy stuff on Amazon, I admit that I am one of the people that will you know, take like three different I actually, here's a good example, I just bought some wireless headphones, so that I could go running and not have the stupid wires in my face all the time. When I did that, I found like four or five different ones on Amazon and I checked out the reviews to see what people thought of them. And I, I will say I gave a couple extra points to the one that had better reviews. And I ended up buying it and I'm not terribly happy with it. Was I taken was was that were there a lot of phony reviews that are on these Amazon items and has this become a problem?

Craig 5:53
Well, that's a really good point because there's an article I have up on my site this week. It's from The Hustle. But this one particular was headphones, his iPhone plug it has that little iPhone connector on it. And it was ranked five stars, almost it had almost 4000 5-star reviews. And yet when the guy order did, that connector came right off broke off for like almost the first time right in his iPhone when he was trying to use it. And it's it is a real problem in something that we've kind of known about for a while. But the reason that's happening I think is very interesting. We used to have a, we still do, a lot of people here in the US who are buying stuff in China or from someplace else. They're shipping it over here. And then they are selling it on Amazon, they're reselling. And what's been happening over the last two to three years is these Chinese companies that are making these things have figured out, well, maybe we can get rid of that middleman. And so they've been shipping directly to Amazon. We're not going to get into all of the details here of how that all works. But they ship their stuff over and then they sell it. So there are some things that are going on that are kind of bad. You know, there's 82% of Americans, both all probably all three of us, right? Who checked the reviews, who checked the stars in it. But it turns out that there are sellers in China, who are paying people here in the US, they have secret Facebook groups, they have all closed Facebook groups, and they have other ways of communicating. And they will have you buy their product, they'll reimburse you for having bought it from Amazon. And then they'll give you an extra 10 bucks if you give it a five star review online. And so this guy got into this, he started poking around, he was invited to be a reviewer  of this nice little iPhone charger cable. And he found out that there is a big underbelly here there's a site you might want to check out called Fakespot, F-A-K-E-S-P-O-T. And people are looking at these five star reviews and Fakespot had a look at these. And found that in fact, there there there is star inflation going on. And they use some interesting ways to try and figure it out. But kind of on average, it's about a half a star inflation on some of these products. And when maybe as many as 30% of all of these reviews online are fake. And that is a real problem, Matt.

Matt 8:46
So I have this to blame for my wireless headphones not working the way that I want them to. Excellent.

Craig 8:50
It might be. 

Matt 8:53
I really just want to blame someone, Craig. So I'm gonna go ahead and pick this and call it good.

Craig 8:57
Call it good. When you get right down to it, read the reviews and see if they're all the same. I found reviews, I did a search online about this that said I haven't tried this product but and do a search for that. Go to Google and tell it to search Amazon for I haven't tried this product. And you will find reviews where people are giving a five star review and saying I haven't tried this product. So look for those, when you're looking at a product and then also look for people saying almost the exact same thing over and over again. And for me something that spooks me badly is very poor English. And that means that they aren't you know, they aren't people who can speak English well. So maybe they're legit. Maybe they're great people. But I get a little nervous about it.

Ken 9:53
We are down with Craig Peterson. He's our tech guru.

Matt 9:58
Peterson.

Ken 9:59
Exactly what I said. He joins us, everyone Wednesday at 7:38. Sorry for the cough.

Matt 10:06
We're now at 7:48. 10 minutes into the segment.

Ken 10:09
I didn't. I know, but he joins us at 7:38.

Matt 10:11
I'm just saying.

Ken 10:12
I didn't know the dark web, I know dark web deals with a lot of bad, you know, kiddie porn, but I didn't know it looked at my taxes.

Matt 10:23
Are you saying that you can Donald Trump's taxes on the dark web?

Ken 10:26
Yeah. Can we go down and find out? 

Craig 10:29
You will if the congressional committee catch all of them. Here's what's going on, I want to give everyone a quick piece of advice here. And that is if you have filed an extension for your taxes, file them as soon as you possibly can. Because what's happening is the bad guys are doing a couple of things. We already know they've got your passwords, we already know they've got your accounts. And we already know that most Americans are still using one of 10 passwords, people. And because of that what they've done now is the bad guys are hijacking People's Bank Accounts unbeknownst to them. So you can still use your bank account, but the bad guys have access to it. And then they are filing fake tax returns. And they're filing those big tax returns. And then they're pulling the money, all of it, including your tax return out of your bank account. And so that's how they get the guys you say well, I don't get much money. Yeah, but you're looking forward to that $500 tax refund. Well so are the bad guys. And they are paying online, anywhere from $1 for up to $52 for W-2s, 1040s, your name, your social security number and your birthdate is worth as little as 19 cents on the dark web. But just think of that. It can take you 300 hours to recover your credit and name and it's only worth 19 cents. And you can if you want to become a bad guy, you can get a how to guide to cash in on a victim's tax return for only $70 on the dark web. So it's our money, our identity isn't worth much. But if it's worth more than 17 cents to you, maybe you should change your passwords and use a password manager like 1Password or Lastpass online because man this is a real problem. And the best way to deal with this particular the taxes is to file your return early before the bad guys file one on your behalf.

---

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

It's Wednesday morning. Time for the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. Today they talked about the Samsung Galaxy Fold, the fake 5-star reviews on Amazon, and how much your tax info is worth on the dark web.

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

---

Related Articles:

5-Star Phonies: Inside The Fake Amazon Review Complex

Here’s How Much Your Tax Info Is Worth On The Dark Web

---

Transcript:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 04/24/2019

Samsung Fold Problem - How Much Your Tax Info Sells For - Matt's Bad Amazon Headphones

Craig Peterson  0:00
Hey, everybody, we talked this morning about the Samsung fold problem, how much your tax and photos worth on the dark web and Matt bought some headphones online on Amazon based on the star ratings. And guess what? They aren't so good. So we talked about that as well. So here we go Craig Peterson with Ken and Matt in Maine, this morning.

Matt Gagnon0:26
WGAN Wednesday morning, that time and that day means Craig Peterson, man about town and tech guru joins us as he does now. What's going on, Craig?

Craig 0:37
Hey, good morning. Caribou still has snow on the ground. But that's a shocker. 

Ken Altshuler 0:45
Which is why we should annex it to Canada. It doesn't belong in America, get rid of it.

So I didn't see this on your, we're not going, I'm sure you've talked about the Samson folding tablet fiasco. And since I love to talk about how Samsung sucks. Any comment on Samsung?

Craig 1:09
You summed it up there in one word.

Ken 1:11
Well, thank you for joining us.

Matt 1:16
Oh, you fanboys.

Ken 1:17
I haven't had that with my iPhone, Matt.

Matt 1:19
At least they're trying to develop something new.

Craig 1:22
It's a problem. And of course, we're talking about these folding things. With the Galaxy Fold. The screens are breaking and people are kind of getting upset. But it's a cool new technology. Matt's right for once, Ken. You know.

Ken 1:37
Matt's never right. Ever.

Craig 1:40
Ever? Oh, come on. I was trying to give you one Matt. So here's a problem. It's, how do I even explain this? Okay, here we go. I've got one Matt. The Apple MacBook Pro has a similar problem. And that is that when you're bending these things, sometimes those cables are, and the conductors are extremely, extremely small. And when you bend them a lot, of course you get mechanical breakdowns and that's what's happening right now with the galaxy fold and with the MacBook Pro, in fact, both companies are scrambling Apple's scrambling to get a new MacBook Pro out this September. And it looks like they're kind of pushing it up a little sooner than they had wanted to. Because of the two big problems with the MacBook Pro. One is the keyboard is still an issue for a lot of people. I just I don't like the feel of it. I don't. Ken, you like the feel your MacBook Pro keyboard right?

Ken 2:42
I do. Well, I kind of like the raised a little better. I've got a use of this. But that when I was raised lettering, I liked it a little better.

Craig 2:52
Yeah, I'd like to the old one little bit better. And then there's some problems with the cables in the screen there. And then the Galaxy Fold from Samsung is incredibly new technology. No one's really tried to do this quite this way before. And so it's it's kind of falling on its face. But also Samsung doesn't have the profit margin Apple does to invest in some of this stuff. So it's impressive what they did. But I'm not sure it'll ever be, well ever is a long time. Right. But anytime soon? 

Matt 3:22
I don't know, I guess I don't understand. And I'm a Samsung aficionado, if you will. So I don't get why you'd want it. I don't want to fold my phone. Is it just because you want to get a bigger screen? I guess. And so you can fold it that way? I don't care that much. Yeah, I mean, where is the demand for this? That I mean, I want to have a tablet, but I wanted the size of a phone. I really don't a tablet the size of my phone.

Craig 3:47
Well, it's the phablet thing, right? But let's go back again to Apple as an example, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Henry Ford, let's go way back to Henry Ford. He said if we had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. And Steve Jobs said of you know, we came up with the with the iPod and then the iPhone. And it, nobody was asking for it. And then when they came up with these bigger ones, like the one I have sitting right in front of me right now, they came up with a bigger screens and displays people were not asking for that either. And yet, in all of those cases, they became very, very popular. So as a business person, I've got to say, you, you have to what's the word cannibalize your own business, even if you have a business model and your business is doing well, if you don't compete against yourself with some new innovations, someone else is going to compete against yourself with that same innovation that you didn't bother doing. So I've got to in this case, praise Samsung for trying it. And I also agree with both you guys, I don't really want one that big. I have an iPad, if I need it, you know something that's bigger, but you know, having it in my pocket is going to be is going to be problematic. So I think that's why. So good, good on them for trying something new. But they definitely did not pull it off.

Matt 5:10
Talking to Craig Peterson our tech guru joins us at this time, every Wednesday to go over the world of technology. Craig, when I buy stuff on Amazon, I admit that I am one of the people that will you know, take like three different I actually, here's a good example, I just bought some wireless headphones, so that I could go running and not have the stupid wires in my face all the time. When I did that, I found like four or five different ones on Amazon and I checked out the reviews to see what people thought of them. And I, I will say I gave a couple extra points to the one that had better reviews. And I ended up buying it and I'm not terribly happy with it. Was I taken was was that were there a lot of phony reviews that are on these Amazon items and has this become a problem?

Craig 5:53
Well, that's a really good point because there's an article I have up on my site this week. It's from The Hustle. But this one particular was headphones, his iPhone plug it has that little iPhone connector on it. And it was ranked five stars, almost it had almost 4000 5-star reviews. And yet when the guy order did, that connector came right off broke off for like almost the first time right in his iPhone when he was trying to use it. And it's it is a real problem in something that we've kind of known about for a while. But the reason that's happening I think is very interesting. We used to have a, we still do, a lot of people here in the US who are buying stuff in China or from someplace else. They're shipping it over here. And then they are selling it on Amazon, they're reselling. And what's been happening over the last two to three years is these Chinese companies that are making these things have figured out, well, maybe we can get rid of that middleman. And so they've been shipping directly to Amazon. We're not going to get into all of the details here of how that all works. But they ship their stuff over and then they sell it. So there are some things that are going on that are kind of bad. You know, there's 82% of Americans, both all probably all three of us, right? Who checked the reviews, who checked the stars in it. But it turns out that there are sellers in China, who are paying people here in the US, they have secret Facebook groups, they have all closed Facebook groups, and they have other ways of communicating. And they will have you buy their product, they'll reimburse you for having bought it from Amazon. And then they'll give you an extra 10 bucks if you give it a five star review online. And so this guy got into this, he started poking around, he was invited to be a reviewer  of this nice little iPhone charger cable. And he found out that there is a big underbelly here there's a site you might want to check out called Fakespot, F-A-K-E-S-P-O-T. And people are looking at these five star reviews and Fakespot had a look at these. And found that in fact, there there there is star inflation going on. And they use some interesting ways to try and figure it out. But kind of on average, it's about a half a star inflation on some of these products. And when maybe as many as 30% of all of these reviews online are fake. And that is a real problem, Matt.

Matt 8:46
So I have this to blame for my wireless headphones not working the way that I want them to. Excellent.

Craig 8:50
It might be. 

Matt 8:53
I really just want to blame someone, Craig. So I'm gonna go ahead and pick this and call it good.

Craig 8:57
Call it good. When you get right down to it, read the reviews and see if they're all the same. I found reviews, I did a search online about this that said I haven't tried this product but and do a search for that. Go to Google and tell it to search Amazon for I haven't tried this product. And you will find reviews where people are giving a five star review and saying I haven't tried this product. So look for those, when you're looking at a product and then also look for people saying almost the exact same thing over and over again. And for me something that spooks me badly is very poor English. And that means that they aren't you know, they aren't people who can speak English well. So maybe they're legit. Maybe they're great people. But I get a little nervous about it.

Ken 9:53
We are down with Craig Peterson. He's our tech guru.

Matt 9:58
Peterson.

Ken 9:59
Exactly what I said. He joins us, everyone Wednesday at 7:38. Sorry for the cough.

Matt 10:06
We're now at 7:48. 10 minutes into the segment.

Ken 10:09
I didn't. I know, but he joins us at 7:38.

Matt 10:11
I'm just saying.

Ken 10:12
I didn't know the dark web, I know dark web deals with a lot of bad, you know, kiddie porn, but I didn't know it looked at my taxes.

Matt 10:23
Are you saying that you can Donald Trump's taxes on the dark web?

Ken 10:26
Yeah. Can we go down and find out? 

Craig 10:29
You will if the congressional committee catch all of them. Here's what's going on, I want to give everyone a quick piece of advice here. And that is if you have filed an extension for your taxes, file them as soon as you possibly can. Because what's happening is the bad guys are doing a couple of things. We already know they've got your passwords, we already know they've got your accounts. And we already know that most Americans are still using one of 10 passwords, people. And because of that what they've done now is the bad guys are hijacking People's Bank Accounts unbeknownst to them. So you can still use your bank account, but the bad guys have access to it. And then they are filing fake tax returns. And they're filing those big tax returns. And then they're pulling the money, all of it, including your tax return out of your bank account. And so that's how they get the guys you say well, I don't get much money. Yeah, but you're looking forward to that $500 tax refund. Well so are the bad guys. And they are paying online, anywhere from $1 for up to $52 for W-2s, 1040s, your name, your social security number and your birthdate is worth as little as 19 cents on the dark web. But just think of that. It can take you 300 hours to recover your credit and name and it's only worth 19 cents. And you can if you want to become a bad guy, you can get a how to guide to cash in on a victim's tax return for only $70 on the dark web. So it's our money, our identity isn't worth much. But if it's worth more than 17 cents to you, maybe you should change your passwords and use a password manager like 1Password or Lastpass online because man this is a real problem. And the best way to deal with this particular the taxes is to file your return early before the bad guys file one on your behalf.

---

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

Craig is on the Jim Polito Show. Today they discussed the phony 5-star reviews in Amazon. 

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

---

Related Articles:

5-Star Phonies: Inside The Fake Amazon Review Complex

--- 

Transcript:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 04/23/2019

Inside The World Of Fake Amazon Reviews

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. This morning, we talked about five star phonies I went into in some depth here as to how does Amazon actually work? How are these Chinese companies selling products to us? And the problem that's arisen of many of them apparently getting five star reviews posted for products that are just junk. So how can you trust it? What can you do? Well, actually, we did get to that. Yes, indeed, with Jim Polito this morning. So here we go.

Jim Polito 0:39
This is a much anticipated visit from our tech talk guru Craig Peterson, talking about something that I myself and many others rely on.You buying a product on Amazon, you look at the stars, you say why full five stars? I gotta read these reviews. Is it really that good? Well, are the reviews really true. Joining us now. Our friend Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir.

Craig 1:08
Hey, good morning, you know, if you do check those product reviews before you make a purchase, you're about equal on footing with about 82% of American adults.

Jim 1:19
Yeah, the guys, we had it, we had a chat, we had a chat about it. And we all have our own method of checking their reviews, if we're buying something that we've never bought before, like I, not if I'm buying like detergent, or, you know, something like that, if I'm buying a product I haven't bought before I've done my research. And then you know, I say well this one looks good. I read Yeah, we all have different ways of reading the reviews. But the question is, can I believe them?

Craig 1:45
Yeah, and that's a really, really good question. Because if life has changed. Everything that's changed, you know, used to be, you could trust the name brand, because you knew they didn't want to mess up all of the money they've spent on advertising. And, you know, the name brand was in it frankly, and you know, you talked about Coke, for instance, and buying all of these other things. Coke has a name brand they're trying to protect. But when you're buying on Amazon, and the seller is someone in China, or maybe someone here in the US or somewhere else in the world, there's no brand name that you can trust. Right? There's, there's nothing that you know, so yes, we do look at those stars. And there's a really good article I put up on my website, and it's from The Hustle. And it's talking about what's been happening more recently on Amazon Now, we know Amazon trying to get the prices of everything down as low as t it can so they can pass some of those savings on to consumers and, and really kind of put its competitors out of business. Even Walmart's having a hard time trying to compete with Amazon out there. So one of the things, here's how it used to work, and it's still kind of works this way, I have a couple of buddies that do this. They go online, let's say they go to Alibaba, which is a kind of, you know, big place almost like eBay for businesses over in China. They they do analysis of Amazon, what's selling, what are people looking for, and then they go to Alibaba, they find a vendor that has a good price, and hopefully a decent quality, they order a bunch of them, they check them out, and then they ship them off to Amazon. So this is how this whole thing works. Amazon has them now in their warehouses, and Amazon charges the seller, just to have the product shipped and sitting there ready to ship out. Okay. And then of course, Amazon charges when it's sold. And you know, there's money exchanging hands all of the time. And that's what's been happening for quite some time. Well, what's been happening more recently is some of these Chinese companies are sitting there saying, why are we like having a middleman in the middle of all of this. And so these people here in the states that have been kind of, you know, buying and then reselling on Amazon, they have been bypassed now, in many, many cases. So you have these Chinese companies that are just going ahead, and shipping directly to Amazon here in the US to the warehouses, and so now those Chinese companies are paying the warehouse fees are paying the Commission's, but now there's no longer the markup of that middleman, who was based in the US whose throat, you could choke if you had to, and who's verifying things? Okay. So all of this has really changed over the last two to three years in a big way. And leads us directly to the five stars you're just asking about.

Jim 4:44
And so how do I look, look? And then this isn't, this isn't doesn't have anything to do with the ethnicity of Chinese people, but you can't trust China, when it comes to a lot of this stuff. They don't.

Craig 5:00
Yeah. You're absolutely right.

Jim 5:02
I mean, think about what's been done with dog food, lead paint, all of these things that came out of China that we really can't trust them for in terms of manufacturing and businesses. So the five stars by cutting out the middleman, that five star to just be bunked.

Craig 5:21
Yeah, it could be. And in fact, that's what's been happening here. This is a little bit of an in depth research that was done. And again, you can see the articles and all the details. They've got statistics and everything else about what's been happening out there. But he's talking about one of the highest ranked iPhone chargers, and it had an almost 4000 5 star reviews, and Amazon's Choice Label on it you saying in the article, and and he goes on to do a little bit more investigation because he was able to hop into this private Facebook group and talk with us Amazon seller named Lian Xi from I'm just guessing the pronunciations here, but what is joins out China? And she said, hey, listen, if you buy something, if you buy my product, which was an iPhone charger cable, charger, if you buy my my cable, I will reimburse you for the purchase and give you a $10 commission, if you go ahead and give me a five star rating on Amazon. Now, this is this has been a problem for a while. We have these influencers looking at Kim Kardashian and others who are online, who are pouting products who are saying we are the ones to you know, to believe. And I'm wearing this mascara because it stays on all day without ruining, right? And is this an ad? Is this not an ad? Is this a paid compensation? Where does the line start and stop? And that's what the Federal Trade Commission's been trying to figure out. And now, on top of it, we apparently have these Chinese resellers who are paying people to to do this. And, man, this has been a big deal for a long time. Okay. And, and the products break almost immediately. And yet it has 4000 5 star reviews. So what are you supposed to do?

Jim 7:25
And you know, you used a good example, like a cord, an iPhone charging cord, like an aftermarket one, not one of theirs. We know if you get a cheap one, it busts in no time at all. It doesn't work. And if I see a great price, and a five star rating on Amazon, I'm going to be inclined to buy that.

Craig 7:46
Yeah, but read these things. I guess some of these are amazing. Here's another example. This is from this bodybuilding enthusiast guy named Tommy Noonan. And he's looking at these testosterone boosters on Amazon, and you noticed that a product had 580 reviews, and every single one was five stars. And then he decided he read them. And this has always been the giveaway for me. And we've talked a little bit about this before, you know the languaging that's used. And it's like the morning did the democrats and out their talking points. And every single one of them is saying the exact same thing. So that's number one. And number two is people were reading things like I haven't tried this product, but and then they leave a glowing review. So I went on Amazon and I searched actually I just went to Google and search Amazon. And I found tons of reviews just like this. I never use this product but.

Jim 8:44
So what you do is, yeah, and I've done that to see, I've done it before, to see if someone has lifted what they've written from somebody else. And I just cut and paste and drop it in Google and you see it comes up somewhere else. So you say you cut and paste that review, put it in there, and it pops up in a million different locations. Identical wording.

Craig 9:09
Yeah, exactly. And it's, it's easy enough just to look and see even within one product, or most of these almost exactly the same wording. And now it's gotten even easier, Amazon has something else called Mechanical Turk. And Mechanical Turk is designed, it's fantastic for businesses, if you have something that needs to be done by someone. And it's a very repetitive task. And maybe you want to pay a cent or five cents to find me a picture of a kitty cat with this or that. That's what Mechanical Turk is all about. And with Mechanical Turk, you can even though this is against the policies, okay? But you can even have people post things, find things put things up. So all of this huge, beautiful infrastructure that's out there on the internet is being misused, and they're able to help thousands of people. You can have immediately, I could have 5000 followers for your Facebook page tomorrow, if you're willing to pay 100 bucks. And the same thing's true with Amazon reviews now I'm afraid.

Jim 10:12
Well Craig, this has been great information very helpful to people, because so many of us who are shopping there. Now, folks, this information more in depth plus other information, plus when there's a big hack. You want to be on Craig's list, you want to be one of the people who's able to get a text from him and get this information. So here's what you do. You text my name, Jim to this number.

Craig 10:46
855-385-5553. That's 855-385-5553.

Jim 10:56
Standard data and text rates apply. And he will not bother you. He will not sell your name to somebody else. Craig, always a pleasure. But especially today, this was great information.

Craig 11:09
Hey, thanks, Jim. Take care.

Jim 11:11
Take care. All right, when we return a final word.

Craig 11:15
I guess the bottom line here is things aren't always as they appear to be. I do spend some time with the reviews myself. And obviously I think everybody should nowadays. And what I didn't mention with Jim is that Amazon has a lot they could do in order to stop this from happening. But is it really in their best interest? I think ultimately it is. And they have been cracking down a little bit but I think there's still a lot more Amazon could do to become a trusted place to buy online. All right, Take care everybody. Have a great day. We'll be back tomorrow. Bye bye. 

---

Don't miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Subscribe and give us a rating!

Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We're really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year! 

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:

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Craig is on the Jim Polito Show. Today they discussed the phony 5-star reviews in Amazon. 

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

---

Related Articles:

5-Star Phonies: Inside The Fake Amazon Review Complex

--- 

Transcript:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 04/23/2019

Inside The World Of Fake Amazon Reviews

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. This morning, we talked about five star phonies I went into in some depth here as to how does Amazon actually work? How are these Chinese companies selling products to us? And the problem that's arisen of many of them apparently getting five star reviews posted for products that are just junk. So how can you trust it? What can you do? Well, actually, we did get to that. Yes, indeed, with Jim Polito this morning. So here we go.

Jim Polito 0:39
This is a much anticipated visit from our tech talk guru Craig Peterson, talking about something that I myself and many others rely on.You buying a product on Amazon, you look at the stars, you say why full five stars? I gotta read these reviews. Is it really that good? Well, are the reviews really true. Joining us now. Our friend Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir.

Craig 1:08
Hey, good morning, you know, if you do check those product reviews before you make a purchase, you're about equal on footing with about 82% of American adults.

Jim 1:19
Yeah, the guys, we had it, we had a chat, we had a chat about it. And we all have our own method of checking their reviews, if we're buying something that we've never bought before, like I, not if I'm buying like detergent, or, you know, something like that, if I'm buying a product I haven't bought before I've done my research. And then you know, I say well this one looks good. I read Yeah, we all have different ways of reading the reviews. But the question is, can I believe them?

Craig 1:45
Yeah, and that's a really, really good question. Because if life has changed. Everything that's changed, you know, used to be, you could trust the name brand, because you knew they didn't want to mess up all of the money they've spent on advertising. And, you know, the name brand was in it frankly, and you know, you talked about Coke, for instance, and buying all of these other things. Coke has a name brand they're trying to protect. But when you're buying on Amazon, and the seller is someone in China, or maybe someone here in the US or somewhere else in the world, there's no brand name that you can trust. Right? There's, there's nothing that you know, so yes, we do look at those stars. And there's a really good article I put up on my website, and it's from The Hustle. And it's talking about what's been happening more recently on Amazon Now, we know Amazon trying to get the prices of everything down as low as t it can so they can pass some of those savings on to consumers and, and really kind of put its competitors out of business. Even Walmart's having a hard time trying to compete with Amazon out there. So one of the things, here's how it used to work, and it's still kind of works this way, I have a couple of buddies that do this. They go online, let's say they go to Alibaba, which is a kind of, you know, big place almost like eBay for businesses over in China. They they do analysis of Amazon, what's selling, what are people looking for, and then they go to Alibaba, they find a vendor that has a good price, and hopefully a decent quality, they order a bunch of them, they check them out, and then they ship them off to Amazon. So this is how this whole thing works. Amazon has them now in their warehouses, and Amazon charges the seller, just to have the product shipped and sitting there ready to ship out. Okay. And then of course, Amazon charges when it's sold. And you know, there's money exchanging hands all of the time. And that's what's been happening for quite some time. Well, what's been happening more recently is some of these Chinese companies are sitting there saying, why are we like having a middleman in the middle of all of this. And so these people here in the states that have been kind of, you know, buying and then reselling on Amazon, they have been bypassed now, in many, many cases. So you have these Chinese companies that are just going ahead, and shipping directly to Amazon here in the US to the warehouses, and so now those Chinese companies are paying the warehouse fees are paying the Commission's, but now there's no longer the markup of that middleman, who was based in the US whose throat, you could choke if you had to, and who's verifying things? Okay. So all of this has really changed over the last two to three years in a big way. And leads us directly to the five stars you're just asking about.

Jim 4:44
And so how do I look, look? And then this isn't, this isn't doesn't have anything to do with the ethnicity of Chinese people, but you can't trust China, when it comes to a lot of this stuff. They don't.

Craig 5:00
Yeah. You're absolutely right.

Jim 5:02
I mean, think about what's been done with dog food, lead paint, all of these things that came out of China that we really can't trust them for in terms of manufacturing and businesses. So the five stars by cutting out the middleman, that five star to just be bunked.

Craig 5:21
Yeah, it could be. And in fact, that's what's been happening here. This is a little bit of an in depth research that was done. And again, you can see the articles and all the details. They've got statistics and everything else about what's been happening out there. But he's talking about one of the highest ranked iPhone chargers, and it had an almost 4000 5 star reviews, and Amazon's Choice Label on it you saying in the article, and and he goes on to do a little bit more investigation because he was able to hop into this private Facebook group and talk with us Amazon seller named Lian Xi from I'm just guessing the pronunciations here, but what is joins out China? And she said, hey, listen, if you buy something, if you buy my product, which was an iPhone charger cable, charger, if you buy my my cable, I will reimburse you for the purchase and give you a $10 commission, if you go ahead and give me a five star rating on Amazon. Now, this is this has been a problem for a while. We have these influencers looking at Kim Kardashian and others who are online, who are pouting products who are saying we are the ones to you know, to believe. And I'm wearing this mascara because it stays on all day without ruining, right? And is this an ad? Is this not an ad? Is this a paid compensation? Where does the line start and stop? And that's what the Federal Trade Commission's been trying to figure out. And now, on top of it, we apparently have these Chinese resellers who are paying people to to do this. And, man, this has been a big deal for a long time. Okay. And, and the products break almost immediately. And yet it has 4000 5 star reviews. So what are you supposed to do?

Jim 7:25
And you know, you used a good example, like a cord, an iPhone charging cord, like an aftermarket one, not one of theirs. We know if you get a cheap one, it busts in no time at all. It doesn't work. And if I see a great price, and a five star rating on Amazon, I'm going to be inclined to buy that.

Craig 7:46
Yeah, but read these things. I guess some of these are amazing. Here's another example. This is from this bodybuilding enthusiast guy named Tommy Noonan. And he's looking at these testosterone boosters on Amazon, and you noticed that a product had 580 reviews, and every single one was five stars. And then he decided he read them. And this has always been the giveaway for me. And we've talked a little bit about this before, you know the languaging that's used. And it's like the morning did the democrats and out their talking points. And every single one of them is saying the exact same thing. So that's number one. And number two is people were reading things like I haven't tried this product, but and then they leave a glowing review. So I went on Amazon and I searched actually I just went to Google and search Amazon. And I found tons of reviews just like this. I never use this product but.

Jim 8:44
So what you do is, yeah, and I've done that to see, I've done it before, to see if someone has lifted what they've written from somebody else. And I just cut and paste and drop it in Google and you see it comes up somewhere else. So you say you cut and paste that review, put it in there, and it pops up in a million different locations. Identical wording.

Craig 9:09
Yeah, exactly. And it's, it's easy enough just to look and see even within one product, or most of these almost exactly the same wording. And now it's gotten even easier, Amazon has something else called Mechanical Turk. And Mechanical Turk is designed, it's fantastic for businesses, if you have something that needs to be done by someone. And it's a very repetitive task. And maybe you want to pay a cent or five cents to find me a picture of a kitty cat with this or that. That's what Mechanical Turk is all about. And with Mechanical Turk, you can even though this is against the policies, okay? But you can even have people post things, find things put things up. So all of this huge, beautiful infrastructure that's out there on the internet is being misused, and they're able to help thousands of people. You can have immediately, I could have 5000 followers for your Facebook page tomorrow, if you're willing to pay 100 bucks. And the same thing's true with Amazon reviews now I'm afraid.

Jim 10:12
Well Craig, this has been great information very helpful to people, because so many of us who are shopping there. Now, folks, this information more in depth plus other information, plus when there's a big hack. You want to be on Craig's list, you want to be one of the people who's able to get a text from him and get this information. So here's what you do. You text my name, Jim to this number.

Craig 10:46
855-385-5553. That's 855-385-5553.

Jim 10:56
Standard data and text rates apply. And he will not bother you. He will not sell your name to somebody else. Craig, always a pleasure. But especially today, this was great information.

Craig 11:09
Hey, thanks, Jim. Take care.

Jim 11:11
Take care. All right, when we return a final word.

Craig 11:15
I guess the bottom line here is things aren't always as they appear to be. I do spend some time with the reviews myself. And obviously I think everybody should nowadays. And what I didn't mention with Jim is that Amazon has a lot they could do in order to stop this from happening. But is it really in their best interest? I think ultimately it is. And they have been cracking down a little bit but I think there's still a lot more Amazon could do to become a trusted place to buy online. All right, Take care everybody. Have a great day. We'll be back tomorrow. Bye bye. 

---

Don't miss any episode from Craig. Visit http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. Subscribe and give us a rating!

Thanks, everyone, for listening and sharing our podcasts. We're really hitting it out of the park. This will be a great year! 

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

Craig is on with Jack Heath as they discussed presidential candidate Representative Delaney's plans to make some cyber changes in the government. They also discussed how much your tax information is worth in the dark web.

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

---

Related Articles 

Here’s How Much Your Tax Info Is Worth On The Dark Web
---

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 04/22/2019

Rep Delaney Cybersecurity Cabinet Position - What Your Tax Info Is Worth

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey everybody. Good morning, Craig Peterson here with another busy week I had. I was on this morning with Mr. Jack Heath and we talked a little bit about two things and I gotta say here I'm, I'm, I wish I had more time with him. A little disappointed. But we talked about Delaney, who's running for president right now, representative Delaney wants to make some major cyber changes to the federal government. And then we also talked a little bit about the scammers that are out there right now with your tax info and stuff. And I really wanted to give you some more information, but he kind of cut me off but it's his radio show. I shouldn't have any complaints. Anyways. Here we go with Mr. Heath and a bit of a surprise to I think about exactly what Delaney's trying to do.

Jack Heath 0:51
Craig Peterson, our tech talk guy. His show airs on weekends. Tech Talk on our iHeart News talk network. He joins us in the auto fair listener lines. Good morning, Mr. Craig.

Craig 0:59
Hey good morning, Jack. Interesting, you're talking about Delaney here who is running, of course, for the presidential slot and what's been happening with our US Cyber Command, because there is a lot going on right now. As you know, there are brightened held somewhere around 2 million open jobs in cyber security. And in the federal government, it's really scattered across a number of different agencies. And President Trump eliminated the position of what was called a cyber security coordinator, or maybe cyber security is our and what's happening with Delaney is he is looking to try and make a federal agency that everything comes underneath. And I get concerned when I see that sort of thing, Jack, because it's, it's difficult enough for businesses that can move quickly, that can respond quickly to be able to handle cyber security. But when you're talking about the federal government, that is a slow as molasses at best, I start getting kind of concerned. But I can see his point trying to pull it all together have a more holistic approach, and maybe having a cabinet level agency to focus on protecting cyberspace isn't a bad thing.

Jack 2:13
Well, I imagine, you know, you look at the future. And in fact, it was a story I thought of you early early early this morning Craig that one of the concerns with Russia right now. Is they either as a government or their intelligence folks are working with more cyber criminals right now.

Craig 2:33
Yeah, I read that as well.

Jack 2:33
That's not very encouraging. I mean, you know, it's not going to go away. I mean, you know as everything grows online  commerce, retail information, the appetite for those who want to take advantage of others. It's just, it's just a bigger bonanza, bigger pool, right?

Craig 2:48
Well, it is. And remember what caused the fall of the Soviet Union, ultimately, it was the spending, and they could not keep up with us in the spending race when it came to military, right? There is nothing cheaper for a government in a country than cyber attacks compared to of course, building tanks and trying to hire people and everything else. With a small team in North Korea has already demonstrated this was a small team of just a few hundred people maximum, you can cause incredible damage. And I saw that same article and what's happening over there with Russia and, and partnering with some of these criminals. It concerns me to no end. And we just had evidence come out a few weeks ago, that there again, have been attacks against some of our major pieces of infrastructure. It didn't really hit the news very much. I saw it in some of my internal security bulletins. But it's happening, it's growing. And I have to say, I don't disagree at all, with Representative Delaney, that we do need something at the top of the Federal infrastructure to protect our federal network. But how far does this go? And what kind of controls are they going to put in place? And what sort of responsibilities are they going to expect businesses to have with all of this? There's a lot of questions to answer still.

Jack 4:12
All right, any other consumer tips or observations on this Monday?

Craig 4:16
Well, hey, if you haven't found your tax reports, yet, your taxes, there is, of course, a concerted effort still going on by the bad guys. And what they'll do is they've already got your information in many cases. They'll file a W-2, they'll file 1040s. They've really gotten kind of crazy here. And they're trying to get your tax return into your bank account, and then pull the money out. So your W-2 or a 1040 is only worth between about $1 for right now on the black market and maybe 20 bucks. So. 

Jack 4:52
Yeah. Thanks. Great stuff Craig. Great, great stuff. And you know, some of the scammers out there, if you'd just get a little more conditioned to to be thinking cynically, you can pick up on it, but your email, for example, you might get an email. And they'll go after the biggest financial names. This is how simple and clever they are, for example, like the biggest bank name you've heard of, or big financial name, like Chase, or Wells Fargo, some household name. And they'll send you something like to Erin Boss, they'll say you know, an email to you Erin. Somehow they get your personal email. This very look, very official looking bank thing saying they just need to verify your Wells Fargo account or Chase, then you might think, or DC, you might think I don't really have something with oh, wait a minute, my car payment might be leased to them. So people go online, and they click verify the account. And they want you to give your account information and then pretend to tell you something where your account's at risk. The whole thing's a scam. The whole thing's a scam.

Craig 5:54
And I got something for the listeners Jack, don't let me go quick. Yeah, Google put together a really good little website that you can use that allows you to see how they are doing it. Gives you real emails, lets you look at them and determine whether or not things are false.

Jack 6:12 
I got one. And I took it to my bank because it looked so official. I go, oh my goodness, our logo, that a lot of times, you gotta look at the return website.

Unknown 6:20
And it's not the actual institution. But again, the worst thing that can happen is you ignore these things do nothing. And if it's legit, you're going to get a call. But you know, it's exactly the other thing is if you're trying to sell something online, like you go to one of these sites like say, Erin, you're trying to sell some clothing or you're trying to sell a piece of furniture. They even try and get you there. They all just set that and then start contacting you and say, well, we want you you know, we want this but in order for us to buy it, we need you to send us this and you're like no, no, no, that's not how it works. All right Craig make it a good one. Next Monday. Make it a good Monday Craig thank you very much Craig Peterson. Craig Peterson with an O-N.com.

Craig 6:54
Hey, I gotta add this in here. In case you did not get this before, previously, what I was trying to get across to Jack was there is a phishing quiz online that Google's provided. And the URL for that is http://phishingquizwithGoogle.com. That's spelled P-H-I-S-H-I-N-G-Q-U-I-Z. You already know how to spell phishing, right? But it's phishingquiz one word, dot with Google. One word, W-I-T-H-G-O-O-G-L-E.com. PhishingquizwithGoogle com. There are two dots here. There's only one in front of com. Anyways, take it, look at it. Have your friends and relatives look at it. Have everybody inside your business organization look at it. It is very, very helpful. Of course, yours truly got 100% on it. But a lot of people I've pointed to it have gotten seven or eight right. 70 or 80%. So you know, I guess that's normal. So if you don't get a great mark on it a great score. Don't feel so bad because the this technology really is kind of confusing. There's so many things going on. You just don't know what to do what to trust, just like Jack talked about with his own bank. Anyways, have a great day. We'll be back tomorrow with Mr. Polito. Bye bye

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

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Craig is on with Jack Heath as they discussed presidential candidate Representative Delaney's plans to make some cyber changes in the government. They also discussed how much your tax information is worth in the dark web.

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

---

Related Articles 

Here’s How Much Your Tax Info Is Worth On The Dark Web
---

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 04/22/2019

Rep Delaney Cybersecurity Cabinet Position - What Your Tax Info Is Worth

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey everybody. Good morning, Craig Peterson here with another busy week I had. I was on this morning with Mr. Jack Heath and we talked a little bit about two things and I gotta say here I'm, I'm, I wish I had more time with him. A little disappointed. But we talked about Delaney, who's running for president right now, representative Delaney wants to make some major cyber changes to the federal government. And then we also talked a little bit about the scammers that are out there right now with your tax info and stuff. And I really wanted to give you some more information, but he kind of cut me off but it's his radio show. I shouldn't have any complaints. Anyways. Here we go with Mr. Heath and a bit of a surprise to I think about exactly what Delaney's trying to do.

Jack Heath 0:51
Craig Peterson, our tech talk guy. His show airs on weekends. Tech Talk on our iHeart News talk network. He joins us in the auto fair listener lines. Good morning, Mr. Craig.

Craig 0:59
Hey good morning, Jack. Interesting, you're talking about Delaney here who is running, of course, for the presidential slot and what's been happening with our US Cyber Command, because there is a lot going on right now. As you know, there are brightened held somewhere around 2 million open jobs in cyber security. And in the federal government, it's really scattered across a number of different agencies. And President Trump eliminated the position of what was called a cyber security coordinator, or maybe cyber security is our and what's happening with Delaney is he is looking to try and make a federal agency that everything comes underneath. And I get concerned when I see that sort of thing, Jack, because it's, it's difficult enough for businesses that can move quickly, that can respond quickly to be able to handle cyber security. But when you're talking about the federal government, that is a slow as molasses at best, I start getting kind of concerned. But I can see his point trying to pull it all together have a more holistic approach, and maybe having a cabinet level agency to focus on protecting cyberspace isn't a bad thing.

Jack 2:13
Well, I imagine, you know, you look at the future. And in fact, it was a story I thought of you early early early this morning Craig that one of the concerns with Russia right now. Is they either as a government or their intelligence folks are working with more cyber criminals right now.

Craig 2:33
Yeah, I read that as well.

Jack 2:33
That's not very encouraging. I mean, you know, it's not going to go away. I mean, you know as everything grows online  commerce, retail information, the appetite for those who want to take advantage of others. It's just, it's just a bigger bonanza, bigger pool, right?

Craig 2:48
Well, it is. And remember what caused the fall of the Soviet Union, ultimately, it was the spending, and they could not keep up with us in the spending race when it came to military, right? There is nothing cheaper for a government in a country than cyber attacks compared to of course, building tanks and trying to hire people and everything else. With a small team in North Korea has already demonstrated this was a small team of just a few hundred people maximum, you can cause incredible damage. And I saw that same article and what's happening over there with Russia and, and partnering with some of these criminals. It concerns me to no end. And we just had evidence come out a few weeks ago, that there again, have been attacks against some of our major pieces of infrastructure. It didn't really hit the news very much. I saw it in some of my internal security bulletins. But it's happening, it's growing. And I have to say, I don't disagree at all, with Representative Delaney, that we do need something at the top of the Federal infrastructure to protect our federal network. But how far does this go? And what kind of controls are they going to put in place? And what sort of responsibilities are they going to expect businesses to have with all of this? There's a lot of questions to answer still.

Jack 4:12
All right, any other consumer tips or observations on this Monday?

Craig 4:16
Well, hey, if you haven't found your tax reports, yet, your taxes, there is, of course, a concerted effort still going on by the bad guys. And what they'll do is they've already got your information in many cases. They'll file a W-2, they'll file 1040s. They've really gotten kind of crazy here. And they're trying to get your tax return into your bank account, and then pull the money out. So your W-2 or a 1040 is only worth between about $1 for right now on the black market and maybe 20 bucks. So. 

Jack 4:52
Yeah. Thanks. Great stuff Craig. Great, great stuff. And you know, some of the scammers out there, if you'd just get a little more conditioned to to be thinking cynically, you can pick up on it, but your email, for example, you might get an email. And they'll go after the biggest financial names. This is how simple and clever they are, for example, like the biggest bank name you've heard of, or big financial name, like Chase, or Wells Fargo, some household name. And they'll send you something like to Erin Boss, they'll say you know, an email to you Erin. Somehow they get your personal email. This very look, very official looking bank thing saying they just need to verify your Wells Fargo account or Chase, then you might think, or DC, you might think I don't really have something with oh, wait a minute, my car payment might be leased to them. So people go online, and they click verify the account. And they want you to give your account information and then pretend to tell you something where your account's at risk. The whole thing's a scam. The whole thing's a scam.

Craig 5:54
And I got something for the listeners Jack, don't let me go quick. Yeah, Google put together a really good little website that you can use that allows you to see how they are doing it. Gives you real emails, lets you look at them and determine whether or not things are false.

Jack 6:12 
I got one. And I took it to my bank because it looked so official. I go, oh my goodness, our logo, that a lot of times, you gotta look at the return website.

Unknown 6:20
And it's not the actual institution. But again, the worst thing that can happen is you ignore these things do nothing. And if it's legit, you're going to get a call. But you know, it's exactly the other thing is if you're trying to sell something online, like you go to one of these sites like say, Erin, you're trying to sell some clothing or you're trying to sell a piece of furniture. They even try and get you there. They all just set that and then start contacting you and say, well, we want you you know, we want this but in order for us to buy it, we need you to send us this and you're like no, no, no, that's not how it works. All right Craig make it a good one. Next Monday. Make it a good Monday Craig thank you very much Craig Peterson. Craig Peterson with an O-N.com.

Craig 6:54
Hey, I gotta add this in here. In case you did not get this before, previously, what I was trying to get across to Jack was there is a phishing quiz online that Google's provided. And the URL for that is http://phishingquizwithGoogle.com. That's spelled P-H-I-S-H-I-N-G-Q-U-I-Z. You already know how to spell phishing, right? But it's phishingquiz one word, dot with Google. One word, W-I-T-H-G-O-O-G-L-E.com. PhishingquizwithGoogle com. There are two dots here. There's only one in front of com. Anyways, take it, look at it. Have your friends and relatives look at it. Have everybody inside your business organization look at it. It is very, very helpful. Of course, yours truly got 100% on it. But a lot of people I've pointed to it have gotten seven or eight right. 70 or 80%. So you know, I guess that's normal. So if you don't get a great mark on it a great score. Don't feel so bad because the this technology really is kind of confusing. There's so many things going on. You just don't know what to do what to trust, just like Jack talked about with his own bank. Anyways, have a great day. We'll be back tomorrow with Mr. Polito. Bye bye

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Did you upgrade your Router?  If not you probably have been hacked by hacker groups have been hijacking DNS traffic on D-Link routers for months and I will get into that more today.

Yet again, Facebook is in the news and again it is for their privacy and their cameras so i will discuss the implications of this.

April 15 -- the date that looms over all of us each year. Have you considered the value of your Tax information to a criminal?  Today we will cover more on this and how you can protect yourself.

The person who started this whole Walking Dead series has a brand new series that's coming out and she has some creepy thoughts about technology.  More on this

Updates are important.  Guess who found out the hard way -- Yes that would be NYC IT.  Failure to update their systems brought the New York City wireless network down. So let's get right into it here.

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

---

Transcript:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment; it might contain errors.

Airing date: 04/20/2019

Home And Small Business Routers Hacked - NYC Wireless Down Due To Lack Of Updates - Fake Amazon Reviews Critical - Amazon Show The Feed Walking Dead Channing Powell

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey, everybody. We are getting going here. Of course, Craig Peterson. We're going to talk about some of the major tech stories. This week, we're going to talk about the hacker groups been hijacking DNS traffic on D-Link routers for months. Now, what does that mean to you? What can you do about it? How can you detect it? Facebook, the privacy kings, right? What's happening with Facebook and their really creepy portal? Yeah, it's kind of interesting, that little camera they have. Tax info, of course, April 15, time to file the personal taxes. What is happening? What's the cost? What's the value of your tax information online and why would they steal it? The founder, the person who started this whole Walking Dead series has a brand new series that's coming out. And she's got some creepy things to say about technology. And we've got the New York City wireless network down, I warned you. Don't say I didn't warn you guys about that and what's happening. So let's get right into it here.

Craig 1:12
DNS has, of course, been one of the most important parts of our internet for very, very long time. Time was we had to maintain hosts tables, we had to know where everybody was, we had to do hop routing, we'd send it to somebody that knew more, they had a bigger map of the internet. So you know, we had upstream providers and we would send it to them, we were all connected together. And it was really quite a hodgepodge. So DNS came out. And the idea behind DNS isa dynamic name system was to allow us now to have one massive name database. Now it was designed in the times when the internet was a much more friendly place. We didn't have bad guys out there running around, we didn't have opposition parties who are trying to shut us down, denial of service attacks and and hijacking domains. Well, actually, we kind of did have hijacking domains. Had a couple stolen from me back in the day, but it was a much more genteel place. And DNS was designed for a cooperative system. So if you want to go to Google com, or http://CraigPeterson.com or anywhere online, you could use the name, it would go to this DNS system, who would then look up that name, it would come back with an Internet address, and then that address would be used to route your data. Does that make sense to you? I, you know, I hopefully I explained that right. And simply enough. The idea is that we can using DNS just use names because as humans aren't great at remembering all of these multi multi digit numbers. And it's gotten even worse now with IPV6, but we're not going to get into that right now. So what's been happening with our wonderful little hacker group here, while the modems here from D-Link, ARG, DS-LINK, SECUTECH, and TOTOLINK, and you can see them here on my screen. You'll find them on my website, just go to http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. And you can watch along here, but for the last few months, they've really been hacking a lot, I have the list of known routers that have this vulnerability that had been hacked. And this is based on a one of the security companies that went and had up, poke around, Troy Mercer's, the guy's name, Bad Packets, his name of the company. And he's saying there were three major waves, there is a wave, late December, early February, late March as well, in 2019. But these attacks are still going on, these hacks are still out there. And what they're doing is they're taking the DNS information that you would normally have in your router, and they are changing it to some of these malicious DNS servers. Now, I've got it up on my screen, I just pulled it up from this article, which you will also find on ZDNet, which is when we're talking about or right there and http://CraigPeterson.com, that's probably the easiest way to find it. And I send it out today in my show notes as well, my show notes email, but these are the addresses. So if you want to check right now to see if your router has been compromised, have a look for these addresses in your DNS settings. And the idea here is they change the settings on your router, it now provides those DNS addresses to your other equipment in your home or your office. So now when your other equipment tries to go somewhere online, they have the ability to intercept it, because they just say hey, yeah, Google isn't at 123 Main Street in Merrimack. No, no, no, it's at 1745 Lenin street in Moscow, and some how now your traffic in some going to Moscow? Well, in this case, right? This kind of looks like it's some Brazilian people. They're really trying to do this the most. But they've hijacked traffic that's been meant for Netflix, Google, PayPal, and some Brazilian banks. So the idea here is you try and go to one of these sites. And what do they require you to do? They require you to log in. Or maybe there's a cookie set in your browser that they can read and use to login. So they try and get you to login, get the information from you. And then now they've got your information, we already discussed why they want it. And we'll get into in just a couple more minutes too when we're talking about what's happening right now with your tax information. But they are using what are called bulletproof hosting providers, in case you're not familiar with that is these bulletproof hosting providers. And I'm going to stick their ASs here, up on the screen. If you're a total geek, you will find right there. There we go.

Craig 6:01
There's AS's which are autonomous systems, part of the internet backbone. But bulletproof hosting providers will not provide information about their clients to law enforcement. And they try and prevent anybody from figuring out who their customers are. So these two hosting providers of the guys that are doing it, this has all happened before, there's a massive, malvertising operation. Sometimes they'll use these DNS attacks, in order to inject into the stream ads. We've had ISPs, legit ones here in the US who've been doing similar things. If you try and go to a site that doesn't have a DNS entry, guess what they're going to do?

Craig 6:44
Yeah, they're going to send you to their site to their advertising.

Craig 6:49
So that's what's been going on. If you are using any one of these routers button up on the screen, again, which are basically the D-Links, ARG, DS-LINK, SECUTECH, and TOTOLINK, as well as many others. Make sure you update them, upgrading them or replace them. And I went over this in quite a bit of detail in my most recent master course, about what is happening out there and what you need to be aware of. All right.

Craig 7:21
So let's move on to our next article. This is something I warned everybody about last year. And then again, I warned everybody about just about a month ago. And as it turns out our friends at New York City, they kind of knew about it, too, but they didn't really do anything about it. And that is this New York City wireless network. And it is down due to a bug at least it has been down. They've been working on trying to get this thing back up online, which makes sense, right?

Craig 7:58
And this has to do with failure to update. How many times have we talked about that being a real problem out there. And the failure to update in this case is all of our wonderful data that they're using to allow the police, fire departments and others to communicate. Now, the fire department is saying they got off of what's called NYC WIN which is their wide area internet. They got off of it a couple of years ago, they switched over to Verizon mobile data. And they're using that in order to communicate with the hospitals when they're transporting patients and things. But the transit officials can't remotely control 12,000 plus traffic lights, traffic cameras, NYPD license plate readers are down. This is according to the New York Post. It crashed on Saturday, April 6. Do you remember that date?

Craig 8:55
Yeah, I warned everybody, right. Remember that one guy quoted him saying I am not going to be anywhere near an airplane on April 6th? Well, the the Department of it there New York City is paying Northrop Grumman about $40 million a year to run this network that cost them a half a billion to put in place and has been in service in for 10 years. And they never updated some of the core components. Why would you use GPS? Here's what's happening.

Craig 9:28
The GPS, older GPS equipment had what's called a rollover event. They were using Okay, there's a little geeky but 32 bit counters, you remember the old 32 bit computers and you got upgrade you want 64 bit Windows and 32 bit Windows. Remember all that thing, while these older GPS units had 32 bit counters in them. And what that meant is come April 6th, they went from it's 5pm on April 5th to it's zero pm. It rolls back to zero, which goes back to the Epic, which I'm not sure what it wasn't GPS, and the Unix world it was 1970. But everything got messed up. So now all of a sudden, their traffic cameras, security cameras are all saying that they are down for maintenance because they are down and they're down hard. The same thing with license plate readers, not all of them, but the ones that were older, all are failing on them now. But they use GPS for the clocks. Now think about gridlock. Gridlock is a term that was invented in the city of New York. And what it meant was they have this grid laid out, right, it's all beautiful grid straight lines. And gridlocked meant that traffic couldn't move, because the lights weren't properly synchronized. And it was there for decades. And they they came up with that term. So they decided they had to synchronize all of the light so that traffic could flow properly. Well, traffic isn't flowing properly, because now the clocks that are in the light, the traffic lights that were using a clock coming from the satellites via the GPS signal. That GPS receivers not working, the clocks are now falling out of sync. Some of them I suspect pretty quickly falling out of sync. So now New York's in for more gridlock, hopefully, they'll get this fixed pretty quickly. But it's a very, very big deal. Police have been sent to spots with vehicle mounted readers where the readers are failing. And I kind of find that interesting, too, because you're talking about license plate readers really, that's a critical piece of infrastructure. I guess it is if you're trying to find people who owe money on parking tickets, but otherwise, and fire department and you New York with a patient care reports to hospitals, they've got that all fixed. They're saying they're all set and according to New York Post Northrop Grumman declined to comment is, is that a shocker? Is that a shocker to you as well?

Craig 12:09
Yeah, of course, they're not going to comment on that sort of thing. Alright, so next up here, let's go to our fake Amazon reviews stories. This is just crazy here. Have you gone to Amazon? Have you used some of their review stuff? I know I have. And it's, it's you know, it's very handy. And I use it quite a bit, right. And that's kind of the stars that are that are on top of the page, and they put this up on the screen for you.

Craig 12:42
And a five star reviews, can you trust them? Well this particular reporter from the Hustle, went underground and spent two weeks there and found out what was really happening. So gives a, actually, I'm not even sure what the name of the author of this article is. They don't mention their name, and they don't have credit. Okay, maybe it's Zachary Crockett, that might be it.

Craig 13:11
So, here's what he said. He said he went to this private Facebook group, this underground Facebook group, and was chatting with this person named Lien Xi, an Amazon seller from Guangzhou China. And she offered him a deal. If he gave her a five star review. For her iPhone charger. Now he would need to buy the charger from Amazon. So that could be a verified purchase. And then what she would do is she would refund him via PayPal and pay him a $10 commission. So he was asking, Hey, isn't this illegal? And her response was? Well, that she didn't say no. She said what you will love is all she said right? So he looked up or product review. And you can see this on my screen here http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. 

Craig 14:09
But he found her iPhone charger on Amazon. And it had almost 4000 5-star reviews.

Craig 14:19
Isn't that just amazing?

Craig 14:21
Also got Amazon's Choice Label, which is very, very valuable. I know I use that. So when I'm looking on something on Amazon, I'm looking at the stars. And I'm looking at the Amazon's choice on the little black box that comes up. And then occasionally, depending on the price of the item, I'll scroll down to read the reviews. Well, apparently I'm not alone. And if you do the same thing, you're not alone, either. Because what it's saying here is 65% of us trust online reviews. 82% of American adults check the product reviews before making a purchase. I think that's low frankly, I think it's almost 100%. If you're an Amazon, right, it's probably 100%. But just generally shopping online is probably more like 82 I can see that.

Craig 15:11
So research is showing that we're more swayed by a simple star rating than what the reviewers actually write. And I've got to also go Let me see pop hit head a little bit here. Some of these reviews and you might have seen stuff like this. I know I have. And it really upset me. You see reviews and he's saying this one product is looking at. this is another guy this guy named Tommy Noonan had 580 reviews, and every single one of them was five stars. But he recalls people would write things like I haven't tried this product but and then leave a glowing review. Well, does that smell like it's a setup, or what? It definitely does. Let me show you this here. Okay, on the screen again, http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. Facebook reviews are boosting a lot of products. And I've seen stats saying it's 20% all the way up to 60% of these are fake. But look at this, headphones, it saying the fake reviews, the average star rating is 4.89 out of five. And the real reviews are 3.99. So that's a difference for headphones. I'm almost a whole star.

Craig 16:28
Isn't that amazing? So it's showing up as five stars almost when it should be four stars. Then what happened is there's a guy out there who's doing some research. Fakespot is where you'll find it. Fakespot.com. And they came up with some of these stats. And they are absolutely shocking. When you get right down to it here I'm going to bring this up. So it's my absolute full desktop view here. So you can see this whole thing and in more detail. But there it is, right headphones, cell phone accessories, pest control, car control, sexual wellness, pet supplies, all of these things, vitamins and supplements, by the way, kind of the bottom of the list. They they only have a differential between fake and real stars of the quarter star here, bottom line. And then there's another one I want to show you here too. This is the search on unreliable Amazon reviews. This is a chart again, that I've got up on, you'll see it on YouTube. But they are hosting, Amazon's hosting 1.8 million vendors and sellers who are selling nearly 600 million items that are generating about 9.6 million new product reviews every month. So really the the big deal here, the big question is, how can you tell when they are fake? How can Amazon tell? If you're talking about 10 million reviews a month, how can they tell? Well, there's some ways to do it. They're kind of trying to do it. But I've got to say I think they have a negative motivation in trying to do it. I'm not sure it's all it's cracked up to be. Because by having these people shipping products directly from China to Amazon's warehouses in bulk. So they ship 10,000, 100,000 of these things to Amazon warehouses, Amazon, then prepositions them in warehouses close to where they think there will be people that will be buying them. And then those people who are looking to buy them can get them very quickly, right? That's the whole idea behind it.

Craig 18:38
Well, you're cutting out the middleman, instead of having somebody buy it from China, ship it to the US and then ship them in with smaller quantity used to Amazon, the Chinese manufacturers effectively are shipping it right to Amazon, who ships that right to you. So that's saving you a lot of money, which I would prefer recently called a disincentive. Right? I don't think Amazon's purposely trying to be, you know, hiding things from us. But be very careful out there. Because there's been a huge rush in the marketplace, there are dozens of products that are almost indistinguishable from each other. And frankly, that's exactly what what they're taking advantage of right now. With these fake reviews, how do they get their product well known while they just make themselves a fake little review, right? That makes it easy enough.

Craig 19:30
So let me pull up our next little article. And this is fascinating. And I am totally looking forward to seeing this when it comes out. And this is from Yahoo, and right now they just had a film festival over in Cannes over in southern France. And Channing Powell, you might have heard that name before. She's the lady who founded, who started Walking Dead. And she's been thinking about what's happening with technology now and what's happening with technology in the future. And this is an article from Yahoo News that they picked up from AFP Wire. But she says she is terrified of what big tech might be up to. She has a new show called The Feed. And it's premiering in Cannes. And that's the just this week, by the way. And my birthday, by the way this week as well. It's premiering and Cannes this week, and it's all about a dystopian future now who hasn't heard about dystopian futures? Right? That's it's all normal. Well, what she's saying is Elon Musk, and Facebook are both trying to develop technology that can allow you to remotely control things. But The Feed, this new Amazon series goes a step further. Not only can you control things with your mind, but people you can send your feelings, what you're seeing, what you're smelling, everything you can send it to someone else in social media. So someone else can live your life. Well, what happens if someone's in the middle of that, a company, like a Facebook or whomever. And let's say they're malicious, and they modify that, or they they play with your mind and your emotions, because now they can send emotions to you. And the cells, the smells, and the the eyesight, everything to make it seem real well, that's what this is all about. And she says that Elon Musk right now is developing a neural lace computer that covers the entire brain that you would control with thought, okay. She also goes in and talks about what's been happening at MIT, they have something that clips on your ear, and will do some remote control stuff for you. She's saying she's 39 years old, by the way, so she's not quite a millennial. But she's very concerned, you know, we got our iPhones with us all the time, and people just can't leave them behind. They're checking Instagram constantly. So what's going to end up happening here? There's some companies already in Belgium, in Sweden that are implanting chips into people. When here's a direct quote from here to that I totally agree with, when somebody like Elon Musk, who's a radical libertarian, who's inside all of this development and understanding of it. When someone like Elon Musk is telling government that you need to regulate us and stop us from doing what we are doing, that is absolutely terrifying, absolutely terrifying. And frankly, we're at a tipping point now. The Chinese government has already started a social credit score, where they will now we reward you or punish you, based on social credit that starts January 1, 2020.

Craig 23:10
That's the tipping point. I talked last week on my show about what has happened in Venezuela, they have purchased the Chinese social credit system, where now you have a national ID card that you sir, everything from banking through voting, they know how you voted, they know where your money's coming from. And if you're getting any money from the government, they can, will and do control it. So maybe we're already past the tipping point, she doesn't say that she says, you know, we're really close. But maybe we are already passed it. And and frankly, that's scary. That really scares me the bottom line.

Craig 23:49
Alright, so we've got a couple more articles. And we've only got a couple more minutes. So let's get to those pretty quickly here.

Craig 23:57
Let's get that up on my screen. And I'm going to let's see. So let's talk about this really quick. And this has to do with your taxes. You have of course been paying taxes for years, right? Just one of the two things that that is certain than life, death and taxes. So this is an article from Fox Business and I got it up on my screen, YouTube or excuse me http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. But we have our taxes out there. IRS is said to have the largest database in the world. And that doesn't surprise me. But here's how much it's worth. We filed W2s and 1040s. There's the business stuff that's out there. They are all available for purchase online. And you've heard these tips before use multi-factor authentication with your bank, right? Use a password manager, don't say passwords in your browser, file your taxes as soon as possible. So that with the bad guys file of false tax reporting your name, it's not going it's going to pop up a flag it's not going to go through. Don't give away personal information as you have to never transfer money based on an email, right? All the basic stuff. Well, here's how much your information is worth. I'm going to pull us up on the screen. Here we go right now. So basically, for $1,000, a hacker can purchase access to a US based bank account, file a fake return, claim the IRS refund and cash out through cryptocurrency exchange. And they will make more not 100% return on their thousand dollar investment. That's the bottom line here. So they're really are trying to do it. IRS is saying that there's 1.4 billion breach attempts every year, many of them are coming from nation states, which frankly, doesn't surprise me in the least. Why not? It's a good way to fund your operations when you get right down to it.

Craig 26:05
And then we got one more article really quickly here. I couldn't believe it when our friends over at Facebook decided that they would go ahead, I just couldn't believe this, that they would go ahead and release a nice little creepy device.

Craig 26:27
This is the Portal Have you heard about their Portal before? This is a device they were selling for 200 bucks and it had in at some pretty darn neat technology. And this technologies designed to be able to recognize faces in the room, follow faces. And you could call out to your family and friends you know really cool stuff that an article by our friends over at Boeing Boeing. Well, the bottom line is who wants to buy a telescreen from Facebook? Nobody trusts them. They were selling it six months ago for 200 bucks. Apparently, it hasn't been selling very well. And as part of Facebook's apology tour they've been doing for the last year, they dropped the price. So if you want Facebook to spy on you in your home, and track you and your face as you walk around the room, which is nice if you're cooking dinner and you're talking with someone and it's creepy if you're not, then go ahead for 99 bucks, you can get it right now as well. So that's it for today. Have a great week. We are putting these up online as well. You can see them at http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube for all of the YouTube people who want to follow it and we're putting our security tips up there and other things as well. So it should be a good time for all. Keep an eye out and please do subscribe. Follow me over there http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. And I will be back next week right here. And I'll be here with Jack Heath on Monday morning and Jim Polito on Tuesday morning and an even more throughout the week. So keep an eye on my podcast and that's at http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes. Take care everybody. Have a great week ahead. Bye bye. 

--- 

Related articles:

5-Star Phonies: Inside The Fake Amazon Review Complex

Here’s How Much Your Tax Info Is Worth On The Dark Web

NYC Wireless Network Down Due To Y2K-Like Software Bug

Hacker Group Has Been Hijacking DNS Traffic On D-Link Routers For Three Months

‘They’re In Our Heads’: TV Series Tackles Big-Tech Nightmare

Facebook Slashes Price Of Its Creepy Portal Home Surveillance Telescreen
---

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

Did you upgrade your Router?  If not you probably have been hacked by hacker groups have been hijacking DNS traffic on D-Link routers for months and I will get into that more today.

Yet again, Facebook is in the news and again it is for their privacy and their cameras so i will discuss the implications of this.

April 15 -- the date that looms over all of us each year. Have you considered the value of your Tax information to a criminal?  Today we will cover more on this and how you can protect yourself.

The person who started this whole Walking Dead series has a brand new series that's coming out and she has some creepy thoughts about technology.  More on this

Updates are important.  Guess who found out the hard way -- Yes that would be NYC IT.  Failure to update their systems brought the New York City wireless network down. So let's get right into it here.

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

---

Transcript:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment; it might contain errors.

Airing date: 04/20/2019

Home And Small Business Routers Hacked - NYC Wireless Down Due To Lack Of Updates - Fake Amazon Reviews Critical - Amazon Show The Feed Walking Dead Channing Powell

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey, everybody. We are getting going here. Of course, Craig Peterson. We're going to talk about some of the major tech stories. This week, we're going to talk about the hacker groups been hijacking DNS traffic on D-Link routers for months. Now, what does that mean to you? What can you do about it? How can you detect it? Facebook, the privacy kings, right? What's happening with Facebook and their really creepy portal? Yeah, it's kind of interesting, that little camera they have. Tax info, of course, April 15, time to file the personal taxes. What is happening? What's the cost? What's the value of your tax information online and why would they steal it? The founder, the person who started this whole Walking Dead series has a brand new series that's coming out. And she's got some creepy things to say about technology. And we've got the New York City wireless network down, I warned you. Don't say I didn't warn you guys about that and what's happening. So let's get right into it here.

Craig 1:12
DNS has, of course, been one of the most important parts of our internet for very, very long time. Time was we had to maintain hosts tables, we had to know where everybody was, we had to do hop routing, we'd send it to somebody that knew more, they had a bigger map of the internet. So you know, we had upstream providers and we would send it to them, we were all connected together. And it was really quite a hodgepodge. So DNS came out. And the idea behind DNS isa dynamic name system was to allow us now to have one massive name database. Now it was designed in the times when the internet was a much more friendly place. We didn't have bad guys out there running around, we didn't have opposition parties who are trying to shut us down, denial of service attacks and and hijacking domains. Well, actually, we kind of did have hijacking domains. Had a couple stolen from me back in the day, but it was a much more genteel place. And DNS was designed for a cooperative system. So if you want to go to Google com, or http://CraigPeterson.com or anywhere online, you could use the name, it would go to this DNS system, who would then look up that name, it would come back with an Internet address, and then that address would be used to route your data. Does that make sense to you? I, you know, I hopefully I explained that right. And simply enough. The idea is that we can using DNS just use names because as humans aren't great at remembering all of these multi multi digit numbers. And it's gotten even worse now with IPV6, but we're not going to get into that right now. So what's been happening with our wonderful little hacker group here, while the modems here from D-Link, ARG, DS-LINK, SECUTECH, and TOTOLINK, and you can see them here on my screen. You'll find them on my website, just go to http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. And you can watch along here, but for the last few months, they've really been hacking a lot, I have the list of known routers that have this vulnerability that had been hacked. And this is based on a one of the security companies that went and had up, poke around, Troy Mercer's, the guy's name, Bad Packets, his name of the company. And he's saying there were three major waves, there is a wave, late December, early February, late March as well, in 2019. But these attacks are still going on, these hacks are still out there. And what they're doing is they're taking the DNS information that you would normally have in your router, and they are changing it to some of these malicious DNS servers. Now, I've got it up on my screen, I just pulled it up from this article, which you will also find on ZDNet, which is when we're talking about or right there and http://CraigPeterson.com, that's probably the easiest way to find it. And I send it out today in my show notes as well, my show notes email, but these are the addresses. So if you want to check right now to see if your router has been compromised, have a look for these addresses in your DNS settings. And the idea here is they change the settings on your router, it now provides those DNS addresses to your other equipment in your home or your office. So now when your other equipment tries to go somewhere online, they have the ability to intercept it, because they just say hey, yeah, Google isn't at 123 Main Street in Merrimack. No, no, no, it's at 1745 Lenin street in Moscow, and some how now your traffic in some going to Moscow? Well, in this case, right? This kind of looks like it's some Brazilian people. They're really trying to do this the most. But they've hijacked traffic that's been meant for Netflix, Google, PayPal, and some Brazilian banks. So the idea here is you try and go to one of these sites. And what do they require you to do? They require you to log in. Or maybe there's a cookie set in your browser that they can read and use to login. So they try and get you to login, get the information from you. And then now they've got your information, we already discussed why they want it. And we'll get into in just a couple more minutes too when we're talking about what's happening right now with your tax information. But they are using what are called bulletproof hosting providers, in case you're not familiar with that is these bulletproof hosting providers. And I'm going to stick their ASs here, up on the screen. If you're a total geek, you will find right there. There we go.

Craig 6:01
There's AS's which are autonomous systems, part of the internet backbone. But bulletproof hosting providers will not provide information about their clients to law enforcement. And they try and prevent anybody from figuring out who their customers are. So these two hosting providers of the guys that are doing it, this has all happened before, there's a massive, malvertising operation. Sometimes they'll use these DNS attacks, in order to inject into the stream ads. We've had ISPs, legit ones here in the US who've been doing similar things. If you try and go to a site that doesn't have a DNS entry, guess what they're going to do?

Craig 6:44
Yeah, they're going to send you to their site to their advertising.

Craig 6:49
So that's what's been going on. If you are using any one of these routers button up on the screen, again, which are basically the D-Links, ARG, DS-LINK, SECUTECH, and TOTOLINK, as well as many others. Make sure you update them, upgrading them or replace them. And I went over this in quite a bit of detail in my most recent master course, about what is happening out there and what you need to be aware of. All right.

Craig 7:21
So let's move on to our next article. This is something I warned everybody about last year. And then again, I warned everybody about just about a month ago. And as it turns out our friends at New York City, they kind of knew about it, too, but they didn't really do anything about it. And that is this New York City wireless network. And it is down due to a bug at least it has been down. They've been working on trying to get this thing back up online, which makes sense, right?

Craig 7:58
And this has to do with failure to update. How many times have we talked about that being a real problem out there. And the failure to update in this case is all of our wonderful data that they're using to allow the police, fire departments and others to communicate. Now, the fire department is saying they got off of what's called NYC WIN which is their wide area internet. They got off of it a couple of years ago, they switched over to Verizon mobile data. And they're using that in order to communicate with the hospitals when they're transporting patients and things. But the transit officials can't remotely control 12,000 plus traffic lights, traffic cameras, NYPD license plate readers are down. This is according to the New York Post. It crashed on Saturday, April 6. Do you remember that date?

Craig 8:55
Yeah, I warned everybody, right. Remember that one guy quoted him saying I am not going to be anywhere near an airplane on April 6th? Well, the the Department of it there New York City is paying Northrop Grumman about $40 million a year to run this network that cost them a half a billion to put in place and has been in service in for 10 years. And they never updated some of the core components. Why would you use GPS? Here's what's happening.

Craig 9:28
The GPS, older GPS equipment had what's called a rollover event. They were using Okay, there's a little geeky but 32 bit counters, you remember the old 32 bit computers and you got upgrade you want 64 bit Windows and 32 bit Windows. Remember all that thing, while these older GPS units had 32 bit counters in them. And what that meant is come April 6th, they went from it's 5pm on April 5th to it's zero pm. It rolls back to zero, which goes back to the Epic, which I'm not sure what it wasn't GPS, and the Unix world it was 1970. But everything got messed up. So now all of a sudden, their traffic cameras, security cameras are all saying that they are down for maintenance because they are down and they're down hard. The same thing with license plate readers, not all of them, but the ones that were older, all are failing on them now. But they use GPS for the clocks. Now think about gridlock. Gridlock is a term that was invented in the city of New York. And what it meant was they have this grid laid out, right, it's all beautiful grid straight lines. And gridlocked meant that traffic couldn't move, because the lights weren't properly synchronized. And it was there for decades. And they they came up with that term. So they decided they had to synchronize all of the light so that traffic could flow properly. Well, traffic isn't flowing properly, because now the clocks that are in the light, the traffic lights that were using a clock coming from the satellites via the GPS signal. That GPS receivers not working, the clocks are now falling out of sync. Some of them I suspect pretty quickly falling out of sync. So now New York's in for more gridlock, hopefully, they'll get this fixed pretty quickly. But it's a very, very big deal. Police have been sent to spots with vehicle mounted readers where the readers are failing. And I kind of find that interesting, too, because you're talking about license plate readers really, that's a critical piece of infrastructure. I guess it is if you're trying to find people who owe money on parking tickets, but otherwise, and fire department and you New York with a patient care reports to hospitals, they've got that all fixed. They're saying they're all set and according to New York Post Northrop Grumman declined to comment is, is that a shocker? Is that a shocker to you as well?

Craig 12:09
Yeah, of course, they're not going to comment on that sort of thing. Alright, so next up here, let's go to our fake Amazon reviews stories. This is just crazy here. Have you gone to Amazon? Have you used some of their review stuff? I know I have. And it's, it's you know, it's very handy. And I use it quite a bit, right. And that's kind of the stars that are that are on top of the page, and they put this up on the screen for you.

Craig 12:42
And a five star reviews, can you trust them? Well this particular reporter from the Hustle, went underground and spent two weeks there and found out what was really happening. So gives a, actually, I'm not even sure what the name of the author of this article is. They don't mention their name, and they don't have credit. Okay, maybe it's Zachary Crockett, that might be it.

Craig 13:11
So, here's what he said. He said he went to this private Facebook group, this underground Facebook group, and was chatting with this person named Lien Xi, an Amazon seller from Guangzhou China. And she offered him a deal. If he gave her a five star review. For her iPhone charger. Now he would need to buy the charger from Amazon. So that could be a verified purchase. And then what she would do is she would refund him via PayPal and pay him a $10 commission. So he was asking, Hey, isn't this illegal? And her response was? Well, that she didn't say no. She said what you will love is all she said right? So he looked up or product review. And you can see this on my screen here http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. 

Craig 14:09
But he found her iPhone charger on Amazon. And it had almost 4000 5-star reviews.

Craig 14:19
Isn't that just amazing?

Craig 14:21
Also got Amazon's Choice Label, which is very, very valuable. I know I use that. So when I'm looking on something on Amazon, I'm looking at the stars. And I'm looking at the Amazon's choice on the little black box that comes up. And then occasionally, depending on the price of the item, I'll scroll down to read the reviews. Well, apparently I'm not alone. And if you do the same thing, you're not alone, either. Because what it's saying here is 65% of us trust online reviews. 82% of American adults check the product reviews before making a purchase. I think that's low frankly, I think it's almost 100%. If you're an Amazon, right, it's probably 100%. But just generally shopping online is probably more like 82 I can see that.

Craig 15:11
So research is showing that we're more swayed by a simple star rating than what the reviewers actually write. And I've got to also go Let me see pop hit head a little bit here. Some of these reviews and you might have seen stuff like this. I know I have. And it really upset me. You see reviews and he's saying this one product is looking at. this is another guy this guy named Tommy Noonan had 580 reviews, and every single one of them was five stars. But he recalls people would write things like I haven't tried this product but and then leave a glowing review. Well, does that smell like it's a setup, or what? It definitely does. Let me show you this here. Okay, on the screen again, http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. Facebook reviews are boosting a lot of products. And I've seen stats saying it's 20% all the way up to 60% of these are fake. But look at this, headphones, it saying the fake reviews, the average star rating is 4.89 out of five. And the real reviews are 3.99. So that's a difference for headphones. I'm almost a whole star.

Craig 16:28
Isn't that amazing? So it's showing up as five stars almost when it should be four stars. Then what happened is there's a guy out there who's doing some research. Fakespot is where you'll find it. Fakespot.com. And they came up with some of these stats. And they are absolutely shocking. When you get right down to it here I'm going to bring this up. So it's my absolute full desktop view here. So you can see this whole thing and in more detail. But there it is, right headphones, cell phone accessories, pest control, car control, sexual wellness, pet supplies, all of these things, vitamins and supplements, by the way, kind of the bottom of the list. They they only have a differential between fake and real stars of the quarter star here, bottom line. And then there's another one I want to show you here too. This is the search on unreliable Amazon reviews. This is a chart again, that I've got up on, you'll see it on YouTube. But they are hosting, Amazon's hosting 1.8 million vendors and sellers who are selling nearly 600 million items that are generating about 9.6 million new product reviews every month. So really the the big deal here, the big question is, how can you tell when they are fake? How can Amazon tell? If you're talking about 10 million reviews a month, how can they tell? Well, there's some ways to do it. They're kind of trying to do it. But I've got to say I think they have a negative motivation in trying to do it. I'm not sure it's all it's cracked up to be. Because by having these people shipping products directly from China to Amazon's warehouses in bulk. So they ship 10,000, 100,000 of these things to Amazon warehouses, Amazon, then prepositions them in warehouses close to where they think there will be people that will be buying them. And then those people who are looking to buy them can get them very quickly, right? That's the whole idea behind it.

Craig 18:38
Well, you're cutting out the middleman, instead of having somebody buy it from China, ship it to the US and then ship them in with smaller quantity used to Amazon, the Chinese manufacturers effectively are shipping it right to Amazon, who ships that right to you. So that's saving you a lot of money, which I would prefer recently called a disincentive. Right? I don't think Amazon's purposely trying to be, you know, hiding things from us. But be very careful out there. Because there's been a huge rush in the marketplace, there are dozens of products that are almost indistinguishable from each other. And frankly, that's exactly what what they're taking advantage of right now. With these fake reviews, how do they get their product well known while they just make themselves a fake little review, right? That makes it easy enough.

Craig 19:30
So let me pull up our next little article. And this is fascinating. And I am totally looking forward to seeing this when it comes out. And this is from Yahoo, and right now they just had a film festival over in Cannes over in southern France. And Channing Powell, you might have heard that name before. She's the lady who founded, who started Walking Dead. And she's been thinking about what's happening with technology now and what's happening with technology in the future. And this is an article from Yahoo News that they picked up from AFP Wire. But she says she is terrified of what big tech might be up to. She has a new show called The Feed. And it's premiering in Cannes. And that's the just this week, by the way. And my birthday, by the way this week as well. It's premiering and Cannes this week, and it's all about a dystopian future now who hasn't heard about dystopian futures? Right? That's it's all normal. Well, what she's saying is Elon Musk, and Facebook are both trying to develop technology that can allow you to remotely control things. But The Feed, this new Amazon series goes a step further. Not only can you control things with your mind, but people you can send your feelings, what you're seeing, what you're smelling, everything you can send it to someone else in social media. So someone else can live your life. Well, what happens if someone's in the middle of that, a company, like a Facebook or whomever. And let's say they're malicious, and they modify that, or they they play with your mind and your emotions, because now they can send emotions to you. And the cells, the smells, and the the eyesight, everything to make it seem real well, that's what this is all about. And she says that Elon Musk right now is developing a neural lace computer that covers the entire brain that you would control with thought, okay. She also goes in and talks about what's been happening at MIT, they have something that clips on your ear, and will do some remote control stuff for you. She's saying she's 39 years old, by the way, so she's not quite a millennial. But she's very concerned, you know, we got our iPhones with us all the time, and people just can't leave them behind. They're checking Instagram constantly. So what's going to end up happening here? There's some companies already in Belgium, in Sweden that are implanting chips into people. When here's a direct quote from here to that I totally agree with, when somebody like Elon Musk, who's a radical libertarian, who's inside all of this development and understanding of it. When someone like Elon Musk is telling government that you need to regulate us and stop us from doing what we are doing, that is absolutely terrifying, absolutely terrifying. And frankly, we're at a tipping point now. The Chinese government has already started a social credit score, where they will now we reward you or punish you, based on social credit that starts January 1, 2020.

Craig 23:10
That's the tipping point. I talked last week on my show about what has happened in Venezuela, they have purchased the Chinese social credit system, where now you have a national ID card that you sir, everything from banking through voting, they know how you voted, they know where your money's coming from. And if you're getting any money from the government, they can, will and do control it. So maybe we're already past the tipping point, she doesn't say that she says, you know, we're really close. But maybe we are already passed it. And and frankly, that's scary. That really scares me the bottom line.

Craig 23:49
Alright, so we've got a couple more articles. And we've only got a couple more minutes. So let's get to those pretty quickly here.

Craig 23:57
Let's get that up on my screen. And I'm going to let's see. So let's talk about this really quick. And this has to do with your taxes. You have of course been paying taxes for years, right? Just one of the two things that that is certain than life, death and taxes. So this is an article from Fox Business and I got it up on my screen, YouTube or excuse me http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. But we have our taxes out there. IRS is said to have the largest database in the world. And that doesn't surprise me. But here's how much it's worth. We filed W2s and 1040s. There's the business stuff that's out there. They are all available for purchase online. And you've heard these tips before use multi-factor authentication with your bank, right? Use a password manager, don't say passwords in your browser, file your taxes as soon as possible. So that with the bad guys file of false tax reporting your name, it's not going it's going to pop up a flag it's not going to go through. Don't give away personal information as you have to never transfer money based on an email, right? All the basic stuff. Well, here's how much your information is worth. I'm going to pull us up on the screen. Here we go right now. So basically, for $1,000, a hacker can purchase access to a US based bank account, file a fake return, claim the IRS refund and cash out through cryptocurrency exchange. And they will make more not 100% return on their thousand dollar investment. That's the bottom line here. So they're really are trying to do it. IRS is saying that there's 1.4 billion breach attempts every year, many of them are coming from nation states, which frankly, doesn't surprise me in the least. Why not? It's a good way to fund your operations when you get right down to it.

Craig 26:05
And then we got one more article really quickly here. I couldn't believe it when our friends over at Facebook decided that they would go ahead, I just couldn't believe this, that they would go ahead and release a nice little creepy device.

Craig 26:27
This is the Portal Have you heard about their Portal before? This is a device they were selling for 200 bucks and it had in at some pretty darn neat technology. And this technologies designed to be able to recognize faces in the room, follow faces. And you could call out to your family and friends you know really cool stuff that an article by our friends over at Boeing Boeing. Well, the bottom line is who wants to buy a telescreen from Facebook? Nobody trusts them. They were selling it six months ago for 200 bucks. Apparently, it hasn't been selling very well. And as part of Facebook's apology tour they've been doing for the last year, they dropped the price. So if you want Facebook to spy on you in your home, and track you and your face as you walk around the room, which is nice if you're cooking dinner and you're talking with someone and it's creepy if you're not, then go ahead for 99 bucks, you can get it right now as well. So that's it for today. Have a great week. We are putting these up online as well. You can see them at http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube for all of the YouTube people who want to follow it and we're putting our security tips up there and other things as well. So it should be a good time for all. Keep an eye out and please do subscribe. Follow me over there http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. And I will be back next week right here. And I'll be here with Jack Heath on Monday morning and Jim Polito on Tuesday morning and an even more throughout the week. So keep an eye on my podcast and that's at http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes. Take care everybody. Have a great week ahead. Bye bye. 

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Related articles:

5-Star Phonies: Inside The Fake Amazon Review Complex

Here’s How Much Your Tax Info Is Worth On The Dark Web

NYC Wireless Network Down Due To Y2K-Like Software Bug

Hacker Group Has Been Hijacking DNS Traffic On D-Link Routers For Three Months

‘They’re In Our Heads’: TV Series Tackles Big-Tech Nightmare

Facebook Slashes Price Of Its Creepy Portal Home Surveillance Telescreen
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Are we living in a virtual world? Is Amazon spying on us? Is your car watching you? Find out more as Craig discusses these topics with Ken and Matt on the WGAN Morning News this Wednesday morning.

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

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Related Articles:

Amazon Workers Are Listening To What You Tell Alexa

Are We Living In A Simulation? This Mit Scientist Says It’s More Likely Than Not

Your Car Is Watching You. Who Owns The Data?
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Transcript:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 04/17/2019

Our Virtual world - Data Cars Are Collecting - The Truth About Amazon Alexa Monitoring

Craig Peterson  0:00 
Good morning, everybody. I expect I'll be doing a couple of It's a Security Thing podcasts this week. So make sure you check back. Today I was on with Ken and Matt. And we reviewed of course the articles in the news this week we talked about the cars and the amount of data they are collecting on us right now. We spent a little bit of time talking about this whole what's happening with virtual reality thing and, you know, a couple of other topics came up as well. So here we go with Ken and Matt.

Matt Gagnon 0:34
Alright, here we go. It is 7:38 on the WGAN Morning News on Wednesday morning. And Craig Peterson joins us as he typically does on this day to go over what's happening in the world of technology Craig Peterson. Welcome to the program, sir.

Craig 0:46
Hey, he does you know, I remember back in the, must have been 74, 75 driving down the Decarie expressway in Montreal and having the axle in our car come out the side rear axle. And it was hanging out about two and a half three feet almost ready to completely come out. So we didn't just almost lose a tire or lose a tire. We almost lost the whole wheel and the actual want to happen to be actual came out of our car. That would, let me tell you that was quite a quite an event because the Decarie expressway was was a very busy back then in the mid 70s.

Ken Altshuler 1:28
How did the wheel on the other side stay on if your axle came out that far?

Craig 1:34
What is the differential in the rear right, rear wheel drive car. So there's really two axles and so the one on the left side somehow the bearing went and became detached from the differential and slid it out. Man, that'll wake you up.

Ken 1:51
Yes, it will. Speaking of waking up, Craig Peterson. I thought that Alexa, can't listen to what's going on in your house?

Craig 2:02
Yeah, you know, there's been a lot of bad reporting on this. And you know, other than us right here, I think most stations tend to report things incorrectly. Knee jerk. Let me put it that way.

Matt 2:15  
Are you calling people a fake news?

Craig 2:16 
Fake news? Yeah, exactly. It's been all over the place just last week. So I'm not surprised you kind of caught up top this one Ken. But here's what they're saying. They're saying they're complaining that the Alexa is listening to you. And worse than than Amazon's people are listening to you. Here's the bottom line on this. And here's what's really happening. If you develop some software, you have to test it. And one of the things I never worked on was voice recognition software. I worked on signature recognition analysis, but never voice. Always a very difficult thing to do. And frankly, I am shocked and amazed how good voice recognition has become. Well, it's become really good. Not because somehow computers have gotten smarter or faster, that has nothing really to do with it. voice recognition has gotten really good because people are analyzing what the computers are doing. So you, you know, breaks down the speech and tries to understand you. And you have to have a human come in afterwards, make sure that computer did it correctly. Maybe you flag something that you want people to listen to, because the person just kept asking basically the same thing and the computer couldn't recognize it. So what's going on here right now is Amazon has a team, a worldwide team, a global team. And they examine a small portion of the recordings that the Alexa has made of your commands. So Matt, for instance, how would you tell an Amazon device to tune in to the radio station this morning?

Matt 4:02
Alexa, tune in to WGAN.

Craig 4:07 
Exactly. And so now Alexa is going to tune in and you have a great radio announcer voice.

Ken 4:14 
He does.

Matt 4:14
Thank you, I appreciate that.

Ken 4:15
Nobody says that to me clearly.

Craig 4:18
So it would pick it up and it would handle it pretty darn well. But a lot of us kind of mumble and you know, our accents are there from other languages we might speak and things. So the Amazon Alexa, the workers are not sitting there listening to all of your conversations. What's happening is a very small percentage of commands just like Matt gave, are analyzed by humans to make sure it's doing the right things. And then they use that to tune up the Alexa to be able to appropriately answer questions or obey commands. Google does it with their Google Home systems, Siri does it. Apple does it with their systems, and the workers don't have your name, your email address. They don't know who you are. They have nothing personally identifiable about you. All they're trying to do is make the speech recognition better. And they also if they hear something that might be considered suspicious, they do nothing with it, because they have no context. So people have been worried about that, too. And I can tell you, and you know, as an emergency medical professional for 10 years, I was a mandated reporter. And we had to report things that we thought were suspicious. Well, different people have different levels of suspicion. And we saw that in Blue Bloods, I love Blue Bloods on TV here this last week, where you have a woman who is there in a park and doesn't like the way another mother is talking to her and teasing her about this other mother's baby and stuff. So she reports it to the police and everything. So there's different levels of suspicion. And all you're hearing, when you're examining this, when this team is listening to the audio, is a 10 second snippet, a maximum of 30 seconds that you can't really tell what's going on. So don't worry about it. Yeah, they have it. Yeah, they're keeping it Yeah, they're analyzing it. But it bottom line, the best of my knowledge, even though it's been called up as evidence in some court cases, it's never actually been particularly valuable, other than in divorce cases.

Matt 6:32
All right, we're talking to Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru. He joins us on Wednesdays at this time to go over what's happening in the world of technology. And Craig, I rewatched The Matrix the other day. And I remember 1999, when that came out, which is now 20 years ago, my god in heaven, that it sparked a number of conversations between college philosophy majors about whether or not it was something that would show us that we actually did already live inside a simulation and whether or not The Matrix was real, and the movie was kind of showing us that reality, and so on and so forth. But this conversation is rearing its ugly head yet again, because there's an argument being made right now that we are, in fact, living in a simulation. So Craig, I guess my question to you is, am I currently plugged into a computer somewhere living my life as a simulation?

Craig 7:17
Yeah, it's a real interesting question. Oh, my gosh, I got into this in some detail on my podcast, too, because this is something that's fascinated me for at least 25 years before it came out, The Matrix came out. Do you remember the same time? Do you remember two more movies that came out in 98, 99? The 13th Floor and Dark City?

Matt 7:38  
I remember both of those movies.

Craig 7:40
Yeah. All kind of the same thing. Well, here's the bottom line on all this. I'll make this pretty quick. We could go on for hours. But the basic thinking is, we have virtual reality right now. I'm sure Ken uses it every day as he's playing his video games, right. And it's getting better and better as we go forward. At some point, this is going to be better than, well, it's much better than today. But it's going to be as good as the real world you won't be able to distinguish the real world from not it was even in the fifth, The 5th Day, right? Or The 6th Day. What was that Schwarzenegger movie?

Matt 8:22
I think it was the 6th Day wasn't it?

Craig 8:24 
6th Day.

Matt 8:26 
And I remember when we're talking about. Yeah. Not a lot of people remember that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie,

Craig 8:28
Well, the guy had a virtual girlfriend.

Matt 8:30 
Correct.

Craig 8:30 
So it gets to that point. And our computers are fast enough to be able to simulate people just like they did in these movies, then what's to say that some history major doesn't create a program that spins up a society from 500, a thousand years ago, and lets the program run. Lets things happen within the program, to try and see how people might have acted a thousand years ago, or changing things just a little bit here or there. What would happen? Well, if any of that is possible, and it is all possible, there's no question and then it'll be extremely possible in another, certainly within 50 years, some people are saying 20 or 30 years, then what are the odds that what we are experiencing is real? And in other words, if there was one society that went all the way past where we're at to indistinguishable virtual reality, to be able to create virtual reality, civilizations, what are the odds that we are that initial civilization, and not one of millions of likely virtual civilizations in the future? And so this is from an MIT science as he just came out with a book called The simulation hypothesis. There are quite a few books out about the same topic, but I love that, that title. And he is a computer scientist, Video game developer. He leads the Playlabs at MIT. And I'm assuming it's a he. Yeah, it is a he. Rizwan Virk. R-I-Z-W-A-N Virk. So if he's right, what does it mean to us? Does it matter? You know, does it all of a sudden change our lives in any way? They the answer's no. It's very interesting to think about that though, I agree with you Matt.

Ken 10:28
We are talking to our tech guru, Craig Peterson, who joins us every week at this time. 7:30 every Wednesdays. And you can go to http://CraigPeterson.com and get all this news all the time. Before we let you go, are you telling me now that my cars watching what I'm doing? I mean, I have no privacy in my car?

Craig 10:47  
None whatsoever.

Matt 10:49
You don't have any privacy anywhere Ken. 

Unknown 10:51
I guess so.

Matt 10:52
This is America in 2019.

Craig 10:54
Well, you know, when you're really good looking Matt, everyone's watching.

Ken 10:54
Exactly, really?

Craig 10:55 
Yeah. Yeah, I've heard that anyways. Well, I didn't realize this statistic. But cars now are capable, because really, it's just a computer on wheels. In fact, that's not even true. It is 20 to 30, at least computers on wheels in your car. And it can generate about 25 gigabytes of data every hour. Four terabytes a day. And they're saying that in another 10 years, that data from our cars is going to be worth almost a trillion dollars. So the big question out there right now is who owns that data from our cars and and how private is it going to be? Because when we take our cars, and even now, they are plugged into a network and able for instance, with Mercedes, they have engineers in Germany, that examine the data in your car to try and figure out if there's any issues, things you might not be aware of. Acura is doing some of those same things, many high end car brands are doing it and even lower end car brand are set up right now to plug your car into their computers, collect data and do some analysis. So who owns it? How private should it be? Could it be at this point in Europe, they have some laws that that aren't specifically about this, but the GDPR does kind of cover it. California has a lot that goes into effect next year. And that law is going to try and keep this private information private. But as much as 10 years ago, I know speaking of Decarie expressway in Montreal, I know in Montreal on Sherbrooke, they pulled a car over because people had reported it as speeding. The police didn't see it speed, but they pulled it over. They plugged a reader into that port in your car. And it reported that the car had within the last 10 minutes been doing 70 miles an hour on a city street and they issued a  ticket. So things to think about and maybe look forward to hear guys.

Matt 13:06 
All right. Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday. Appreciate it Craig as always. And we will talk to you again next week, sir.

Craig 13:15
Take care, guys. Bye Bye.

Ken 13:16
Thanks, Craig.

Craig 13:24
And I'll be back tomorrow. Take care guys. Bye bye.

---

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Are we living in a virtual world? Is Amazon spying on us? Is your car watching you? Find out more as Craig discusses these topics with Ken and Matt on the WGAN Morning News this Wednesday morning.

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

---

Related Articles:

Amazon Workers Are Listening To What You Tell Alexa

Are We Living In A Simulation? This Mit Scientist Says It’s More Likely Than Not

Your Car Is Watching You. Who Owns The Data?
---

Transcript:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 04/17/2019

Our Virtual world - Data Cars Are Collecting - The Truth About Amazon Alexa Monitoring

Craig Peterson  0:00 
Good morning, everybody. I expect I'll be doing a couple of It's a Security Thing podcasts this week. So make sure you check back. Today I was on with Ken and Matt. And we reviewed of course the articles in the news this week we talked about the cars and the amount of data they are collecting on us right now. We spent a little bit of time talking about this whole what's happening with virtual reality thing and, you know, a couple of other topics came up as well. So here we go with Ken and Matt.

Matt Gagnon 0:34
Alright, here we go. It is 7:38 on the WGAN Morning News on Wednesday morning. And Craig Peterson joins us as he typically does on this day to go over what's happening in the world of technology Craig Peterson. Welcome to the program, sir.

Craig 0:46
Hey, he does you know, I remember back in the, must have been 74, 75 driving down the Decarie expressway in Montreal and having the axle in our car come out the side rear axle. And it was hanging out about two and a half three feet almost ready to completely come out. So we didn't just almost lose a tire or lose a tire. We almost lost the whole wheel and the actual want to happen to be actual came out of our car. That would, let me tell you that was quite a quite an event because the Decarie expressway was was a very busy back then in the mid 70s.

Ken Altshuler 1:28
How did the wheel on the other side stay on if your axle came out that far?

Craig 1:34
What is the differential in the rear right, rear wheel drive car. So there's really two axles and so the one on the left side somehow the bearing went and became detached from the differential and slid it out. Man, that'll wake you up.

Ken 1:51
Yes, it will. Speaking of waking up, Craig Peterson. I thought that Alexa, can't listen to what's going on in your house?

Craig 2:02
Yeah, you know, there's been a lot of bad reporting on this. And you know, other than us right here, I think most stations tend to report things incorrectly. Knee jerk. Let me put it that way.

Matt 2:15  
Are you calling people a fake news?

Craig 2:16 
Fake news? Yeah, exactly. It's been all over the place just last week. So I'm not surprised you kind of caught up top this one Ken. But here's what they're saying. They're saying they're complaining that the Alexa is listening to you. And worse than than Amazon's people are listening to you. Here's the bottom line on this. And here's what's really happening. If you develop some software, you have to test it. And one of the things I never worked on was voice recognition software. I worked on signature recognition analysis, but never voice. Always a very difficult thing to do. And frankly, I am shocked and amazed how good voice recognition has become. Well, it's become really good. Not because somehow computers have gotten smarter or faster, that has nothing really to do with it. voice recognition has gotten really good because people are analyzing what the computers are doing. So you, you know, breaks down the speech and tries to understand you. And you have to have a human come in afterwards, make sure that computer did it correctly. Maybe you flag something that you want people to listen to, because the person just kept asking basically the same thing and the computer couldn't recognize it. So what's going on here right now is Amazon has a team, a worldwide team, a global team. And they examine a small portion of the recordings that the Alexa has made of your commands. So Matt, for instance, how would you tell an Amazon device to tune in to the radio station this morning?

Matt 4:02
Alexa, tune in to WGAN.

Craig 4:07 
Exactly. And so now Alexa is going to tune in and you have a great radio announcer voice.

Ken 4:14 
He does.

Matt 4:14
Thank you, I appreciate that.

Ken 4:15
Nobody says that to me clearly.

Craig 4:18
So it would pick it up and it would handle it pretty darn well. But a lot of us kind of mumble and you know, our accents are there from other languages we might speak and things. So the Amazon Alexa, the workers are not sitting there listening to all of your conversations. What's happening is a very small percentage of commands just like Matt gave, are analyzed by humans to make sure it's doing the right things. And then they use that to tune up the Alexa to be able to appropriately answer questions or obey commands. Google does it with their Google Home systems, Siri does it. Apple does it with their systems, and the workers don't have your name, your email address. They don't know who you are. They have nothing personally identifiable about you. All they're trying to do is make the speech recognition better. And they also if they hear something that might be considered suspicious, they do nothing with it, because they have no context. So people have been worried about that, too. And I can tell you, and you know, as an emergency medical professional for 10 years, I was a mandated reporter. And we had to report things that we thought were suspicious. Well, different people have different levels of suspicion. And we saw that in Blue Bloods, I love Blue Bloods on TV here this last week, where you have a woman who is there in a park and doesn't like the way another mother is talking to her and teasing her about this other mother's baby and stuff. So she reports it to the police and everything. So there's different levels of suspicion. And all you're hearing, when you're examining this, when this team is listening to the audio, is a 10 second snippet, a maximum of 30 seconds that you can't really tell what's going on. So don't worry about it. Yeah, they have it. Yeah, they're keeping it Yeah, they're analyzing it. But it bottom line, the best of my knowledge, even though it's been called up as evidence in some court cases, it's never actually been particularly valuable, other than in divorce cases.

Matt 6:32
All right, we're talking to Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru. He joins us on Wednesdays at this time to go over what's happening in the world of technology. And Craig, I rewatched The Matrix the other day. And I remember 1999, when that came out, which is now 20 years ago, my god in heaven, that it sparked a number of conversations between college philosophy majors about whether or not it was something that would show us that we actually did already live inside a simulation and whether or not The Matrix was real, and the movie was kind of showing us that reality, and so on and so forth. But this conversation is rearing its ugly head yet again, because there's an argument being made right now that we are, in fact, living in a simulation. So Craig, I guess my question to you is, am I currently plugged into a computer somewhere living my life as a simulation?

Craig 7:17
Yeah, it's a real interesting question. Oh, my gosh, I got into this in some detail on my podcast, too, because this is something that's fascinated me for at least 25 years before it came out, The Matrix came out. Do you remember the same time? Do you remember two more movies that came out in 98, 99? The 13th Floor and Dark City?

Matt 7:38  
I remember both of those movies.

Craig 7:40
Yeah. All kind of the same thing. Well, here's the bottom line on all this. I'll make this pretty quick. We could go on for hours. But the basic thinking is, we have virtual reality right now. I'm sure Ken uses it every day as he's playing his video games, right. And it's getting better and better as we go forward. At some point, this is going to be better than, well, it's much better than today. But it's going to be as good as the real world you won't be able to distinguish the real world from not it was even in the fifth, The 5th Day, right? Or The 6th Day. What was that Schwarzenegger movie?

Matt 8:22
I think it was the 6th Day wasn't it?

Craig 8:24 
6th Day.

Matt 8:26 
And I remember when we're talking about. Yeah. Not a lot of people remember that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie,

Craig 8:28
Well, the guy had a virtual girlfriend.

Matt 8:30 
Correct.

Craig 8:30 
So it gets to that point. And our computers are fast enough to be able to simulate people just like they did in these movies, then what's to say that some history major doesn't create a program that spins up a society from 500, a thousand years ago, and lets the program run. Lets things happen within the program, to try and see how people might have acted a thousand years ago, or changing things just a little bit here or there. What would happen? Well, if any of that is possible, and it is all possible, there's no question and then it'll be extremely possible in another, certainly within 50 years, some people are saying 20 or 30 years, then what are the odds that what we are experiencing is real? And in other words, if there was one society that went all the way past where we're at to indistinguishable virtual reality, to be able to create virtual reality, civilizations, what are the odds that we are that initial civilization, and not one of millions of likely virtual civilizations in the future? And so this is from an MIT science as he just came out with a book called The simulation hypothesis. There are quite a few books out about the same topic, but I love that, that title. And he is a computer scientist, Video game developer. He leads the Playlabs at MIT. And I'm assuming it's a he. Yeah, it is a he. Rizwan Virk. R-I-Z-W-A-N Virk. So if he's right, what does it mean to us? Does it matter? You know, does it all of a sudden change our lives in any way? They the answer's no. It's very interesting to think about that though, I agree with you Matt.

Ken 10:28
We are talking to our tech guru, Craig Peterson, who joins us every week at this time. 7:30 every Wednesdays. And you can go to http://CraigPeterson.com and get all this news all the time. Before we let you go, are you telling me now that my cars watching what I'm doing? I mean, I have no privacy in my car?

Craig 10:47  
None whatsoever.

Matt 10:49
You don't have any privacy anywhere Ken. 

Unknown 10:51
I guess so.

Matt 10:52
This is America in 2019.

Craig 10:54
Well, you know, when you're really good looking Matt, everyone's watching.

Ken 10:54
Exactly, really?

Craig 10:55 
Yeah. Yeah, I've heard that anyways. Well, I didn't realize this statistic. But cars now are capable, because really, it's just a computer on wheels. In fact, that's not even true. It is 20 to 30, at least computers on wheels in your car. And it can generate about 25 gigabytes of data every hour. Four terabytes a day. And they're saying that in another 10 years, that data from our cars is going to be worth almost a trillion dollars. So the big question out there right now is who owns that data from our cars and and how private is it going to be? Because when we take our cars, and even now, they are plugged into a network and able for instance, with Mercedes, they have engineers in Germany, that examine the data in your car to try and figure out if there's any issues, things you might not be aware of. Acura is doing some of those same things, many high end car brands are doing it and even lower end car brand are set up right now to plug your car into their computers, collect data and do some analysis. So who owns it? How private should it be? Could it be at this point in Europe, they have some laws that that aren't specifically about this, but the GDPR does kind of cover it. California has a lot that goes into effect next year. And that law is going to try and keep this private information private. But as much as 10 years ago, I know speaking of Decarie expressway in Montreal, I know in Montreal on Sherbrooke, they pulled a car over because people had reported it as speeding. The police didn't see it speed, but they pulled it over. They plugged a reader into that port in your car. And it reported that the car had within the last 10 minutes been doing 70 miles an hour on a city street and they issued a  ticket. So things to think about and maybe look forward to hear guys.

Matt 13:06 
All right. Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday. Appreciate it Craig as always. And we will talk to you again next week, sir.

Craig 13:15
Take care, guys. Bye Bye.

Ken 13:16
Thanks, Craig.

Craig 13:24
And I'll be back tomorrow. Take care guys. Bye bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

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855-385-5553