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

It's another It's a Security Thing Thursday. Craig talked about why businesses feel vulnerable to security attacks and what they can do about it.

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

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Related Articles 

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

Airing date: 02/28/2019

Why Business Feels Vulnerable To Security Attacks

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey everybody. Craig Peterson here. This is a little bit of a Security Thing today and it's all about two thirds of businesses. What are they thinking? You know, I've got a new section on my website at http://CraigPeterson.com that is all about security breaches and why they occurred. And I think it's really important for people to understand what's really happening out there. So that's why we're doing it. My wife and I've been putting a lot of work into that. But one of the articles that we have up there right now is from Infosecurity Magazine, and it's talking about how to in three, that's two thirds of organizations say that they are not convinced that they can avoid a breach. Now to me, that's a very big deal. I just don't get it. This was a Parliament Institute survey that was done of 600 cyber security leaders and professionals in these organizations. Now these people were people who are responsible for evaluating, selecting or implementing security solutions. And those are the only people who are supposed to take part in the survey. So it should be a pretty legitimate survey when it comes to understanding are these companies really positive about the outlooks or negative about the outlooks?

Now I can tell you that the software we use for our bigger clients is designed to be really is designed to be 100% safe, and it's better than 99.9% safe statistically after billions of attempts to hack it. Quite literally billions. It never been never been broken through.

So I know personally that there are ways to make sure that you aren't broken into. But here we go with these numbers. This is a quote right from the article vulnerability management particularly those vulnerabilities and unseen or unpatched systems is an issue for many organizations was 69% of respondents identify and delayed patching is an issue. 63% admitting they are not able to respond to alert.

Now I have seen both of these as real big problems and they may be problems for you too because delayed patching is a problem in some areas of the business more than it is in other areas of the business so for instance if you have a really good next generation firewall like what, again I keep coming back to what we're using right, but there's Cisco their Firepower firewall family ties in with their switches, ties in with the software on your computers to help make it so that if something does happen, it recognizes almost instantly.

So what they're talking about, really here are zero day attacks. In other words, attacks have never been seen before, all the way through attacks that maybe have been out there for six months like Equifax and they got hacked because they didn't patch and that's a real problem. It's a real problem and patching organizations don't do because it can mess things up. So let's say that you're a small organization. And if you're a small organization, you are probably running a website, but you're probably not doing it yourself. You probably didn't write the software for your website from scratch. Most likely you're using WordPress, or maybe Drupal which has turned into be quite the security nightmare.

But let's say you're using Wordpress. How much patching do you need to do nowadays WordPress will patch itself and there are plugins you can put into WordPress that will not only make sure the core WordPress is up to date, but all of your modules, all of the things that you've installed in WordPress, all these plugins, it'll make sure they're all up to date as well. And it does it all automatically. So rule one, make sure those are in place. And just this week it was Monday night, I guess. I don't know it was over the weekend. That's what it was. We started getting alarms from our Firepower systems telling us that we were under attack and they were trying to use some vulnerabilities in some of the common software that used on the web. And it was the software that's typically used by bigger companies. It was some middleware attacks that were underway and it recognized them, it stopped them. 

In fact this week no I think you but it's been a bad week for a tad attacks. We stopped a one of our customers. It's a fairly small company that is a very small company. But we have this technology in place for them because they are concerned about about breaches. And for some reason, over the weekend, when people are usually not there, because part of what we do is monitor when they're working, what are they doing when they're working? And what's abnormal? Well, we saw some abnormal stuff happening. And it was very abnormal stuff because they were sending files to a public file sharing service over on Google.

And so again, automated systems took over and it was stopped almost instantly, which is again a very big deal a very good deal very positive thing. So we're meeting with them today to talk about what happened, the incident and how it was responded to and who was trying to breach what, you know, how did this happen? How could this happen? And it kind of smells like it was probably an insider who was just doing something that, you know, hopefully not malicious because many times your insiders will try and steal customer lists or plans or diagrams and other things and share them with someone else. And as part of that sharing, of course, they get a little remuneration right? They get a few bucks sent their way so that might have been what happened and and the reason we didn't meet with them right away is one they the CEO was very busy this week and two, we stopped it. So what's with these two thirds of companies that think they can't stop it? Well, they probably have an antivirus mentality because antivirus does not work anymore. You need a much more integrated, much larger response mechanism in place and needs to be completely automated in order to really stop the bad guys nowadays.

But secondly I have to feel for them because you have an additional problem. And that is if you wrote the software for your business. In other words, a company like Equifax has huge department with programmers and analysts and stuff. So they write their software, they have to maintain it. So let's say they're using Apache Struts. And there is an Apache Struts attack, which is what actually happened to us this weekend. Now, in our case, it was stopped. But in many cases, it just won't be stopped. And it can't be stopped because they don't have the right stuff in place. So there's a Struts to attack because they haven't patch well why didn't they patch because they have to test their whole system. An integrated test, right? And that integrated test has to look at every component try it all tested all so it might take six months to do a patch because you can't just throw it in place. So an organization like that where you are writing your own software, I would highly advise you have one of these fully integrated systems like what we have in place for many of our clients now.

So that's what I wanted to point out. Two thirds of businesses think that they just can't avoid a breach. In fact, you can avoid a breach, it doesn't matter the size of the organization. And if your people are telling you, you can't avoid a breach, they are wrong. Okay, they either don't know what they're talking about. Or they're being way, way, way, way too honest. Because there's always a chance that there is a breach or potential breach. But based on the responses from these guys where they're saying that the obstacles are really the mitigation and patching mitigation. You can take care of patching, you can kind of take care of but you can mitigate all of these risks by using the right kinds of systems. So anyways, that's a little bit of a security thing for today.

I'm a little disappointed to see this come out I'm glad Kacy Zurkus wrote this article you'll find her on on Twitter as well as LinkedIn and the articles up on my website at http://CraigPeterson.com. You'll also find it over at Infosecurity Magazine. Take care. We'll talk to you a little bit later.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Message Input:

Message #techtalk

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

It's another It's a Security Thing Thursday. Craig talked about why businesses feel vulnerable to security attacks and what they can do about it.

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

---

Related Articles 

---

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

Airing date: 02/28/2019

Why Business Feels Vulnerable To Security Attacks

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey everybody. Craig Peterson here. This is a little bit of a Security Thing today and it's all about two thirds of businesses. What are they thinking? You know, I've got a new section on my website at http://CraigPeterson.com that is all about security breaches and why they occurred. And I think it's really important for people to understand what's really happening out there. So that's why we're doing it. My wife and I've been putting a lot of work into that. But one of the articles that we have up there right now is from Infosecurity Magazine, and it's talking about how to in three, that's two thirds of organizations say that they are not convinced that they can avoid a breach. Now to me, that's a very big deal. I just don't get it. This was a Parliament Institute survey that was done of 600 cyber security leaders and professionals in these organizations. Now these people were people who are responsible for evaluating, selecting or implementing security solutions. And those are the only people who are supposed to take part in the survey. So it should be a pretty legitimate survey when it comes to understanding are these companies really positive about the outlooks or negative about the outlooks?

Now I can tell you that the software we use for our bigger clients is designed to be really is designed to be 100% safe, and it's better than 99.9% safe statistically after billions of attempts to hack it. Quite literally billions. It never been never been broken through.

So I know personally that there are ways to make sure that you aren't broken into. But here we go with these numbers. This is a quote right from the article vulnerability management particularly those vulnerabilities and unseen or unpatched systems is an issue for many organizations was 69% of respondents identify and delayed patching is an issue. 63% admitting they are not able to respond to alert.

Now I have seen both of these as real big problems and they may be problems for you too because delayed patching is a problem in some areas of the business more than it is in other areas of the business so for instance if you have a really good next generation firewall like what, again I keep coming back to what we're using right, but there's Cisco their Firepower firewall family ties in with their switches, ties in with the software on your computers to help make it so that if something does happen, it recognizes almost instantly.

So what they're talking about, really here are zero day attacks. In other words, attacks have never been seen before, all the way through attacks that maybe have been out there for six months like Equifax and they got hacked because they didn't patch and that's a real problem. It's a real problem and patching organizations don't do because it can mess things up. So let's say that you're a small organization. And if you're a small organization, you are probably running a website, but you're probably not doing it yourself. You probably didn't write the software for your website from scratch. Most likely you're using WordPress, or maybe Drupal which has turned into be quite the security nightmare.

But let's say you're using Wordpress. How much patching do you need to do nowadays WordPress will patch itself and there are plugins you can put into WordPress that will not only make sure the core WordPress is up to date, but all of your modules, all of the things that you've installed in WordPress, all these plugins, it'll make sure they're all up to date as well. And it does it all automatically. So rule one, make sure those are in place. And just this week it was Monday night, I guess. I don't know it was over the weekend. That's what it was. We started getting alarms from our Firepower systems telling us that we were under attack and they were trying to use some vulnerabilities in some of the common software that used on the web. And it was the software that's typically used by bigger companies. It was some middleware attacks that were underway and it recognized them, it stopped them. 

In fact this week no I think you but it's been a bad week for a tad attacks. We stopped a one of our customers. It's a fairly small company that is a very small company. But we have this technology in place for them because they are concerned about about breaches. And for some reason, over the weekend, when people are usually not there, because part of what we do is monitor when they're working, what are they doing when they're working? And what's abnormal? Well, we saw some abnormal stuff happening. And it was very abnormal stuff because they were sending files to a public file sharing service over on Google.

And so again, automated systems took over and it was stopped almost instantly, which is again a very big deal a very good deal very positive thing. So we're meeting with them today to talk about what happened, the incident and how it was responded to and who was trying to breach what, you know, how did this happen? How could this happen? And it kind of smells like it was probably an insider who was just doing something that, you know, hopefully not malicious because many times your insiders will try and steal customer lists or plans or diagrams and other things and share them with someone else. And as part of that sharing, of course, they get a little remuneration right? They get a few bucks sent their way so that might have been what happened and and the reason we didn't meet with them right away is one they the CEO was very busy this week and two, we stopped it. So what's with these two thirds of companies that think they can't stop it? Well, they probably have an antivirus mentality because antivirus does not work anymore. You need a much more integrated, much larger response mechanism in place and needs to be completely automated in order to really stop the bad guys nowadays.

But secondly I have to feel for them because you have an additional problem. And that is if you wrote the software for your business. In other words, a company like Equifax has huge department with programmers and analysts and stuff. So they write their software, they have to maintain it. So let's say they're using Apache Struts. And there is an Apache Struts attack, which is what actually happened to us this weekend. Now, in our case, it was stopped. But in many cases, it just won't be stopped. And it can't be stopped because they don't have the right stuff in place. So there's a Struts to attack because they haven't patch well why didn't they patch because they have to test their whole system. An integrated test, right? And that integrated test has to look at every component try it all tested all so it might take six months to do a patch because you can't just throw it in place. So an organization like that where you are writing your own software, I would highly advise you have one of these fully integrated systems like what we have in place for many of our clients now.

So that's what I wanted to point out. Two thirds of businesses think that they just can't avoid a breach. In fact, you can avoid a breach, it doesn't matter the size of the organization. And if your people are telling you, you can't avoid a breach, they are wrong. Okay, they either don't know what they're talking about. Or they're being way, way, way, way too honest. Because there's always a chance that there is a breach or potential breach. But based on the responses from these guys where they're saying that the obstacles are really the mitigation and patching mitigation. You can take care of patching, you can kind of take care of but you can mitigate all of these risks by using the right kinds of systems. So anyways, that's a little bit of a security thing for today.

I'm a little disappointed to see this come out I'm glad Kacy Zurkus wrote this article you'll find her on on Twitter as well as LinkedIn and the articles up on my website at http://CraigPeterson.com. You'll also find it over at Infosecurity Magazine. Take care. We'll talk to you a little bit later.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Message Input:

Message #techtalk

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Craig is on the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. They talked about Zillow helping to flip houses, the YouTuber who discovered a pedophile ring in YouTube, and an app that might help stop you from procrastinating.

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

---

Related Articles:

Youtuber Claims Online Pedophile Ring Operates Freely On Youtube

Prevent Procrastination With This Chrome Extension

Zillow Wants To Flip Your House

---

Transcript:

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

Airing date: 02/27/2019

Keeping Your Family Safe Online

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hi, Craig Peterson here. Have you ever wondered how you can keep your kids off the dark web or maybe what you can do for free, that's going to really help keep the ransomware off of your machine out of your house, out of your very small business. So hope and do it all for free. While that's one of the things I talked about this morning with Ken and Matt. It's also something we're doing a deep dive on this week in my course on DIY cyber security. So here we go. Learn how to do it right now.

Unknown 0:36
Well, guess what? We're back again. It's Wednesday at 7:38. And it's Craig Peterson time. He's here to join us to talk about all things technology. Craig, how are you this morning?

Unknown 0:45 
Hey, good morning. Doing well. Looking forward to 20 whole degrees this afternoon.

Unknown 0:50 
That's a heatwave. We're having a heatwave. Tropical heatwave. But you know, I don't know that much. You know, I want to stay inside. It's cold outside and I thought I don't have anything else to do. Why don't I go look at the dark web and see what's there. Is that a good idea?

Unknown 1:05
The dark web is an interesting place and there's there's a few ways to get on to it. But basically it's probably 90, 95% maybe even worse on the bad side. This is where the Silk Road website was and those the Silk Road website was a place where people would go and they could buy drugs illegally online if they can factor all kinds of illegal activities activity and it was tracked down. They were using bitcoin and and other types of currencies out there in order to do a little trading back and forth and they thought they were safe because it was on the dark web in the dark web supposedly is like 100% faith and they were using bitcoin cryptocurrency because that's supposed to be untrackable as well.

But I attended a really interesting lecture by the Secret Service talking about how they tracked it all down. And they arrested the guy that was running the Silk Road there on the dark web. And it's it's not a safe place. There are all kinds of nastiness that we're not going to get into right now, including things told read rooms and others that have questionable at best backgrounds to them. So you do, generally speaking, want to avoid the dark web. It is a place for various types of political activists as well. Good guys and bad guys together and do a little communications but it's also the place where they're trading our personal information. They're selling it online. I just checked it. I had a webinar that I ran to the FBI Infragard program just this week and So we went on to the dark web and poke around a little bit. And we found all kinds of stuff, including software you can use to hack people's computers for as little as $1.99 US. It's kind of a scary place, you might not want to go there Ken.

Unknown 3:16
So I should go now.

Unknown 3:19
Yeah, exactly. That's why we're not really telling them how to get out to the dark web. Because I'm sure there's some kids out there that might want to go there. And as a parent, you kind of want to keep an eye on this. It doesn't look any different. They're still going to use web browsers are still going to use the web browsers are probably already using although you can certainly use other web browsers kind of depending. But it's kind of hard to police as a parent as to where your kids are going online. That's why I really advise it. And this is part of this week's course that I'm doing. I really advise people use something called OpenDNS. There is a free version online. It's O-P-E-N-D-N-S. And I can send you more info if you want about it. But what that does is it allows you to reconfigure your web browser shows you how to do it that your web browser but your computer it shows you how to do it. They're on their website. Once you start using this it will stop your kids from going on to places like the dark web. It automatically blocks pornographic sites. And it also helps to completely almost completely eliminate ransomware. Open DNS is where you'll find it online. http://OpenDNS.com, they have a paid version which you know, it's probably a really good idea to use. And if you're a little bit more advanced, you can also use a version a version that's only 40 bucks a year and it allows you to reconfigure your router in your home so that even if your kid is a little more technically advanced and knows how to get into the DNS settings of the router in your home who is going to give out OpenDNS for every device, including those nasty Internet of Things, devices in your homes or in your small business.

If you're a larger business, you should use Umbrella. But you have to get that from special vendors like like myself, as it turns out, but the OpenDNS stuff is absolutely fantastic. If you do configured on your router in your home, it's going to help protect your whole a whole home and it'll keep Ken from going to the dark web.

Unknown 5:31 
Which he's known to do.

Unknown 5:34 
Nothing can stop me from it.

Unknown 5:34
He'll go hell or high water. Right. We're going to talk to you here. Craig Peterson here a little bit more about technology as we do every Wednesday at this time. Craig, you know, I was looking through some of these stories to talk to you about today. One of them stood out to me, the the Zillow flip house thing is pretty interesting to me because I've always been trying to figure out exactly how accurate these things are in the first place when they're sort of estimating home value because if some of these things are right then, boy, I'm sitting on a pile of cash right now.

But there are people that are exploiting the, the, like the Zillow and places like it on the internet that basically value your house and and look at things to like look for values to flip. Why don't you talk to me about the story a little bit?

Unknown 6:18 
Yeah you've got an interesting angle on it too when you're talking about this, Matt, because the question is how do you get a good value for your house? You go to someone who wants to buy your house and say, yeah, I'll pay 50 grand for you go to somebody who maybe wants to buy your house for the low price or somebody who wants to sell your house for a commission who says yes, yes, this was 75 grand and then you sit on it for a year or two or three because they've overvalued the house because they want to get every penny of commission out of it they possibly can get right and so that's your I think that's kind of part of your premise, Matt.

Is Zillow legit? Is the price that they're saying correct? And they've got these estimates on the Zillow site. I love Zillow. I poke around on it quite frequently, especially when I'm traveling to see what local real estate prices are. So, Zillow has been doing that for a while they use public records and they try and compare your house do to other houses in the area and come up with a reasonable price. But now with all of the flipping that's been going on they're taking a little bit of a different angle which is kind of cool you know there's all these show shows I don't know about you if you watch some I know my wife and kids love these shows on the Home and Garden TV I think it is, that is how to flip your house right? There's a couple that in Waco, Texas. Magnolia I think his name of their company and they buy homes and small buildings, business buildings and fix them up and and then turn around and sell them. And there are constantly people out there with the training programs on how to buy homes with no money down and then fix them up and flip them. And my wife and I looked at that at one point. And we actually went to one of these weekend webinars or seminars, I should say, and we learned a lot, but we didn't feel comfortable enough to do it.

So what's happening now with Zillow. Zillow has these estimates you mentioned. They call them Zestimates. And what Zillow is doing now is they're thinking that their database is so good that they will allow you now to go on to the website. Depending on where you are. You can look up your home and see what the value of it might be. And then you can ask Zillow, Hey, I want to get out of my house right now. I want you to buy my house from me. And so Zillow will kind of backup their Zestimate as to what your house is worth and they will buy the house and then sell it for you and what they're going to do, once you sign up with them to do this as they'll send someone out to just double check, make sure there aren't some major defects in the house that they don't know about. They will give you a very hard offer for your house. And then they'll chart you between 6 and 9% for that house for commission which is a lot more. It's almost double what most real estate companies will charge you and they they're done you're out of your house and they can just take a matter of days. And then Zillow will come in and they'll have a crew come in and fix up things that need to be fixed. Paint it up and resell your house.

So it's interesting to me to see hey wow. Now the internet is is really putting his money where his mouth is in the case of Zillow. They will backup that estimate for your house they will buy your house and you can be out of that house the matter of well, however long that however long it to do a quick inspection and the closing So, Matt, it's an interesting angle.

Unknown 10:06
We're talking to Craig Peterson our tech guru joins us, Wednesdays at 7:38. You can always go to http://CraigPeterson.com and get all the information if you can't wait to hear him on Wednesday at 7:38. You know some people believe that Matt procrastinate quite a bit. I'm not one of those people. But there are many people who think they procrastinate.

Unknown 10:26
I disagree, but I'll get to it later.

Unknown 10:28 
Is there an extension that he can do to kind of help him on this. I'm trying to help him.

Unknown 10:31 
Yeah, there's a few different things that I've used in the past that I really liked when it comes to help him with procrastination. I use something called Vitamin-R and it allows you to break your day into chunks of it. All you're really focused on at that point is what am I going to do for the next 20 minutes or so. And it's based on a message that came out of the mentality and method and the result there's whole books written on

This, but the idea is let's go ahead and focus and let's focus for short periods of time. Let's accomplish something, take a five minute break and then move on. And there is a new extension now for Chrome that is come out. It's called HabitLab and you'll find it online. I have it up on my website as well. And if you're kind of compulsive, if you're always kind of poking around on different websites, you get distracted at work or at home. This is going to be interesting for you. Yeah, I think you should have looked at it. It's based on some research that came out of Stanford University and they have all kinds of encouragement in HabitLab, some of them kind of gentle the two back on track other ones just going so far as to say no, you can't go to Facebook or wherever it is, but it really can be a time saver. A big one for people depending on what you want to do. It's got nudges built in based on the book called Nudge, which was really popular with Hillary Clinton and the Obamas to try and get people to do things. But it's based on all of that technology, some more research that came out of Stanford. And if you are online and you have the Chrome browser that you're using, have a look at it. It's called HabitLab, Ken, and it'll help you get your work done, and it'll help you from procrastinating as well. It's really kind of cool.

Unknown 12:33
We're talking to our friend Craig Peterson, our tech guru is here to talk to us about technology. Craig, you only have about a minute, two minutes to answer this question. But there's a YouTuber out there who is scaring some parents about a pedophile ring that might be operating around YouTube. Is this true? Should I be running and screaming in terror? 

Unknown 13:01
Well, man, this is something that I wish we didn't have to talk about. Well my whole tone has changed. You can probably tell about a week ago Matt Watson who is a YouTuber exposed what he's called it a wormhole into the soft core pedophilia ring and what these guys were apparently doing or are apparently doing is encouraging young kids who are under 13 years of age to post a compromising basically pictures of themselves on YouTube videos of them. Now I mentioned that 13 year age because of the fact that YouTube has a policy against people under 13 posting online. In fact I don't think they can have an account. And yet these were accounts controlled by kids under 13 and posting these pictures and these videos which means if parents were allowing them access to smartphones, were allowing them to have a YouTube account we're monitoring this close enough, but Watson's claiming he found links to actual child porn on the site. We had YouTube ads being pulled by dozens of major corporations when this came out. For some reason that didn't really hit the news, but within less than 24 hours, there is a whole hashtag campaign about this. If you're a Twitter user, check out the YouTube white top hashtag campaign. So it has hurt substantially YouTube's bottom line. Hopefully they'll do something about it. And frankly, just enforcing this under 13 years of age. You're not allowed to include these kids in any videos and they're not allowed to have any accounts. Just enforcing their existing policy would stop this ring. Hopefully people are waking up and complaining to YouTube and YouTube is going to really do something about it this time. 

Unknown 15:00
Alright. Craig Peterson our tech guru joins us Wednesdays at this time to go over the world of technology. Craig, as always, thank you very much. And we will talk to you next week sir. 

Unknown 15:00
Take care, gentlemen. Thanks.

Hey, if you are in my course here, the master course on DIY cybersecurity. I just want a quick note. Sorry I had hoped to get stuff out yesterday. It looks like it's going out first thing this morning. At least the first part of it I put way more work into it than I thought I would. Because it as I was going through some of this course material for this module, I realized that it could be really confusing for some people. So I went seriously above and beyond on this but it's taken me about another day. So sorry about that. But I think you're going to like the results. It's really going to help you just walk right through in making frankly all your computers and your business and your home a lot safer. So anyways quick apology to those people and we will be back hopefully tomorrow will be able to do another one of my real quick here security things so stick around. We'll have more here on this podcast. Bye bye.

---

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 WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. They talked about Zillow helping to flip houses, the YouTuber who discovered a pedophile ring in YouTube, and an app that might help stop you from procrastinating.

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

---

Related Articles:

Youtuber Claims Online Pedophile Ring Operates Freely On Youtube

Prevent Procrastination With This Chrome Extension

Zillow Wants To Flip Your House

---

Transcript:

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

Airing date: 02/27/2019

Keeping Your Family Safe Online

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hi, Craig Peterson here. Have you ever wondered how you can keep your kids off the dark web or maybe what you can do for free, that's going to really help keep the ransomware off of your machine out of your house, out of your very small business. So hope and do it all for free. While that's one of the things I talked about this morning with Ken and Matt. It's also something we're doing a deep dive on this week in my course on DIY cyber security. So here we go. Learn how to do it right now.

Unknown 0:36
Well, guess what? We're back again. It's Wednesday at 7:38. And it's Craig Peterson time. He's here to join us to talk about all things technology. Craig, how are you this morning?

Unknown 0:45 
Hey, good morning. Doing well. Looking forward to 20 whole degrees this afternoon.

Unknown 0:50 
That's a heatwave. We're having a heatwave. Tropical heatwave. But you know, I don't know that much. You know, I want to stay inside. It's cold outside and I thought I don't have anything else to do. Why don't I go look at the dark web and see what's there. Is that a good idea?

Unknown 1:05
The dark web is an interesting place and there's there's a few ways to get on to it. But basically it's probably 90, 95% maybe even worse on the bad side. This is where the Silk Road website was and those the Silk Road website was a place where people would go and they could buy drugs illegally online if they can factor all kinds of illegal activities activity and it was tracked down. They were using bitcoin and and other types of currencies out there in order to do a little trading back and forth and they thought they were safe because it was on the dark web in the dark web supposedly is like 100% faith and they were using bitcoin cryptocurrency because that's supposed to be untrackable as well.

But I attended a really interesting lecture by the Secret Service talking about how they tracked it all down. And they arrested the guy that was running the Silk Road there on the dark web. And it's it's not a safe place. There are all kinds of nastiness that we're not going to get into right now, including things told read rooms and others that have questionable at best backgrounds to them. So you do, generally speaking, want to avoid the dark web. It is a place for various types of political activists as well. Good guys and bad guys together and do a little communications but it's also the place where they're trading our personal information. They're selling it online. I just checked it. I had a webinar that I ran to the FBI Infragard program just this week and So we went on to the dark web and poke around a little bit. And we found all kinds of stuff, including software you can use to hack people's computers for as little as $1.99 US. It's kind of a scary place, you might not want to go there Ken.

Unknown 3:16
So I should go now.

Unknown 3:19
Yeah, exactly. That's why we're not really telling them how to get out to the dark web. Because I'm sure there's some kids out there that might want to go there. And as a parent, you kind of want to keep an eye on this. It doesn't look any different. They're still going to use web browsers are still going to use the web browsers are probably already using although you can certainly use other web browsers kind of depending. But it's kind of hard to police as a parent as to where your kids are going online. That's why I really advise it. And this is part of this week's course that I'm doing. I really advise people use something called OpenDNS. There is a free version online. It's O-P-E-N-D-N-S. And I can send you more info if you want about it. But what that does is it allows you to reconfigure your web browser shows you how to do it that your web browser but your computer it shows you how to do it. They're on their website. Once you start using this it will stop your kids from going on to places like the dark web. It automatically blocks pornographic sites. And it also helps to completely almost completely eliminate ransomware. Open DNS is where you'll find it online. http://OpenDNS.com, they have a paid version which you know, it's probably a really good idea to use. And if you're a little bit more advanced, you can also use a version a version that's only 40 bucks a year and it allows you to reconfigure your router in your home so that even if your kid is a little more technically advanced and knows how to get into the DNS settings of the router in your home who is going to give out OpenDNS for every device, including those nasty Internet of Things, devices in your homes or in your small business.

If you're a larger business, you should use Umbrella. But you have to get that from special vendors like like myself, as it turns out, but the OpenDNS stuff is absolutely fantastic. If you do configured on your router in your home, it's going to help protect your whole a whole home and it'll keep Ken from going to the dark web.

Unknown 5:31 
Which he's known to do.

Unknown 5:34 
Nothing can stop me from it.

Unknown 5:34
He'll go hell or high water. Right. We're going to talk to you here. Craig Peterson here a little bit more about technology as we do every Wednesday at this time. Craig, you know, I was looking through some of these stories to talk to you about today. One of them stood out to me, the the Zillow flip house thing is pretty interesting to me because I've always been trying to figure out exactly how accurate these things are in the first place when they're sort of estimating home value because if some of these things are right then, boy, I'm sitting on a pile of cash right now.

But there are people that are exploiting the, the, like the Zillow and places like it on the internet that basically value your house and and look at things to like look for values to flip. Why don't you talk to me about the story a little bit?

Unknown 6:18 
Yeah you've got an interesting angle on it too when you're talking about this, Matt, because the question is how do you get a good value for your house? You go to someone who wants to buy your house and say, yeah, I'll pay 50 grand for you go to somebody who maybe wants to buy your house for the low price or somebody who wants to sell your house for a commission who says yes, yes, this was 75 grand and then you sit on it for a year or two or three because they've overvalued the house because they want to get every penny of commission out of it they possibly can get right and so that's your I think that's kind of part of your premise, Matt.

Is Zillow legit? Is the price that they're saying correct? And they've got these estimates on the Zillow site. I love Zillow. I poke around on it quite frequently, especially when I'm traveling to see what local real estate prices are. So, Zillow has been doing that for a while they use public records and they try and compare your house do to other houses in the area and come up with a reasonable price. But now with all of the flipping that's been going on they're taking a little bit of a different angle which is kind of cool you know there's all these show shows I don't know about you if you watch some I know my wife and kids love these shows on the Home and Garden TV I think it is, that is how to flip your house right? There's a couple that in Waco, Texas. Magnolia I think his name of their company and they buy homes and small buildings, business buildings and fix them up and and then turn around and sell them. And there are constantly people out there with the training programs on how to buy homes with no money down and then fix them up and flip them. And my wife and I looked at that at one point. And we actually went to one of these weekend webinars or seminars, I should say, and we learned a lot, but we didn't feel comfortable enough to do it.

So what's happening now with Zillow. Zillow has these estimates you mentioned. They call them Zestimates. And what Zillow is doing now is they're thinking that their database is so good that they will allow you now to go on to the website. Depending on where you are. You can look up your home and see what the value of it might be. And then you can ask Zillow, Hey, I want to get out of my house right now. I want you to buy my house from me. And so Zillow will kind of backup their Zestimate as to what your house is worth and they will buy the house and then sell it for you and what they're going to do, once you sign up with them to do this as they'll send someone out to just double check, make sure there aren't some major defects in the house that they don't know about. They will give you a very hard offer for your house. And then they'll chart you between 6 and 9% for that house for commission which is a lot more. It's almost double what most real estate companies will charge you and they they're done you're out of your house and they can just take a matter of days. And then Zillow will come in and they'll have a crew come in and fix up things that need to be fixed. Paint it up and resell your house.

So it's interesting to me to see hey wow. Now the internet is is really putting his money where his mouth is in the case of Zillow. They will backup that estimate for your house they will buy your house and you can be out of that house the matter of well, however long that however long it to do a quick inspection and the closing So, Matt, it's an interesting angle.

Unknown 10:06
We're talking to Craig Peterson our tech guru joins us, Wednesdays at 7:38. You can always go to http://CraigPeterson.com and get all the information if you can't wait to hear him on Wednesday at 7:38. You know some people believe that Matt procrastinate quite a bit. I'm not one of those people. But there are many people who think they procrastinate.

Unknown 10:26
I disagree, but I'll get to it later.

Unknown 10:28 
Is there an extension that he can do to kind of help him on this. I'm trying to help him.

Unknown 10:31 
Yeah, there's a few different things that I've used in the past that I really liked when it comes to help him with procrastination. I use something called Vitamin-R and it allows you to break your day into chunks of it. All you're really focused on at that point is what am I going to do for the next 20 minutes or so. And it's based on a message that came out of the mentality and method and the result there's whole books written on

This, but the idea is let's go ahead and focus and let's focus for short periods of time. Let's accomplish something, take a five minute break and then move on. And there is a new extension now for Chrome that is come out. It's called HabitLab and you'll find it online. I have it up on my website as well. And if you're kind of compulsive, if you're always kind of poking around on different websites, you get distracted at work or at home. This is going to be interesting for you. Yeah, I think you should have looked at it. It's based on some research that came out of Stanford University and they have all kinds of encouragement in HabitLab, some of them kind of gentle the two back on track other ones just going so far as to say no, you can't go to Facebook or wherever it is, but it really can be a time saver. A big one for people depending on what you want to do. It's got nudges built in based on the book called Nudge, which was really popular with Hillary Clinton and the Obamas to try and get people to do things. But it's based on all of that technology, some more research that came out of Stanford. And if you are online and you have the Chrome browser that you're using, have a look at it. It's called HabitLab, Ken, and it'll help you get your work done, and it'll help you from procrastinating as well. It's really kind of cool.

Unknown 12:33
We're talking to our friend Craig Peterson, our tech guru is here to talk to us about technology. Craig, you only have about a minute, two minutes to answer this question. But there's a YouTuber out there who is scaring some parents about a pedophile ring that might be operating around YouTube. Is this true? Should I be running and screaming in terror? 

Unknown 13:01
Well, man, this is something that I wish we didn't have to talk about. Well my whole tone has changed. You can probably tell about a week ago Matt Watson who is a YouTuber exposed what he's called it a wormhole into the soft core pedophilia ring and what these guys were apparently doing or are apparently doing is encouraging young kids who are under 13 years of age to post a compromising basically pictures of themselves on YouTube videos of them. Now I mentioned that 13 year age because of the fact that YouTube has a policy against people under 13 posting online. In fact I don't think they can have an account. And yet these were accounts controlled by kids under 13 and posting these pictures and these videos which means if parents were allowing them access to smartphones, were allowing them to have a YouTube account we're monitoring this close enough, but Watson's claiming he found links to actual child porn on the site. We had YouTube ads being pulled by dozens of major corporations when this came out. For some reason that didn't really hit the news, but within less than 24 hours, there is a whole hashtag campaign about this. If you're a Twitter user, check out the YouTube white top hashtag campaign. So it has hurt substantially YouTube's bottom line. Hopefully they'll do something about it. And frankly, just enforcing this under 13 years of age. You're not allowed to include these kids in any videos and they're not allowed to have any accounts. Just enforcing their existing policy would stop this ring. Hopefully people are waking up and complaining to YouTube and YouTube is going to really do something about it this time. 

Unknown 15:00
Alright. Craig Peterson our tech guru joins us Wednesdays at this time to go over the world of technology. Craig, as always, thank you very much. And we will talk to you next week sir. 

Unknown 15:00
Take care, gentlemen. Thanks.

Hey, if you are in my course here, the master course on DIY cybersecurity. I just want a quick note. Sorry I had hoped to get stuff out yesterday. It looks like it's going out first thing this morning. At least the first part of it I put way more work into it than I thought I would. Because it as I was going through some of this course material for this module, I realized that it could be really confusing for some people. So I went seriously above and beyond on this but it's taken me about another day. So sorry about that. But I think you're going to like the results. It's really going to help you just walk right through in making frankly all your computers and your business and your home a lot safer. So anyways quick apology to those people and we will be back hopefully tomorrow will be able to do another one of my real quick here security things so stick around. We'll have more here on this podcast. Bye bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

What is the dark web? What will you find in the dark web? Craig is on today on the Jim Polito show as they discussed the dark web, the pedophilia ring that a YouTuber discovered, and how Facebook uses its apps to track users.

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

---

Related Articles:

What Is The Dark Web? How To Access It And What You’ll Find

Facebook Uses Its Apps To Track Users It Thinks Could Threaten Employees And Offices

Youtuber Claims Online Pedophile Ring Operates Freely On Youtube

--- 

Transcript:

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

Airing date: 02/26/2019

What Is The Dark Web - Who Created It

Craig Peterson: 0:00
We had a really good webinar yesterday. Craig Peterson here for the Infragard. It's kind of cool looking at some of the patterns and what people are interested in. Yesterday, we were talking about the difference between cyber and cyber enabled crimes. Very, very hot topic. The other real hot topic that we discussed, in fact, the number one topic in the last year on the FBI Infragard webinars I've been running. The number one topic has been dark web. And that's kind of interesting, because that's what we talked about today with Jim Polito. Some history here behind the dark web. And why did the government create this thing? So here we go with Mr. Polito.

Unknown 0:47
The man who knows it all our good friend and Tech Talk guru Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir.

Unknown 0:55
Hey, good morning, Jim. How y'all?

Unknown 0:58
You're from Canada. Don't say y'all just just because you travel the country frequently.

Unknown 1:07
Isn't this the deep south? Isn't that how y'all talk down here

Unknown 1:09
For you technically it's the deep south.

Unknown 1:12
Yeah

Unknown 1:14
Speaking of the deep south, let's see Facebook which has nothing to do with the deep south uses its app to track users it thinks could threaten employees and offices. Wait a minute. So Facebook can't you know a tell me can't the tell me whether or not a real post is actually offensive or just a lot of people complained about it. But they can tell me when there's going to be like an attack at work. And not that I'm making light of that.

Unknown 1:55
It's kind of interesting. There's two interesting stories kind of along the same lines as this week. The Facebook one and then YouTube one both of which are how come they can police things they want to police but they can't police these things they don't want.

Unknown 2:10
Right? Exactly good. That's what I was trying to say. But I'm not as smart as you.

Unknown 2:18
It's interesting to look at. And that's a lot of interesting in one paragraph but to look at what Facebook is doing, and that is they have a whole security team that just cracking people who might who might threaten their employees or some of the physical offices. So for instance, there was a threat against their offices over in Europe. And Facebook picked on that really, really quickly. And CNBC ended up doing a story about it because they had more than a dozen former Facebook employees who said that Facebook is mining its social net

Unknown 3:00
Work for threatening comments against Facebook wow some cases it uses its products which are of course the Facebook app the Facebook never use it VPN that using its products to track the location of people it believes present a credible threat now this is incredibly Big Brother-esque here bottom Yeah, yeah and Facebook's other employees are out there and you know Facebook's management is saying well listen it's only legitimate Every business has physical security. We have a physical security team why wouldn't we do it? But you know when when you get right down to a Jim. Why aren't they doing this sort of thing for threats against other people warning people about it. Why aren't they reporting all of this stuff to the local police departments? Why are they trying to do it themselves.

Unknown 4:00
And why are they using their app to track these people basically without their knowledge that Facebook thinks might be a threat to themselves in this? That's where I think they really crossed the line.

Unknown 4:15
Wow. Wow. We're talking with our good friend Craig Peterson, our Tech Talk guru and at the end of this segment I'll give you, well Craig will give you a number and you'll be able to get this information plus a whole lot more. Could this ever help you know I mean, is there any way that they could use this to help him in always in almost in a bit of remember the science fiction movie Minority Report where someone Yeah, predict someone was going to commit a crime and you'd be arrested before you committed the crime and... what?

Unknown 5:01
Future crime became a crime in itself. If you are going to do that.

Unknown 5:05
You are going to commit a crime? Yeah. Which is completely contrary to our Constitution. But all right, Craig, let's suspend disbelief here for a little bit. Could you know police use this kind of modeling to see where they may be spikes in crime? Could Facebook use the same kind of stuff?

Unknown 5:26
That's why like you, you really are brilliant because you're pulling together a whole bunch of pieces. And one of the pieces that should enter into this fray here is the fact that there is already pre crime type technology in place. Then they're using it in New York City. They're using it Los Angeles. My last I heard Boston might be using this but what it is it looks at trends. It looks at social media feeds.

Unknown 6:00
To try and find agitators to try and predict where a crime is going to occur and then the police departments are using that kind of pre crime information to have police officers and units and even in some cases SWAT teams on the standby in that area because this machine learning system this are you know not quite artificial intelligence is predicting crimes there so you combine that technology that already is there is already in the field with the ability of somebody like Google or Facebook is what we're talking about right now who does collect all of this information who does sell all of this information put it all into a pot and stir it and Jim it's a civil libertarians worst nightmare.

Unknown 7:00
Yeah, I can see that. I mean it's like fire it's the good and the bad unfortunately you've destroyed your reputation by saying Jim you're brilliant I mean that's you know Craig we all know you're brilliant but if you're going to say that I'm brilliant people gonna say I don't know if I completely trust Craig Peterson. and his intellect i don't know if I.

Unknown 7:22
Most people Jim they're not thinking it through right and that's the brilliance of brilliance is seen through just the normal short term thought process. And nowadays the average millennial has a an attention span less than that of a goldfish. We're talking five or six seconds so how would somebody like that going to think the next order through and that's where the brilliance comes in Jim in and it's absolutely necessary to think this through what's the ultimate outcome, right of this type of technology?

And then look at the story on YouTube this region where we've got YouTube now ads pulled from companies like McDonald's, Disney, Grammarly. Chromebook, Purina, IKEA, Glad, GNC, Lysol. Now why did those ads get pulled? This is a story that's not really making the news but it turns out that there was a pedophilia ring, a pretty big one, a soft core pedophilia ring running on YouTube, and apparently YouTube kind of knew about it, trying to should have done something about it and absolutely didn't. So this YouTuber guy, his name's Matt Watson. Yeah, he exposed what he's calling a wormhole into this ring on the YouTube platform. He uploaded a video a week ago Sunday about all of this stuff, and it's disgusting to look at. I don't want to get into any of the details but it's right there in the open on YouTube. So you talk about Facebook tracking users is threatened Facebook and and the Facebook is insane, seemingly doing much about anything else who got YouTube now with some of the most important stuff you can imagine out in the open and it gets it so bad that advertisers have to pull their advertising to try and make YouTube do something about it. And it really makes you wonder where we're going.

Unknown 10:00
Wow, we're talking with Craig Peterson. Our Tech Talk guru. At the end of this segment will give you a number you can get all this information for free. Plus other stuff when there's a crisis. I'll explain to you how you do it. There's no obligation All right, this is a question people ask me all the time and I give them a half baked explanation. But let's get it from the guy who's an expert at explaining the technical aspects of the web in a simple way that most people can understand, probably because you wrote some of the language, some of the code for the web that's still in use today. But what is the dark web? Almost sounds like that old dark shadows. That soap opera horror. So what is the dark web?

Unknown 10:27
It does, doesn't it? Well, there, there are multiple parts to the internet. But you can think of it like an iceberg. The dark dark web and the business web are both the part that's underwater, in other words, is a part you don't see the internet inside businesses is bigger than the internet anyone else can see. And the number of apps in fact that are in use outside of the public curve, you are actually outnumber the number of apps available in the app store.

Unknown 11:01
So so there's this huge underwater component of the iceberg when it comes to the internet. And there's really two parts to that. there's what's called the dark web. It's kind of a generic term. And believe it or not, the dark web was set up the effectively by our government and our tax dollars still maintain it. And the idea behind the dark web was how do we let people who are in these countries where there's heavy oppression in Iran, etc, etc. How do we let these militants communicate with each other and communicate with us, our military or the State Department, etc. So we developed this this dark web concept around Tor and some other technologies to allow these people to be able to communicate.

Unknown 11:51
Oh wait a minute. I got it right now. So the government put this together for good and it's been taken over by the identity theft people the people you just talked about pedophilia and YouTube that's where pedophiles trade video in this dark web which was created for good and where did it, where is it ended up?

Unknown 12:19
Well it is created for good it's still used for good but the overwhelming use of the dark web is really a lot of different types of criminal activity in this day and age frankly. So now there's a conundrum here for the federal government. Do do we shut this down which they can't do by the way there's no way they could shut it down because it was designed to be unsettled and shut down a

Unknown 12:46
They did too good of a job you mean it was a government contract that did too good of a job. Yeah, exactly. So and they still want militants to be able to use it. So it's kind of stuck though there's a really interesting article on CSL online that I put up on my website that goes into this because not all of the dark web is bad. Not all of the tools by militants but if you do go out on to that dark web Be careful because it's easy to stumble on stuff that will make your eyeballs pop out.

Unknown 13:18
Yeah. Oh the real bad stuff the really really bad stuff that people want to be able to share. It's like the back alley of the internet, isn't it?

Unknown 13:33
It really is. You know, this is a place where people like Bob Kraft might find another a new massage parlor

Unknown 13:46
Oh. So wrong on so many levels. But ok, I'll let it go.

Unknown 13:51
We also have out there have been some of these sites like the Silk Road and things where people were buying and trading drugs and they was shut down. These people were caught. So just because it's on the dark web, just because you're using cryptocurrencies doesn't mean that the FBI or the Secret Service or other guys can track you down because they can and they do. So keep that in mind as well. It's a scary place to go. There are a lot of dark alleys out there we keep an eye on some parts of the dark web so that we know what's going on. And if there's something major that's where we find these huge cracks when when you know one of these places is broken into that's where we find that and that's what we use it for. But you know as a general rule, Jim they away from the dark web.

Unknown 14:45
So, you know, teach us how to access it, which is good, but at least we know what it is and why it was created. It's kind of a back alley for the government to communicate with individuals who are in countries where they don't allow the internet and yet Then it got co opted by the bad guys all right I promised that I would give you a full well that Craig would give you a phone number and you'd be able to get this information plus a whole lot other stuff you get on Craig's list. Hey, Craigslist. Hey that's pretty good I just made a pun there well good register that yeah might be a little late. But anyway you get on Craig's mailing list. How about we say that and he sends you information without annoying you. He doesn't do it constantly. But the good thing is when there's a big problem like a big hack, he tells you what to do. And it's all free. So Craig, the number that people should text my name to is what?

Unknown 15:47
It is 855-385-5553 that's 855-385-5553.

Unknown 16:00
Standard data and text rates apply and again it's it's great to get the service but Craig it's better to get you in person every Tuesday here and we appreciate your time We hope you have a great day.  Thank you. Thank you to talk to you next week.

---

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

What is the dark web? What will you find in the dark web? Craig is on today on the Jim Polito show as they discussed the dark web, the pedophilia ring that a YouTuber discovered, and how Facebook uses its apps to track users.

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

---

Related Articles:

What Is The Dark Web? How To Access It And What You’ll Find

Facebook Uses Its Apps To Track Users It Thinks Could Threaten Employees And Offices

Youtuber Claims Online Pedophile Ring Operates Freely On Youtube

--- 

Transcript:

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

Airing date: 02/26/2019

What Is The Dark Web - Who Created It

Craig Peterson: 0:00
We had a really good webinar yesterday. Craig Peterson here for the Infragard. It's kind of cool looking at some of the patterns and what people are interested in. Yesterday, we were talking about the difference between cyber and cyber enabled crimes. Very, very hot topic. The other real hot topic that we discussed, in fact, the number one topic in the last year on the FBI Infragard webinars I've been running. The number one topic has been dark web. And that's kind of interesting, because that's what we talked about today with Jim Polito. Some history here behind the dark web. And why did the government create this thing? So here we go with Mr. Polito.

Unknown 0:47
The man who knows it all our good friend and Tech Talk guru Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir.

Unknown 0:55
Hey, good morning, Jim. How y'all?

Unknown 0:58
You're from Canada. Don't say y'all just just because you travel the country frequently.

Unknown 1:07
Isn't this the deep south? Isn't that how y'all talk down here

Unknown 1:09
For you technically it's the deep south.

Unknown 1:12
Yeah

Unknown 1:14
Speaking of the deep south, let's see Facebook which has nothing to do with the deep south uses its app to track users it thinks could threaten employees and offices. Wait a minute. So Facebook can't you know a tell me can't the tell me whether or not a real post is actually offensive or just a lot of people complained about it. But they can tell me when there's going to be like an attack at work. And not that I'm making light of that.

Unknown 1:55
It's kind of interesting. There's two interesting stories kind of along the same lines as this week. The Facebook one and then YouTube one both of which are how come they can police things they want to police but they can't police these things they don't want.

Unknown 2:10
Right? Exactly good. That's what I was trying to say. But I'm not as smart as you.

Unknown 2:18
It's interesting to look at. And that's a lot of interesting in one paragraph but to look at what Facebook is doing, and that is they have a whole security team that just cracking people who might who might threaten their employees or some of the physical offices. So for instance, there was a threat against their offices over in Europe. And Facebook picked on that really, really quickly. And CNBC ended up doing a story about it because they had more than a dozen former Facebook employees who said that Facebook is mining its social net

Unknown 3:00
Work for threatening comments against Facebook wow some cases it uses its products which are of course the Facebook app the Facebook never use it VPN that using its products to track the location of people it believes present a credible threat now this is incredibly Big Brother-esque here bottom Yeah, yeah and Facebook's other employees are out there and you know Facebook's management is saying well listen it's only legitimate Every business has physical security. We have a physical security team why wouldn't we do it? But you know when when you get right down to a Jim. Why aren't they doing this sort of thing for threats against other people warning people about it. Why aren't they reporting all of this stuff to the local police departments? Why are they trying to do it themselves.

Unknown 4:00
And why are they using their app to track these people basically without their knowledge that Facebook thinks might be a threat to themselves in this? That's where I think they really crossed the line.

Unknown 4:15
Wow. Wow. We're talking with our good friend Craig Peterson, our Tech Talk guru and at the end of this segment I'll give you, well Craig will give you a number and you'll be able to get this information plus a whole lot more. Could this ever help you know I mean, is there any way that they could use this to help him in always in almost in a bit of remember the science fiction movie Minority Report where someone Yeah, predict someone was going to commit a crime and you'd be arrested before you committed the crime and... what?

Unknown 5:01
Future crime became a crime in itself. If you are going to do that.

Unknown 5:05
You are going to commit a crime? Yeah. Which is completely contrary to our Constitution. But all right, Craig, let's suspend disbelief here for a little bit. Could you know police use this kind of modeling to see where they may be spikes in crime? Could Facebook use the same kind of stuff?

Unknown 5:26
That's why like you, you really are brilliant because you're pulling together a whole bunch of pieces. And one of the pieces that should enter into this fray here is the fact that there is already pre crime type technology in place. Then they're using it in New York City. They're using it Los Angeles. My last I heard Boston might be using this but what it is it looks at trends. It looks at social media feeds.

Unknown 6:00
To try and find agitators to try and predict where a crime is going to occur and then the police departments are using that kind of pre crime information to have police officers and units and even in some cases SWAT teams on the standby in that area because this machine learning system this are you know not quite artificial intelligence is predicting crimes there so you combine that technology that already is there is already in the field with the ability of somebody like Google or Facebook is what we're talking about right now who does collect all of this information who does sell all of this information put it all into a pot and stir it and Jim it's a civil libertarians worst nightmare.

Unknown 7:00
Yeah, I can see that. I mean it's like fire it's the good and the bad unfortunately you've destroyed your reputation by saying Jim you're brilliant I mean that's you know Craig we all know you're brilliant but if you're going to say that I'm brilliant people gonna say I don't know if I completely trust Craig Peterson. and his intellect i don't know if I.

Unknown 7:22
Most people Jim they're not thinking it through right and that's the brilliance of brilliance is seen through just the normal short term thought process. And nowadays the average millennial has a an attention span less than that of a goldfish. We're talking five or six seconds so how would somebody like that going to think the next order through and that's where the brilliance comes in Jim in and it's absolutely necessary to think this through what's the ultimate outcome, right of this type of technology?

And then look at the story on YouTube this region where we've got YouTube now ads pulled from companies like McDonald's, Disney, Grammarly. Chromebook, Purina, IKEA, Glad, GNC, Lysol. Now why did those ads get pulled? This is a story that's not really making the news but it turns out that there was a pedophilia ring, a pretty big one, a soft core pedophilia ring running on YouTube, and apparently YouTube kind of knew about it, trying to should have done something about it and absolutely didn't. So this YouTuber guy, his name's Matt Watson. Yeah, he exposed what he's calling a wormhole into this ring on the YouTube platform. He uploaded a video a week ago Sunday about all of this stuff, and it's disgusting to look at. I don't want to get into any of the details but it's right there in the open on YouTube. So you talk about Facebook tracking users is threatened Facebook and and the Facebook is insane, seemingly doing much about anything else who got YouTube now with some of the most important stuff you can imagine out in the open and it gets it so bad that advertisers have to pull their advertising to try and make YouTube do something about it. And it really makes you wonder where we're going.

Unknown 10:00
Wow, we're talking with Craig Peterson. Our Tech Talk guru. At the end of this segment will give you a number you can get all this information for free. Plus other stuff when there's a crisis. I'll explain to you how you do it. There's no obligation All right, this is a question people ask me all the time and I give them a half baked explanation. But let's get it from the guy who's an expert at explaining the technical aspects of the web in a simple way that most people can understand, probably because you wrote some of the language, some of the code for the web that's still in use today. But what is the dark web? Almost sounds like that old dark shadows. That soap opera horror. So what is the dark web?

Unknown 10:27
It does, doesn't it? Well, there, there are multiple parts to the internet. But you can think of it like an iceberg. The dark dark web and the business web are both the part that's underwater, in other words, is a part you don't see the internet inside businesses is bigger than the internet anyone else can see. And the number of apps in fact that are in use outside of the public curve, you are actually outnumber the number of apps available in the app store.

Unknown 11:01
So so there's this huge underwater component of the iceberg when it comes to the internet. And there's really two parts to that. there's what's called the dark web. It's kind of a generic term. And believe it or not, the dark web was set up the effectively by our government and our tax dollars still maintain it. And the idea behind the dark web was how do we let people who are in these countries where there's heavy oppression in Iran, etc, etc. How do we let these militants communicate with each other and communicate with us, our military or the State Department, etc. So we developed this this dark web concept around Tor and some other technologies to allow these people to be able to communicate.

Unknown 11:51
Oh wait a minute. I got it right now. So the government put this together for good and it's been taken over by the identity theft people the people you just talked about pedophilia and YouTube that's where pedophiles trade video in this dark web which was created for good and where did it, where is it ended up?

Unknown 12:19
Well it is created for good it's still used for good but the overwhelming use of the dark web is really a lot of different types of criminal activity in this day and age frankly. So now there's a conundrum here for the federal government. Do do we shut this down which they can't do by the way there's no way they could shut it down because it was designed to be unsettled and shut down a

Unknown 12:46
They did too good of a job you mean it was a government contract that did too good of a job. Yeah, exactly. So and they still want militants to be able to use it. So it's kind of stuck though there's a really interesting article on CSL online that I put up on my website that goes into this because not all of the dark web is bad. Not all of the tools by militants but if you do go out on to that dark web Be careful because it's easy to stumble on stuff that will make your eyeballs pop out.

Unknown 13:18
Yeah. Oh the real bad stuff the really really bad stuff that people want to be able to share. It's like the back alley of the internet, isn't it?

Unknown 13:33
It really is. You know, this is a place where people like Bob Kraft might find another a new massage parlor

Unknown 13:46
Oh. So wrong on so many levels. But ok, I'll let it go.

Unknown 13:51
We also have out there have been some of these sites like the Silk Road and things where people were buying and trading drugs and they was shut down. These people were caught. So just because it's on the dark web, just because you're using cryptocurrencies doesn't mean that the FBI or the Secret Service or other guys can track you down because they can and they do. So keep that in mind as well. It's a scary place to go. There are a lot of dark alleys out there we keep an eye on some parts of the dark web so that we know what's going on. And if there's something major that's where we find these huge cracks when when you know one of these places is broken into that's where we find that and that's what we use it for. But you know as a general rule, Jim they away from the dark web.

Unknown 14:45
So, you know, teach us how to access it, which is good, but at least we know what it is and why it was created. It's kind of a back alley for the government to communicate with individuals who are in countries where they don't allow the internet and yet Then it got co opted by the bad guys all right I promised that I would give you a full well that Craig would give you a phone number and you'd be able to get this information plus a whole lot other stuff you get on Craig's list. Hey, Craigslist. Hey that's pretty good I just made a pun there well good register that yeah might be a little late. But anyway you get on Craig's mailing list. How about we say that and he sends you information without annoying you. He doesn't do it constantly. But the good thing is when there's a big problem like a big hack, he tells you what to do. And it's all free. So Craig, the number that people should text my name to is what?

Unknown 15:47
It is 855-385-5553 that's 855-385-5553.

Unknown 16:00
Standard data and text rates apply and again it's it's great to get the service but Craig it's better to get you in person every Tuesday here and we appreciate your time We hope you have a great day.  Thank you. Thank you to talk to you next week.

---

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:

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Craig is on with Jack Heath as they talked about the presidential candidate who is trying to fend off the unemployment riots.

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

---

Related Articles 

---

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

Airing date: 02/25/2019

Presidential Candidate And Unemployment Riots

Craig Peterson 0:00
Good morning, everybody. Very, very busy putting together all of this course material. It is really kind of fun. And it's fun helping out all of these people who signed up. We're covering a bunch of things. This last weekend. We spent the whole weekend and module last week, but in together a whole set of modules real, it's one module, but it's multiple sections in the module on securing Windows devices, Macintosh devices, mobile devices, using your free tools and installing the top notch security tools, what you should use and when you should use it. So it's been a whole lot of fun. And no, we're not taking any more people into this class right now. But it's fun. I'm feeling alive. Again, this is really quite neat. A lot of work but you know, it is a whole lot of fun as well. So this morning I was on with Mr. Jack Heath, and we had a good little chat and we took a political angle to this whole presidential race and technology and what is happening out there hearing what's happening with stop and shop here in New England, which is a New England grocery store. Is this going to impact the whole country? Again, something here in New England getting pushed out, we got a presidential candidate and Volleyed. This is really something so here we go with Mr. Heath.

Jack Heath 1:30
Alright, joining us now on the Auto Fair listener lines. Our regular contributor. Our Tech Talk guy, Craig Peterson joins us in the Auto Fair listener lines. Good morning, Craig.

Craig 1:37
Hey, good morning. I don't know Jack if you heard about this 44 year old democrat who's running for president. And he's got a real interesting technology angle to his campaign. He's trying to fend off what he's calling the unemployment riots of that he says are on the way he said, we're in the middle of the third inning of the greatest economic and technology shift in human history is named to Andrew Yang. And he brings up an interesting point about jobs and technology and automation and where everything is going. He's trying to provide a soft landing for truckers and manufacturing workers who he believes are going to be out of work, frankly, pretty soon here. Jack.

Jack 2:21
It's interesting you say that Craig early early morning I was listening and watching or reading a story that's I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, I believe, stop and shop unionized workers are potentially looking at a strike because they are in the middle of a deal. But one of the workers interviewed when asked what's their beef because they are I guess, in the retail grocery world, some of the higher paid but for example, deli workers and others, they're talking about that Stop and Shop and baggers and you know, cashiers there's so much replacement with technology, that's one reason why they're looking at possibly striking that they're, they're sort of taking their jobs and replace it with technology.

Justin 3:03
I don't use those automatic checkouts. Because I feel like it's eventually that's all there will be. And if you know, I don't like if I'm running my own groceries out, you know, do I get a check at the end of the week? You know, do I get to fill out a W two? What's going on there?

Jack 3:15
No, I it's funny. I liked I like to go through the human part. But But that's an interesting thing. So this person saying that we're going to see a lot of displacement and that's been talked about.

Craig 3:26
Yeah, and but you know, it's always been talked about. We were worried about what would happen if all the people took care of the horses once the horseless carriage came in, but you know, Justin, ultimately, where this is going and Jack and everybody is you're not going to check out yourself. You're just going to walk around the store, pull things off the shelf and walk out of the store, because it's all going to be automated. We are.

Jack Unknown 3:48
That's what Amazon's trying to do, right.

Craig 3:50
Yeah, exactly. And we're talking about nearly 10,000 of the 15,000 members of the Union there at Stop and Shop devoted to the would strike because of that. So it's a difficult thing. We've always had this with new technology. I don't think it's going away. And frankly, Jack, I think it's interesting that it's entered into the whole presidential race. 

Jack 4:14 
Interesting. All right. Well, and you know, the other thing I was thinking of you on this morning, Craig Peterson with Tech Talk is, you know, again, another big another big story is Karen Curtis with a local news talk, radio station and Florida pelt. Palm Beach has joined us saying for Robert Kraft, the Patriots owner, it's a misdemeanor in Florida what he's charged with, but it's a PR nightmare. And the social media coming out of this on Friday over the weekend. And I looked at some of the Florida, the Jupiter and that area, new sites. The social media is where the real fire comes from these stories.

Craig 4:48
it does in it. And that's impossible to crouch. It doesn't matter how rich you are, you know, you can't go pay off some local reporter to try and keep it down or maybe work with the local police department. Once that word gets out. Jack on the social media, there's a lot of people that just love to tear other people down. There's no way to stop it. But you know it it is a small misdemeanor, frankly, it's illegal, it's a crime, etc, etc. But normally, something like this would not get a whole lot of attention. You know, you mentioned earlier that the PR is where he's really going to get nailed here. But when it comes to social media, it doesn't matter. You know, we've heard just a rumor of a rumor and it spreads across the country versus the old days where it took something really substantial before there. There was much talk in the media.

Jack 5:40
Before the newspaper was read are delivered. might have been a few weeks before you'd hear something or a few days now. It's a few seconds. Thank you, Craig Peterson Tech Talk. http://CraigPeterson/.om. Thanks Craig.

Craig 5:52
Thanks, Jack.

Craig 5:53
All right. That's it for today. I will be back tomorrow with of course, Jim Polito. I always have so much fun on with him, and will will also on Wednesday. Be back with our friends in Maine. And then Thursday and Friday. I've been trying to do my Security Thing podcasts. But I'm so busy with this course. I've had a little bit of trouble with that. But I'm going to really try and do it this week as well. And today if you are an FBI Infragard member I have webinar for you this afternoon. So Craig's keeping busy plus I was approached by a CEO group here, mastermind group of some pretty big companies to speak to them, maybe do a half a day for them on some of the security stops. I gotta get a proposal together for that and more. Anyhow, I will talk to you guys tomorrow. Always make time for this. I think it's important. So take care. Bye bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Message Input:

Message #techtalk

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

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Craig is on with Jack Heath as they talked about the presidential candidate who is trying to fend off the unemployment riots.

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

---

Related Articles 

---

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

Airing date: 02/25/2019

Presidential Candidate And Unemployment Riots

Craig Peterson 0:00
Good morning, everybody. Very, very busy putting together all of this course material. It is really kind of fun. And it's fun helping out all of these people who signed up. We're covering a bunch of things. This last weekend. We spent the whole weekend and module last week, but in together a whole set of modules real, it's one module, but it's multiple sections in the module on securing Windows devices, Macintosh devices, mobile devices, using your free tools and installing the top notch security tools, what you should use and when you should use it. So it's been a whole lot of fun. And no, we're not taking any more people into this class right now. But it's fun. I'm feeling alive. Again, this is really quite neat. A lot of work but you know, it is a whole lot of fun as well. So this morning I was on with Mr. Jack Heath, and we had a good little chat and we took a political angle to this whole presidential race and technology and what is happening out there hearing what's happening with stop and shop here in New England, which is a New England grocery store. Is this going to impact the whole country? Again, something here in New England getting pushed out, we got a presidential candidate and Volleyed. This is really something so here we go with Mr. Heath.

Jack Heath 1:30
Alright, joining us now on the Auto Fair listener lines. Our regular contributor. Our Tech Talk guy, Craig Peterson joins us in the Auto Fair listener lines. Good morning, Craig.

Craig 1:37
Hey, good morning. I don't know Jack if you heard about this 44 year old democrat who's running for president. And he's got a real interesting technology angle to his campaign. He's trying to fend off what he's calling the unemployment riots of that he says are on the way he said, we're in the middle of the third inning of the greatest economic and technology shift in human history is named to Andrew Yang. And he brings up an interesting point about jobs and technology and automation and where everything is going. He's trying to provide a soft landing for truckers and manufacturing workers who he believes are going to be out of work, frankly, pretty soon here. Jack.

Jack 2:21
It's interesting you say that Craig early early morning I was listening and watching or reading a story that's I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, I believe, stop and shop unionized workers are potentially looking at a strike because they are in the middle of a deal. But one of the workers interviewed when asked what's their beef because they are I guess, in the retail grocery world, some of the higher paid but for example, deli workers and others, they're talking about that Stop and Shop and baggers and you know, cashiers there's so much replacement with technology, that's one reason why they're looking at possibly striking that they're, they're sort of taking their jobs and replace it with technology.

Justin 3:03
I don't use those automatic checkouts. Because I feel like it's eventually that's all there will be. And if you know, I don't like if I'm running my own groceries out, you know, do I get a check at the end of the week? You know, do I get to fill out a W two? What's going on there?

Jack 3:15
No, I it's funny. I liked I like to go through the human part. But But that's an interesting thing. So this person saying that we're going to see a lot of displacement and that's been talked about.

Craig 3:26
Yeah, and but you know, it's always been talked about. We were worried about what would happen if all the people took care of the horses once the horseless carriage came in, but you know, Justin, ultimately, where this is going and Jack and everybody is you're not going to check out yourself. You're just going to walk around the store, pull things off the shelf and walk out of the store, because it's all going to be automated. We are.

Jack Unknown 3:48
That's what Amazon's trying to do, right.

Craig 3:50
Yeah, exactly. And we're talking about nearly 10,000 of the 15,000 members of the Union there at Stop and Shop devoted to the would strike because of that. So it's a difficult thing. We've always had this with new technology. I don't think it's going away. And frankly, Jack, I think it's interesting that it's entered into the whole presidential race. 

Jack 4:14 
Interesting. All right. Well, and you know, the other thing I was thinking of you on this morning, Craig Peterson with Tech Talk is, you know, again, another big another big story is Karen Curtis with a local news talk, radio station and Florida pelt. Palm Beach has joined us saying for Robert Kraft, the Patriots owner, it's a misdemeanor in Florida what he's charged with, but it's a PR nightmare. And the social media coming out of this on Friday over the weekend. And I looked at some of the Florida, the Jupiter and that area, new sites. The social media is where the real fire comes from these stories.

Craig 4:48
it does in it. And that's impossible to crouch. It doesn't matter how rich you are, you know, you can't go pay off some local reporter to try and keep it down or maybe work with the local police department. Once that word gets out. Jack on the social media, there's a lot of people that just love to tear other people down. There's no way to stop it. But you know it it is a small misdemeanor, frankly, it's illegal, it's a crime, etc, etc. But normally, something like this would not get a whole lot of attention. You know, you mentioned earlier that the PR is where he's really going to get nailed here. But when it comes to social media, it doesn't matter. You know, we've heard just a rumor of a rumor and it spreads across the country versus the old days where it took something really substantial before there. There was much talk in the media.

Jack 5:40
Before the newspaper was read are delivered. might have been a few weeks before you'd hear something or a few days now. It's a few seconds. Thank you, Craig Peterson Tech Talk. http://CraigPeterson/.om. Thanks Craig.

Craig 5:52
Thanks, Jack.

Craig 5:53
All right. That's it for today. I will be back tomorrow with of course, Jim Polito. I always have so much fun on with him, and will will also on Wednesday. Be back with our friends in Maine. And then Thursday and Friday. I've been trying to do my Security Thing podcasts. But I'm so busy with this course. I've had a little bit of trouble with that. But I'm going to really try and do it this week as well. And today if you are an FBI Infragard member I have webinar for you this afternoon. So Craig's keeping busy plus I was approached by a CEO group here, mastermind group of some pretty big companies to speak to them, maybe do a half a day for them on some of the security stops. I gotta get a proposal together for that and more. Anyhow, I will talk to you guys tomorrow. Always make time for this. I think it's important. So take care. Bye bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Message Input:

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855-385-5553

YouTube and Soft Porn? There is a YouTuber, named Matt Watson who exposed what he called a wormhole into a soft core pedophilia ring and posted this out on YouTube. In less than a week he essentially caused the cut off of advertising, some very big advertisers on YouTube. I'll tell you more about that today.

You know, I've been warning you about these smart devices and today there is a real-world example of the bad guys at work and the true invasion of our private lives.  

The Dark Web is in the News.  We'll talk about what it is, What's available. How do you access it? What you can find.

We've got Windows Defender. This is something I'm talking about in my new master course over the next couple of weeks.  Where I will teach how to secure your computers and secure them effectively.

Do you put things off?  We all do.  We'll talk a little bit that and procrastination. I will tell you about an extension for Chrome that just might help you out.

Facebook may not be trying to protect the rest of us, but they are trying to protect their own. Yes, indeed, Facebook is using its apps to track people. And we'll tell you why and how.

Flipping Houses.  Has it ever intrigued you?  I know it has me. Now, Zillow is helping you get the information you need if you are interested in buying or selling properties. They have a couple of new tools that I will talk to you about. 

These 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: 02/23/2019

Flipping Houses The Hitech Way - Smart TVs Chrome sticks Hacked For-Profit - Pedophile Ring Operating On YouTube

Craig Peterson: 0:00
Here we go again Craig Peterson. Man we just keep pushing to that thousand week mark this is so cool. I have to thank everybody course at Clear Channel and iHeart and even before it was either one of those for putting up with me all these years and for you guys for listening right. If it wasn't for listeners there just wouldn't be a radio show and podcast. So, hey thank you very much. Of course, you can listen to me live on iHeart app. I'm not sure why they're podcasting isn't picking me up but yeah we never been able to resolve that maybe I should get somebody to work on that one as well because there was a lot of people that really enjoy it and if you want to listen to the podcast it's just http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes and you'll find it right there. I'm also on a bunch of other ones. I'm in a SoundCloud I think I'm know I'm in TuneIn and a few of these other distribution networks out there. So have a look for it Tech Talk with Craig Peterson and don't get confused with this other guy that's been trying to steal my name and my show out in the Seattle area. No, no, no, no, it's me. I have a kind of distinctive voice. And so from that, hopefully you'll be able to figure out which one is which. Because I am the original

Now, okay, moving on. Today, we've got as usual, a whole ton of stuff. Our email should be back to usual for you guys. So, this morning, Saturday morning, you should have received the weekly show notes and those show notes go through all of the articles that I think are worth covering in the news. So let's get going. We've got a YouTuber here who has cut off essentially, he has caused the cut off of advertising, some big advertisers on YouTube will tell you about that. You know, I've been warning you about these smart devices that are out there. We're going to tell you about why. Here's a real-world example of what a bad guy has been doing. And he says he's going to stop doing it now. The dark web, what is it? What can you access? How do you access it? What can you find, and we've got Windows Defender. This is something I'm talking about in the course, my master course over the next couple of weeks about how to secure your computers and secure them effectively. So we'll talk a little bit about that and procrastination. This is kind of cool. How many of us get on the computer, we open up Chrome, we start poking around on the internet. And we end up wasting a lot of time. Well here's a Chrome extension that might help you out. Facebook may not be trying to protect the rest of us, but they are trying to protect their own. Yes, indeed, Facebook is using its apps to track people. And we'll tell you why and how. And we'll start out with this one because I think this is really cool. You've probably heard of Zillow before, it's an app. It's a website. I've used it before, you know, you go into a nice neighborhood or area of the country and say, Wow, I wonder what it costs to buy a house here. So you pop up Zillow and Zillow comes up and says, hey, yeah, here's what it costs and in this town, and here's all the houses are for sale that even now tells you about rentals and rental availability. And Zillow has been keeping a very close eye on the real estate market. It's pretty much right almost all the time. It even has a tool that will estimate what a house is worth. So it'll have its little Zillow estimate. It'll let you know what the taxes are, what the was paid for that house originally kind of pulls it all together.

Now, you've been watching on TV, there's, I think it's home and garden TV, HDTV. My wife loves this channel, and some of the stuff that's out on it. But they have these house flipping shows, there are these twin brothers that do one, there are these people in Waco, Texas, a husband and wife, I guess they're having marital issues. Now, I'm not sure. But this whole Magnolia thing and how popular it is, it's gotten so popular that even our target has picked up her chain of household decorations and everything, which is really kind of cool. When you get right down to it. And think about it. She has really built an empire along with her husband, I think it's mainly her. But you know, it's hard to tell, maybe it's him driving it. And she's just the voice for the most part. But she's definitely the decorator type. Well, these shows have become very popular, they are inexpensive to produce, at least for the most part. And the idea is that the host, and I only mentioned two shows there's a lot of them, but the idea is the hosts go in, they find a house maybe a distressed house somebody's about to get foreclosed on or something else is happening. But they find the house and they try and buy it at a deal. And oftentimes they are on foreclosed homes and they don't get a chance to inspect them beforehand. But they're still able to make a bunch of money. And that's how they're compensated. Of course, they get money from the show's production company. And there may be other money's involved to go between all of these different people involved. It's fairly expensive, obviously to produce a show. But, because the host can make so much money it costs a lot less to produce these shows and people love them right. I like those shows also where they go to different parts of the world. I saw when they were in Panama and they the show that couple three different properties and they have to decide which one they want to buy and sell your their guests and against your wife trying to figure out what it is right? Aren't those things kind of cool. Obviously, I'm not the only one that likes these just based on the numbers that are out there. And if you've seen them, you might have thought a little bit about maybe flipping a house. And there have been ads on this radio station that I'm on and others for seminars you can attend where they'll teach you everything you need to know about how to make money fast, and you do it in the real estate market. And you use other people's money. I took Bob Allen's course. read his book, and he and Mark Victor Hansen got together they put together this whole thing and I bought it all and I went to some of the seminars. I've been to these before. Multi-day seminars on buying houses and flipping them and things. I never did it because it wasn't something I was comfortable doing. You know what do I know, I certainly have done renovations in my own home before and I mean, done them, you know, built everything. Built the cabinets from scratch, and, and the whole nine yards. So, I know a little bit about it. But I never felt comfortable enough to go out and do it all on my own. How about you guys, right?

I guess it's the same thing with computer security. Most of the people that signed up for this latest master course for me were kind of wondering, what should they do? How should they do it? They didn't even know where to start. And that's kind of where I would be. And even after attending these seminars, these live events, I didn't feel comfortable enough to go out and start flipping houses, right. Well, this is interesting when we tie in Zillow because you can use it a little in order to kind of figure out is there a house I should flip. And bottom line if you are going to be buying homes and flipping them, which means you're going to renovate them, you're going to turn them into a valuable property from whatever they are now and sell it for a higher price. And hopefully higher than what it cost you to buy it and renovate it. Right? That's what flipping is when talking about flipping a house. So hopefully, you know the neighborhood. Everybody that I've read and the seminars I've attended, say get to know a neighborhood. It might be your neighborhood. It might be a close by neighborhood but know everything, know all of the houses, what are they sold for? What are they really worth? How long have they been sitting on the market? That information can help you also get a really good deal on a house.

Now, remember, I mentioned Zillow. Have you used Zillow before? Have you wondered what their model is? How do they really make money? It is obvious that they're taking somebody from the real estate agents that are are advertising in there and the leads that they're getting from Zillow. But, this is very interesting because Zillow is now getting in the house flipping business. Isn't that something. So you can now go on to Zillow. And this is cool, I even saw an ad I have it up on my website. When you look at this article that came out of Bloomberg, they have a little ad that right out of a print media about flipping your house, my you know, we want to buy your home. So people have these problems all the time where they're trying to sell their home, but they can't buy a new home until they sold the current home. And once I sold the current home, they're in real trouble now, because I got to get out of that home and 30 days or 60 days, whatever it is, which means that's all the time they have to find a new home and that just not going to work out very well for them. Been in that position before. So should I do repairs on the house before I sell it? How much repair should I do? Should I just paint the walls white, I've got to replace this floor or that flooring. I gotta fix this roof leak that's been there for a long time, right? All of these things you guys have dealt with this before. Right? And if you've ever sold a house.

Well, the company that came up with this whole business thing and came up with the programs and the website. And now the apps have something called Zestimates. Z-E-S-T, Just like Zillow. Z-I-L-L-O-W. You check it out if you haven't checked out that app or website yet.

But Zestimates now, and it's kind of a Kelley Blue Book for American homes. And they've started an instant offers business. The idea behind this is if you think you want to sell your home, you go on to the Zillow site and you get a Zestimate. And the whole idea behind this is Zillow has a pretty good idea of what your house might be worth. Because they're using some machine learning. They have all of this data about homes that have been sold in your neighborhood in your town, and what they're all worth. So if you sign up for this, it's part of this whole new breed of high tech home flippers. They've been called iBuyers before. There are some Silicon Valley startups that are doing this and real estate brokerages that have instant offer operations as well. So Zillow has kind of pulled this all together the information from Wall Street, and the finances and Silicon Valley capital, and all of these algorithms they've developed. And they can make very detailed and fine and correct really predictions about home prices.

So, these investors are buying homes on a massive scale. And because it's such a big scale, unlike the Magnolia people we talked about before, they only have to make a just a small profit out of each flip. So that's putting these real estate investors that have been flipping homes the old fashioned way, it's putting them in a bit of a bad spot. But it's interesting because this Bloomberg article goes through a specific example in the Phoenix area. And what happened was, they listed their home, they weren't sure what to do, what to fix what not to fix, normally, what would happen, right, you'd have a real estate agent come out, they look at the house and say, Well, if you fix the bathroom, you're going to get your money out. If you do the kitchen, you're not going to get your money out. And you got to fix the roof because it's got a second roofline or whatever, all of those things are right. And then you do it and you have your fingers crossed, that you're going to be able to sell that house at some point in the future. Well, in this case, what happens is Zillow make some really good estimates based on what's happening in your neighborhood. And they now have this great opportunity because they might make a good deal on it. So they hire someone to come out at that point and look at your house. So they have an appraiser who comes out and has a quick look around, makes sure there's nothing like terrible with your house, which would lower its value on the market. And then Tada, you're done. It's just absolutely amazing.

So, you know, agents in the past have really resented Zillow is market power. And they've been complaining about this whole idea behind this Zestimate and Zillow as had these estimates for a long time and saying that they're creating unrealistic expectations. But now Zillow with Zappraisal might be a way to put it has a very good business model and a very good idea of what your house is actually worth. So, keep an eye out for that if you're looking to buy a house right now today. You can go to Zillow and find out what there's Zestimate is their Zillow estimate for the value of the house. just generically speaking, assuming there are no major flaws in the home. And you can now also have Zillow buy your house from you and flip it. Now, because they only need a very small margin, you might actually do better on one of these Zillow flips. And they do charge like a six to I think it goes as high as 10%, which is higher than your normal real estate agent. But you're also guaranteed a sale and the sale is going to happen very quickly. So you know, I have to take all of that stuff into consideration when you're looking at it.

Well, we're going to come back here in just a second, I want to talk about this guy called TheHackerGiraffe and why my warnings about smart TVs are coming true, what he's been doing and why he's retiring. So, here we go.

So, this guy calls himself or called himself, I guess TheHackerGiraffe. And he said he's retired from hacking smart TVs. This is really, really interesting, because, you know, I've warned about this before, before, excuse me, we've had manufacturers who have installed cameras in your TV. And the idea is, the TV looks back at you. It's watching you while you're watching TV. And the idea for that type of spying on people is to try and figure out are you paying attention. Are you paying attention during the ads, when you look away, who's in the room, there's facial recognition software, some of these vendors are using, so they know oh, this, it's this person. And they always watch this type of show. It's that person, oh, we've got a whole family in here recognizes there's like, three, four or five faces and how often they're watching TV. And of course, that's a true invasion of our privacy. And there was a great article this week about Paul Vixie, a guy who I've admired for years and loosely worked with on some of the DNS stuff. I've used his code forever, you know, kind of advanced, techie geeky stuff on the internet. But he was all upset because he installed a machine that was calling home. And it was, I think it was a Google Home device. And it wasn't using his DNS and there's no way to change. And, you know, these devices we're putting in our homes, and we're using this Internet of Things, frankly, can be dangerous, and it can be spying on us and worse and can be used to find out by the bad guys when are people not home. That's the time to rob the house. Right? It's breaking and entering versus some form of assault that might happen.

So people should be concerned very legitimately, I think, be concerned about all of this. And when you're talking about the smart TVs, there's, even more, this guy, TheHackerGiraffe, he hacked not just smart TVs, but he hacked these Google Chromecast streaming devices and others, and his whole idea was to promote a YouTuber that he liked. Have you heard of this guy, this PewDiePie guy, you might not have a very strange guy. Very, very strange guy. But he had a popular YouTube channel he did some things that kind of forced him out of favor and that was a problem because he started losing followers. I think in fact he got completely delisted off of YouTube and he managed to get back on.

Well apparently this guy, TheHackerGiraffe and I'm looking at this article from Graham Cluley, thanks for forwarding this along it's kind of interesting just see that I don't know that he was paid I think he was paid yeah In fact he was he used Patreon in order to get paid but he was going out and hacking people's smart TV its TVs and smart TV devices and had it set up so that you turn on your TV you'd be watching a program or whatever and up would come and add to watch this PewDieGuy for his channel. There he was here's his YouTube channel click on it sort of thing it's kind of nuts when you think about it and he was doing it not just for PewDiePie he was doing for other people too.

Now I have long criticized the Huffington Post because they used black techniques in order to get followers. In other words, they cheated and lied, they did a lot of things that people have accused all kinds of people on the internet for doing but you know the ends justify the means to these people. And in this case, the Huffington Post the ends justified the means we got to get our message out there. So we've got to get bigger and stronger and last year and in fact, that's exactly what they did. Well by getting bigger and stronger, and nastier they increase their base. They  increase their base and then the rules changed and you could do the practice these dark arts back in the day to try and fool people into following your website but you couldn't do it anymore because they started getting clamped on people didn't like it and the FTC came after them saying this is illegal unfair etc and so they stopped doing it and it's not just the Huffington Puffington Post its many of these different websites and did it over the years.

So now this guy was paid to go on to your Smart TV or Chromecast devices and hack them to get you to watch their internet channel so a lot of people were asking them, Chromecast owners Why their TV suddenly showing a video promoting this YouTube superstar PewDiePie and Chromecast owners complained to Google who looked into this and started finding out oh wait a minute now this all happened because of again incorrectly configured routers that had this you p&p enabled you might have heard of this before. It's a way for you to get out to the internet and then have the internet get back to you. But it's interesting. Just because it's misconfigured doesn't give you carte blanche access to it right. I misconfigured my WiFi Why does that somehow mean to you that you have every right to kind of break in on me? That's the question.

And this guy, TheHackerGiraffe has decided he's going to retire. He posted his retirement notice online and we've seen the PewDiePie fans doing all kinds of things. Just last month, they defaced a section of the Wall Street Journal website. And of course, this TheHackerGiraffe guy and PewDiePie both claim they had no involvement in the attack. But it frankly it's interesting to look at right because we are seeing major changes in the internet and major changes in what we consider to be acceptable. So that brings us to Facebook and pedophiles. Believe it or not

I'm not saying that everybody is a pedophile on new I said Facebook, but it's YouTube on YouTube. But it's kind of interesting to look at this here. Obviously, not everybody is a pedophile on YouTube. And I'm also not saying that YouTube has pictures that are showing minors in various seriously compromising positions if you will.

But this is kind of interesting because a YouTuber by the name of Matt Watson just this week exposed what he called a wormhole into a soft core pedophilia ring. And he posted this out on YouTube. He uploaded it on Sunday. So it hasn't even quite been a week yet. But his video claim to reveal a frankly, what's not so underground YouTube community of adults who are encouraging very young children to upload videos of themselves in compromising situations. I don't want to go into all of this because it just disgusts me, frankly. And I'm sure would you too. Now what's happening here, because of this coming out, is major corporations have pulled all of their advertising from YouTube once this came out because remember, Facebook is supposed to be policing itself. In fact, it entered into an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission years ago about self-policing. And Facebook's been accused of not following through with the plea deal. YouTube is also trying to be self-policing. But remember I said we've seen a lot of changes over the years where you know what is acceptable is not the same today as it was a few years ago. Obviously, this is not acceptable. So all kinds of people pulled funding. YouTube's trying to figure out how can they deal with this how can they find the pictures because these are not naked pictures that are easy enough to find through a computer an algorithm that showing a certain percentage of skin etc right that you normally would look for for the typical pornography. So, in this case, it's very difficult for them.

There's a hashtag campaign over on Twitter and you might look it up if your Twitter user to find out more about this the hashtag is YouTubeWakeUp and within 24 hours these advertisers had caught on. It's crazy. We've got multiple ads from McDonalds Disney  Grammarly, Chromebook, Purina, IKEA, Glad, GNC, Lysol and many others that just said forget about this. So, Watson's calling this as a small victory. It certainly is a victory. This battle still ongoing. And frankly, the public's known for a long time about child exploitation on YouTube. But so far, YouTube has failed to adequately address the issue according to Watson and some of these other people out there.

Now, this video came out just days after multiple innocent YouTube channels were wrongly deleted after being flagged for tagging their videos with the abbreviation for child porn. And that happens all too often as well. Someone who doesn't like a YouTube channel, somebody that's a competitor in the financial space with a YouTube channel will go and flag, inappropriately flag content is being inappropriate wrong kitty porn etc. etc. So YouTube has a nightmare on their hands, right? It is like the boy who called wolf we just had that rest just this week an actor on TV who apparently came out and hired a couple of Nigerian guys, big bodybuilders to supposedly beat him up and put a noose around his neck and dump bleach on him. The accusations are flying on that front. But people do this kind of stuff all the time. So how is YouTube supposed to be able to deal with this? Even ads getting ads pulled down because of so-called inappropriate content or doesn't meet the Facebook guidelines or you know all across out there. It's difficult as an advertiser nowadays to figure this whole thing out. So interesting these videos that Watson exposes this week obviously slipped under the radar but we'll see what happens that YouTube if it simply enforces its rule that forbade uploads from users under the age of 13 that would have stopped all of these videos that we're just talking about.

So a lot more my website. Check it out. http://CraigPeterson.com. You can find everything we talked about today. Plus more including what Facebook's doing to people who threatened employees. Procrastination. This is great. a Chrome extension you should look that up. You'll find it on my website. Why Windows Defender antivirus is the most deployed antivirus and big, big businesses out there and what is the dark web how to access it what you'll find it's not all necessarily bad there certainly is enough of that but it's not all bad out there all of that. http://CraigPeterson.com, and make sure you get my newsletter because that's going to keep you up to date on all the security stuff and get you the weekly show notes as well.

Have a good great day and we'll see you next week. Take care. Bye-bye.

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Related articles:

What Is The Dark Web? How To Access It And What You’ll Find

Did Your Smart-Tv Start Showing You Shows You Didn’t Subscribe To?
“TheHackerGiraffe” Says He’s Retired From Hacking Smart Tvs To Promote Pewdiepie

Youtuber Claims Online Pedophile Ring Operates Freely On Youtube

Why Windows Defender Antivirus Is The Most Deployed In The Enterprise

Prevent Procrastination With This Chrome Extension

Facebook Uses Its Apps To Track Users It Thinks Could Threaten Employees And Offices

Zillow Wants To Flip Your House
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YouTube and Soft Porn? There is a YouTuber, named Matt Watson who exposed what he called a wormhole into a soft core pedophilia ring and posted this out on YouTube. In less than a week he essentially caused the cut off of advertising, some very big advertisers on YouTube. I'll tell you more about that today.

You know, I've been warning you about these smart devices and today there is a real-world example of the bad guys at work and the true invasion of our private lives.  

The Dark Web is in the News.  We'll talk about what it is, What's available. How do you access it? What you can find.

We've got Windows Defender. This is something I'm talking about in my new master course over the next couple of weeks.  Where I will teach how to secure your computers and secure them effectively.

Do you put things off?  We all do.  We'll talk a little bit that and procrastination. I will tell you about an extension for Chrome that just might help you out.

Facebook may not be trying to protect the rest of us, but they are trying to protect their own. Yes, indeed, Facebook is using its apps to track people. And we'll tell you why and how.

Flipping Houses.  Has it ever intrigued you?  I know it has me. Now, Zillow is helping you get the information you need if you are interested in buying or selling properties. They have a couple of new tools that I will talk to you about. 

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

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Transcript:

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

Airing date: 02/23/2019

Flipping Houses The Hitech Way - Smart TVs Chrome sticks Hacked For-Profit - Pedophile Ring Operating On YouTube

Craig Peterson: 0:00
Here we go again Craig Peterson. Man we just keep pushing to that thousand week mark this is so cool. I have to thank everybody course at Clear Channel and iHeart and even before it was either one of those for putting up with me all these years and for you guys for listening right. If it wasn't for listeners there just wouldn't be a radio show and podcast. So, hey thank you very much. Of course, you can listen to me live on iHeart app. I'm not sure why they're podcasting isn't picking me up but yeah we never been able to resolve that maybe I should get somebody to work on that one as well because there was a lot of people that really enjoy it and if you want to listen to the podcast it's just http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes and you'll find it right there. I'm also on a bunch of other ones. I'm in a SoundCloud I think I'm know I'm in TuneIn and a few of these other distribution networks out there. So have a look for it Tech Talk with Craig Peterson and don't get confused with this other guy that's been trying to steal my name and my show out in the Seattle area. No, no, no, no, it's me. I have a kind of distinctive voice. And so from that, hopefully you'll be able to figure out which one is which. Because I am the original

Now, okay, moving on. Today, we've got as usual, a whole ton of stuff. Our email should be back to usual for you guys. So, this morning, Saturday morning, you should have received the weekly show notes and those show notes go through all of the articles that I think are worth covering in the news. So let's get going. We've got a YouTuber here who has cut off essentially, he has caused the cut off of advertising, some big advertisers on YouTube will tell you about that. You know, I've been warning you about these smart devices that are out there. We're going to tell you about why. Here's a real-world example of what a bad guy has been doing. And he says he's going to stop doing it now. The dark web, what is it? What can you access? How do you access it? What can you find, and we've got Windows Defender. This is something I'm talking about in the course, my master course over the next couple of weeks about how to secure your computers and secure them effectively. So we'll talk a little bit about that and procrastination. This is kind of cool. How many of us get on the computer, we open up Chrome, we start poking around on the internet. And we end up wasting a lot of time. Well here's a Chrome extension that might help you out. Facebook may not be trying to protect the rest of us, but they are trying to protect their own. Yes, indeed, Facebook is using its apps to track people. And we'll tell you why and how. And we'll start out with this one because I think this is really cool. You've probably heard of Zillow before, it's an app. It's a website. I've used it before, you know, you go into a nice neighborhood or area of the country and say, Wow, I wonder what it costs to buy a house here. So you pop up Zillow and Zillow comes up and says, hey, yeah, here's what it costs and in this town, and here's all the houses are for sale that even now tells you about rentals and rental availability. And Zillow has been keeping a very close eye on the real estate market. It's pretty much right almost all the time. It even has a tool that will estimate what a house is worth. So it'll have its little Zillow estimate. It'll let you know what the taxes are, what the was paid for that house originally kind of pulls it all together.

Now, you've been watching on TV, there's, I think it's home and garden TV, HDTV. My wife loves this channel, and some of the stuff that's out on it. But they have these house flipping shows, there are these twin brothers that do one, there are these people in Waco, Texas, a husband and wife, I guess they're having marital issues. Now, I'm not sure. But this whole Magnolia thing and how popular it is, it's gotten so popular that even our target has picked up her chain of household decorations and everything, which is really kind of cool. When you get right down to it. And think about it. She has really built an empire along with her husband, I think it's mainly her. But you know, it's hard to tell, maybe it's him driving it. And she's just the voice for the most part. But she's definitely the decorator type. Well, these shows have become very popular, they are inexpensive to produce, at least for the most part. And the idea is that the host, and I only mentioned two shows there's a lot of them, but the idea is the hosts go in, they find a house maybe a distressed house somebody's about to get foreclosed on or something else is happening. But they find the house and they try and buy it at a deal. And oftentimes they are on foreclosed homes and they don't get a chance to inspect them beforehand. But they're still able to make a bunch of money. And that's how they're compensated. Of course, they get money from the show's production company. And there may be other money's involved to go between all of these different people involved. It's fairly expensive, obviously to produce a show. But, because the host can make so much money it costs a lot less to produce these shows and people love them right. I like those shows also where they go to different parts of the world. I saw when they were in Panama and they the show that couple three different properties and they have to decide which one they want to buy and sell your their guests and against your wife trying to figure out what it is right? Aren't those things kind of cool. Obviously, I'm not the only one that likes these just based on the numbers that are out there. And if you've seen them, you might have thought a little bit about maybe flipping a house. And there have been ads on this radio station that I'm on and others for seminars you can attend where they'll teach you everything you need to know about how to make money fast, and you do it in the real estate market. And you use other people's money. I took Bob Allen's course. read his book, and he and Mark Victor Hansen got together they put together this whole thing and I bought it all and I went to some of the seminars. I've been to these before. Multi-day seminars on buying houses and flipping them and things. I never did it because it wasn't something I was comfortable doing. You know what do I know, I certainly have done renovations in my own home before and I mean, done them, you know, built everything. Built the cabinets from scratch, and, and the whole nine yards. So, I know a little bit about it. But I never felt comfortable enough to go out and do it all on my own. How about you guys, right?

I guess it's the same thing with computer security. Most of the people that signed up for this latest master course for me were kind of wondering, what should they do? How should they do it? They didn't even know where to start. And that's kind of where I would be. And even after attending these seminars, these live events, I didn't feel comfortable enough to go out and start flipping houses, right. Well, this is interesting when we tie in Zillow because you can use it a little in order to kind of figure out is there a house I should flip. And bottom line if you are going to be buying homes and flipping them, which means you're going to renovate them, you're going to turn them into a valuable property from whatever they are now and sell it for a higher price. And hopefully higher than what it cost you to buy it and renovate it. Right? That's what flipping is when talking about flipping a house. So hopefully, you know the neighborhood. Everybody that I've read and the seminars I've attended, say get to know a neighborhood. It might be your neighborhood. It might be a close by neighborhood but know everything, know all of the houses, what are they sold for? What are they really worth? How long have they been sitting on the market? That information can help you also get a really good deal on a house.

Now, remember, I mentioned Zillow. Have you used Zillow before? Have you wondered what their model is? How do they really make money? It is obvious that they're taking somebody from the real estate agents that are are advertising in there and the leads that they're getting from Zillow. But, this is very interesting because Zillow is now getting in the house flipping business. Isn't that something. So you can now go on to Zillow. And this is cool, I even saw an ad I have it up on my website. When you look at this article that came out of Bloomberg, they have a little ad that right out of a print media about flipping your house, my you know, we want to buy your home. So people have these problems all the time where they're trying to sell their home, but they can't buy a new home until they sold the current home. And once I sold the current home, they're in real trouble now, because I got to get out of that home and 30 days or 60 days, whatever it is, which means that's all the time they have to find a new home and that just not going to work out very well for them. Been in that position before. So should I do repairs on the house before I sell it? How much repair should I do? Should I just paint the walls white, I've got to replace this floor or that flooring. I gotta fix this roof leak that's been there for a long time, right? All of these things you guys have dealt with this before. Right? And if you've ever sold a house.

Well, the company that came up with this whole business thing and came up with the programs and the website. And now the apps have something called Zestimates. Z-E-S-T, Just like Zillow. Z-I-L-L-O-W. You check it out if you haven't checked out that app or website yet.

But Zestimates now, and it's kind of a Kelley Blue Book for American homes. And they've started an instant offers business. The idea behind this is if you think you want to sell your home, you go on to the Zillow site and you get a Zestimate. And the whole idea behind this is Zillow has a pretty good idea of what your house might be worth. Because they're using some machine learning. They have all of this data about homes that have been sold in your neighborhood in your town, and what they're all worth. So if you sign up for this, it's part of this whole new breed of high tech home flippers. They've been called iBuyers before. There are some Silicon Valley startups that are doing this and real estate brokerages that have instant offer operations as well. So Zillow has kind of pulled this all together the information from Wall Street, and the finances and Silicon Valley capital, and all of these algorithms they've developed. And they can make very detailed and fine and correct really predictions about home prices.

So, these investors are buying homes on a massive scale. And because it's such a big scale, unlike the Magnolia people we talked about before, they only have to make a just a small profit out of each flip. So that's putting these real estate investors that have been flipping homes the old fashioned way, it's putting them in a bit of a bad spot. But it's interesting because this Bloomberg article goes through a specific example in the Phoenix area. And what happened was, they listed their home, they weren't sure what to do, what to fix what not to fix, normally, what would happen, right, you'd have a real estate agent come out, they look at the house and say, Well, if you fix the bathroom, you're going to get your money out. If you do the kitchen, you're not going to get your money out. And you got to fix the roof because it's got a second roofline or whatever, all of those things are right. And then you do it and you have your fingers crossed, that you're going to be able to sell that house at some point in the future. Well, in this case, what happens is Zillow make some really good estimates based on what's happening in your neighborhood. And they now have this great opportunity because they might make a good deal on it. So they hire someone to come out at that point and look at your house. So they have an appraiser who comes out and has a quick look around, makes sure there's nothing like terrible with your house, which would lower its value on the market. And then Tada, you're done. It's just absolutely amazing.

So, you know, agents in the past have really resented Zillow is market power. And they've been complaining about this whole idea behind this Zestimate and Zillow as had these estimates for a long time and saying that they're creating unrealistic expectations. But now Zillow with Zappraisal might be a way to put it has a very good business model and a very good idea of what your house is actually worth. So, keep an eye out for that if you're looking to buy a house right now today. You can go to Zillow and find out what there's Zestimate is their Zillow estimate for the value of the house. just generically speaking, assuming there are no major flaws in the home. And you can now also have Zillow buy your house from you and flip it. Now, because they only need a very small margin, you might actually do better on one of these Zillow flips. And they do charge like a six to I think it goes as high as 10%, which is higher than your normal real estate agent. But you're also guaranteed a sale and the sale is going to happen very quickly. So you know, I have to take all of that stuff into consideration when you're looking at it.

Well, we're going to come back here in just a second, I want to talk about this guy called TheHackerGiraffe and why my warnings about smart TVs are coming true, what he's been doing and why he's retiring. So, here we go.

So, this guy calls himself or called himself, I guess TheHackerGiraffe. And he said he's retired from hacking smart TVs. This is really, really interesting, because, you know, I've warned about this before, before, excuse me, we've had manufacturers who have installed cameras in your TV. And the idea is, the TV looks back at you. It's watching you while you're watching TV. And the idea for that type of spying on people is to try and figure out are you paying attention. Are you paying attention during the ads, when you look away, who's in the room, there's facial recognition software, some of these vendors are using, so they know oh, this, it's this person. And they always watch this type of show. It's that person, oh, we've got a whole family in here recognizes there's like, three, four or five faces and how often they're watching TV. And of course, that's a true invasion of our privacy. And there was a great article this week about Paul Vixie, a guy who I've admired for years and loosely worked with on some of the DNS stuff. I've used his code forever, you know, kind of advanced, techie geeky stuff on the internet. But he was all upset because he installed a machine that was calling home. And it was, I think it was a Google Home device. And it wasn't using his DNS and there's no way to change. And, you know, these devices we're putting in our homes, and we're using this Internet of Things, frankly, can be dangerous, and it can be spying on us and worse and can be used to find out by the bad guys when are people not home. That's the time to rob the house. Right? It's breaking and entering versus some form of assault that might happen.

So people should be concerned very legitimately, I think, be concerned about all of this. And when you're talking about the smart TVs, there's, even more, this guy, TheHackerGiraffe, he hacked not just smart TVs, but he hacked these Google Chromecast streaming devices and others, and his whole idea was to promote a YouTuber that he liked. Have you heard of this guy, this PewDiePie guy, you might not have a very strange guy. Very, very strange guy. But he had a popular YouTube channel he did some things that kind of forced him out of favor and that was a problem because he started losing followers. I think in fact he got completely delisted off of YouTube and he managed to get back on.

Well apparently this guy, TheHackerGiraffe and I'm looking at this article from Graham Cluley, thanks for forwarding this along it's kind of interesting just see that I don't know that he was paid I think he was paid yeah In fact he was he used Patreon in order to get paid but he was going out and hacking people's smart TV its TVs and smart TV devices and had it set up so that you turn on your TV you'd be watching a program or whatever and up would come and add to watch this PewDieGuy for his channel. There he was here's his YouTube channel click on it sort of thing it's kind of nuts when you think about it and he was doing it not just for PewDiePie he was doing for other people too.

Now I have long criticized the Huffington Post because they used black techniques in order to get followers. In other words, they cheated and lied, they did a lot of things that people have accused all kinds of people on the internet for doing but you know the ends justify the means to these people. And in this case, the Huffington Post the ends justified the means we got to get our message out there. So we've got to get bigger and stronger and last year and in fact, that's exactly what they did. Well by getting bigger and stronger, and nastier they increase their base. They  increase their base and then the rules changed and you could do the practice these dark arts back in the day to try and fool people into following your website but you couldn't do it anymore because they started getting clamped on people didn't like it and the FTC came after them saying this is illegal unfair etc and so they stopped doing it and it's not just the Huffington Puffington Post its many of these different websites and did it over the years.

So now this guy was paid to go on to your Smart TV or Chromecast devices and hack them to get you to watch their internet channel so a lot of people were asking them, Chromecast owners Why their TV suddenly showing a video promoting this YouTube superstar PewDiePie and Chromecast owners complained to Google who looked into this and started finding out oh wait a minute now this all happened because of again incorrectly configured routers that had this you p&p enabled you might have heard of this before. It's a way for you to get out to the internet and then have the internet get back to you. But it's interesting. Just because it's misconfigured doesn't give you carte blanche access to it right. I misconfigured my WiFi Why does that somehow mean to you that you have every right to kind of break in on me? That's the question.

And this guy, TheHackerGiraffe has decided he's going to retire. He posted his retirement notice online and we've seen the PewDiePie fans doing all kinds of things. Just last month, they defaced a section of the Wall Street Journal website. And of course, this TheHackerGiraffe guy and PewDiePie both claim they had no involvement in the attack. But it frankly it's interesting to look at right because we are seeing major changes in the internet and major changes in what we consider to be acceptable. So that brings us to Facebook and pedophiles. Believe it or not

I'm not saying that everybody is a pedophile on new I said Facebook, but it's YouTube on YouTube. But it's kind of interesting to look at this here. Obviously, not everybody is a pedophile on YouTube. And I'm also not saying that YouTube has pictures that are showing minors in various seriously compromising positions if you will.

But this is kind of interesting because a YouTuber by the name of Matt Watson just this week exposed what he called a wormhole into a soft core pedophilia ring. And he posted this out on YouTube. He uploaded it on Sunday. So it hasn't even quite been a week yet. But his video claim to reveal a frankly, what's not so underground YouTube community of adults who are encouraging very young children to upload videos of themselves in compromising situations. I don't want to go into all of this because it just disgusts me, frankly. And I'm sure would you too. Now what's happening here, because of this coming out, is major corporations have pulled all of their advertising from YouTube once this came out because remember, Facebook is supposed to be policing itself. In fact, it entered into an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission years ago about self-policing. And Facebook's been accused of not following through with the plea deal. YouTube is also trying to be self-policing. But remember I said we've seen a lot of changes over the years where you know what is acceptable is not the same today as it was a few years ago. Obviously, this is not acceptable. So all kinds of people pulled funding. YouTube's trying to figure out how can they deal with this how can they find the pictures because these are not naked pictures that are easy enough to find through a computer an algorithm that showing a certain percentage of skin etc right that you normally would look for for the typical pornography. So, in this case, it's very difficult for them.

There's a hashtag campaign over on Twitter and you might look it up if your Twitter user to find out more about this the hashtag is YouTubeWakeUp and within 24 hours these advertisers had caught on. It's crazy. We've got multiple ads from McDonalds Disney  Grammarly, Chromebook, Purina, IKEA, Glad, GNC, Lysol and many others that just said forget about this. So, Watson's calling this as a small victory. It certainly is a victory. This battle still ongoing. And frankly, the public's known for a long time about child exploitation on YouTube. But so far, YouTube has failed to adequately address the issue according to Watson and some of these other people out there.

Now, this video came out just days after multiple innocent YouTube channels were wrongly deleted after being flagged for tagging their videos with the abbreviation for child porn. And that happens all too often as well. Someone who doesn't like a YouTube channel, somebody that's a competitor in the financial space with a YouTube channel will go and flag, inappropriately flag content is being inappropriate wrong kitty porn etc. etc. So YouTube has a nightmare on their hands, right? It is like the boy who called wolf we just had that rest just this week an actor on TV who apparently came out and hired a couple of Nigerian guys, big bodybuilders to supposedly beat him up and put a noose around his neck and dump bleach on him. The accusations are flying on that front. But people do this kind of stuff all the time. So how is YouTube supposed to be able to deal with this? Even ads getting ads pulled down because of so-called inappropriate content or doesn't meet the Facebook guidelines or you know all across out there. It's difficult as an advertiser nowadays to figure this whole thing out. So interesting these videos that Watson exposes this week obviously slipped under the radar but we'll see what happens that YouTube if it simply enforces its rule that forbade uploads from users under the age of 13 that would have stopped all of these videos that we're just talking about.

So a lot more my website. Check it out. http://CraigPeterson.com. You can find everything we talked about today. Plus more including what Facebook's doing to people who threatened employees. Procrastination. This is great. a Chrome extension you should look that up. You'll find it on my website. Why Windows Defender antivirus is the most deployed antivirus and big, big businesses out there and what is the dark web how to access it what you'll find it's not all necessarily bad there certainly is enough of that but it's not all bad out there all of that. http://CraigPeterson.com, and make sure you get my newsletter because that's going to keep you up to date on all the security stuff and get you the weekly show notes as well.

Have a good great day and we'll see you next week. Take care. Bye-bye.

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Related articles:

What Is The Dark Web? How To Access It And What You’ll Find

Did Your Smart-Tv Start Showing You Shows You Didn’t Subscribe To?
“TheHackerGiraffe” Says He’s Retired From Hacking Smart Tvs To Promote Pewdiepie

Youtuber Claims Online Pedophile Ring Operates Freely On Youtube

Why Windows Defender Antivirus Is The Most Deployed In The Enterprise

Prevent Procrastination With This Chrome Extension

Facebook Uses Its Apps To Track Users It Thinks Could Threaten Employees And Offices

Zillow Wants To Flip Your House
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