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Colorado First State to Take Control of Smart Thermostats - Green Energy Initiatives About to Kill - This Winter Will Be Terrible - We Need 487 New eCar Charging Stations Per Day For Next Eight Years

If you got my newsletter this week, you might have noticed that almost everything is about the power grid. Well, it, it kind of is. And we're going to be talking about some of the implications here...

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Well, I'm sure you've heard about California and the amazing power shortages that they have out there.

It's terrible, right? On a hot day, they're running out of power and on a cold day, they're running out of power. I remember when I lived in Southern California for a couple of years, well, I'm more than a couple, but I had an apartment in one of my first and the only heat was an electric heater that was on the wall between the bathroom and the living.

[00:00:44] And, and that's it. Right. So everything in the apartment was heated from there. There was a, a bedroom. Okay, great. Isn't that wonderful, but there's no heat in the bedroom. So if it was a cold day and I wanted to heat, I had to turn the temperature way up on without electric heater. In the living room slash bathroom, keep the bathroom door open.

[00:01:07] And then it would allow me to kind of heat up the rest of the apartment. Right. It had a separate kitchen with the door. It had the bedroom with the door and it had the big living room. So think about that for a minute. Think about how much it really can drive. Electrical demands and California has been having some real problems about 30%, just slightly more comes from what California calls, renewable resources.

[00:01:37] and there's a great, great quote here. This is from CBS news saying that governor Newsome signed legislation potentially allowing the state's last remaining nuclear plant to stay opened beyond the plan 2025 closure. In order to provide more power for the energy grid. Again, it kind of makes sense. You might remember back in the summer of 2020, there were some real problems with the grid and they had rolling blackouts.

[00:02:09] They've managed to mostly avoid that, but they're asking people, Hey, don't charge your cars, your electric cars don't charge. 'em the grid's under great stress. And we're seeing in Colorado another problem, right? Yeah. Isn't it great here, Denver residents have been able to just go ahead and yeah. Get a hundred dollars bonus for installing smart thermostats.

[00:02:34] A hundred dollars. Yeah. And also on top of that a hundred dollars, they get $25 after the first year. Now why that what's the advantage to these smart thermostats? You know, you look at it at the surface, it says, well, yeah, that's probably a great idea, right? Some of these smarter thermostats measure who's in the room.

[00:02:56] Well, you know that there's people in the room, there's a heat source in the room. There's movement in the room. So it either turns it up or turns it down. Some of them are, are very simple, like mine, right? They're not connected to the. At all and we'll turn the temperature up and down on certain times of certain days so that I can, you know, have a comfortable temperature, but these ones are interesting because what's happened here in Denver.

[00:03:25] is it the residents have lost control of their thermostats. Yeah. So Colorado's having an energy crisis. Let me see, what are these states have in common? Hmm. I wonder Colorado and California. And they're deciding now that the power grid, the, the guys that run it, you know, they that have the monopoly they get to make, what is it?

[00:03:49] Five or 10% of the gross. Income as profit, which is really kind of cool because you know, what that means is the more expensive electricity is to produce and deliver the more money they make. Right. So they just constantly go to the public utilities commission and say, Hey, we need a rate increase. And isn't that wonderful.

[00:04:11] Cause if it was you, would you rather have 5% of a hundred million dollars or 5% of 200 million? I I'll wait.

[00:04:25] Okay. So you'd rather have 5% of $200 million. So, so would the electric grid companies, so why would they want to invest in increasing the electric power when there's so many reasons? Not. Two, you see, let's talk about this for a minute. To build a new plant is very expensive in New Hampshire. The Seabrook nuclear plant was designed.

[00:04:51] They, they were gonna have two major reactors there. Powering New Hampshire. Putting power into the Northeast grid, which would help to service Maine help to service mass. Right. It, it was gonna be just a wonderful thing. And then Jane Fonda's people got gathered around and said, no, no, you can't do that.

[00:05:11] Right. China syndrome, China syndrome, which isn't true. These types of reactors don't have that problem. And, but the newest reactors really don't, we've talked about those on the show before, because they're intrinsically safe. Doesn't. It, they can submerge them. You can cut out all the power to 'em doesn't matter.

[00:05:30] Well, I'll, um, Let me see, do, do I want to, as a power grid company, go to the expense of a couple of things, right? Do do I want to, first of all, go through the latest, uh, number I saw was about six year process to try and get a basic approval for nuclear power plant. Of course, on top of that, you got way more that you have to worry.

[00:05:54] Approvals from, you know, federal and state and county and city, et cetera, et cetera. And, uh, we, so you gotta put your money into that and then you gotta build the darn thing and Seabrook in, which is the one I just mentioned in New Hampshire is an expensive thing to build. So if you put, build a Seabrook nuclear power plant, right.

[00:06:18] And you've got it sitting there, but you never get to quite finish it, then what. While the construction cost of Seabrook. And this is, uh, right now owned by next era. Next era energy resources, Seabrook cost, $17 billion to build, and it never went fully operational. So let me see if I'm a power provider. Do I want to build a nuclear power plant?

[00:06:49] Well, probably not. Probably not. Well, how about a, a gas, power plant? Well, one of the nice things about gas or coal or wood, or even nuclear is they all have the same basic backend. So you might ask me, well, what is that, Craig? What kind of a backend are you talking about here? Well, we're talking about the back end.

[00:07:14] Steam think steam, locomotive, right? What happened with steam? Well, it's still out there and it's still the back end of all of our electric production, at least almost all of it. Right? So you can take an old coal plant and convert it to nuclear. For instance, there's even some ways to convert them to solar, but that's a more expensive process and a lot of stuff has to be changed.

[00:07:39] So 17 billion. To build Seabrook and it never goes into production. And now the people in New Hampshire are paying 17 billion, right. For a nuclear power plant. That's only partially in use. So let me see what other options do they have? Well, of course they could build a cold plant, you know, maybe. Try to anyways, and then what's gonna happen.

[00:08:03] Well, it's gonna get shut down and it's gonna probably take 20 years nowadays to try and get approval for it. Even though we have some pretty darn good clean coal plant, plant technology out there, uh, other options. Well, we mentioned natural gas if we can get it right, but we can't frack in a lot of areas, which is where we get a lot of our natural gas from so natural gas, even though we have more.

[00:08:27] Any other other country or supplier in the world, we can't really use natural gas can because it's, we don't know what's gonna happen here in the future, solar. Well, you know, it doesn't work at night, uh, wind. Well, it, it doesn't work. If the wind isn't blowing, uh, battery technology distort it. We just don't have it.

[00:08:47] Hm. So if you are a provider of electricity, maybe your best choice is to restrict the production of power. Don't bother investing in new power plants, at least, you know, pretend you are, but don't bother. And then ultimately all you have to do is raise your prices. So you raise your price and wait a minute.

[00:09:09] What was that formula I talked about before? Would you rather have 5% of a hundred million or 5% of 200 million? Hmm. Let's see here. Um, what was the answer to that? Oh, 5% of $200 million wins. So the less efficiency that they can have so that they can charge the higher price means they can pull more to their bottom line and life is good.

[00:09:39] Don't you love these types of government regulations are protecting us. They're keeping the prices under control, making it so everything so much better for us all across the board. So California. is doing a couple of other things that are also absolutely ridiculous. One of the things California is doing and, uh, you know, have, have a look at this is 2035.

[00:10:06] You might have heard of this one too. What's happening in 2035. Well, in 2035, California says they will not allow the sale of any new gasoline or internal combustion engine. Cars, at least maybe trucks as well. So let me see if their electric grid is hurting. They're complaining right now because one of their most reliable sources of energy, uh, nuclear they've been shutting down.

[00:10:37] So I mentioned Gavin, Newsome's bringing nuclear back on the table, keeping that plant running. Uh, the other big one of course is water power, hydro dams, right? Uh, and guess what they're running out of out there is the water. And they're having trouble with keeping hydro plants running. So production of electricity, there is way down and to top it off, they want electric vehicles.

[00:11:04] So we're gonna get into this some more where we get back the insanity. Has just gone way overboard here, way, way overboard. And you haven't even heard the half of it yet. Visit me online. Make sure you get my newsletter. My free insider show notes. Visit Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

[00:11:28] We're talking a little bit about green energy, green quote, unquote. Right? Because a lot of it is anything but green. We've talked about many of those things before, but right now we're gonna start out with Germany. What is up over there? The greenest of green.

[00:11:45] Germany has been a leader over in the EU in a number of ways.

[00:11:49] Right? Well, number one, it's the biggest economy in Europe. It's an incredible economy and it has frankly supported many of the EU. Uh, com countries over there from going broke, right? The, the P I G S the Portugal, uh, Italy crease in Spain have been taking a lot of the money from Germany. That's part of the reason that Britain decided to get out of the EU.

[00:12:18] It's just kind of crazy. Right? So Germany being a major provider of some of the financing for some of these program. Has kind of run the EU, even though it's in Brussels there in Belgium, the headquarters anyways. Right? Well, Germany is facing a complete collapse of its power grid system, complete collapse because of the demand for electric.

[00:12:47] Now I'm gonna get into a little bit more of what's happening here in the us with California. You probably saw all of the stuff in my newsletter this week. Craig peterson.com/subscribe in my free newsletter. Uh, and. Here's what's happening over there right now because the gas was cut off to Germany.

[00:13:11] People are panicking. It's also been cut off to pretty much all of the other European countries, France has been playing footsy with Russia. And, uh, because of that, they haven't been completely cut off yet. I haven't seen the latest numbers, but basically Russia's cutting way back, 80% or more to these major.

[00:13:33] European countries. Well, we're looking at a problem in the us too. I burn home heating oil. Most of that comes from Canada. A lot of people burn natural gas in my neighborhood. There's some people that burn LPG, liquified petroleum gas, which is a blend of waste gas gases for the most part. But because we are competing on an international stage, we got a bit of a different problem that we would have otherwise.

[00:14:04] you might know one of my daughters and sons-in-law son-in-laws sons-in-law yeah, that'd be right. Have been working for an, um, a company that transports various types of natural gas and LP gas. So they'll take that gas. At least I used to work for them. Uh, they've moved on, but they'll take that gas and they'll move it from one place to another, for instance, in Boston.

[00:14:32] A few years ago, her ship was sitting in the Harbor. They pull up this buoy from the bottom of the ocean, pull it into the bottom of the ship. And once it was in the bottom of the ship, now, they were able to take the liquified gas that they had on board reg gasify it, and provide the Northeast natural gas grid with natural gas for the winter.

[00:14:55] So she was sitting there at anchor all winter and. Was providing us with natural gas. So one of the beauties of these regas ships is first of all, mass, that two sets did not want a Rega plant on land. So they built a ship with it right there. And then secondly, if you are doing that, you can fill up your LP.

[00:15:18] Uh, ships, right? Because there's some that just transport the liquified gas and some that, that hold a smaller amount and reify, you can take that anywhere. So one year she was sitting off the coast of Israel and they were filling up of course, from the other ships that would come in with the liquid gas and they would reify it and pump that directly into Israel's.

[00:15:46] Pipelines for natural gas. So natural gas is now a worldwide commodity. You can sell it pretty much anywhere because of these new technology ships that are out there that have Rega plants right on them. So all you have to do is give them access to your main pipeline for natural gas. For the area or for the country and they fill it up and you're off and running.

[00:16:14] So now we've got countries all over the world that are competing for the natural gas that we're selling. The natural gas of Russia was selling, right. That some of the natural gas from some of these other places around the world, that means this winter Europe is going to be buying more and more and more natural gas.

[00:16:38] People are gonna die over there. Don't get me wrong because of the cold. They are gonna have a hard time providing natural gas to enough people because everyone's bidding the value, the price of natural gas. And the same, thing's been true for oil for a long time. Right? It's you, you get a ship, it's got however, million barrels of oil on it.

[00:17:01] I'm not even sure. And they deliver that anywhere you want it delivered. One of the things all of these companies do is they sit off shore, so they get filled up and they just sit there waiting for the value of their cargo to go. Now that's been true forever, right? There's what are called tramp ships.

[00:17:25] And, and they'll just go pick up whatever, and they'll sit around and find out, okay, where do you want me to deliver it? And off they go once the price is high enough. So they're already doing that. They're staging some of these ships with oil, they're staging some of them with natural gas or LPG, and there's watching the markets and waiting for the time that the price goes up.

[00:17:49] So many people in Germany are worried about being able to get any heat. because natural gas, man, it's gonna be rashing something awful. If Russia doesn't turn those pipelines up all of the way. Remember president Trump warned them about that at the UN and the German representatives were sitting there in the UN on camera snickering that president Trump would suggest that buying all of their natural gas from our friends over in Russia was not the best idea possible.

[00:18:20] Right. So they really messed that one. The people in Germany have been going out and doing what. The sales of electric heaters are higher this year than any other year. So far in 2022, Germans have bought more than 600,000 electric heaters. Isn't that something, and that's a 35% increase from usual. Just to let you know, you can put that in some perspective.

[00:18:51] And of course that number keeps going up and their critical infrastructures now facing this massive strain, this 20 million Germans have homes that are dependent on natural gas, 20. Million and are switching to electric heaters. We're gonna be doing the same thing here. I'm sure. And I mentioned earlier about my first apartment down there in California that had electric heater and that was it.

[00:19:20] That's how we heated the whole crazy thing. So think about that. Germany's been having power problems. They had them last year. They've had them for a few years because they've been turning off reliable sources of energy and trying to move to windmills and solar, which are not ready for prime time. So they are expecting some problems here.

[00:19:44] As remix news is reporting. Blackouts who are not just hit private households, but also affect German infrastructure, including cash payment systems, mobile phone networks, street light. Now that's, uh, from a gentleman, from the association of electrical engineering, and he's saying all of these networks would be down for long periods of time.

[00:20:08] You remember the year 2000 Y2K, the world is gonna come to an end. Computers are gonna go down. Yeah. turns out they were off by about 22 years. Right? Meanwhile, This is the daily fetched reporting German. These biggest cities are preparing for an energy crisis as a country prepares to limit heat and shut off warm water and shut off lighting.

[00:20:34] Absolutely amazing. We're gonna pick this up when we come back. So don't go anywhere. Look for my podcast. You'll find it pretty much everywhere. Just search for Craig Peterson and, or go to my website. Craig peterson.com.

[00:20:55] We've talked about the internet of things here before many times and the security problems with it. Well, Denver and California are proving that there are more problems with internet of things as governments taking control.

[00:21:11] I mentioned a little bit earlier about how the guys and gals in Denver, Colorado have succumbed to just, well, it really was a very good deal.

[00:21:23] Succumb is probably the wrong word. You see, they would let you have a smart thermostat and they would pay you a hundred dollars. If you bought a smart thermostat that met their requirements. Of course, and then $25 a year. If you kept that smart thermostat online. Now that's an internet of things. We've talked about, the serious problems we've seen in the past about them.

[00:21:49] So for instance, Google smart thermostat decided that, uh, well it needed a microphone and, um, it didn't tell anybody and nobody knew why Google had put a microphone in there because they weren't using. of course, they kind of make sense to put a, some, our microphone in there, so you can talk to it. Right.

[00:22:09] But none of that was implemented. Then we had some of these smart thermostats being broken into. In fact, some of these, uh, smart thermostats with microphones were not only broken into, but were used to listen the end on what was happening in a. So there's all kinds of problems with them. I OT internet of things is any device that gets hooked up to the internet gets hooked up to your network.

[00:22:35] Nowadays that's things like refrigerators that might remind you that you need to buy some eggs and some of them will even place orders for you for groceries. And they'll just show up. You can expect more of that by the way as time goes. And there are some services that will not only take that order of groceries, but will come into your home and put them in the fridge for you depending on where you live.

[00:23:00] Right. Doesn't that sound absolutely wonderful. But the internet of things here. Is really concerning cuz we're tying more and more of our appliances and other electronic devices into this central control system out there. We've seen issues where they're tied in centrally things like your washer. You're dryer.

[00:23:25] And now they're being controlled by the utilities so that you don't run your wash at a certain time of day when they might need the electricity. Now I can see that, that, that kind of makes sense to me, but I think the best way to incentivize consumers is to do a pricing system that is variable. So if it's peak time, Hey, electricity is cheap.

[00:23:48] If you use it after 10:00 PM or whatever the right time is. And there are some utilities that are doing that, but there are states out there that are again, Democrat controlled. It seems to be the theme, doesn't it, where they are starting to mandate that you have smart appliances and that they be tied into a control system that ultimately the state can.

[00:24:19] So they know when you're washing your clothes, they know when you're ordering your grocer groceries, they know where they're coming from. Now, of course they can get some of that information. Like the groceries from credit cards, cuz most of us were paying for groceries. The credit cards aren't we. But ultimately what we're doing is opening up everything in our homes to external monitoring and potentially to control.

[00:24:44] And that's what's happening right now. It really is external. Control and that's what's happened in Denver where they had a heat wave and people went up to their thermostat to turn it down because man, it was hot and you know what I've had, I've had my temperature turned way up because I didn't wanna waste electricity, but it's really hot today.

[00:25:06] So I'm gonna turn it up and what. What happens. It says right there in the thermostat that you can't change it due to an energy emergency, California is going to mandate these types of smart thermostats that control how much heat you get in the winter and how much cooling you get in the summer. They're also starting to require that your washing machine and dryer, particularly electric dryers are also controlled by this.

[00:25:38] See, it all goes back to what I was talking about before. If you are a power grid. What are you gonna do? Is it better for you to just increase prices or is it better for you to build new sources of electricity? And as I mentioned before, I went through all of this in detail. It's usually much better for you to just go ahead and increase your prices.

[00:26:02] You'll make more money. You don't have that money at risk because man, somebody might pass a law, a rule, a regulation, heck some dictator might sign an executive order cutting off your supply. Right. Might be Putin might be somebody else. You never know. So instead of relying so heavily on things such as our natural gas supply, which president Biden effectively shut down some of the exploration for natural gas because he shut down fracking.

[00:26:35] Uh, we are now burning natural gas to produce electricity. So what happens? Electric prices while in New Hampshire, they doubled doubled from one month to the next. The price of electricity. Now your bill wouldn't have doubled because there's also the delivery costs and other things that are involved, but the price of electricity itself doubled, we've got to get smart about this stuff.

[00:27:03] So I'm, I'm gonna go to another one. We mentioned, and this was in the newsletter that came out. Um, you can find that, uh, on the newsletter subscription online at Craig peterson.com/subscribe, but here's another problem we got California is requiring electric vehicles. By 2035, they want half or not half.

[00:27:30] Excuse me. They want all of the vehicles sold in California. All of them to be electric, no more internal combustion engines in California, at least new cars, right? No, probably be, uh, the gas cars for quite a while. So let's look at this. The federal government wants us to be driving electric cars, all of the car companies, making electric cars.

[00:27:54] Are they making them cuz people want them are demanding them? No. They're not look at the number of cars sold. Look at how some of these electric car lines have been shut down. Nissan Nissan closed one of their cars off a GM closed one of their cars off, right? These electric cars don't make sense, but if you are going to stay in business and you're going to get an executive order or a law coming down from Congress.

[00:28:22] And that law says you're gonna have to produce electric vehicles. You're gonna do it. It's just like the cafe standards. Yeah. Hey, listen, your whole fleet. In other words, all of the cars that you sell, sell half to meet these standards for fuel economy across the board. So what are you gonna do? How are you gonna deal with that?

[00:28:41] Well, you're gonna make the cars less safe by taking some of this deal out of. You're gonna make them less safe because you want to make them lighter. You're gonna get rid of that really great spare tire that was in the back, and you can replace it with one of those stupid little space saver, saver tires, right?

[00:28:57] All, to save weight, all, to meet federal regulations on the mileage the vehicles have to meet. Now, when we're looking at the electricity, we've already established that we don't have the electrical supply to power. These cars. We Don. We don't, we're already having brownouts in the summer and in the winter, in different parts of the country.

[00:29:22] Well, let's also talk about one more thing and that is okay. So how are we gonna charge the cars? And obviously getting the electricity is a very big deal. And there was a new nuclear plant license that finally went through. It started the application process. Back at the pretty much the beginning of the Trump administration and was signed off by the Biden administration for one of these new nuclear plant.

[00:29:53] And the nuclear plant is by the way, intrinsically safe. It's made enough. Factory. It's not custom made on site, whole new world. And then how are we gonna charge the cars? That's another problem. it hasn't been addressed yet. So we'll get into all of that stick around. Of course, listening to Craig Peterson, you can sign up and find out more.

[00:30:19] Craig peterson.com.

[00:30:21] So, how are we going to charge the mall? man, this is gonna be a problem. We're gonna get into that right now. Uh, again, man talking about the cart before the horse, what's the matter with these people? It's crazy.

[00:30:38] You know, I am all for electric cars. I think they are cool.

[00:30:43] Very neat. But they are not green. Okay. Don't fool yourself. They are not green. The manufacturing of the batteries where they're mining, how they're. Processing it we're just outsourcing the pollution to third world countries, making people there sick. Right. Why, why bother you? You remember the Olympics that were held in Beijing and how the air was just so nasty people were wearing face masks?

[00:31:14] Uh, not because of worried about. Disease. They were worried about the particulate matter in the air. So what China did is they shut down all manufacturing. For well over a hundred miles so that the Beijing Olympics would not look like what it normally looks like in that area, which is just horrific, almost unbreathable air, same thing with the water.

[00:31:45] You look at the plastic in our oceans, which people are complaining about. And I get it. I don't want microplastics in me and I certainly don't want that little kid to shove a straw up my nose. Like he did the turtle, but that's really what we're looking at here. We're outsourcing our pollution elsewhere and that pollution.

[00:32:08] Ends up here. It ends up in our aquifers. It ends up in the oceans, obviously. Right. And in the air, which blows around the globe. And some of it settles down to the earth and that gets washed away by the rains and then ends up in all kinds of nasty places. So don't, don't let them convince you that electric cars are.

[00:32:33] they are cool. They're wonderful. They're really neat. They're fast. Uh, we should talk again, some point about the autonomous systems I've been driving, Ford's latest, uh, you know, semi-autonomous system. And we can talk about that. What I like and don't like about those things, but, uh, when we're talking about the electric cars, I, I love what my daughter said.

[00:32:57] Who's living in Norway. They have a Tesla. Uh, I think it's a. What is it? Model three, I think. And they're driving in Norway. Now in Norway, you get a, a 25% price, uh, difference, um, buying electric versus gas. The government gives you 25% off because this tax free and the sales tax is 25%. Can you believe that?

[00:33:21] Right? Oh, but things are cheap. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways. What they are saying. Cause I asked my daughter, I said, now, you know, that Tesla is not green. Right. And she said, yeah. And I said, well, how about people in Norway? What are they thinking? Why are they buying it? Why is Norway the most, uh, populated electric vehicle country in the world?

[00:33:46] Per capita, they have more electric cars than any other country. Well, the main reason for that is because of the massive tax incentives, but the other side of that coin here, frankly, is the, how Norway wants to stay green. They wanna be, have fresh air. They wanna be living in a clean environment. And so what she told me was that Norwegian realizes.

[00:34:11] You know, not everybody obviously, but, um, that these cars, these electric cars are not green. They are hard on the environment, but not the environment in nor. Talking about being closed minded. Right? Very narrow minded. All that matters is that we're not polluting Norway by driving those cars. Now, ultimately they may be because in most parts of the world, the electric cars, batteries are being put in storage facilities or are ending up in waste.

[00:34:45] Piles, uh, around the world. It it's really kind of crazy because most of them cannot be recycled. Now there's some work on that right now. Tesla's doing some amazing stuff with changing the battery, not just the chemistry, but it's makeup and in the car. And they think they're gonna be able to have a car out that gets 650 miles, 6, 5 0 on a charge.

[00:35:08] Which is pretty darn cool by changing a whole bunch of stuff. In fact, the batteries become a structural, uh, component of the vehicle. So that's really kind of cool. But if we have all of these electric cars on the road, whether they're polluting or not, how do we charge these things? We've got the problem of how do we generate enough electricity and.

[00:35:33] Again, you've been listening to me long enough, you know, nuclear, nuclear nuclear are the three best options because we need power that's on. When the sun's set, we need power that's on. When the wind isn't blowing, we need power in the Northern realms of Alaska. We need power everywhere. So I really like these new intrinsically safe nuclear plants.

[00:36:00] Germany is turning them back on earlier. I talked about how California has now extended the life on this nuclear plant. They were gonna shut down just so they can keep electricity up. And yet we're talking about millions, more of these electric cars on the. So, what does that mean? Well, it also means that we need to spend 35 billion to meet the demand for an additional 1.2 million public charging stations by 2030.

[00:36:36] And that's not counting the 28 million that are needed in people's home. So the us needs to build 30 million EV charging parts. So let's do the math. Now. We're not gonna do the math up to 2035, which is the Dday for California. Let's do the math to 2030. Okay. The math for up to 2030 means that they need to be installing 478.

[00:37:08] Charging stations per day for the next eight years. And that's of half the drivers switched to electric. I don't think that's gonna happen that quickly, but it is eventually going to happen. So right now we have about 128,000 public electric vehicle charging outlets. And I've shared some articles in the past talking about how so many of them don't work.

[00:37:34] They won't work with your car or, or just plain broken. Uh, there's a lot of those out there. So 128,000 public and at least 4,500 private ones currently in comparison with 150,000 gas stations. Okay. So, although EV sales have climbed a lot each year since 2016, most consumers like myself are really concerned about the batteries.

[00:38:01] How long will they last? How far will they go? And then how long does it take to charge? Where can I charge them? Right. It's uh, very, very big deal. So that's a huge number. Isn't it. Now. And then, then we're talking about putting charging ports into our homes. and you probably have to get an electrician to come into your home to hook up a charging port to charge up your car.

[00:38:27] Right? So it's an interesting set of problems. So when I talked about having the cart before the horse, the obvious problem here is we're pushing electric vehicles and pushing. All out really heavily, the tax incentives have changed recently due to this, this, uh, inflation and increasing act. Right.

[00:38:57] Reduction. I Ugh, crazy. But anyways, I. We are seeing more and more of these vehicles. Some manufacturers such as Tesla are losing their, the federal, uh, chip in other manufacturers like for GM and others, uh, have gone ahead and raised their prices to match or exceed the amount of money that federal government's chipping in.

[00:39:23] Oh boy, I hate it. When that happens, goes down the wrong way. Where are we gonna end up? How is this going to happen? Um, we've got the car before the horse was pushing these cars. The car manufacturers have said, oh, wait a minute. There's gonna be a $5,000, uh, chip in by the federal government, by the taxpayers.

[00:39:44] Yeah. By the, you know, the widows, the people who are working really hard, driving the trucks and everything. Yeah. Those loose guys are gonna pay for electric cars, which by the way, vast majority electric car owners are our wealthy people. Thank you very much. Well, have the poverty line. So we're gonna take money from people at, or below the poverty line and give it to those people.

[00:40:04] And uh, $5,000. No problem. So what do the automakers do? They went ahead and raised their prices by at least the amount of money that the federal government said that they were going to chip in. Is that a surprise to anybody? It shouldn't be it. It's kind of like the student loan problems. Right? Why is tuition so expensive?

[00:40:28] Well, let me see. Government is making it possible for people to borrow more money, to go to college. Government's giving the. Pell grants and others for people to go to college. Uh, they're letting you pay it off over your lifetime. Yeah. It's the same sort of thing. So those, those benefits of thousands of dollars that are in this new bill that was passed, that are there to help you buy electric vehicles won't matter because they have raised their prices of the cars.

[00:41:03] At or above the amount of money the government's going to contribute yet you and me are going to contribute, you know, the small business people that, um, you know, readers, digested a survey of small business people and found out we only have to work a half a day. Did you know that only a half a day? And it doesn't really matter which 12 hours you work, which is true.

[00:41:23] Right. I've had like two vacations in, in my whole adult life. That's it because I care about my customers. Right. I try and make sure everything's going fine for them. So we get to pay for these electric cars they're being bought by people who are in the highest levels of, uh, income in the country. It's absolutely crazy, absolutely crazy.

[00:41:52] And we only have to build about 500 charging stations a day. So there you go. And then, you know, there's this minor problem of the electricity, where's it gonna come from? But you know, don't worry about that. Right? Cuz Bernie natural gas, that's the way to do it. And natural gas prices have gone up, which means electric prices have gone up just like I mentioned before.

[00:42:15] Hey, you know, it, it is probably time to do an upgrade on that computer of yours for windows 11, or maybe you're gonna move over to the Linux world. That's what I did with my older computer, frankly. I it's Linux now much faster, but there's more to it.

[00:42:31] Hey, I send out my newsletter, my insider show notes every Monday morning.

[00:42:37] Usually sometimes it's Tuesday, sometimes it's Wednesday depends on the week. This week I was at a client's site over the weekend, actually, and Monday and Tuesday down in Atlanta. So I, I was busy down there. This is a DOD subcontractor. They just. Parts, but they are required by CMMC these new regulations I've actually been around for a while now to really keep an eye on their cybersecurity.

[00:43:06] And so of course they bring me in and my team cuz you know, that's what we do. But I told you that because of my newsletter this week, I got some comments from a few people that the cybersecurity section in my newsletter was. Two articles from 2015 and , they both pointed it out. I think it's great that everybody's paying that much attention.

[00:43:32] I actually, there's a few people that notice that, and it was my fault for not explaining what I was trying to do. And, and that's because I was in a hotel room and I was getting ready to go to the client site and do. Dates fix a couple of things, check the seals on computers and you know, all of those sorts of maintenance things you have to do clean them out.

[00:43:53] I brought down a, a little blower and stuff. They, they were amazingly clean cuz we put them in a special cabinet that has these big air filters on them and stuff. Anyhow. The two articles this week on cybersecurity in my newsletter. Well, this was even in the free newsletter, talked about two different things.

[00:44:12] Lenovo was installing software and laptops, and they apparently have still kind of done that. This was some years ago. like, uh, seven years ago now, I guess. And they were putting it on there and you had no control over it. Okay. It was a real problem. And then the other one was. About your hard drives and what NSA did for years in modifying the firmware on the hard disk drives of a number of computers, many computers out there.

[00:44:48] And in both cases, Lenovo and the NSA, their national security agency. Put software on the computers so that even if you erased your computers, you would still have their software on it. They would reinstall itself. And Lenovo has been caught again, doing that. Okay. So there there's articles out there talking about.

[00:45:13] Just all of the stuff they've been doing. So here's what I want propose to you guys. And I did not make this clear in the newsletter. And for that, I apologize. I was in a hurry and that was my intention and it just had never happened. Not, but not being in a hurry was my intention. But I, I, I intended to explain this a little bit better and I did on the radio a little bit this week as well.

[00:45:37] And I'm doing it right now. My intention is to let you know that for decades now, bad guys have been able to embed malware into parts of your computer. So instead of just the operating system where they might have re. Placed some sort of a library file. And now when your machine boots up, it's going to pull it in from that library file or one of the many other ways, uh, they, they will go beneath your operating system.

[00:46:12] So they'll put things in the boot blocks of your computer and. As we just mentioned here, they will put things in the hard drive itself, not on the blocks of the hard drive, but in the controller of the hard drive right there on the hard drive's board motherboard, if you will, for the hard drive and they can make it persistent.

[00:46:37] now we've tried to get around some of these problems. Apple came up with the T two chip and what the T two chip does is really lock things down on your apple computer. And that's always a good thing, right? And the apple T two chip keeps track of. Passwords and makes things bootable and everything else.

[00:46:59] And apple has also really kind of spun things out a little bit here with their T2 chip. They had some security problems. Uh they're in all of the newer apple computers. In fact, the one I use a lot is an older computer that doesn't have that T2 chip in it, but what Microsoft has done now, and this isn't really Microsoft, it's really the hardware vendors.

[00:47:25] They have something called a TP. And this TPM is there for security. It's the trusted platform module. You want the version two or better, uh, as they come out, right. Kind of keep it up to date. But the T2, this trusted platform module is kind of like the apple two chip. It is nowhere near as. Complete, if you will, as the apple T two chip is, and it's designed primarily for booting your computer, which is really kind of cool.

[00:48:03] There's a cute article over on medium. And it's saying that the author's, uh, professor bill Buchanan. The author of this article says, uh, the TPM chip in your computer is perhaps a forgotten device. It often sits there not doing much and never quite achieving its full potential. You bought the laptop because it had one, but you just can't find a use for it.

[00:48:25] The chip itself is rather jealous of the apple TTU chip and which does so much more and where people actually buy the computer for the things it bring. Few people actually buy a computer, cuz it has a TPM, but lots of people buy a MacBook and an iPhone because it is trusted to look after your sensitive data.

[00:48:45] And he's absolutely right about that stuff. Now I've got clients who have been buying servers and other computers and the T2 chip has been. Option for them. I think that's probably almost gone nowadays. It is probably added in by default. These things are pretty cheap, cuz again, they don't really do much, but they are now a part of it because of what Microsoft has done.

[00:49:14] Microsoft has made it so that you pretty much have to have one of. T2 chip or TPM chips, I should say the TPM 2.0 cuz you know, it's gotta be as good as apples T2 the TPM 2.0, which is a crypto processor so that you can run windows 11. Now, I don't want you to think that having this TPM chip in your computer, all of a sudden makes it.

[00:49:40] But it does do a few things that are very, very good. First of all, it has a random number generator, which is super important when we're talking about encrypt. And that random number generator is used to generate keys that are used for your disc encryption and potentially other things. So if you are encrypting the disc on your windows machine, you are really moving ahead in a very big way, because now if your computer is stolen and it boots up, they won't be able to.

[00:50:13] at any of that data, it'll all look like random trash. If it's done its job. Right. And it can also of course store the user's password in the chip. It has some what's called persistent memory. I told you all of the stuff cuz of what I want to tell you next. All of this stuff from Lenovo, from the NSA over the years.

[00:50:36] And, and of course the bad guys, whether it's Russia, China, it can be really anywhere. North. Korea's been big on this. Iran's been doing this sort of thing. All of those guys may well have had access to your computer in the past. If you have an older computer. And because some of this software, some of this malware is persistent.

[00:51:00] And because windows now is, as I said, pretty much requiring one of these TPM chips, the TPM 2.0 or better is what you want. I think that it's time to seriously consider buying a new windows computer. Now we're working with a client right now that has an engineer who has been continually upgrading his windows computer since I don't know, windows XP days, I think.

[00:51:29] And every time he gets a new computer, he just goes ahead and migrates everything over. Doesn't upgrade. Doesn't update to the newest operating system. And for him, anyways, life is good. Well, it ain't so good folks because he has all kinds of nastiness, little turds. If you will, that are hiding all around his computer.

[00:51:54] The registry is going to be scattered with these things. Some of them probably installed by some form of malware over the years, his disc is gonna be cluttered, everything. So I'm saying right now, Get a new computer and go ahead and make sure you reinstall windows. That's the first thing we do. In fact, what we do for our clients.

[00:52:17] We have a version of windows that we have updated stream updated and. We don't have any of that bloatware on it, that the manufacturers get their 10 bucks from the various of vendors, you know, to put the Norton antivirus and all this other useless stuff on your computer. So by reinstalling, just the windows.

[00:52:40] And of course, since its windows, you go to install all of the drivers for your computer, too. But by doing that, you're getting rid of all of the bloatware. And then what you wanna do is either copy or restore your files onto the new computer. And then when you're done with that install, Your applications, the newest versions of your applications.

[00:53:05] And I can hear people right now complaining, cuz I hear this all of the time. My gosh, I've had that application for 10 years and you can't even get it anymore. Blah blah. You know what? You should not be using that application. You need to get the newest version or if that vendor's out of. You need to make sure that you go one more step, find a compatible vendor or whatever.

[00:53:29] We have to stop using old computers and old software. Uh, there's options here, but seriously, consider this because of what's been happening to us for years. Hey, visit me online. Sign up for my newsletter, Craig Peter son.com.

[00:53:48] Well, autonomous cars are on the road and there was an accident in Germany. We don't have all of the details yet, but it's really concerning. And it's about the anonymous cars. Yeah. Autonomous cars. And, uh, we gotta study out. I want to talk about as well.

[00:54:05] There are various levels of autonomy, I guess. Yeah.

[00:54:09] That's the right word in these autonomous vehicles that we have and that we're looking forward to level one is kind of the gold standard, right? That's where we want to get. That's where the cars don't even need a churn wheel pedals, your tension, nothing. They just drive themselves. We're not there. And you probably guess that.

[00:54:32] and then there's level two where you're the driver's supposed to pay attention, but the car's pretty much going to drive itself. Well, there is an article here from the associated press talking about what happened in Germany. And, uh, this is a, a few weeks back, and this is the first time I've seen this article, but they're saying that a test car with autonomous steering capability veered into oncoming traffic in Germany, killing one person and seriously injuring nine others.

[00:55:10] A spokesman for police in the Southwestern town of Rogen said the electric BMW. Nine with five people on board, including a young child swerved out of its lane at abandoned the road. Triggering a series of collisions involving four vehicles after brushing an oncoming search, the BMW hit a Mercedes van.

[00:55:37] Head on resulting in the death of a 33 year old passenger in that vehicle, the 70 year old driver, the Sitan lost control of her car and crashed into another vehicle with two people on board, pushing it off the road and causing it to burst into flame. Ruly again, police spokesman. Michael Shaw said four rescue helicopters, and dozens of firefighters responded to the incident and the injured were taken to several hospitals in the region.

[00:56:11] They included the 43 year old driver of the BMW three adults aged 31 42 and 47 and an 18 month old child who are all in the test. The article goes on, uh, is the police said in a statement, the crash vehicle was an autonomous electric test car, whether it was being steered by the 43, 3 year old driver or not is a subject of investigation.

[00:56:40] So this is called a level two driving assistance system. It's already incorporated in production vehicles today. They can support the driver on when the driver turns them on according to BMW with the level two vehicles, the driver always retains responsibility. In other words, if that car gets into.

[00:57:04] Accident while you are behind the wheel and responsible for it, it's your fault. So that solves the problem of whose insurance covers what doesn't it? Yeah, it, it does it pretty well because it's your fault is kind of the bottom line. So we are in the process of investigating the exact circumstances of the crash.

[00:57:25] BMW said, of course we are in close contact with the authorities. It's it's concerning very concerning and I am not ready yet. Autonomous vehicles. Now we've seen, and we've talked about on the show before a number of problems with some of these different vehicles from Tesla and others, and they are on the roads in many states right now, even in the Northeast, not just the Teslas, but these fully autonomous test vehicles.

[00:57:59] There are a number of things to be concerned about here. For instance, how can an autonomous vehicle determine what to do when there's a police officer in the middle of the road or a flagman? Or obviously it really can't determine it because it can't make out. What's what, in fact we might remember, and I'm sure they've made some adjustments here over at Tesla, but a Tesla car went ahead and, uh, struck and I think killed a lady who was crossing the road with her bicycle.

[00:58:36] I think she was walking it across when she was hit. How can they tell, how can they tell the difference between a car that's wrapped and has someone's face on it, maybe a politician full body on the back of a box truck as an advertisement. How can it tell the difference between that and a person that might be standing there?

[00:59:00] It, it gets to be a real problem. We're already seeing that some of these autonomous vehicles go directly rear end fire trucks stopped at the side of the road with their lights on police cars stopped at the side of the road with the lights on. Just completely rear-end them. We're seeing that. So how about when it gets a little more difficult than a fire truck parked on the side of the road?

[00:59:25] Now these cars, apparently autonomous steering and, uh, lane detection and correction, all that sort of stuff. These vehicles are looking at things and trying to determine, well, what should I do here? And oftentimes what they determine is, oh, well, okay. That's just something that's fixed at the side of the road.

[00:59:45] Like, like a sign post, like a speed sign. When in fact it's not. So we've gotta solve that problem. It, it still isn't solved yet. What caused this car to steer directly into oncoming traffic and, and head first into a Mercedes van? I, I don't know. They don't know yet. Anyways. I'm sure they'll find out soon enough, but there are real questions here and then I wanna take it to the next levels.

[01:00:18] If the car is in, let's say level one where it's full autonomous, even if it's not, even if it's a level two, like this car was, or is, uh, what happens when the car is either going to hit a pedestrian or go over a cliff or into a brick wall? That's even better. Cuz the car might not know the cliff is there.

[01:00:43] What decision should the car make? What kind of ethics should it be? You know, executing here, can it even make an ethical decision? And this is the trolley testing in case you're not familiar with the whole trolley test thing. It's, let's say you are. A trolley operator, you're going down a hill and there is a fork in the tracks.

[01:01:09] And all you can do is select tracks at a or track set B you can't stop the trolley. You can't slow the trolley down in tracks at a there's a group of seniors walking across the tracks that you will hit. If you go down tracks at a tracks at B. There's some young kids playing on the tracks and if you choose B, you're gonna kill the kids.

[01:01:35] So ethical dilemma here, who do you kill? Cuz that's what the whole trolley test is about. Look it up online. There's a lot of different variations of this, but what about the car? What decision should the car make? Should the car make the decision to protect you the driver, or should the car be making the decision to protect the pedestrian?

[01:01:59] If it's going to protect the pedestrian by plowing into that brick wall and potentially killing the occupants of the car. How about when there is the decision of the old people or the young people? There is a lot to solve here. And some of these companies, including Mercedes have come out already with their decisions, Mercedes said they will protect the occupants of the vehicle.

[01:02:27] now when you're driving the car yourself, of course, you're making that decision in a, a split second, maybe something you thought about, maybe not, you might make a rational decision. You might not. It's, you know, it's hard to say. And you'll find these articles in my newsletter this week at, uh, Craig peterson.com.

[01:02:49] If you're not on the newsletter list, you can sign up. It's absolutely free. This is the free newsletter and you can see all my insiders show notes every week, but it's an issue. Isn't it. The car veering into traffic hitting another one head first. How about later on when it's completely autonomous, what should it do?

[01:03:14] By now you've seen one of these new cars with that big screen right there in the center of the console. I've got a few problems with this, more than a few problems with you people, right. To quote Seinfeld. Yeah. Let's talk about it.

[01:03:31] You know, it, it's very cool to have that display in the center of the car console.

[01:03:36] One of the major reasons that the automotive manufacturers are putting that console right there in the center is because we are demanding, uh, the apple car play the Android car functions in order to have. Really cool stuff, right. Where we can just run our apps and have all of this, uh, wonderful information.

[01:04:02] What I really like about it and Android auto and, uh, the apple car both provide this. What I really like is you can use the navigation system that you prefer, that you like, that you want that's in your. I have switched over to apple maps. Now I used to use ways. And before that I would use Google maps and way before that map question and others, my wife could tell you some stories of us trying to use some of the very first generation GPS stuff, having a, a lap.

[01:04:38] Top in the car and then having a hockey puck up on the dashboard to try and pick up at least three satellites. And, and, uh, if you went off course at all, went the wrong way, took the wrong. it would just insist on bringing you back to where you were when you went off course, as opposed to taking you from where you are, to where you want to go, which they do nowadays.

[01:05:01] But I like that. Right. And, and I like the new features that are always coming out in these apps that we run on our smartphone. I do not like the fact that the cars have navigation in them. Eh, some of them are pretty cool. They're nice. Like in our car, if you use the incar navigation, it mutes the music or the radio, whatever is playing on the driver's side speaker there in the front of the car.

[01:05:32] And then it gives the driver the direction. So everyone else can just keep listening to whatever they were listening to before on the radio, et. You I'll need features like that. But what I don't like is they wanna get six or 800 bucks out of us in order to get new maps in order to get new software for the mapping system.

[01:05:53] When we can get things like apple maps for free. Where they're not even using our data against us, like Google does right Android. Uh, very, very nice. I, I really like them. And the apple maps now is really good. I don't know if you remember how bad it was when it first came out, but Steve jobs brought all of the mapping, senior management into a room and asked them what happened.

[01:06:20] Why is it so bad? You might remember that it took some people in Australia. Way off the beaten track out in the middle of nowhere with no water, with no fuel and they could have died out there, you know, Australia, everything's out to kill you and they might well have died and they didn't, which is good news.

[01:06:42] But even in the us, it was just messing up. It wasn't very good. Wasn't taking it always to the right place. And certainly not the best route. Now it's just gotten amazingly good. Very, very good. So I can choose, right. If I still want to use ways I can use it. If I wanna use apple, I can use it. Google maps. I can use it some third party.

[01:07:01] I can use it, but if I've got the stuff that's built into the car, I'm stuck with the stuff that's built into the car, and maybe I can pay to upgrade it. A lot of people have found recently, Hey, guess what? That two G data network went. and that means now that your remote control for your card doesn't work anymore, you might have found your navigation doesn't work anymore.

[01:07:28] I remember I had a Garmin that got live traffic updates, but it was using FM carriers on FM radio stations. And many of them dumped that. guess what your garment's no good anymore. At least that part of it isn't any good and garment charging for map updates. And I don't blame 'em for this stuff. Right.

[01:07:48] But I would prefer to have my own device to use. So that's part of the problem. In fact, that's indicative of what I see to be the very big problem with these new in car systems, because that display in the computer behind it. Isn't just handling your navigation. It's controlling your seat, heaters, the radio, the music you're listening to the lights, the dimming, the headlights, almost everything in the car goes through.

[01:08:23] Infotainment system, right? Yeah. Figured out where I'm going next, because that infotainment system just like the maps on my car right now is going to become out outdated. And then what are you gonna do? And when I say out outdated, I don't just mean, oh, well I want the new features. It might be that you want the new maps.

[01:08:48] Yeah. But what happens when it breaks? This leads us to a study that happened here. A Swedish publication had performed a test. They took 11 new cars alongside an older car, a Volvo C 70 from 2005. now that Volvo had buttons and knobs, buttons and knobs. I've always liked that. And those 11 new cars all had these wonderful infotainment systems, all in one touch screens in the center of the console, they tested this whole thing and they timed how long it took people to perform a li list of tasks in each car.

[01:09:35] So. Included things like turning on that seat, heater, turning up the temperature inside the car, the defrost, adjust the radio, reset the trip. Computer. Turn off the screen. Dim the instruments. The old Volvo was the clear winner. Yeah, indeed. So according to this article in ours, Technica, the four tasks were handled within 10 seconds flat using buttons and knobs in the Volvo.

[01:10:06] So in the amount of time it took them to do all of the tasks, the four tasks that they were given out of that selection here. I just read the car, drove a thousand feet at 68 miles per hour. Now most of these other cars with that wonderful infotainment system required twice as long or even more to complete those same.

[01:10:34] Tasks. So some 30 seconds. So you're talking about traveling two or 3000 feet while you're messing around with that display in the central console. Looks cool. Isn't this the neatest thing ever, but the problem is you have to hunt and Peck now, before you say, oh, well, Craig, these people weren't familiar with that console.

[01:10:58] Well, yeah. Okay. I'll give you that. But what they did with this test is. They let all of the participants play with the cars systems before they started the tests. In other words, they knew the menus, they knew where things were and it still took that time. You see what we're really talking about here is muscle memory, the ability for your car or for you to know your.

[01:11:29] so you can reach out and you can turn that volume knob. You might have to glance real quick to make sure you got the volume knob, but you don't have to hunt and Peck through menus. I like that. So as you can tell, I am not all that hot on these new, all touch interfaces. BMW has an interesting solution to this and that is that I drive system that little knob people didn't like it at first, but you get used to it, right?

[01:12:00] So, you know, if you need to turn on their seat heater, you just press a knob up, up right down. And then TA your seat heater and you get to adjust it right there. That is muscle memory as well. So we've got some work to do here. Uh, there are some decent systems out there in Acura, MDX Mazda, CX 50, neither one of them uses a touchscreen infiltration inform attainment system.

[01:12:29] So that's good. We'll see how it all goes. Make sure you're on my newsletter. So you can read this article and more. Craig peterson.com.

[01:12:39] We've had a chip shortage. I'm sure you've heard of it. And it's been a real problem for everybody from car manufacturers through PC makers. Well, now we're seeing a sudden downturn what's happening now. The Congress has funded it.

[01:12:56] Hey, surprisingly enough. Congress comes along to fix the chip problem with the chip bill, billions of dollars, tens of billions actually being spent on our chip plants here to help the chip industry make more chips, cuz we need chips, chips, chips, right?

[01:13:16] Well, ArsTechnica has a great little article. They're actually taking it from the financial time searched waters. Uh, I subscribe the furniture times for quite a while, but I don't anymore. And they're talking about how we went from a boom economy when it came to chips, these microchips, everything from, uh, Intel corporation out through the manufacturers of some of these much more common chip styles nowadays, the arm chips and how this new.

[01:13:51] That's supposed to, uh, boost production is coming at a point where, okay, first of all, these manufacturers put billions of dollars into building new plants here in the us of a. So that's a good thing. And then Congress comes along sometime after the fact and gives him tens of billions more. And by the way, managed, and this apparently was Senator Chuck, Schumer's doing managed to remove a provision in the build that said that none of that money for chip plants could be spent in China.

[01:14:28] So yeah, there you go. China, you get billions more from us, potentially here as we build chip plants over there, but now what do we find out? Well, a bit of a turn here because there is now excess inventory. Dan Hutchinson, who is the chief executive V L S I research. Who's been really watching the whole chip cycle since 1980s came out and said, quote, I have never seen a time when we had excess inventory.

[01:14:59] And we had shortages. Okay. So the immediate cause of this is a rapid buildup and inventory in the chip supply chain since early the year 2022 here. So compared to February, there are enough chips on hand to support about a month and a half of production. Global inventory levels jumped. Even higher and then even higher in July to almost two months.

[01:15:26] So that's been an issue. And then on top of it, PC sales have been tumbling. Smartphone demand has dropped, and those have been the main causes as consumers are slowing their spending, why they slowing spending. Because they don't have the money they used to have because of the non inflation that's happening right now.

[01:15:48] So we've kind of got all of these things happening and to top it all off, as I said, they're taking tens of billions of dollars of our tax money and, uh, going to be spending it, all of this. It's just absolutely amazing. But the suddenness of this turn, again, according to the financial times has, was when in.

[01:16:08] Dun wall street with news that its revenue in the last quarter had fallen 2.6 billion, 15%, which of course was short of what they were expecting on wall street. There. This is really quite amazing. They took an inventory adjustment that only hits like once a decade and video man, they are about to, uh, to really get hit too.

[01:16:34] I don't, I don't think I talked about this. there's the largest maker of these GPS, these graphics, processing boards, and supplemental chips that are on motherboards. And a lot of computers used a lot in video graphics, machine learning, and of course, mining of cryptocurrencies, and they have seen it fall dramatically 44% fall in these GPU that have been used for gaming.

[01:17:06] And. Bitcoin and, and mining and, and other of these cryptocurrencies and micron, one of the largest makers of memory chip said it's free cash flow was likely to turn negative in the next three months after averaging $1 billion in recent quarters. Isn't that amazing? So all of these problems have been.

[01:17:29] Also throughout Asia last, uh, month here over the last month, the chief executive of Chinese ship maker, semiconductor manufacturing, international corporation, SM IC said that demand had slowed from smartphone and other consumer electronics makers. And some of these manufacturers, electronics makers have stopped orders.

[01:17:52] All together. So guess what happens when you do that? Think about what happened with the lockdown, right? That really spurred this whole thing on a month before Taiwan, semiconductor manufacturing company, TSMC, which is like the biggest guy out there for making many of the chips we depend upon said it was expecting an inventory correction that would last until.

[01:18:17] Next year. So this has been a very abrupt slide. Chip makers in the us are trying to manage this decline at the very moment. They're laying the ground for huge increase in production because of the. Tens of billions, they have spent plus the 52 billion bill that was signed into law here. What a month or two ago, uh, government support provided by the chips act.

[01:18:47] So on the same day that Congress passed the law, Intel expected to be the biggest beneficiary of all of these government grants of our tax dollars. Sliced 4 billion permits, capital spending plans for the rest of the. Now isn't that? What happens every time really? Isn't that? What happens every time? For instance, the, uh, build back better plan renamed the inflation causation actor, I think is what they might have called it.

[01:19:17] Um, that particular bill. Put money in for you to buy an electrical car electric car, like four grand, eight grand kind of depends, uh, across the board. So what do electronic electric car makers do? They increase their prices? Yes, indeed buy, you know, six or eight grand as much as 12 grand. Right? Because now we got government money.

[01:19:42] We don't have to have you. Pay for it. So we're gonna take a bigger profit and that profit's gonna come from the tax dollars that were taken from you and from me and from the widow down the. Right. Yeah. That's what happens every time? Why do we have this whole thing about the loans for people who went to college?

[01:20:03] Well, why is college so expensive? Well, it, it continued to go up as government started providing grants and started backing loans. Right? All of the stuff the government was doing was ultimately driving up the cost of your schooling. Now they've driven up the. Of electric cars because of the money they put in.

[01:20:26] And because of the money that they've put in for the chips act the 52 billion to make chips that, Hey, we got a glut right now. Yeah. Um, guess what? The manufacturers of chips, the companies that we're spending the money in order to create. Plants more plants, more chip factories, fabrication plants have decided they're gonna cut their spending.

[01:20:53] Why not? Because they're gonna get money from you at the point of a gun, right? Yeah. That's exactly what's happening. Oh man. So for now, again, according to the financial times, most chip supply chain experts predict a relatively shallow downturn provided that the global economy is headed first off landing something that's obviously not guaranteed, but it has really left them scrambling, trying to figure out what.

[01:21:23] Happened here because it just fell apart so quickly. Gartner group, you might know them. They put together a lot of studies on a lot of different industries had been expecting the growth in ship sales this year to have from 2020 ones, 26%. So it took its forecast down further to 7% and is now predicting a 2.5% contraction in 2023.

[01:21:52] Isn't that something, um, the, the Philadelphia semiconductor index, if you are an investor, you've heard of that before, and that comprises the 30 largest us companies involved in, in chip design, manufacturer and sale. Fell back almost 40% as a stock market corrected this year after rising threefold, after the early lockdown stock market slump, because people were working from home, they couldn't go in to work people.

[01:22:23] The kids were home, people were buying computers so they could play games or get on a video conference with the office, et cetera. It has really, really changed. And I mentioned Nvidia and how NVIDIA's been hurt pretty badly. And you'll find this article by the way, in my newsletter that went out on, um, Monday.

[01:22:45] And if you don't get my free newsletter, definitely get it to just up to date. Craig, Peter son.com/subscribe. It's it's all worth doing, but within NVI. Here's what's happening. One of the biggest cryptocurrencies out there has decided that they don't want to be part of this whole energy problem that we have.

[01:23:09] You know, some of these minors for various types of cryptocurrencies have actually bought power plants, old coal PLA powered power plants that the states don't wanna buy power from anymore because it's, it's. Right. Kohl's evil. But the private sector came in and said, okay, well, if we run our own power company and we put these GPU's and special purpose made mining equipment.

[01:23:38] Into the power plant. We can save a lot of money. That's how much power they need everybody, a whole power plant to run some of these mining operations. And remember the way you mine, the cryptocurrencies. In most cases, you have to solve very complex mathematical problems to prove that you did the. that was needed in order to then, um, be awarded that Bitcoin or whatever it was that you were mining.

[01:24:09] So pretty much all of the major cryptocurrencies are looking at how can we move away from this model? Because in, in some cases, you know, we're talking about electrical consumption, just for mining cryptocurrencies that serve passes, some countries entire need for electricity. That's how bad it is. And supposedly here, we've got one of the major cryptocurrencies that is changing the entire way you.

[01:24:44] Mining, if you will. Very, very big changes. So expect GPUs and companies like Nvidia that make them to go way down in value here over the coming months. Hey, visit me online. Craig peterson.com. Subscribe to my podcast and find me at YouTube. Take care.

It's Trash Time For Your Computer - Autonomous Car Crash Kills - Which is better for your car? Buttons or a Screen? - Now we have a Chip Backlog! - Facebook tracking Your Hospital Appointments

Hey, you know, it is probably time to do an upgrade on that computer of yours to Windows 11. Or maybe you're going to move over to the Linux world. That's what I did with my older computer. It's running Linux now. Much faster, but there's more to it than that.

[Automated transcript follows]

I send out my newsletter, my insider show notes every Monday morning.

[00:00:22] Usually sometimes it's Tuesday, sometimes it's Wednesday depends on the week. This week I was at a client site over the weekend, actually, and Monday and Tuesday. Down in Atlanta. So I, I was busy down there. This is a DOD subcontractor. They just ship parts, but they are required by CMMC these new regulations I've actually been around for a while now to really.

[00:00:49] Keep an eye on their cybersecurity. And so of course they bring me in and my team cuz you know, that's what we do. But I told you that because of my newsletter this week, I got some comments from a few people that the cybersecurity section in my newsletter was two articles from 2015. And , they both pointed it out.

[00:01:13] I think it's great that everybody's paying that much attention. I actually, there's a few people that notice that, and it was my fault for not explaining what I was trying to do. And, and that's because I was in a hotel room and I was getting ready to go to the client site and do. Dates fix a couple of things, check the seals on computers and you know, all of those sorts of maintenance things you have to do clean them out.

[00:01:38] I brought down a, a little blower and stuff. They, they were amazingly clean cuz we put them in a special cabinet that has these big air filters on them and stuff. Anyhow, the two articles this week on cybersecurity in my newsletter. Well, this is even in the free newsletter. Talked about two different things.

[00:01:57] Lenovo was installing software and laptops and they apparently have still kind of done that. This was some years ago, like how seven years ago now, I guess. And they were putting it on there and you had no control over it. Okay. It was a real problem. And then the other one was. About your hard drives and what NSA did for years in modifying the firmware on the hard disk drives of a number of computers, many computers out there.

[00:02:32] And in both cases, Lenovo and the NSA, the national security agency put software on the computers so that even if you erased your computers, you would still. Have their software on it, they would reinstall itself and Lenovo has been caught again, doing that. Okay. So there there's articles out there talking about just all of the stuff they've been doing.

[00:03:00] So here's what I want to propose to you guys. And I did not make. This clear in the newsletter. And for that, I apologize, I was in a hurry and that was my intention and it just had never happened. Not, but not being in a hurry was my intention. But I, I, I intended to explain this a little bit better and I did on the radio a little bit this week as well.

[00:03:22] And I'm doing it right now. My intention is to let you know that for decades now, bad guys have been able to embed malware into parts of your computer. So instead of just the operating system where they might have a. Replaced some sort of a library file. And now when your machine boots up, it's going to pull it in from that library file or one of the many other ways, uh, they, they will go beneath your operating system.

[00:03:57] So they'll put things in the boot blocks of your computer. And as we just mentioned here, they will put things in the hard drive itself, not on the blocks of the hard drive, but in the control. Of the hard drive right there on the hard drive's board motherboard, if you will, for the hard drive and they can make it persistent.

[00:04:21] Now we've tried to get around some of these problems. Apple came up with the T2 chip and what the T2 chip does is really lock things down on your apple. And that's always a good thing, right? And the apple TTU chip keeps track of passwords and makes things bootable and everything else. And apple has also really kind of spun things out a little bit here with their TTU chip.

[00:04:51] They had some security problems. Uh they're in all of the newer apple computers. In fact, the one I use a lot is an older computer that doesn't. That T2 chip in it, but what Microsoft has done now, and this isn't really Microsoft, it's really the hardware vendors. They have something called a TP. And this TPM is there for security.

[00:05:16] It's the trusted platform module. You want the version two or better, uh, as they come out, right. Kind of keep it up to date. But the T2, this trusted platform module is kind of like the apple T2 chip. It is nowhere near as. Complete, if you will, as the apple T two chip is, and it's designed primarily for booting your computer, which is really kind of cool.

[00:05:47] There's a cute article over a medium. And it's saying that the authors of professor bill Buchanan, the author of this article says, uh, the TPM chip in your computer is perhaps a forgotten device. It often sits there not doing much and never quite achieving its full potential. You bought the laptop because it had one, but you just can't find a use for it.

[00:06:09] The chip itself is rather jealous of the applet two chip and which does so much more and where people actually buy the computer for the things it bring. Few people actually buy a computer, cuz it has a TPM, but lots of people buy a MacBook and an iPhone because it is trusted to look after your sensitive data.

[00:06:29] And he's absolutely right about that stuff. Now I've got clients who have been buying servers and other computers and the T2 chip has been. Option for them. I think that's probably almost gone nowadays. It is probably added in by default. These things are pretty cheap, cuz again, they don't really do much, but they are now a part of it because of what Microsoft has done.

[00:06:58] Microsoft has made it so that you pretty much have to have one of. T2 chip or TPM chips, I should say the TPM 2.0 cuz you know, it's gotta be as good as apples T2 the TPM 2.0, which is a crypto processor so that you can run windows 11. Now, I don't want you to think that having this TPM chip in your computer, all of a sudden makes it safe, but it does do a few things that are very, very.

[00:07:28] First of all, it has a random number generator, which is super important when we're talking about encrypt. And that random number generator is used to generate keys that are used for your disc encryption and potentially other things. So if you are encrypting the disc on your windows machine, you are really moving ahead in a very big way, because now if your computer is stolen and it boots up, they won't be able.

[00:07:57] At any of that data, it'll all look like random trash. If it's done its job. Right. And it can also of course store the user's password in the chip. It has some what's called persistent memory. I told you all of the stuff because of what I want to tell you next. All of this stuff from Lenovo, from the NSA over the years.

[00:08:20] And, and of course the bad guys, whether it's Russia, China, it can be really anywhere. North. Korea's been big on this. Iran's been doing this sort of thing. Uh, All of those guys may well have had access to your computer in the past, if you have an older computer. And because some of this software, some of this malware is persistent.

[00:08:44] And because windows now is, as I said, pretty much requiring one of these TPM chips, the TPM 2.0 were better is what you want. I think that it's time to seriously consider buying a new windows computer. Now we're working with a client right now that has an engineer who has been continually upgrading his windows computer since I don't know, windows XP days, I think.

[00:09:13] And every time he gets a new computer, he just goes ahead and migrates everything over. Doesn't upgrade. Doesn't update to the newest operating system. And for him, anyways, life is good. Well, it ain't so good folks because he has all kinds of nastiness, little turds. If you will, that are hiding all around his computer.

[00:09:37] The registry is going to be scattered with these things. Some of them probably installed by some form of malware over the years, his disc is gonna be cluttered, everything. So I'm saying right now, Get a new computer and go ahead and make sure you reinstall windows. That's the first thing we do. In fact, what we do for our clients.

[00:10:01] We have a version of windows that we have updated stream updated, and we don't have any of that bloatware on it. That the manufacturers get their 10 bucks from the various offenders, you know, to put the Norton antivirus and all this other useless stuff on your computer. So by reinstalling, just the windows.

[00:10:23] And of course, since it's windows, you gotta install all of the drivers for your computer, too. But by doing that, you're getting rid of all of the bloatware. And then what you wanna do is either copy or restore your files onto the new computer. And then when you're done with that install, Your applications, the newest versions of your applications.

[00:10:48] And I can hear people right now complaining, cuz I hear this all of the time. My gosh, I've had that application for 10 years and you can't even get it anymore. Blah blah. You know what? You should not be using that application. You need to get the newest version, or if that vendor's out of business, you need to make sure that you go one more step, find a compatible vendor or whatever.

[00:11:12] We have to stop using old computers and old software. Uh, there's options here, but seriously, consider this because of what's been happening to us for years. Hey, visit me online. Sign up for my newsletter, Craig Peter son.com.

[00:11:31] Well, autonomous cars are on the road and there was an accident in Germany. We don't have all of the details yet, but it's really concerning. And it's about the anonymous cars. Yeah. Autonomous cars. And, uh, we gotta study out. I want to talk about as well.

[00:11:48] There are various levels of autonomy, I guess. Yeah.

[00:11:53] That's the right word in these autonomous vehicles that we have and that we're looking forward to level one is kind of the gold standard, right? That's where we want to get. That's where the cars don't even need a churn pedals, your tension, nothing. They just drive themselves. We're not there. And you probably guess that.

[00:12:15] And then there's level two where you, the driver's supposed to pay attention, but the car's pretty much going to drive itself. Well, there is an article here from the associated press talking about what happened in Germany. And, uh, this is a few weeks back and this is the first time I've seen this article, but they're saying.

[00:12:41] Test car with autonomous steering capability, veered into oncoming traffic in Germany, killing one person and seriously injuring nine others. A spokesman for police in the Southwestern town of Roy. Again said the electric BMW. Nine with five people on board, including a young child swerved out of its lane at abandoned the road, triggering a series of collisions involving four vehicles after brushing an oncoming search, the BMW hit a Mercedes Benz's van head on resulting in the death of a 33 year old passenger in that.

[00:13:27] The 70 year old driver, the Cien lost control of her car and crashed into another vehicle with two people on board, pushing it off the road and causing it to burst into flame Ruly. Again, police spokesman, Michael Shaw said four rescue helicopters and dozens of firefighters. Responded to the incident and the injured were taken to several hospitals in the region.

[00:13:55] They included the 43 year old driver of the BMW three adults aged 31 42 and 47 and an 18 month old child who were all in the test vehicle. The article goes on, uh, is the police said in a statement, the crash vehicle was an autonomous electric test car, whether it was being steered by the 43, 3 year old driver or not is a subject of investigation.

[00:14:24] So this is called a level two driving assistance system. It's already incorporated in production vehicles today. They can support the driver on when the driver turns them on according to BMW with the level two vehicles, the driver. Always retains responsibility. In other words, if that car gets into an accident while you are behind the wheel and responsible for it, it's your fault.

[00:14:54] So that solves the problem of whose insurance covers what doesn't it? Yeah, it, it does it. Pretty well, because it's your fault is kind of the bottom line. So we are in the process of investigating the exact circumstances of the crash. BMW said, of course we are in close contact with the authorities. It's it's concerning very concerning and I am not ready yet.

[00:15:23] Autonomous vehicles. Now we've seen, and we've talked about on the show before a number of problems with some of these different vehicles from Tesla and others, and they are on the roads in many states right now, even in the Northeast, not just the Teslas, but these fully autonomous test vehicles. And.

[00:15:43] There are a number of things to be concerned about here. For instance, how can an autonomous vehicle determine what to do when there's a police officer in the middle of the road or a flagman? Or obviously it really can't determine it because it can't make out. What's what, in fact we might remember, and I'm sure they've made some adjustments here over at Tesla, but a Tesla car went ahead and, uh, struck and I think killed a lady who was crossing the road with her bicycle.

[00:16:20] I think she was walking it across when she was hit. So how can they. How can they tell the difference between a car that's wrapped and has someone's face on it, maybe a politician full body on the back of a box truck as an advertisement. How can it tell the difference between that and a person that might be standing there?

[00:16:44] It, it gets to be a real problem. We're already seeing that some of these autonomous vehicles go directly rear end fire trucks stopped at the side of the road with their lights on police cars stopped at the side of the road with the lights on just completely rear end them. We're seeing that. So how about when it gets a little more difficult than a fire truck parked on the side of the road?

[00:17:10] Now these cars, apparently autonomous steering and, uh, lane detection and correction, all that sort of stuff. These vehicles are looking at things and trying to determine, well, what should I do here? And oftentimes what they determine is, oh, well, okay. That's just something that's fixed at the side of the road.

[00:17:30] Like, like a sign post, like a speed sign. When in fact it's not. So we've gotta solve that problem. It, it still isn't solved yet. What caused this car to steer directly into oncoming traffic and, and head first into a Mercedes van? I, I don't know. They don't know yet. Anyways. I'm sure they'll find out soon enough.

[00:17:57] There are real questions here. And then I wanna take it to the next levels. If the car is in, let's say level one where it's full autonomous, even if it's not, even if it's a level two, like this car was, or is, uh, what happens when the car is either going to hit a pedestrian or go over a cliff or into a brick wall?

[00:18:23] That's even better. Cuz the car might not know the cliff is there. What decision should the car make? What kind of ethics should it be? You know, executing here. Can it even make an ethical decision? And this is the trolley testing in case you're not familiar with the whole trolley test thing. It's, let's say you are.

[00:18:47] A trolley operator, you're going down a hill and there is a fork in the tracks. And all you can do is select track set a or track set B you can't stop the trolley. You can't slow the trolley down in track. Set a there's a group of seniors walking across the tracks that you will hit. If you go down tracks at a tracks at B there's, some young kids playing on the.

[00:19:16] And if you choose B, you're gonna kill the kids. So ethical dilemma here, who do you kill? Cuz that's what the whole trolley test is about. Look it up online. There's a lot of different variations of this, but what about the car? What decision should the car make? Should the car make the decision to protect you the driver, or should the car be making the decision to protect the pedestrian?

[00:19:43] If it's going to protect the pedestrian by plowing into that brick wall and potentially killing the occupants of the car. How about when there is the decision of the old people or the young. There is a lot to solve here. And some of these companies, including Mercedes have come out already with their decisions, Mercedes said they will protect the occupants of the vehicle.

[00:20:11] now when you're driving the car yourself, of course, you're making that decision in a, a split second, maybe something you thought about, maybe not, you might make a rational decision. You might not. It's, you know, it's hard to say. And you'll find these articles in my newsletter this week at, uh, Craig peterson.com.

[00:20:32] If you're not on the newsletter list, you can sign up. It's absolutely free. This is the free newsletter and you can see all my insiders show notes every week. But it's an issue, isn't it? The car veering into traffic hitting another one head first. How about later on when it's completely autonomous, what should it do?

[00:20:58] By now you've seen one of these new cars with that big screen right there in the center of the console. I've got a few problems with this, more than a few problems with you people, right. To quote Seinfeld. Yeah. Let's talk about it.

[00:21:15] Right here, you know, it, it's very cool to have that display in the center of the car console.

[00:21:21] One of the major reasons that the automotive manufacturers are putting that console right there in the center is because we are demanding, uh, the apple car play the Android car functions in order to have some really cool stuff, right. Where we can just run our. And have all of this, uh, wonderful information.

[00:21:47] What I really like about it and Android auto and, uh, the apple car both provide this. What I really like is you can use the navigation system that you prefer, that you like, that you want that's in your. I have switched over to apple maps. Now I used to use ways. And before that I would use Google maps and way before that map quest and, and others, my wife could tell you some stories of us trying to use some of the very first generation GPS stuff, having a, a laptop in the car and then having.

[00:22:25] Keep pup on the dashboard to try and pick up at least three satellites. And, and, uh, if you went off course at all, went the wrong way, took the wrong. It would just insist on bringing you back to where you were when you went off course, as opposed to taking you from where you are, to where you want to go, which they do nowadays.

[00:22:47] But I like that. Right. And, and I like the new features that are always coming out in these apps that we run on our smartphone. I do not like the fact that the cars have navigation in them. Eh, some of them are pretty cool. They're nice. Like in our car, if you use the in-car navigation, it mutes the music or the radio, whatever is playing on the driver's side speaker there in the front of the car.

[00:23:17] And then it gives the driver the direction. So everyone else can just keep listening to whatever they were listening to before on the radio, et. You I'll need features like that. But what I don't like is they wanna get six or 800 bucks out of us in order to get new maps in order to get new software for the mapping system.

[00:23:38] When we can get things like apple maps for free. Where they're not even using our data against us, like Google does right Android. Uh, very, very nice. I, I really like them. And the apple maps now is really good. I don't know if you remember how bad it was when it first came out, but Steve jobs brought all of the mapping, senior management into a room and asked them what happened.

[00:24:05] Why is it so bad? You might remember that it took some people in Australia. Way off the beaten track out in the middle of nowhere with no water, with no fuel and they could have died out there, you know, Australia, everything's out to kill you and they might well have died and they didn't, which is good news.

[00:24:27] But even in the us, it was just messing up. It wasn't very good. Wasn't taking you always to the right place and certainly not the best route. Now it's just gotten amazingly good. Very, very good. So I can choose, right. If I still want to use ways I can use it. If I wanna use apple, I can use it. Google maps.

[00:24:45] I can use it some third party. I can use it, but if I've got the stuff that's built into the car, I'm stuck with the stuff that's built into the car, and maybe I can pay to upgrade it. A lot of people have found recently, Hey, guess what? That two G data network went. And that means now that your remote control for your card doesn't work anymore, you might have found your navigation doesn't work anymore.

[00:25:13] I remember I had a garment that got live traffic updates, but it was using FM carriers on FM radio stations. And many of them dumped that. guess what your garment's no good anymore. At least that part of it isn't any good and garment charging for map updates. And I don't blame 'em for this stuff. Right.

[00:25:33] But I would prefer to have my own device to use. So that's part of the problem. In fact, that's indicative of what I see to be the very big problem with these new in car systems, because that display in the computer behind it. Isn't just handling your navigation. It's controlling your seat, heaters, the radio, the music you're listening to the lights, the dimming, the headlights, almost everything in the car goes through.

[00:26:08] Infotainment system, right? Yeah. Figured out where I'm going next. Cuz that infotainment system just like the maps on my car right now is going to become out outdated. And then what are you gonna do? And when I say out outdated, I don't just mean, oh, well I want the new features. It might be that you want the new maps.

[00:26:34] Yeah. But what happens when it breaks? This leads us to a study that happened here. A Swedish publication had performed a test. They took 11 new cars alongside an older car, a Volvo C 70 from 2005. Now that Volvo had buttons and knobs, buttons and knobs, I've always liked that. And those 11 new cars all had these wonderful infotainment systems, all in one touch screens in the center of the console.

[00:27:11] They tested this whole thing and they timed how long it took people to perform a li list of tasks in each car. So they included things like turning on that seat. Heater, turning up the temperature inside the car, the frost, adjust the radio, reset the trip. Computer, turn off the screen. Dim the instruments.

[00:27:35] The old Volvo was the clear winner. . Yeah, indeed. So according to this article in ours, Technica, the four tasks were handled within 10 seconds, flat using buttons and knobs in the Volvo. So in the amount of time it took them to do all of the tasks, the four tasks that they were given out of that selection here, I just read the car, drove a thousand.

[00:28:06] At 68 miles per hour. Now most of these other cars with that wonderful infotainment system required twice as long, or even more to complete those same four tasks. So some 30 seconds. So you're talking about traveling two or 3000 feet while you're messing around with that display in the central console.

[00:28:34] Looks cool. Isn't this the neatest thing ever, but the problem is you have to hunt and now before you say, oh, well, Craig, these people weren't familiar with that console. Well, yeah. Okay. I'll give you that. But what they did with this test is. They let all of the participants play with the cars systems before they started the tests.

[00:28:57] In other words, they knew the menus, they knew where things were and it still took that time. See, what we're really talking about here is muscle memory, the ability for your car or for you to know your. so you can reach out and you can turn that volume knob. You might have to glance real quick to make sure you got the volume knob, but you don't have to hunt and Peck through menus.

[00:29:26] I like that. So as you can tell, I am not all that hot on these new, all touch interfaces. BMW has an interesting solution to this and that is that I drive system that little knob people didn't like it at first, but you get used to it, right? So, you know, if you need to turn on the seat heater, you just press a knob up, up right down.

[00:29:52] And then TA your seat heater and you get to adjust it right there. That is muscle memory as well. So we've got some work to do here. Uh, there are some decent systems out there in Acura, MDX Mazda, CX 50, neither one of them uses a touchscreen infiltration inform attainment system. So that's good. We'll see how it all goes.

[00:30:18] Make sure you're on my newsletter. So you can read this article and more. Craig peterson.com.

[00:30:26] We've had a chip shortage. I'm sure you've heard of it. And it's been a real problem for everybody from car manufacturers through PC makers. Well, now we're seeing a sudden downturn what's happening now. The Congress has funded it.

[00:30:43] Hey, surprisingly enough. Congress comes along to fix the chip problem with the chip bill, billions of dollars, tens of billions actually being spent on our chip plants here to help the chip industry make more chips, cuz we need chips, chips, chips, right?

[00:31:03] Well, ours Technica has a great little article. They're actually taking it from the financial time searched waters. Uh, I subscribe the France for times for quite a while, but I don't anymore. And they're talking about how we went from a boom economy when it came to chips, these microchips, everything from, uh, Intel corporation out through the manufacturers of some of these much more common chip styles nowadays, the arm chips and how this new.

[00:31:38] That's supposed to, uh, boost production is coming at a point where, okay, first of all, these manufacturers put billions of dollars into building new plants here in the us of a. So that's a good thing. And then Congress comes along sometime after the fact and gives him tens of billions more. And by the way, managed, and this apparently was Senator Chuck, Schumer's doing managed to remove a provision in the bill that said that none of that money for chip.

[00:32:13] Plants could be spent in China. So yeah, there you go. China, you get billions more from us, potentially here as we build chip plants over there. But now what do we find out? Well, a bit of a turn here, because there is now excess inventory. Dan Hutchinson, who is the chief executive V L S I research. Who's been really watching the whole chip cycle since 1980s came out and said, quote, I have never seen a time when we had excess inventory and.

[00:32:46] We had shortages. Okay. So the immediate cause of this is a rapid buildup and inventory in the chip supply chain since early the year 2022 here. So compared to February, there are enough chips on hand to support about a month and a half of production. Global inventory levels jumped up even higher and then even higher in July to almost two months.

[00:33:13] So that's been an issue. And then on top of it, PC sales have been tumbling. Smartphone demand has dropped, and those have been the main causes as consumers are slowing their spending. Why are they slowing spending? Because they don't have the money they used to have because of the non inflation that's have.

[00:33:33] Right now. So we've kind of got all of these things happening and to top it all off, as I said, they're taking tens of billions of dollars of our tax money and, uh, going to be spending it on all of this. It's just absolutely amazing. But the suddenness of this turn, again, according to financial times has, was when Intel stunned wall street with news that its revenue in the last quarter had fallen 2.6 billion.

[00:34:02] 15%, which of course was short of what they were expecting on wall street. There. This is really quite amazing. They took an inventory adjustment that only hits like once a decade and Vidia man. They are about to, uh, to really get hit too. I don't, I don't think I talked about this, but. They're the largest maker of these GPUs, these graphics, processing boards, and supplemental chips that are on motherboards.

[00:34:32] And a lot of computers used a lot in video graphics, machine learning, and of course, mining of cryptocurrencies and they have seen it fall dramatically 44% fall in these GPUs that have been used for gaming. Bitcoin and, and mining and, and other of these cryptocurrencies and micron, one of the largest makers of memory chip said it's free cash flow was likely to turn negative in the next three months after averaging $1 billion in recent quarters.

[00:35:11] Isn't that amazing? So all of these problems have been. Also throughout Asia last, uh, month here over the last month, the chief executive of Chinese ship maker, semiconductor manufacturing, international corporation, S I C said that demand had slowed from smartphone and other consumer electronics makers.

[00:35:32] And some of these manufacturers, electronics makers have stopped orders all together. So guess what happens when you do that? Think about what happened with. Down right. That really spurred this whole thing on a month before Taiwan, semiconductor manufacturing company, TSMC, which is like the biggest guy out there for making many of the chips we depend upon said it was expecting an inventory correction that would last until late next year.

[00:36:05] So this has been a very abrupt slide. Chip makers in the us are trying to manage this decline at the very moment. They're laying the ground for huge increase in production because of the tens of billions they have spent. Plus the $52 billion bill that was signed into law here. What a month or two ago?

[00:36:30] Uh, government support provided by the chips act. So on the same day that Congress passed the law, Intel expected to be the biggest beneficiary of all of these government grants of our tax dollars, sliced 4 billion summits, capital spending plans for the rest of the year. Now isn't that? What happens every.

[00:36:52] Really isn't it. What happens every time? For instance, the, uh, build back better plan renamed the inflation causation actor, I think is what they might have called it. Um, that particular bill. Put money in for you to buy an electrical car electric car, like four grand, eight grand kind of depends, uh, across the board.

[00:37:14] So what electronic electric car makers do they increase their prices? Yes, indeed. Buy, you know, Six or eight grand as much as 12 grand. Right? Because now we got government money. We don't have to have you pay for it. So we're gonna take a bigger profit and that profit's gonna come from the tax dollars that were taken from you and from me and from the widow down the street, right.

[00:37:40] Yeah. That's what happens every time? Why do we have this whole thing about the loans for people who went to college? Well, why is college so expensive? Well, it, it continued to go up as government started providing grants and started backing loans. Right? All of the stuff the government was doing was ultimately driving up the cost of your schooling.

[00:38:05] Now they've driven up the. Of electric cars because of the money they put in. And because of the money that they've put in for the chips act the 52 billion to make chips that, Hey, we got a glut right now. Yeah. Um, guess what. The manufacturers of chips, the companies that were spending the money in order to create plants, more plants, more chip factories, fabrication plants have decided they're gonna cut their spending.

[00:38:38] Why not? Because they're gonna get money from you at the point of a gun, right? That's exactly what's happening. Oh man. So for now, again, according to the financial times, most chip supply chain experts predict a relatively shallow downturn provided that the global economy is headed first off landing something that's obviously not guaranteed, but it has really left them scrambling, trying to figure out what happened here, because it just fell apart so quickly.

[00:39:13] Gartner group, you might know them. They put together a lot of studies on a lot of different industries had been expecting the growth in chip sales this year to have from 2020 ones, 26%. So it took its forecast down further to 7% and is now predicting a 2.5% contraction in 2023. Isn't that something, um, the, the Philadelphia semiconductor index, if you are an investor, you've heard of that before, and that comprises the 30 largest us companies involved in, in chip design manufacturer and sale fell back almost 40% as a stock market corrected this year.

[00:39:57] After rising threefold after the early lockdown stock market slump, because people were working from home, they couldn't go in to work. Peop the kids were home, people were buying computers so they could play games or get on a video conference with the office, et cetera. It has really, really changed. Oh, and I mentioned Nvidia and how Invidia's been.

[00:40:23] Pretty badly. And you'll find this article by the way, in my newsletter that went out on, um, Monday. And if you don't get my free newsletter, definitely get it to just app to date. Craig, Peter son.com/subscribe. It's it's all worth doing, but within video here's what's happening. One of the biggest cryptocurrencies out there has decided that they don't want to be part of this.

[00:40:52] Energy problem that we have, you know, some of these minors for various types of cryptocurrencies have actually bought power plants, old coal PLA powered power plants that the states don't wanna buy power from anymore because it's, it's coal. Right. Kohl's evil. But the private sector came in and said, okay, well, if we run our own power company and we put these GPU's and special purpose made mining equipment into the power plant, we can save a lot of money.

[00:41:27] That's how much power they need every. A whole power plant to run some of these mining operations. And remember the way you mine, the cryptocurrencies. In most cases, you have to solve very complex mathematical problems to prove that you did the work. That was needed in order to then, um, be awarded that Bitcoin or whatever it was that you were mining.

[00:41:54] So pretty much all of the major cryptocurrencies are looking at how can we move away from this model? Because in, in some cases, you know, we're talking about electrical consumption, just for mining cryptocurrencies that serve passes, some countries entire need for electricity. That's how bad it is. And supposedly here, we've got one of the major cryptocurrencies that is changing.

[00:42:24] The entire way you do mining, if you will. Very, very big changes. So expect GPUs and companies like Nvidia that make them to go way down in value here over the coming months. Hey, visit me online. Craig peterson.com. Subscribe to my podcast and find me at YouTube. Take care.

[00:42:50] If Facebook, isn't the only company doing this, but there's an article from the markup. They did a study and caught Facebook. This is absolutely crazy receiving sensitive medical information. We're gonna talk about that right now.

[00:43:06] This is really concerning for a lot of people. And, and for good reason, frankly, I've been talking about this.

[00:43:13] I, I think the first time I talked about it was over a decade ago and it has to do with what are called pixels. Now, marketers obviously want to show you ads and they want show you ads based on your interest. And frankly, as a consumer, if I'm looking for a new F one. I wouldn't mind seeing ads from competing car dealers or, you know, used car places, et cetera, to try and sell me that Ford truck.

[00:43:43] It makes sense, right? If I'm looking for shoes, why not show me ads for shoes, but what happens when we start talking about the medical business about the legal business things get murky and people get very upset. You see the way these pixels work is you'll put a pixel, like for instance, a Facebook pixel.

[00:44:06] If you go to Craig peterson.com, I've got this pixel on there from Facebook. And what it allows me to do now is retarget Facebook user. So you go to my site to go to a page on my site, and this is true for, uh, pretty much every website out there. And. I know that you went and you were looking for this, so I can retarget you in an ads.

[00:44:28] I'll show you an ad. In other words, on Facebook now I've never actually done that ever. Uh, I I'm like the world's worst marketer, frankly. Uh, and, uh, but I do have that on there because it gives me some other numbers, statistics, and, and really helps you to understand how the website's being used, which I think makes a whole lot of sense.

[00:44:49] So there are marketers that are using this for obvious reasons. Now, I think you understand what the pixel is. It is literally a little picture that is one pixel by one pixel, and it tends to blend in, I think even in most cases, now these pixels from different. Places like Facebook are actually transparent.

[00:45:09] So you, you don't even see it on the page, but the idea is now they have a foothold on a website that doesn't belong to them. In this case, Facebook now has access to information about a website that you visited that has nothing to do with Facebook. okay. So that's the basics of how these pixels work and they're almost impossible to get rid of because in reality, many websites, mine included will even grab graphics from other websites just because you know, it it's, I'm quoting another article I pull in their graphic.

[00:45:50] Of course. I'm gonna point to that other site. Why would I take that picture? Put it on my side. I don't own the rights to it. But if he'll let me that other website will, let me go ahead and show that graphic on my website, cuz there's ways to restrict it. If they don't want me doing that, they could stop me from doing it.

[00:46:09] Then I I'm going to just go to the original website so they can get the credit for it's their property still. I'm not violating any copyright laws, et cetera. Does that make sense to. So what's the difference between the Facebook pixel and a picture I'm pulling from another random website? Well, the obvious thing is it's coming from a Facebook domain of some sort.

[00:46:31] So, so there are ways to stop it, but there's just as many ways to get around stopping it, frankly. Well, Let's move on to something a little more sensitive. We have had problems that I reported on years ago of people going to an emergency room in a hospital. Now, when you're in that emergency room, your phone has GPS capabilities still.

[00:46:57] It knows you went in the emergency entrance to the hospital and you are. Opening it up. Maybe you're looking around, maybe you're reading articles, maybe you're plotting your trip home using Google maps. You are being tracked depending on what apps you have on your phone. If you have an Android versus an iPhone, what you've enabled, what you haven't enabled.

[00:47:20] Right? All of that sort of stuff. well, this now has become a problem because as I reported there have been people who went to the hospital, went to the emergency room and started seeing ads from what you might call ambulance, chasing lawyers. Have you been injured? Is it someone else's fault? Call me right now.

[00:47:45] Do he cheat him in. if that sort of thing showed up on your phone, would you get a little upset, a little nervous saying, what are they doing, trying to cash in on, on my pain, maybe literal pain. And it's not as though those ads are just showing up while you are in the emergency room, because now they've tagged you.

[00:48:06] They know that you are in that emergency room. So off they'll. They will go ahead and track you and send you ads even after you leave. Hey, I wanna remind you if you want to get this, uh, this week's list of articles. I, I put out every week, my insider show notes. It has become very popular. Thousands of people get that every week.

[00:48:32] Go right now to Craig peterson.com. I'll also send out a little bit of training. I do that. I have special reports. I send out. I've got more stuff I'm doing, but you gotta be on the email list. Craig peterson.com to get on my free email list now. What's happened here now is markup went ahead and looked at Newsweek's top 100 hospitals in America.

[00:48:56] They went to their websites and they found about a third of the hospitals using what's called the Meel. That is the Facebook pixels referring to earlier. So it sends a little bit of data. Whenever someone clicks a button to let's say, schedule a doctor's appoint. Why does it do that? Well, because the Facebook pixel is on the scheduling page.

[00:49:24] Let's say there's scheduling page for oncology on the website. I guess who knows that you are going to see an oncologist? Facebook? Why? Well, because the hospital has put a Facebook tracking pixel on that page. So Facebook knows, Hey, he was on the oncologist page. Maybe he has cancer. I should start showing him ads from other hospitals and from cancer medications, et cetera.

[00:49:51] Cetera, that is happen. Right now, 33 of these top 100 hospitals in America. Th these are the top 100, according to Newsweek's list. Have that information. Now that data is connected to your internet. Address. So it's kinda like your computer's mailing address and they can link that back to usually to a specific individual or to a household.

[00:50:20] So now they have a receipt of the appointment request. that's gone to Facebook now. They don't have everything you filled out on the page or anything, you know, you added in your social security number, maybe other medical information. Facebook didn't get all of that, but they do know that you visited the hospital's website and which pages you visited on that website.

[00:50:47] So markup went ahead and contacted these hospital. So, for example, John John's Hopkins hospital, they did find a Facebook pixel tracking on the appointment, scheduling page. They informed John's Hopkins of how that is a leak of personal information. And after being contacted by the markup, they did not remove the track.

[00:51:18] also, by the way, when the markup reached out to them, the hospital did not respond UCLA Reagan medical center. They had of course a pixel and they did remove it from the scheduling page. Although they declined to comment, New York Presbyterian hospital, all these hospitals have that pixel and they did not remove it.

[00:51:40] Northwestern Memorial hospital. Again, they got the tracking pixel did not remove it after they were informed about the security problems, duke university hospital, same thing. Most of these, by the way, did not respond to them. University of Pennsylvania, Houston Methodist hospital, the university of Chicago medical center.

[00:52:02] Uh, the last two of those did remove the pixel. Uh, Scripps Memorial hospital out in LA JOA, California. There are many Brigham and women's Faulkner hospital. They were informed that they had the tracking picture pixel on the, on the, uh, scheduling page. They did not remove it, but you know, the time of this article, a Tufts medical center, same thing did not remove it, uh, out in Sanford in San Diego.

[00:52:29] Same problem. John's Hopkins Bayview medical center, John Jefferson health, Thomas Jefferson university, hospitals, Loyola. These are big name hospitals. I'm looking at these that goes on and on sharp Memorial hospital, Henry Ford hospital. Uh, let's see some more, I'm trying to, oh, Massachusetts general hospital.

[00:52:51] They did not have the tracking pixel Brigham in women's hospital, no tracking pixel on the scheduling page. So some of these hospitals were already doing it right. They re they recognized that putting this face. Pixel on may help them with some of the marketing and understanding the market a little better, which is what I do, but it's also giving personal information, personal health information to Facebook and Facebook's advertisers.

[00:53:23] So they didn't put it on so good for them. Again, mass general Brigham and women's, uh, Sanford Mount Sinai, university of Michigan hospital and, and others, of course. So very good news there in general. Again, don't be worried about a pixel on just a random website because it probably is being used to help with stats to know what's being used on the website.

[00:53:49] And maybe, maybe just maybe using it to send a little ad to you on Facebook later. Of course, you're listening to Craig Peter son. You can get my insider show notes for absolutely free. And my little mini trainings. Oh three to five minutes every [email protected]. Just sign up on the homepage.

[00:54:14] You know, I've got it on my homeowner's policy. I have a special business policy for it. And it's something that you should seriously consider, but you need to understand first. So we're gonna talk about it. What is cyber insurance? Uh, that's what's up now?

[00:54:31] Cyber insurance is something that many businesses have looked at, not all businesses have, which is kind of crazy. If you ask me according to the industry statistics right now, less than 1% market penetration for cyber insurance and is expected to.

[00:54:52] Into a $20 billion industry by 2025. That is some serious money. So what is this cyber insurance? For instance, there's a rider on my home insurance for, for cyber insurance and I have special cyber insurance from a big company underwritten, but it is for anything that happens. In my business, that's related to cyber security and it also covers my clients because that's what we do for living is cyber security.

[00:55:28] If they are following our guidelines. So it's pretty darn cool when you get right down to it, because these risks that we have in the digital world are really every. So if you're a large organization, if you're a small little enterprise, are you going to get hacked? You know, bottom line, anybody could potentially get hacked because the bad guys have gotten pretty good.

[00:55:56] And most of us in business have gotten pretty lackadaisical because of all of this, but not everybody understands when we're talking about cyber insurance. What does cyber mean? Well, the idea is that cyber insurance is created to protect organizations and individuals against digital risks. So we're talking about things like ransonware malware fishing campaigns.

[00:56:24] So for instance, I got a call just this week from a listener who again, had their operating account, emptied out, hate it. When that happens. And so they lost everything. They lost all of the money in the account and they're trying to get it back. I got an email this week and, uh, from a lady that I, there's not much I can do for her.

[00:56:46] I pointed her in the right direction, but her father, I think it was, had his digital wallet of cryptocurrency completely emptied, completely stolen. Can you believe this sort of stuff, right? It's happening every day. You might have insurance that covers that, but you might not. Traditional insurance policies are only looking at physical risks, so they will take the physical risk things like damage to equipment, or maybe you have livestock or you have stock and inventory, a building different locations.

[00:57:29] That's your standard stuff. But cyber insurance is to allow businesses to transfer the costs associated with recovery from the losses incurred when there's some form of cybersecurity breach. Now that's a pretty big deal. because the losses can be huge. It isn't just ransomware where maybe it, it costs you a million dollars in ransom payments.

[00:57:58] Or if you're an individual, a retiree, maybe it only costs you 25,000 in ransom payments. And I know that's a lot, especially for retiree. But there is loss of reputation. There's loss of business, cuz you couldn't conduct business cuz you couldn't use your computers. Right? All of that sort of stuff. You got people that you have to bring in, you have to bring in a special team to try and recover your data.

[00:58:23] Maybe try and figure out what had happened. Right. All of that sort of stuff. So be careful cyber insurance, a lot of people kind of mistake it for policy that pays off. Attackers to retrieve or unlock data. That's not what it's really for cyber insurance is something that allows you to, I guess the term in, in the industry is transfer risk when your online security controls fail and.

[00:58:52] Basically all of them could fail. It, it, it depends, right? If you're a huge company, you can hire a bigger team for a security operation center, but at the same time, you also have more employees that are causing more problems. So look at it entirely business interruption, payments to experts to recover the data.

[00:59:14] Compensation for bodily injuries, uh, depending obviously on the resulting damage and the particular policy and the rates are gonna vary based on the maturity of your cyber defenses. So this is something that I've been big on for a long time, the cyber security maturity CMMC and what that helps 'em to determine is.

[00:59:39] What are your rates gonna be? So if you went out and you're just using the cable modem that they, that the, uh, company, your cable company provided for you, or you go to a big box retailer, and that's where you bought your firewall and switches, and you've got your wonderful little Lenovo PCs or Dows or whatever, and you're running, uh, Norton antivirus.

[01:00:04] You are not well covered. You are not very mature from a cybersecurity standpoint. The other thing you need to be able to do is make sure you've got your asset management all in line, that you have policies and procedures in place for when things happen. You gotta have it all put together, but the average cyber insurance policy for a small to mid-size company in 2021 was about $1,600.

[01:00:31] For $1 million in cyber liability coverage. Now that's not really bad at all. Now there are limits to what the provider will pay. They will often, if you do get nailed, They'll come in and double check that, everything that you said, all of those boxes that you checked when you were applying for your cyber security insurance, make sure you actually did all of them.

[01:00:59] Okay. Yeah. Kind of a big deal. And you not only will they not pay out, if you didn't do everything that you said you were going to be. but the other problem is you might end up getting sued by. Okay. So expect a counter suit if you decide to soothe them. So don't lie on those fors people. Okay. All right. Um, cyber claims, unlike non-technical events, like again, a fire flood storm damage, the cyber insurance claim might be determined by means of attack and your ability or your effort to prevent it.

[01:01:40] As I was saying, make sure you've got the checklist and this is something I think I, I should probably put a course together on to help you guys with, or maybe even a little bit of consulting for people. Let me know, just send an email to me, [email protected]. And uh, if you're interested in more info about cyber insurance, you can either look at this week's newsletter that you can.

[01:02:04] By again, going to Craig peterson.com and a link to this particular article I'm looking at, or you can tell me, Hey, listen, I'd love a little course or little support, a little help. Okay. I think it makes a lot of sense. So does your business qualify for cyber insurance? Well, some do some don't, uh, you might not see yourself as a target.

[01:02:27] For the bad guys, but I'll tell you, my 85 year old father was conned by some of these cyber attack guys. Okay. And he doesn't have much money. He, he's not the bank of, uh, England bank of America. None of these big banks or anything. Oh. Is a retiree living at home trying to make ends meet. So the same, thing's true for you as a business, you as an individual.

[01:02:57] You are vulnerable most likely to a cyber attack, but you've got to really manage your risk posture. You gotta do things, right. So that's the bottom line there. That's what we try and help you do. But you can find information about this again, you can just email me, me, Craig peterson.com and ask for the info on cyber insurance, or if you're already a subscriber to my newsletter.

[01:03:23] That went out Tuesday morning. So just check your mail. Maybe it's in the spam box from Tuesday morning and you'll find a lot more information linked right from there. Craig peterson.com stick around. We'll be right back.

[01:03:41] There are a lot of complaints about how some of these cryptocurrencies are very non green using tons of energy. And now the prices are going down. We're seeing a number of really weird things happening.

[01:03:57] Cryptocurrency, as you probably have heard, has taken a tumble. Now, some of the cryptocurrencies, particularly of course, someone you might know most is Bitcoin use a lot of computing power.

[01:04:11] You see, what they're trying to do is basically solve a very complex mathematical problem. And in order to do that, they need a lot of computing. Now you can certainly run it on your little desktop computer, that program to compute those things. It's called mining. So you're mining for Bitcoin. You're, you're trying to solve these mathematical problems and there's a theoretical limit to how many Bitcoins could actually potentially be mind looking right now.

[01:04:45] They're saying that circulating Bitcoin right now. Is about 19 million Bitcoin that are out there. And Bitcoin is worth about $20,000 right now, down from its huge, huge, huge high. That was, uh, more than two and a half times. What it's worth right now. So, how do you mind? Well, if you take that computer and you run the software, it's gonna do some mining and it is probably going to cost you more in electricity nowadays to mine.

[01:05:21] One Bitcoin than that Bitcoin is worth. In fact, it certainly will cost you more. Now. That's why the people that are professional Bitcoin minors have taken a different tact and what they've done. Is they found places where they can get cheap electricity. For instance, Finland, where they're using geothermal produced electricity.

[01:05:46] They're also using the cold air outside in order to cool down. The computers themselves as they're trying to compute this, but there's another thing that they've been doing. And that is well, how about we buy a coal plant? That's been shut down and that's happened. So they take that coal plant. They bring it back online.

[01:06:08] They burn the coal, they produce electricity at a cheaper rate than they could buy it. but behind all of this is the computing power. And what miners found a long time ago is it's better to have thousands of compute units working on solving these problems than it is just having. I don't know how many CPUs are in your computer.

[01:06:32] Four. Com, um, CPUs. How many? Well, I, how far can you get with those? Yeah, they're fast, but we need thousands of computers. So what they found is that GPU's graphical processing units. Kind of met their goals. You see a GPU is actually composed of thousands of computers, little compute units. Now they can't do real fancy math.

[01:07:01] They can't do anything particularly fancy. They're really designed to move. Pixels around on a screen. In other words, they're designed to help gamers have a nice smooth game while they're playing. They can be used. In fact, they're used all of the time in desktop computers, just for regular display of a webpage, for instance, or if you're watching a video, all of that is part of what they're doing.

[01:07:30] With graphic processing units. And if you've been paying attention, you probably have noticed if you particularly, if you're a gamer that the price for GPUs has gone way up, not only has it gone way up and it isn't just due to the lockdown and the supply chain problems. but they're very, very, very hard to get now.

[01:07:53] Yeah. Some of that is due to supply chain problems. No doubt about it. But most of these GPUs, according to some of the numbers I've seen, have actually been bought by these professional mining companies. In fact, many of them have gone the next step and they have what called custom silicone. These are completely customized process.

[01:08:19] sometimes they're using Asics. Sometimes they're using other things, but these custom processors that are really good at solving that problem that they have to solve in order to mine, a bit Bitcoin or one of these other currencies. So you, you see how that all works. There's a number of GPU manufacturers and something else interesting has happened because of the drop in value of pretty much all of the cryptocurrencies.

[01:08:51] And that is these GPS are going byebye. Right. Do does a company that is now no longer trading. That's no longer operating. Uh, we've seen at least two of these crypto mining companies just completely disappear. So now all of their hardware is going up for sale. You'll find it on EBA. So I, I wanna warn you, if you are looking for a GPU of some sort for your computer, maybe if you're a gamer, be very, very careful.

[01:09:28] We've got a buyer beware situation here because you're not just buying a GPU. A graphics processing card, uh, that has been lightly used. It was sitting in a terminal. Maybe it's a GPU. Like I use them where, when I'm doing video editing, it does use the GPU, even some of the audio editing. It uses the GPU.

[01:09:50] I'm looking at it right now and I've got some, uh, GPU utilization going on. I've got about, uh, 6% of my GPU in use right now on this computer. So. What the problem is is that these minors who are selling their old GPUs have been running them full Bo 24, 7. That's hard on anything. Isn't it. So what, uh, what's happening here is that you are seeing a market getting flooded with GPUs.

[01:10:25] You really don't wanna. All right. Does that make sense? Uh, you know, there we've lost more than 50% this year already in some of these, uh, cryptocurrencies that are out there coin base has had an interesting year Celsius, a major cryptocurrency bank, suspended withdrawals, uh, just here in the last few.

[01:10:52] Coin based crypto exchange announced a round of layoffs. Also here, they paused their hiring a month or two ago. It it's not going very well and prices for new and used graphic cards are continuing to fall. The peak price was late in 2021, a little bit early in 2022, but now you can go to Amazon new egg, best buy and buy current generation GPUs for prices that really would seem like bargain six months ago.

[01:11:26] And pricing for used GPUs has fallen even further, which is the caveat Amour URA thing here that I'm warning everybody about. You need to proceed. With caution. So there's a lot of scams, a lot of bait and switches. You know, that's been kind of normal for some things over the years on eBay. I'm afraid, but I've had pretty good luck with eBay, but any high value eBay purchase CPUs have been mining cryptocurrencies at full tilt for months or years have problems in new GPU.

[01:12:02] Would not have had, you know, this heat that they generate, the dust that gets into them, that the heat is messing with can really degrade the performance and degrade the usage of that GPU here over time. Dust can also, uh, cause problems with the thermal paste that's in them could be dried out thermal paste because of the heat and that causes them to crack and causes other problems.

[01:12:30] So if you buy a used GP that looks dirty or runs hot, removing and cleaning the fan and heat sink, reapplying, fresh thermal paste. Could potentially restore loss performance, and maybe you can even get that new Sony PlayStation because GPS are becoming available. Again. Visit me online Craig peterson.com and get my weekly insider show notes right there.

[01:12:59] Self-driving is relatively new technology. And, uh, our friends at Tesla just fired an employee who posted videos of a full self-driving accident. Uh, he's done it before.

[01:13:15] Tesla has a very interesting background. In fact, Elon Musk has gotten more interesting over time.

[01:13:23] And particularly lately the stuff he's saying, the stuff he's doing, but his companies have really made some amazing progress. Now, one of the things that Elon did pretty well pretty early on was he decided he was going to start selling. A self-driving feature for his cars. And back in the day, you could buy it.

[01:13:49] This was before it was ready at all for, I think it was 5,000 and, uh, it was good for whenever they came out with it. And then it went up to 7,000 and then I think it went to 12,000 and now it's you pay him monthly, but in reality, There are no fully self-driving qualified Teslas on the road today. It will be a little while before that happens.

[01:14:19] So this ex Tesla employee by the name of John Burnell is quoted in ours Technica saying that he was fired for posting YouTube videos about Tesla's full self-driving beta. Now this is called F S D. And if you know, Computers, you know what beta is? Beta means, Hey, you know, should work, could work, probably has some problems.

[01:14:44] And that's exactly what it is. Now. Tesla told California regulators that the full self-driving beta lacks true autonomous features. And that's probably how they got by getting with putting this car on the road, these cars on the road. So this ex employee. Says that Tesla also cut off access to the full self driving beta in the 2021 Tesla model three that he owns.

[01:15:17] Now. He said that he paid for it. He had it legitimately, and yet Tesla cut him off from, and I guess. Anybody can try and sign up for it. I don't know all of the details behind getting that beta code. If you wanted to, you probably could investigate a little bit further, but the video that he posted on February 7th provided a frame by frame analysis of a collision of his Tesla with a Ballard, a a Ballard.

[01:15:48] Those are those stanchions, those, uh, cement pillars. They usually have. Plastic on the outside that you'll see, you know, protecting sidewalks or in this case it was protecting a bike lane in San Jose. So he said, no matter how minor this accident was, it was the first full self-driving beta collision caught on camera.

[01:16:13] That is irrefutable. And he says I was fired from Tesla in February with my U YouTube being cited as the reason why, even though my uploads are for my personal vehicle off company, time or property with software, I paid for. And he has a, um, channel called AI addict that you can find over there on YouTube if it hasn't been taken down yet.

[01:16:38] Right. Uh, he said that he got a notice that his full self-driving beta was disabled be based on his recent driving data, but that didn't seem to fit because the morning I got fired, he says I had zero proper use strikes. On my vehicle. So yeah, I, I can't say as I really would blame him, uh, him being in this case, Elon Musk for firing this guy, but it's an interesting little video to watch.

[01:17:08] It's like two and a half minutes. You'll see. And it, the guy has his hand on the steering. Well, and the car is steering. Itself down the roadway and there's no other traffic really on the road. I don't know when this was like a, a Sunday or something, but you can see on the screen, it is detecting things like the, the little, uh, construction pillars that are on the side of the road.

[01:17:36] And he's in a left. Turn only lane and his Tesla turns, left the steering. Wheel's kind of going a little back and forth, right? As it tries to make up his mind what it's going to do and he's driving down, he just passed a ups truck. Although I would not have passed personally, the way he passed, which is the.

[01:17:56] The car decided it was going to, um, get closer to that ups truck. I, I would've purposely gone further away. And then what happens is he goes around another corner where there's some Ballards. That are in the roadway. And of course the idea behind them is so the cars don't go in and accidentally strike a cyclist.

[01:18:20] But around that corner where there is a crosswalk crossing the street, there's no Ballard. So people don't have to kind of get around them. And then the Ballards start off again. So the Tesla got kind of confused by this and looking at the screen, it doesn't show the, these Ballards. Being recognized. So the driver of the car grabs the stern wheel takes over at the very last second, but did actually hit the Ballard.

[01:18:52] Uh, no two ways about it here. He hit it and the car is stopped and it's just a minor scratch. He's showing it on his, uh, on his screen here. But I gotta say overall, it looks like it performed quite admirably. And the fact that this apparently is the. Uh, the only time it was actually caught on video.

[01:19:16] That's interesting too, but the cars of course have cameras on them too. So I'm sure. In other cases it did record a video of it. So CNBC said it obtained a copy of Tesla's internal social media policy, and it says it makes no direct reference. To criticizing the company's product in public. So we'll see what happens.

[01:19:38] Uh, apparently too, they are saying that this is the first accident in a year of testing this full self-driving. So that is darn good, frankly. And, uh, he's saying, you know, some people are saying I should have reacted sooner, which I should have. But in my year of testing, the full stop driving is usually really good at detecting objects last minute and slowing to avoid.

[01:20:01] So I don't know. We'll see what happens here. Tesla's doing a very good job. Hey, and I got another car story for you. This one, I. Think is totally, totally cool. You might remember Congress passed a law back in the seventies saying that we had to have what these cafe standards for vehicles efficiencies. In other words, you had to have certain fuel efficiency across all of the cars that you manufactured you.

[01:20:29] Okay. It is good enough, whatever. And, uh, they, they weren't able to make. uh, the car manufacturers, they weren't able to hit it until they came up with a whole new ignition technology for the cars. And that of course is fuel injection. You might remember we had car braiders and all of the cars, not very efficient.

[01:20:51] The engines themselves aren't very efficient, but we came up with fuel injection. And that helped the car manufacturers to meet these new cafe standards. Now, unfortunately, car manufacturers have removed weight from the cars in order to gain fuel efficiency in order to meet these federal requirements.

[01:21:13] So they've done things like taking out the full size spare tire, right? You, you had that before and that full size spare tire is now replaced. So. Stupid a little tire, right? That, you know, you can limp down the road a little ways, but not very far, but they've also removed steel and various metals from other parts of the car.

[01:21:32] And many people have said it's made the cars less safe. The same time they've added more safety features like the side impact airbags and, and other things and, and airbags that will Mame. But, but that's a different story entirely. Uh, but this is very, very cool because there's a company called transient plasma systems TPS, and they came up with this new advanced ignition system that uses plasma.

[01:22:02] They've designed it in such a way that it replaces your spark plugs in your. And now they put the ignition module in that uses nanosecond duration, pulses of plasma to ignite that air fuel mixture that's inside the cylinder. So you're still doing the fuel injection, but you're igniting it with a nanosecond worth of.

[01:22:28] Plasma. Isn't that just amazing. So they've tested that technology 2019 is when they came out with it and they did some bench testing, but now it's almost ready for production. So they're doing now with vehicle manufacturers, validation testing. It is frankly very cool. And they don't have to do it on brand new engines either.

[01:22:53] They will come up with retro Kitt fixed fixes. Now, imagine this getting 20% better mileage by basically replacing your spark plugs and a little more firmware changes in your engine controller. No question about that one, right. But this is frankly. Absolutely amazing. Now it's going to take a lot of years before we move to electric vehicles.

[01:23:19] For a lot of reasons. We're not ready. The country isn't ready. The infrastructure isn't ready. People aren't ready. The cars aren't ready. We don't even know what. To do with the batteries. People complain about nuclear waste while there are now huge fields full of these batteries while they're trying to figure out what do we do with the used batteries from these electric or hybrid cars, because man, they it's a huge problem.

[01:23:44] All kinds of toxic stuff in them. And they haven't been good at being able to recycle 'em it's not like the old lead acid batteries. That are very easy to recycle. So it's going to be years before they really stop selling any of these internal combustion engines and even longer before they ban internal combustion engines.

[01:24:06] From the roadways. So this plasma ignition system is going to really, really help 20%. That is darn good. And I am looking at the article right now. They used this Toyota engine. This is a 2.5 liter Toyota Camry cycle, thermal efficiency around 40%, which is absolutely amazing. Good job Toyota. And. Replaced the spark plug with this.

[01:24:38] Ignition system, this new ignition system using of course plasma and they found some amazing, amazing, uh, statistics here improvements. So in some cases they're seeing. The spark plugs and the plasmas getting 6% increase in fuel economy and others are seeing 20% increases. Of course, they've got to do more testing, extreme heat, extreme, cold, wet, dry, but that's gonna be happening.

[01:25:09] And we might see this in our cars in the next couple of years. Make sure you sign up right now. For my newsletter, get my insider show notes for free Craig peterson.com.

Your Crypto Is Being Tracked - Your Passwordless Future - How Safe is WhatsApp? - Business Email Compromise - Facebook Lost Your Data - Ransomware Prevention Cheaper Than Cure

Cryptocurrencies were thought to be like the gold standard of being secure. Having your information stay private. Maybe if you don't want to use regular currency and transactions. But it's changed.

[Following is an automated transcript]

We have had such volatility over the years when it comes to what are called cryptocurrencies.

[00:00:23] Now I, I get a lot of questions about cryptocurrencies. First of all, let me say, I have never owned any cryptocurrencies and I do not own any crypto, crypto, uh, assets at all. Most people look at crypto currencies and think of a couple of things. First of all, an investment. Well, an investment is something that you can use or sell, right?

[00:00:46] Typically investments you don't really use. It's like a house. Is it an investment? Uh, not so much. Uh, it's more of a liability, but people look at it and say, well, listen, it went from, uh, you know, what was a 10,000. Bitcoins to buy a pizza to, it went up to $50,000 per Bitcoin. There's a pretty big jump there.

[00:01:10] And yeah, it was pretty big. And of course, it's gone way down and it's gone back up and it's gone down. It's gone back up. But the idea of any kind of currency is can you do anything with the currency? You can take a dollar bill and go and try and buy a cup of coffee. Okay. A $10 bill and buy a cup of coffee, um, in most places anyways.

[00:01:33] Well, that sounds like a good idea. uh, I could probably use a cup of coffee right now and get a tickle on my throat. I hate that. But if you have something like Bitcoin, where can you spend it? You might remember Elon Musk was saying, yeah, you can use Bitcoin to buy a Tesla. Also Wikipedia would accept donations.

[00:01:54] Via Bitcoin, there were a number of places online that you could use. Bitcoin. In fact, there's a country right now in south central America that has Bitcoin as its currency. That's kind of cool too. When you think about it, you know, what is, so what are you gonna do? Latin American country? Uh, I'm trying to remember what it is.

[00:02:16] Oh yeah. It's all Salvador. The first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin is an official legal. Now there's a number of reasons they're doing that and he can do it basically. You know, if you got a dictator, you can do almost anything you want to. So in El Salvador, they've got apps that you can use and you can go and buy a tree taco using Bitcoin using their app.

[00:02:42] So there you go. If you have Bitcoin, you can go to El Salvador and you can buy all of the tacos and other basic stuff you might wanna buy. But in general, No, you, you can't just go and take any of these cryptocurrencies and use them anywhere. So what good are they as a currency? we already established that they haven't been good as an investment unless you're paying a lot of attention and you're kind of every day buying and selling based on what the movement is.

[00:03:11] I know a guy that does exactly that it's, he's a day trader basically in some of these cryptocurrencies, you know, good for. But in reality, is that something that makes sense in a long term? Is that going to help him long term? I, I don't know. I, I really don't because again, there's no intrinsic value value.

[00:03:33] So some of the cryptocurrencies have decided, well, let's have some sort of intrinsic value. And what they've done is they've created what are generally known as stable coins. And a stable coin is a type of cryptocurrency that behind it has the ability to be tied to something that's kind of stable. So for instance, one that really hit the news recently is a stable coin that is tied to the us dollar.

[00:04:01] And yet, even though it is tied to the us dollar and the coin is a dollar and the dollar is a coin. They managed to get down into the few pennies worth of value, kinda like penny. so what good was that, you know, it has since come back up, some are tied to other types of assets. Some of them say, well, we have gold behind us.

[00:04:24] Kinda like what the United States used to do back when we were on the gold standard. And we became the petrol dollar where countries were using our currency, our us dollars, no matter which country it was to buy and sell oil. Well, things have changed obviously. And, uh, we're not gonna talk about. The whole Petro dollar thing right now.

[00:04:46] So forget about that. Second benefit. Third benefit is while it's crypto, which means it's encrypted, which means we're safe from anybody's spine on us, anybody stealing it. And of course that's been proven to be false too. We've seen the cryptocurrencies stolen by the billions of dollars. We've seen these cryptocurrencies lost by the billions of dollars as well.

[00:05:14] That's pretty substantial. We get right down to it, lost by the billions because people had them in their crypto wallets, lost the password for the crypto wallet. And all of a sudden, now they are completely out of luck. Right. Does that make sense to you? So the basic. Idea behind currency is to make it easier to use the currency than to say, I'll trade you a chicken for five pounds of nail.

[00:05:41] Does that make sense to you? So you use a currency. So you say the chicken is worth five bucks. Well, actually chicken is nowadays is about $30. If it's a LA hen and those five pounds of nails are probably worth about $30. So we just exchanged dollars back and forth. I think that makes a lot of sense. One of the things that has driven up the value of cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin has been criminal marketplaces.

[00:06:10] As you look at some of the stats of ransoms that are occurring, where people's computers are taken over via ransomware, and then that, uh, person then pays a ransom. And what happens when they pay that ransom while they have to go find an exchange. Pay us dollars to buy cryptocurrency Bitcoin usually. And then they have the Bitcoin and they have to transfer to another wallet, whether or not the bad guys can use the money.

[00:06:42] Is a, again, a separate discussion. They, they certainly can than they do because some of these countries like Russia are going ahead and just exchanging the critical currencies for rubs, which again, kind of makes sense if you're Russia. Now we have a lot of criminals that have been using the Bitcoin for ransoms businesses.

[00:07:07] Publicly traded businesses have been buying Bitcoin by the tens of millions of dollars so that they have it as an asset. In case they get ransom. Well, things have changed. There's a great article in NBC news, by Kevin Collier. And Kevin's talking about this California man who was scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency.

[00:07:33] Now this was a fake scam, which is a fairly common one. It. It tends to target older people who are lonely and a romance starts online and they go ahead and, uh, talk and kind of fall in love. Right. And it turns out she or he has this really almost terminal disease. If only they had an extra, a hundred thousand dollars to pay for the surgery.

[00:08:05] You, you know the story, right. So he was conned out of the. What's interesting to me is how the investigation and investigative ability has changed over the years. Uh, probably about five years ago, I sat through a briefing by the secret service and. In that briefing, they explained how they had gone and very, quite cleverly tracked the money that was being sent to and used by this dark web operator who ran a site known as a silk road.

[00:08:42] And that site was selling illegal things online. Oh, and the currency that they were tracking was Bitcoin. Yes, indeed. So much for cryptocurrency being secure it, five years ago, the secret service was able to do it. The FBI was able to do it and you know, they couldn't do a whole lot about it. But part of the problem is all of your transactions are a matter of public record.

[00:09:13] So if someone sends you a fraction of a Bitcoin. That is now in a ledger and that ledger now can be used because when you then spend. Fraction of a Bitcoin somewhere else, it can be tracked. Well, it is tracked is a hundred percent guaranteed to be tracked. And once it's tracked, well, government can get in.

[00:09:37] Now, in this case, a deputy district attorney in Santa Clara county, California, was able to track the movement of the cryptocurrency. Yeah. So this district attorney, okay. Deputy district attorney, not the FBI, not the secret service, not the, the, uh, national security agency, a local district attorney in Santa Clara county, California, not a particularly huge county, but.

[00:10:07] Uh, she was able to track it. And she said that she thinks that the scammer lives in a country where they can't easily extradite them. And so they're unlikely to be arrested at any time soon. So that includes countries like Russia that do not extradite criminals to the United States. Now getting into the details.

[00:10:26] There's a great quote from her in this NBC news article, our bread and butter these days really is tracing cryptocurrency and trying to seize it and trying to get there faster than the bad guys are moving it elsewhere, where we can't. Grab it. So she said the team tracked the victim's money as it bounced from one digital wallet to another, till it ended up at a major cryptocurrency exchange where it appeared the scammer was planning to launder the money or cash out, they sent a warrant to the exchange.

[00:10:58] Froze the money and she plans to return it to the victim. That is a dramatic reversal from just a few years back when cryptocurrencies were seen as a boon for criminals. Amazing. Isn't it? Well, stick around. We get a lot more to talk about here and of course, sign up online Craig peterson.com and get my free newsletter.

[00:11:24] There have been a lot of efforts by many companies, Microsoft, apple, Google, to try and get rid of passwords. Well, how can you do that? What, what is a password and what are these new technologies? Apple thinks they have the answer.

[00:11:41] Passwords have been kind of the bane of existence for a long while. And, and if you'd like, I have a special report on passwords, or I talk about password managers, things you can do, things you should do in order to help keep your information safe, online things like.

[00:11:59] Bank accounts, et cetera. Just email me, me, Craig peterson.com and ask for the password special report and I'll get it to you. Believe me it it's self-contained it's not trying to get you to buy something. Nothing. It is entirely about passwords and what you can do again, just email me, [email protected] and we'll get right back with you.

[00:12:22] Well, you know, give us a couple of days. Passwords are a problem. And over the years, the standards for passwords have changed. I remember way back when some of the passwords might be 2, 3, 4 characters long. and back then, those were kind of hard to crack. Then Unix came along. I started using Unix and, uh, when was that?

[00:12:47] Probably about 81. And as I was messing around with Unix, I. They used to had a couple of changes in how they did passwords. They added assault to it. They used basically the same cipher that the Germans used in world war II, that enigma cipher, which again was okay for the times today, we have much more powerful ciphers and the biggest concern right now, amongst real cybersecurity people.

[00:13:14] Government agencies is okay. So what are we going to do when these new quantum computers come along with their artificial intelligence and other things, that's going to be a bit of a problem because quantum computers are able to problems in fractions of a second. Even that traditional computers cannot solve it.

[00:13:40] It's a whole different thing. I want you to think. Something here. I, if you have a handful of spaghetti, uh, now we're talking about hard spaghetti, not cooked spaghetti and they all dried out and they are a varying links. How could you sort those into the smallest to largest, if you will, how could you find which ones were the longest, perhaps?

[00:14:08] Which ones were the shortest? Well, there's kind of an analog way of doing that and there's a digital way of doing that. So the digital way for the computer would be. To measure them all and compare the measurements and then identify how long the longest one was. And then maybe you'd have to go back and try and find that.

[00:14:27] So you can imagine that would take some time, the analog way of doing that. Cuz there still are analog computers out there and they do an amazing job in certain tasks, but the analog way of doing that is okay. So you take that bundle of various length spaghetti and you slam it on the table. What's gonna happen while those pieces of dried spaghetti are going to self align, right?

[00:14:54] Uh, the shortest ones are going to be down at the bottom and the tallest one's gonna be sticking out from the top. So there you go. There's your tallest, your longest pieces of spaghetti, and it's done. Instantly. So that's just kind of an idea here, quantum, computing's not the same thing, but that's a comparison really of digital and analog computers, but it's the same type of thing.

[00:15:17] Some of these problems that would take thousands of years for digital computer. To work out, can just take a fraction of a second. It's absolutely amazing. So when we're looking at today's algorithms, today's programs for encrypting things like military information, secret telegrams, if you will going back and forth in inside the secretary of state embassies worldwide.

[00:15:43] Today they're considered to be quite secure, but with quantum computing what's gonna happen. So there are a lot of people out there right now who are working on trying to figure out how can we come up with an algorithm that works today with our digital computers and can be easily solved by quantum computer.

[00:16:06] We have a pretty good idea of how quantum computers are going to work in the future, how they kind of work right now, but this really gets us to the next level, which is kind of cool. Franklin. That's a, a little bit here about cybersecurity. Well, how about you and your password? How does this all tie in?

[00:16:26] Well, there are a few standards out there that people have been trying to pass is it's no longer the four character password you might remember. Oh, it needs to be eight to 10 characters, random mix of upper lowercase, special digits, character numbers. Right? You remember those? And you should change it every 30 days.

[00:16:45] And those recommendations changed about three or four years ago when the national Institute of standards and technology said, Hey guys, uh, pass phrase is much better than the, what we've been doing because people are gonna remember it and it can be longer. So if you are using like, I have some pass phrases I use that are 30 characters or more.

[00:17:09] And I mix up the case and I mix up mix ins on special characters and some numbers, but it's a phrase that I can remember and I have different phrases for different websites. Cause I use a password manager right now. I have about 3,100 entries in my password manager. That's a lot. And I bet you have a lot more passwords or at least a lot more websites and accounts than you realize.

[00:17:40] And so that gets to be a real problem. Well, how do you make all of this work and make it easy for people? One of the ways that, uh, that. They're looking at using is something called the Fido alliances, um, technique. And the idea behind Fido is actually similar to what I do right now. Cause I use one password.com.

[00:18:03] I have an app on my phone and the phone goes ahead and gives me the password. In fact, it'll. Put it in. I have plugins in my browsers. It'll put it right into the password form on the website. And then it'll ask me on my phone. Hey, is that really you? And I'll say yes, using duo and TA I'm logged in it's it's really quite cool.

[00:18:28] Well, Fido is a little different than that, but kind of the same, the whole idea behind Fido is you registered a website and the website will send a request to the Fido app. That's on your phone. So now on your phone, you'll use biometrics or maybe, uh, one time pass key, you know, those six digit keys that change every 30 seconds.

[00:18:54] And so now you, you, uh, on your phone, you say, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's me. That's good. That's me. Yeah. Okay. And then the app will exchange with the website using public key cryptography. A public key and it's gonna be unique public key for that website. So it'll generate a private key and a public key for that website.

[00:19:17] And now TA a, the website does not have your password and cannot get your password. And anytime you log in, it's going to ask you on your smartphone. Is this. And there there's ways beyond smartphones. And if you wanna find out more about passwords, I've got, again, that free, special report, just Craig peterson.com.

[00:19:42] Email me, just email [email protected] and I'll make sure we send that off to you and explains a lot about passwords and current technology. So Fido is one way of doing this and a few different companies have gone ahead and have invested some. Into final registration, because it requires changes on the websites as well in order to.

[00:20:08] With Fido. Now you might use a pin, you might use the biometrics, et cetera, but apple has decided they've come up with something even better. Now there's still a lot of questions about what apple is doing, but they are rolling it into the next release of iOS and also of Mac operating system. And you'll be able to use that to secure.

[00:20:31] Log into websites. I think Apple's gonna get a lot of traction on this and I think it's gonna be better for all of us involved here. We'll see. There's still a lot of UN unanswered questions, but I'll, I'll keep you up to date on this whole password technology stick around.

[00:20:51] There are ways for us to communicate nowadays easy ways, but are, are the easy ways, the best ways, kind of the question here, frankly. And part of this answer has to do with WhatsApp and we'll talk right now.

[00:21:07] Many people have asked me about secure messaging. You probably know by now that sending text messages is not secure.

[00:21:18] In fact, it could be illegal if you have any personal information about. Patients or maybe employees, you just can't send those over open channels. So what apple has done for instance is they've got their messaging app and if the message is green, it's just reminding you that this is a text message. Now they stuck with green because that was kind of the industry's standard.

[00:21:45] Green does not mean safe in the apple world when it comes to iMessage. Blue does. So they've got end to end encryption. So if the message is blue, that means the encryptions in place from side to side, there are on the other end of the spectrum. There are apps like telegram, which are not. Particularly safe.

[00:22:06] Now, telegram has pulled up it socks a little bit here, but in order to have end to end encryption and telegram, you have to manually turn it on. It is not on by default. I also personally don't trust telegram because of their background, things that they've done in the past. So, you know, avoid that.

[00:22:28] WhatsApp is something I've been asked about. I had a family member of a service member who was overseas, ask if WhatsApp was safe for them to communicate on cuz they didn't want third parties picking. You know, private messages, things you say and do online with friends and family are not necessarily things there are for public consumption.

[00:22:51] So the answer that I gave was, well, yeah, kind of, you might remember Facebook getting, uh, WhatsApp. They bought it and deciding they were going to make some changes to the privacy settings in. now that was really a big mistake. They said we're gonna add advertisements. Well, how are you going to effectively advertise?

[00:23:15] If you don't know what we're talking about, have you noticed advertising platforms? If you look up something or someone else in your house looks up something, if your neighbors are looking up, so. They assume that you might be interested in it as well. So what do they do? They go ahead and show you ads for that brand new pair of socks that you never really cared about, but because the algorithms in the background figured, well, yeah, that's what you've been talking about.

[00:23:45] Well, let's pass out your pair of socks. So if Facebook is going to. Add into WhatsApp, what's going to happen. Are they going to be monitoring what you're saying? And then sending you some of these messages, right? These ads, because of that, a lot of people started looking for a more secure. Platform and that's frankly, where Moxi Marlin spike comes in kind of a fun name, the bloom in this case, but he started a company called signal.

[00:24:21] He didn't just start it. He wrote the code for it, the server code, everything. And the whole idea behind signal was to have a guaranteed safe end to end way to communicate. A a third party with a friend, a relative, et cetera. So signal is something that I've used in the past. And I used from time to time now, as well, depending on who I'm talking to.

[00:24:49] And it does allow you to send messages. It does allow you to talk. You can do all kinds of stuff with it. So now, now there's an issue with signal. It's disappointing. Moxi has stepped down from running signal. There's a company behind it in January, 2022. And he said, you know, the company's begin off. They can run themselves.

[00:25:12] He's still on the board of direct. And the guy who's currently the head of signal is also a very privacy kind of focused guy, which is really good too signal by the way is free. And you can get it for pretty much any platform you would care to have it for a very, very nice piece of software. I like what they've done.

[00:25:34] Now the problem is that some of those people at signal have decided that they should have a way of making payments inside signal. So a few months ago, they went ahead and added into signal, a piece of software that allows you to send. Payments online. Now this is a little concerning, uh, and the let's talk about some of the reasons for the concern.

[00:26:06] Basically what we're seeing is a cryptocurrency that Moxi himself helped to put in place now, you know, I guess that's good cuz he understands it. It's supposedly a cryptocurrency that is privacy. Focused. And that's a good thing. Well, what type of crypto is it? That's privacy focused. And how good is it going to be?

[00:26:33] You know, those are all good questions, but here's the biggest problem. I think that comes from this. We've got our friends at Facebook, again, trying to add crypto payments to their various messenger and, and other products. We're seeing that from a lot of these communication systems, cuz they can skim a little off the top legally, right.

[00:26:55] Charge you a fee and then make their money that way. But. What happens when you put it into an encrypted messaging app? Well, bottom line, a lot of bad things can happen here because now all of a sudden you come under financial regulations, right? Because you are performing a financial. Function. So now potentially here, there could be criminal misuse of the app because you could have ransomware and they say, reach us on signal.

[00:27:34] Here's our signal account. And go ahead and send us crypto. it's called mobile coin by the way, this particular cryptocurrency. Uh, so now all of a sudden you are opening up the possibility of all kinds of bad things happening and your app signal, which was originally great for messaging now being used nefariously.

[00:27:59] I think that's a real problem. Now, when it comes to money transfer functions with cryptocurrencies to say that they're anonymous, I think is a hundred percent a misnomer because it it's really pseudo anonymous. It's never completely anonymous. So now you've increased the legal attack surface here. So now the various regulators and countries around the world can say, Hey.

[00:28:28] This is no longer just a messaging app. You are using it to send money. We wanna track all money transactions. Right. And so what does that mean? Well, that means now we need to be able to break the encryption or need to shut down your app, or you need to stop the ability to send money. So the concern right now with signal is we really could have some legal problems with signal.

[00:28:56] And we could potentially cause some real life harm. On the other side of, this is what Moi Marlin spike has been really driving with signal over the years, which is we don't want anyone to be able to break into signal. So there's a particularly one Israeli based company that sells tools that you can buy that allow you to break into smartphone.

[00:29:24] And they're used by everybody from criminals. You can even buy some of these things on eBay. And they're used also by law enforcement agencies. So he found that there was a bug in one of the libraries that's used by this Israeli soft. To where that causes it to crash. And so he puts some code into signal, at least he threatened to that would cause any of the scanning software that tries to break into your smartphone to fail to crash.

[00:29:56] Yeah. Yeah. Kind of cool. Greg Peterson here on online, Craig peterson.com and really you are not alone.

[00:30:14] I got some good news about ransomware and some bad news about B E C business email compromise. In fact, I got a call just this, uh, just this week from someone who had in fact again, had their operating account emptied.

[00:30:31] Ransomware is a real problem, but it, it's interesting to watch it as it's evolved over the years.

[00:30:40] We're now seeing crackdowns driving down ransomware profits. Yes, indeed. Ransomware's ROI is dropping the return on investment. And so what we're starting to see is a drive towards more. Business email compromise attack. So we'll talk about those, what those are. And I have a couple of clients now that became clients because of the business email compromises that happened to them.

[00:31:15] A great article that was in this week's newsletter. You should have received it Tuesday morning from me. If you are signed up for the free newsletter. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. You'll get these usually Tuesday morning. It's my insider show notes. So you can kind of get up to speed on some of the articles I'm talking about during the week that I talk about on the radio.

[00:31:43] And of course talk about here on the radio show and podcast and everything else as well. So what we're seeing here, according to dark readings, editor, Becky Bracken is some major changes, a pivot by the bad guys, because, uh, at the RSA conference, they're saying that law enforcement crackdowns try cryptocurrency regulations.

[00:32:11] We've been talking about that today and ransomware as a service operator. Downs are driving the return on investment for ransomware operations across the world all the way across the globe. So what is ransomware as a service? I think that's a good place to start because that has really been an Albert Cross Albert Cross around our next for a long time.

[00:32:36] The idea with ransomware is they get you to download some software, run some software that you really should not be running. That makes sense to you. So you get this software on your computer, it exfil trades files. So in other words, it takes files that you have sends them. Off to the bad guys. And then once it's done that, so it'll send like any word files, it finds Excel, other files.

[00:33:06] It might find interesting, uh, once it's done that, then it goes ahead and encrypts those files. So you no longer have access to them and it doesn't just do them on your computer. If you share a drive, let's say you've got a, uh, Gdrive or something else on your computer that is being mounted from either another computer or maybe a server.

[00:33:31] It will go ahead and do the same. With those files. And remember it, isn't just encrypting because if you have a good backup and by the way, most businesses that I've come into do not have a good backup, which is a real problem because their, their backups fail. They haven't run. I, I had one case where we helped the business out and it had been a year and a half since they had a successful backup and they had no.

[00:34:00] They were dutifully carrying home. Uh, these USB drives every day, plug in a new one in, and the backups were not running. Absolutely amazing. So anyhow, ransomware is a service then. Well, so they they've encrypted your files. They've exfiltrated. In other words, they've taken your files and then they demand a.

[00:34:24] So usually it's like this red screen that comes up and says, Hey, uh, you know, all your files are belong to us and you need to contact us. So they have, uh, people who help you buy Bitcoin or whatever they're looking for. Usually it's Bitcoin and send the Bitcoin to them. And then they'll give you, uh, what's hopefully a decryption.

[00:34:50] Now what's particularly interesting about these decryption keys is they work about half of the time. So in other words, about half of the time, you'll get all your data back about half the time. You will not, it's just not good. So if you are a small operator, if you are just a small, bad guy and it's you and maybe somebody else helping you, you got your nephew there helping you out.

[00:35:14] How are you going to. Help these people that you're ransoming by the cryptocurrency. How are you going to threaten them with release of their documents online? Unless you have a staff of people to really help you out here? Well, that's where ransomware's a service comes in. The whole idea behind Raz is.

[00:35:38] You can just be a one man shop. And all you have to do is get someone to open this file. So you go ahead and register with the ransomware service provider and they give you the software and you embed your little key in there, so they know it's you. And then you send it off in an email. You, you might try and mess with those people to get them to do something they shouldn't do.

[00:36:03] And. That's all you have to do because once somebody opens up that file that you sent them, it's in the hand of these service guys and ransomwares the service guys. So the, these ransomwares of service people will do all of the tech support. They'll help people buy the Bitcoin. They'll help them pay the ransom.

[00:36:25] They'll help them recover files, you know, to a certain extent. Right. Does this make sense to you? Yeah, it's kinda crazy. Now I wanna offer you, I I've got this document about the new rules for backup and again, it's free. You can get it. No problem. Just go ahead and email me, [email protected] [email protected] because the backups are so important and.

[00:36:52] Just like password rules have changed. The rules have changed for backups as well. So just drop me an email [email protected] and ask for it and we'll make sure we send it off to you and is not trying to sell you more stuff. Okay. Uh, it's really is explaining the whole thing for you. I'm not holding anything back.

[00:37:11] Well, these ransoms, the service operators, then get the payment from you and then pay a percentage anywhere from 80% to 50%, sometimes even lower to the person who ransom due. Isn't that just wonderful. So our law enforcement people, as well as in other countries have been going after the ransomware as a service providers, because if they can shut down.

[00:37:40] These RAs guys just shutting. One of them down can shut down thousands of small ransomware people. Isn't that cool works really, really well. So they have been shut down. Many of them there's one that just popped its head back up again. After about six months, we'll see how far they get, but it is a very big.

[00:38:06] Uh, blow to the whole industry, you know, ransomware really because of these O as a service operators has become a centralized business. So there's a small number of operators responsible for the majority of these thousands of hundreds of thousands of attacks. Really. It's probably worse. So couple of dis big groups are left the KTI group and lock bit, and they've got more than 50% of the share of ransomware attacks in the first half of 2022.

[00:38:40] But now they're going after them. The feds. And I think that makes a whole lot of sense, right. Because who do you go for while you go for the people who are causing the most harm and that's certainly them. So I expect they'll be shut down sometimes, sometimes soon, too. So. Ransomware had its moment over the last couple of years, still a lot of ransomware out there, still a lot of problems, but now we're seeing B C business, email compromise tactics, and I did a.

[00:39:14] At television appearance, where I was working with the, um, the, the newsmaker or whatever they call them, right. Talking heads on that TV show and explaining what was happening. And the most standard tactic right now is the gift card swindle. I should put together a little video on this one, but it was all, it's all about tricking employees into buying bogus gift cards.

[00:39:43] So this, this good old fashioned Grif is still working. And what happened in our case is it, it was actually one of the newscasters who got an email, supposedly from someone else saying, Hey, Uh, you know, we wanna celebrate everybody. And in order to do that, I wanna give 'em all gift cards. So can you go out and buy gift cards?

[00:40:10] And so we messed around with them. It was really kind of fun and said, okay, uh, you know, what denomination, how many do you think we need? Uh, who do you think we should give them to? And of course we knew what we were doing. Their English grammar was not very good. And it was really obvious that this was not.

[00:40:30] The person they were pretending to be. So that happens and it happens a lot. They got into a business email account, the email account of that newscaster. So they were able to go through their email, figure out who else was in the business, who was a trusted source inside of the business. So they could pretend that, uh, that they were that newscaster and send emails to this trusted source.

[00:41:01] And today these business email compromise attacks are aimed at the financial supply chain. And once these threat actors are inside, they look for opportunities to spoof vendor emails, to send payments to controlled accounts. And the worst case I know of of this is a company that sent $45 million. To a scammer.

[00:41:28] And what happened here is the, this woman pretended to be the CEO who was out of the country at the time and got the CFO to wire the money to her. Uh, an interesting story. We'll have to tell it to you sometime, but it it's a real problem. And we just had another one. We've had them in school districts, look, 'em up online, do a duck dot, go search for them and you'll find them right.

[00:41:56] Left and center because social engineering works. And frankly, business email compromise is a clear threat to businesses everywhere. I, I, as I mentioned, we had one listens to the show, contact us just last week. Again, $40,000 taken out of the operating account. We had another one that had a, I think it was $120,000 taken out of the operating account.

[00:42:25] And another one that had about $80,000 taken out of the operating account. Make sure you're on my newsletter. even the free one. I do weekly free trainings. Craig peterson.com. Make sure you subscribe now.

[00:42:43] Facebook's about 18 years old coming on 20 Facebook has a lot of data. How much stuff have you given Facebook? You know, did you fall victim for that? Hey, upload your contacts. We'll find your friends. Well, they don't know where your data is.

[00:43:00] There is an article that had appeared on a line from our friends over at, I think it was, yeah. Let me see here. Yeah. Yeah. Motherboard. I was right. And motherboards reporting that Facebook doesn't know what it does with your data or. It goes now, you know, there's always a lot of rumors about different companies and particularly when they're big company and the, the news headlines are kind of grabbing your attention.

[00:43:34] And certainly Facebook can be one of those companies. So where did motherboard get this opinion about Facebook? Just being completely clueless about your personal. well, it came from a leaked document. Yeah, exactly. So I, we find out a lot of stuff like that. Right. I used to follow a, a website about companies that were going to go under and they posted internal memos.

[00:44:08] It basically got sued out of existence, but there's no way that Facebook is gonna be able to Sue this one out of existence because they are describing this as. Internally as a tsunami of privacy regulations all over the world. So of course, if you're older, we used to call those TIAL waves, but think of what the implication there is of a tsunami coming in and just overwhelming everything.

[00:44:37] So Facebook, internally they're engineers are trying to figure out, okay, so how do we deal? People's personal data. It's not categorized in ways that regulators want to control it. Now there's a huge problem right there. You've got third party data. You've got first party data. You've got sensitive categories, data.

[00:45:01] They might know what religion you are, what your persuasions are in various different ways. There's a lot of things they might know about you. How are they all CATA categorized? Now we've got the European union. With their gen general data protection regulation. The GDPR we talked about when it came into effect back in 2018, and I've helped a few companies to comply with that.

[00:45:26] That's not my specialty. My specialty is the cybersecurity side. But in article five, this European law mandates that personal data must be collected for specified explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes. So what that means is that every piece of data, like where you are using Facebook or your religious orientation, Can only be collected and used for a specific purpose and not reused for another purpose.

[00:46:04] So there's an example here that vice is giving in past Facebook, took the phone number that users provided to protect their accounts with two factor authentication and fed it to its people, you know, feature as well as. Advertisers. Yeah. Interesting. Eh, so Gizmoto with the help of academic researchers caught Facebook doing this, and eventually the company had to stop the practice.

[00:46:31] Cuz this goes back to the earlier days where Facebook would say, Hey, find out if your friends are on Facebook, upload your contacts right now. And most people. Right. What did you know back then about trying to keep your data private, to try and stop the proliferation of information about you online and nothing.

[00:46:53] Right? I think I probably even uploaded it back then thinking, well, that'd be nice to see if I got friends here. We can start chatting, et cetera. Well, according to legal experts that were interviewed by motherboard who wrote this article and has a copy of the internal me, uh, memo, this European regulation specifically prohibits that kind of repurposing of your phone number of trying to put together the social graph and the leak document shows that Facebook may not even have the ability to limit.

[00:47:28] how it handles users data. Now I was on a number of radio stations this week, talking about this and the example I gave, I is just look at an average business from the time it start, you know, Facebook started how right. Well, you scrape in pictures of young women off of Harvard universities. Main catalog, right.

[00:47:52] Contact page, and then asking people, well, what do you think of this rate? This person rate that person and off they go, right. Trying to rate them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that matters to a woman, at least according to mark Zuckerberg or all that matters about a woman is how she looks. Right. Do I think she's pretty or not ridiculous what he was doing?

[00:48:13] It just, oh, that's Zuckerberg, right? That's. Who he is not a great guy anyways. So you go from stealing pictures of young ladies asking people to rate them, putting together some class information and stuff there at Harvard, and then moving on to other universities and then opening up even wider and wider.

[00:48:37] And of course, that also created demand because you can't get on. If you're not at one of the universities that we have set it up for. And then you continue to grow. You're adding these universities, certain you're starting to collect data and you're making more money than God. So what do you do? Well, you don't have to worry about inefficiencies.

[00:48:58] I'll tell you that. Right. One thing you don't have to do is worry about, oh, GE we've got a lot of redundant work going on here. We've got a lot of teams working on basically the same. No, you've got more money than you can possibly shake a stick at. So now you go ahead and send that, uh, money to this group or that group.

[00:49:20] And they put together all of the basic information, right. That, that they want. They are. Pulling it out of this database and that database, and they're doing some correlation writing some really cool sequel queries with some incredible joins and everything else. Right. And now that becomes part of the main code for Facebook.

[00:49:43] And then Facebook goes on to the next little project and they do the same thing. Then the next project, then the next project. And then someone comes along and says, uh, Hey, we. This feature, that feature for advertisers and then in that goes, and then along comes candidate Obama. And, uh, they, one of the groups inside Facebook says, yeah, yeah, yeah, here, here we go.

[00:50:07] Here's all of the information we have about everybody and it's free. Don't worry about it. Right. And then when Trump actually bought it and hired a company to try and process some of that information he got in trouble. No, no, no, but, but the Obama. The whole campaign could get access to anything they wanted to, again, because the data wasn't controlled, they had no idea who was doing what with the data.

[00:50:34] And according to this internal memo, they still don't know. They don't even know if they can possibly, uh, comply with these regulations, not just in Europe, but we have regulations in pretty much all of the 50 states in the us Canada of course, has their own Australia, New Zealand think about all the places Facebook makes a lot of.

[00:50:59] So here's a quote from that we build systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy. Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand, the bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data. You pour that ink into a lake of water. Okay. And it flows every.

[00:51:22] The document red. Right. So how do you put that ink back in the bottle, in the right bottle? How do you organize it again? So that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake? They're totally right about that. Where did they collect it from it? Apparently they don't even know where they got some of this information.

[00:51:43] This data from kind of reminds me of the no fly list. Right. You don't know you're on it and you can't get yourself off of it. Right. It is kind of crazy. So this document that we're talking about was written last year by. Privacy engineers on the ad and business product team, whose mission is to make meaningful connections between people and businesses and which quote sits at the center of a monetization strategy monetization strategy.

[00:52:10] And is the engine that powers Facebook's growth. interesting, interesting problems. And, and I see this being a problem well into the future for more and more of these companies, look at Twitter as an example that we've all heard about a lot lately. And I've talked about as well along comes Elon Musk and he says, well, wait a minute now.

[00:52:32] Now I can make Twitter way more profitable. We're gonna get rid of however many people it's well over a thousand, and then we are going to hire more people. We're gonna start charging. We're gonna be more efficient. You can bet all of these redundancies that are in Facebook are also there on. and Twitter also has to comply with all of these regulations that Facebook is kind of freaking out about.

[00:53:00] Well, it, for really a very good reason. So this document is available to anybody who wants to look at it. I'm looking at it right now, talking about regulatory landscape and the fundamental problems Facebook's data lake. And this is a problem that most companies have not. As bad as Facebook does, but most companies, right.

[00:53:25] You grow. I, I have yet to walk into a business that needs help with cybersecurity and find everything in place as it should be, because it grew organically. Right. You, you started out with a little consumer firewall, router and wifi, and then you added to it and you put a switch here and you added another switch behind that and move things around.

[00:53:48] Apparently looting is one of the benefits of being a Russian soldier. And according to the reports coming out of Ukraine, they've been doing it a lot, but there's a tech angle on here that is really turning the tables on these Russian looters.

[00:54:04] Thanks for being with me today. I really appreciate it. And I'm honored, frankly, to be in front of this micro. , this is really something, you know, we, we know in wars, there are people that loot and typically the various militaries try and make sure, at least recently that that looting is kept to an absolute minimum.

[00:54:27] Certainly the Americans, the British, even the Nazis during world war II, the, the, uh, the socialists they're in. Germany, uh, they, they tried to stop some of the looting that was going on. I, I think that's probably a very good thing, right. Because what you end up with is just all of these locals that are just totally upset with you.

[00:54:56] I found a great article on the guardian and there's a village. Had been occupied for about a month by Russian troops and the people came back, they are just shocked to see what happened. They're giving a few examples of different towns. They found that alcohol was stolen and they left empty bottles behind food rappers, cigarette buts, thrown all over the place in apartments and homes.

[00:55:25] Piles of feces blocking the toilets, family photographs torn, thrown around the house. They took away all of the clothes. This is a code from one of the people, literally everything, male and female coats, boots, shirts, jackets, even my dresses and lingerie. This is really, really something. The SIUs didn't do this, but now Russian.

[00:55:49] Military apparently does. So over the past couple of weeks, there've been reporting from numerous places where Russian troops had occupied Ukrainian territory and the guardian, which is this UK newspaper collected evidences suggests looting by Russian forces was not merely a case of a few way, word soldiers, but a systematic part of Russian military behavior across multiple towns.

[00:56:16] And villages. That's absolutely amazing. Another quote here, people saw the Russian soldiers loading everything onto Euro trucks, everything they could get their hands on a dozen houses on the villages. Main street had been looted as well as the shops. Other villagers reported losing washing machines, food laptops, even as sofa, air conditioners.

[00:56:41] Being shipped back, just like, you know, you might use ups here, they have their equivalent over there. A lady here who was the head teacher in the school. She came back in, of course, found her home Lood and in the head teacher's office. she found an open pair of scissors that had been jammed into a plasma screen that was left behind because if they can't steal it, they're gonna destroy it.

[00:57:07] They don't only leave anything behind. They found the Russians had taken most of the computers, the projectors and other electronic equipment. It, it, it's incredible. So let's talk about the turnaround here. A little. You might have heard stories about some of these bad guys that have smashed and grabbed their way into apple stores.

[00:57:27] So they get into the apple store. They grab laptops on iPads, no longer iPods, cuz they don't make those anymore. And I phones. And they take them and they run with them. Well, nowadays there's not a whole lot of use for those. Now what they have been doing, some of these bad guys is, is they take some parts and use them in stolen equipment.

[00:57:53] They sell them on the used market, et cetera. But when you're talking about something specific, like an iPhone that needs specific activation. Completely different problem arises for these guys because that iPhone needs to have a SIM card in order to get onto the cell network. And it also has built in serial numbers.

[00:58:16] So what happens in those cases while apple goes ahead and disables them. So as soon as they connect to the internet, let's say they put 'em on wifi. They don't get a SIM card. They don't. service from T-Mobile or Verizon or whoever it might be. So now they disconnect to the wifi and it calls home, cuz it's gonna get updates.

[00:58:36] So on download stuff from the app store and they find that it's been bricked. Now you can do that with a lot of mobile device managers that are available for. All kinds of equipment nowadays, but certainly apple equipment where if a phone is lost or stolen or a laptop or other pieces of equipment, you can get on the MDM and disable it, have it remotely erased, et cetera.

[00:59:02] Now, police have had some interesting problems with that. Because a bad guy might go ahead and erase a smartphone. That's in the evidence locker at the police station. So they're, they're doing things like putting them into Fairday cages or static bags or other things to try and stop that. So I think we've established here that the higher tech equipment is pretty well protected.

[00:59:26] You steal it. It's not gonna do you much. Good. So one of the things the Russian stole when they were in, uh, it's called, uh, I think you pronounce it. Uh, Mela me pole, uh, which is again, a Erian city is they stole all of the equipment from a farm equipment dealership and shipped it to Chenia. Now that's according to a source in, uh, a businessman in the area that CNN is reporting on.

[00:59:59] So they shipped this equipment. We're talking about combines harvesters worth 300 grand a piece. They shipped it 700 miles. and the thieves were ultimately unable to use the equipment, cuz it had been locked remotely. So think about agriculture equipment that John Deere, in this case, these pieces of equipment, they, they drive themselves.

[01:00:26] It's autonomous. It goes up and down the fields. Goes any pattern that you want to it'll bring itself within a foot or an inch of your boundaries, right. Of your property being very, very efficient the whole time, whether it's planting or harvesting, et cetera. And that's just a phenomenal thing because it saves so much time for the farmer makes it easier to do the companies like John Deere.

[01:00:52] Want to sell as many pieces of this equipment as they possibly can. And farming is known to be a, what not terribly profitable business. It certainly isn't like Facebook. So how can they get this expensive equipment into the hands of a lot of farmers? Well, what they do is they. So you can lease the equipment through leasing company or maybe directly from the manufacturer and now you're off and running.

[01:01:20] But what happens if the lease isn't paid now? It's one thing. If you don't pay your lease on a $2,000 laptop, right? They're probably not gonna come hunting for you, but when you're talking about a $300,000 harvester, they're more interested. So the leasing company. Has titled to the equipment and the leasing company can shut it off remotely.

[01:01:46] Right? You see where I'm going with this so that they can get their equipment in the hands of more farmers cuz the farmers can lease it. It costs them less. They don't have to have a big cash payment. Right? You see how this all works. So when the Russian forces stole this equipment, that's valued. Total value here is about $5 million.

[01:02:07] They were able to shut it all. And obviously, if you can't start the engine, because it's all shut off and it's all run by computers nowadays, and you know, there's pros and cons to that. I think there's a lot of cons, but, uh, what are you gonna do? How's that gonna work for you? Well, it. Isn't going to work for you.

[01:02:28] And they were able to track it. It had GPS trackers find out exactly where it was. That's how they know it was taken to Chenia and could be controlled remotely. And in this case, how'd they control it. Well, they completely. Shut it off. Even if they sell the harvesters for spare parts, they'll learn some money, but they sure can be able to sell 'em for the 300 grand that they were actually worth.

[01:02:54] Hey, stick around. We'll be right back and visit me [email protected]. If you sign up there, you'll be able to get my insider show note. And every week I have a quick five. Training right there in your emails, Craig Peter san.com. That's S O N in case you're wondering.

[01:03:20] If you've been worried about ransomware, you are right to worry. It's up. It's costly. And we're gonna talk about that right now. What are the stats? What can you do? What happens if you do get hacked? Interesting world.

[01:03:36] Ransomware has been a very long running problem. I remember a client of ours, a car dealership who we had gone in.

[01:03:47] We had improved all of their systems and their security and one of their. People who was actually a senior manager, ended up downloading a piece of ransomware, one of these encrypted ones and opened it up and his machine, all of a sudden TA, guess what it had ransomware on it. One of those big reds.

[01:04:09] Greens that say pay up is send us this much Bitcoin. And here's our address. Right. All of that sort of stuff. And he called us up and said, what what's going on here? What happened? Well, first of all, don't bring your own machine into the office. Secondly, don't open up particularly encrypted files using the password that they gave.

[01:04:32] and thirdly, we stopped it automatically. It did not spread. We were able to completely restore his computer. Now let's consider here at the consequences of what happened. So he obviously was scared. Uh, and within a matter of a couple of hours, we actually had him back to where he was and it didn't spread.

[01:05:00] So the consequences there, they, they weren't that bad. But how about if it had gotten worse? How about if they ransomware. Also before it started holding his computer ransom, went out and found all of the data about their customers. Right. Would, do you think an auto dealership would love to hear that all of their customer data was stolen and released all of the personal data of all of their customers?

[01:05:27] Right? Obviously not. So there's a potential cost there. And then how long do you think it would take a normal company? That thinks they have backups to get back online. Well, I can tell you it'll take quite a while because the biggest problem is most backups don't work. We have yet to go into a business that was actually doing backups that would work to help restore them.

[01:05:54] And if you're interested, I can send you, I I've got something. I wrote up. Be glad to email it back to you. Uh, obviously as usual, no charge. and you'll be able to go into that and figure out what you should do. Cause I, I break it down into the different types of backups and why you might want to use them or why you might not want to use them, but ransomware.

[01:06:18] Is a kind of a pernicious nasty little thing, particularly nowadays, because it's two, two factor, right. First is they've encrypted your data. You can't get to it. And then the second side of that is okay, well, I can't get to my data and now they're threatening to hold my data ransom or they'll release. So they they'll put it out there.

[01:06:42] And of course, if you're in a regulated industry, which actually car dealers are because they deal with financial transactions, leases, loans, that sort of thing, uh, you can lose your license for your business. You can U lose your ability to go ahead and frankly, uh, make loans and work with financial companies and financial instruments.

[01:07:06] It could be a very, very big. so there are a lot of potential things that can happen all the way from losing your reputation as a business or an individual losing all of the money in your operating account. And we, again, we've got a client that, uh, we picked up afterwards. That, uh, yes, indeed. They lost all of the money in their operating account.

[01:07:31] And, uh, then how do you make payroll? How do you do things? Well, there's a new study that came out from checkpoint. Checkpoint is one of the original firewall companies and they had a look at ransomware. What are the costs of ransomware? Now bottom line, I'm looking at some stats here on a couple of different sites.

[01:07:52] Uh, one is by the way, KTI, which is a big ransomware gang that also got hacked after they said we are going to attack anyone that. Uh, that doesn't defend Vlad's invasion of Ukraine, and then they got hacked and their information was released, but here's ransomware statistics. This is from cloud words. Uh, first of all, the largest ransom demand is $50 million.

[01:08:20] And that was in 2021 to Acer big computer company. Uh, 37% of businesses were hit by ransomware. In 2021. This is amazing. They're they're expecting by 2031. So in about a decade, ransomware is gonna be costing about $265 billion a year. Now on average, uh, Ransomware costs businesses. 1.8, 5 million to recover from an attack.

[01:08:52] Now that's obviously not a one or two person place, but think of the car dealer again, how much money are they going to make over the year or over the life of the business? Right? If you're a car dealer, you have a license to print money, right? You you're selling car model or cars from manufacturer X. And now you have the right to do that and they can remove that.

[01:09:15] Right? How many tens, hundreds of millions of dollars might that end up costing you? Yeah. Big deal. Total cost of ransomware last year, 20 billion. Now these are the interesting statistics here right now. So pay closer attention to this 32% of ransomware victims paid a ransom demand. So about her third paid ransom demand.

[01:09:40] Last. it's it's actually down. Cuz my recollection is it used to be about 50% would pay a ransom. Now on average that one third of victims that paid a ransom only recovered 65% of their data. Now that differs from a number I've been using from the FBI. That's a little bit older that was saying it's it's a little, little better than 50%, but 65% of paying victims recovered their data.

[01:10:11] Now isn't that absolutely amazing. Now 57% of companies are able to recover the data using a cloud backup. Now think about the different types of backup cloud backup is something that can work pretty well if you're a home user, but how long did it take for your system to get backed? Probably took weeks, right?

[01:10:34] For a, a regular computer over a regular internet line. Now restoring from backup's gonna be faster because your down link is usually faster than your uplink. That's not true for businesses that have real internet service, like, uh, ours. It it's the same bandwidth up as it is down. But it can take again, days or weeks to try and recover your machine.

[01:10:57] So it's very, very expensive. And I wish I had more time to go into this, but looking at the costs here and the fact that insurance companies are no longer paying out for a lot of these ransomware attacks, it could be incredibly expensive for you incredibly. So here you. The number one business types by industry for ransomware tax retail.

[01:11:31] That makes sense. Doesn't it. Real estate. Electrical contractors, law firms and wholesale building materials. Isn't that interesting? And that's probably because none of these people are really aware, conscious of doing what, of keeping their data secure of having a good it team, a good it department. So there's your bottom line.

[01:11:58] Uh, those are the guys that are getting hit. The most, the numbers are increasing dramatically and your costs are not just in the money. You might pay as a ransom. And so, as it turns out in pretty much every case prevention. Is less expensive and much better than the cure of trying to pay ransom or trying to restore from backups.

[01:12:24] Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson. You can get my weekly show notes by just going to Craig peterson.com. And I'll also send you my special report on how to do passwords stick around will be right back.

[01:12:42] You know, you and I have talked about passwords before the way to generate them and how important they are. And we we'll go over that again a little bit in just a second, but there is a new standard out there that will eliminate the need for passwords.

[01:12:59] I remember, I think the only system I've ever really used that did not require passwords was the IBM 360.

[01:13:09] Yeah, 360, you know, you punch up the cards, all of the JCL you feed the card deck in and off it goes. And does this little thing that was a different day, a different era. When I started in college in university, we. We had remote systems, timeshare systems that we could log into. And there weren't much in the line of password requirements in, but you had a username.

[01:13:38] You had a simple password. And I remember one of our instructors, his name was Robert, Andrew Lang. And, uh, his password was always some sort of a combination of RA Lang. So it was always easy to guess what his, what his password was. Today, it has gotten a lot worse today. We have devices with us all of the time.

[01:14:01] You might be wearing a smart watch. That requires a password. You of course probably have a smart phone. That's also maybe requiring a password, certainly after boots nowadays they use fingerprints or facial recognition, which is handy, but has its own drawbacks. But how about the websites? You're going to the systems you're using when you're at work and logging in, they all require passwords.

[01:14:31] And usernames of some sort or another well, apple, Google, and Microsoft have all committed to expanding their support for a standard. That's actually been out there for, for a few years. It's called the Fido standard. And the idea behind this is that you don't have to have a password in order to log. Now that's really kind of an interesting thing, right?

[01:14:59] Just looking at it because we're, we're so used to having this password only authentic. And of course the, the thing to do there is make sure you have for your password, multiple words in the password, it should really be a pass phrase. And between the words put in special characters or numbers, maybe mix.

[01:15:21] Upper lowercase a little bit. In those words, those are the best passwords, you know, 20 characters, 30 characters long. And then if you have to have a pin, I typically use a 12 digit pin. And how do I remember all of these? Cuz I use a completely different password for every website and right now, Let me pull it up.

[01:15:43] I'm using one password dot com's password manager. And my main password for that is about 25 characters long. And I have thirty one hundred and thirty five. Entries here in my password manager, 3,100. That is a whole lot of passwords, right? As well as, um, software licenses and a few other things in there.

[01:16:11] That's how we remember them is using a password manager. One password.com is my favorite. Now, obviously I don't make any money by referring you there. I, I really do like that. Uh, some others that I've liked in the past include last pass, but they really messed. With some of their cybersecurity last year and I lost, lost my faith in it.

[01:16:33] So now what they're trying to do is make these websites that we go to as well as some apps to have a consistent, secure, and passwordless sign in. and they're gonna make it available to consumers across all kinds of devices and platforms. That's why you've got apple, Google, and Microsoft all committing to it.

[01:16:56] And you can bet everybody else is going to follow along because there's hundreds of other companies that have decided they're gonna work with the Fido Alliance and they're gonna create this passwordless future. Which I like this idea. So how does this work? Well, basically you need to have a smartphone.

[01:17:16] This is, I'm just gonna go with the most standard way that this is going to work here in the future. And you can then have a, a. Pass key. This is kind of like a multifactor authentication or two factor authentication. So for instance, right now, when I sign into a website online, I'm giving a username, I'm giving a password and then it comes up and it asks me for a code.

[01:17:40] So I enter an a six digit code and that code changes every 30 seconds. And again, I use my password manager from one password dot. In order to generate that code. So that's how I log into Microsoft sites and Google sites and all kinds of sites out there. So it's kind of a similar thing here now for the sites for my company, because we do cyber security for businesses, including regulated businesses.

[01:18:08] We have biometrics tied in as. so to log into our systems, I have to have a username. I have to have a password. Uh, I then am sent to a single sign on page where I have to have a message sent to my smart device. That then has a special app that uses biometrics either a face ID or a fingerprint to verify who I am.

[01:18:33] So, yeah, it there's a lot there, but I have to protect my customer's data. Something that very, very few it's crazy. Um, actual so-called managed security services providers do, but it's important, right? By the way, if you want my password. Special report, just go to Craig peterson.com. Sign up for my email list.

[01:18:58] I'll send that to you. That's what we're sending out right now for anyone who signs up [email protected]. And if you'd like a copy of it and you're already on the list, just go ahead and email me M E. At Craig peterson.com and ask for the password special report where I go through a lot of this sort of thing.

[01:19:16] So what will happen with this is you go to a website and it might come up with a QR code. So you then scan that QR code with your phone and verify it, authorize it on your phone. You might again have it set up so that your phone requires, uh, a facial recognition or perhaps it'll require a fingerprint.

[01:19:37] And now you are. Which is very cool. They fix some security problems in Fido over the last few years, which is great over the coming year. You're going to see this available on apple devices, Google Microsoft platforms. And it really is simple, stronger authentication. That's what Fido calls it. Right. But it is going to make your life a lot easy.

[01:20:03] It easier. It is a standard and the passwordless future makes a whole lot of sense for all of us. Now I wanna talk about another thing here that has bothered me for a long time. I have a sister-in-law. who is in the medical field and, and, uh, gives prescriptions, you know, doctor thing. And, uh, I think she's not quite a doctor.

[01:20:27] I can't remember what she has or she's an LPN or something. Anyhow. So she. We'll get on a zoom call with someone and they'll go through medical history and what's happening right now and she'll make prescriptions. And so I warned her about that saying, you know, it is very bad to be using zoom because zoom is not secure.

[01:20:52] Never has been, probably never will be right. If you want secure. To go and pay for it from one of these providers like WebEx, that's what we use. We have a version of WebEx that is set up to be secure. So I talked to her about that and said, Hey, listen, you can't do this. You you've really got to go another way here.

[01:21:15] And so she started using one of these mental or. Medical health apps. What I wanna talk about right now specifically are some checks that were just performed some audits on mental health apps. That's why I messed up a second ago, but what they looked at is that things are a serious, serious problem there.

[01:21:42] And then in fact, the threat post is calling it, uh, Frankly, just plain old creepy. So they've got some good intentions. They want to help with mental health. You've probably seen these or at least heard them advertise. So you can get on the horn with, uh, mental health, professional, uh, doctor or otherwise in order to help you here with your psychological or spiritual.

[01:22:05] Well, And people are sharing their personal and sensitive data with third parties and of 32 mental health and prayer mobile apps that were investigated by the open source organization. 28, 28 of the 32 were found to be inherently insecure and were given a privacy, not included label, including, uh, others here.

[01:22:33] So this is a report. uh, that was released here by the open source organization, tied into Mozilla Mozilla. Those are the Firefox people. They have what they call their minimum security standards. So things like requiring strong passwords, managing security, updates, and vulnerabilities, et cetera. 25 of the 32 failed to meet.

[01:22:57] Even those minimum security standards. So these apps are dealing with some of the most sensitive men, mental health and wellness issues people can possibly have, right? Depression, anxieties, suicidal thoughts, domestic violence, eating disorders. And they are being just terrible with your security Mozilla researchers spent 255 hours or, or about eight hours per product pairing under the hood of the security, watching the data that was going back and forth, right.

[01:23:33] Between all of these mental health and prayer apps. It was just crazy. So for example, eight of the apps reviewed allowed week passwords. That range. One digit one as the password, 2, 1, 1, 1 while a mental health app called a mood fit only required one letter or digit as a password. Now that is very concerning for an app that collects mood and symptom data.

[01:24:02] So be very careful. Um, two of the apps better help a popular app that connects users with therapists and better stop suicide, which is of course a suicide prevention app have vague and messy. According to Mozilla privacy policies, they have little or no effect on actual. User data protection. So be very, very careful.

[01:24:26] And if you are a mental health professional, or a medical professional, don't just go and use these open video calls, et cetera, et cetera, find something good. And there are some standards out there. Again. Visit me online, get my insider show notes every week. Get my little mini training. They come out most weeks, just go to Craig peterson.com.

[01:24:52] Craig peterson.com. And I'll send you my special report on passwords and more.

The CHIPS Act More Billions to China? What's the Best Private Search Engine? Private Messengers

Well, they did it. Yeah, it's no longer called "Build Back Better," but it's now the "Inflation Reduction Act." Imagine that. Reducing inflation by causing more inflation through massive spending. And then there's the the "CHIPS" act and, uh, yeah, government's coming for our wallets again. Oh, and this is bound to make things worse.

[Following is an automated transcript.]

The semiconductor industry has been hit hard by the lockdown.

[00:00:21] Of course, it just totally destroyed supply chains all over the world. Makes me wonder if this wasn't intentional, but we are dependent on not just us manufacturers for things like our cars, through our computers, through harvesting machines that farmers need. We are dependent on foreign. Nations to make our chips, our chip sets that that's kind of a bad thing.

[00:00:47] When you consider right now, there is a whole lot of stuff going on over there in the south China sea, which of course is where, what is made. You've probably heard about this before, where in fact, most of our chips are made at least a higher catchups that's a bad. because that means that a place like Taiwan, which has had serious problems with water shortages, and you need a lot of water in order to make chips, it has had all kinds of political instability.

[00:01:21] Of course, they had the same locked. Down messes that the rest of the world had, and that just really messed them up. And then you look at what we did and you had the companies like Ford and GM. These are, I'm mentioning these guys, cuz they're the obvious ones, right? Chrysler, who all said, oh, people aren't gonna buy cars.

[00:01:40] So we're going to cut back our orders. And remember the whole, just in time thing back in the seventies, I remember. Ever so well, it was like, wow, Japan. They are the model of world economies. We've got a. Everything that they do over there in Japan. And the big thing that we took from that was just in time inventory.

[00:02:03] Oh my gosh. I mean, I don't have to have a warehouse with parts and order a train load at a time. I can just order as many as I need and have them arrive just in time. I was watching a documentary on Volkswagen who has, I guess it's the biggest factory in the world. This thing's absolutely amazing. And while they're assembling the cars, the parts that are needed show up just in time, there will be parts that show up that morning from subcontractors, and then they move through their systems there at the factory.

[00:02:39] And then they end up right there at the person who needs to install. Minutes before it's needed. Now that's kind of cool. Cuz it cuts down in your costs. It lets you change a vendor. If you need to change a vendor, if you don't like some parts, you don't have to, you know, get rid of a whole train load or return them all.

[00:02:56] You just have to return that days, but it introduces some very. Serious problems, especially when there are supply chain problems, you know, we've been living in a world that that has just been very, very easy. I'm not gonna say it's too easy, but it's been very easy. We don't have so many of the problems that we used to have way back when, like what 50 years ago really.

[00:03:23] We have these problems where we do a lockdown where a country locks down, let's say Taiwan lockdown, and, and we didn't, and we tried to manufacture things you wouldn't be able to. And part of the theory behind the way we interact with other countries is that it will prevent war. You see if we're a completely separate country and we decide, uh, that, uh, you know, just leave us alone.

[00:03:50] And let's say China decided that they wanted some of our territories or some of their neighbors over there in the south China sea, et cetera. China could just go in and do it. But if we're trading partners, if they rely on us in order to keep their economy going, then we're not going to go to war with them.

[00:04:12] And they're not gonna go to war with us because we both need each other. That's been a, a mantra now for quite a few decades with countries worldwide. Of course, Ukraine and Russia are an interesting combination because Russia needs Ukraine. For quite a number of different supplies, food, and, and other things.

[00:04:32] And Ukraine needs to a lesser extent, Russia, as well as a market, but it, it provides food for a worldwide market. It it's kind of crazy, but that's been the theory. The theory is, well, let's bring. everyone close together. We'll put our hands together, we'll lock them and, and we'll sing, uh, I want the world to buy a Coke, right.

[00:04:56] Or whatever that song was. You you'll probably remember that song, everyone standing around in the circles or whole all the way around the world. Now it's a nice theory. And, and I like it. I like the fact we haven't gone to war, even though we've got a, I guess you could definitely call it a European war going on, but in, in fact, It does cause these types of problem problems, we're seen, we copied the Japanese just in time inventory and that messed things up because those parts are not arriving when they're supposed to be arriving and you no longer have a warehouse full of parts.

[00:05:33] So now you just can't. Can't do anything right now. Now you're in really ultimately big trouble. So what's happening now is Congress decided to pass a, um, I think they're calling it. What was it? A deficit reduction act or something instead of build back better. Because, uh, or no inflation. That's what it was.

[00:05:54] Yeah. This is gonna get rid of inflation because we're increasing taxes and , I, I don't get it. Why would Congress think that increasing taxes would bring more money into their coffers every time it's been done? Yeah. There's a little bit of a bump initially, but. It drops off dramatically. If you want to increase revenue to the federal government, you lower taxes.

[00:06:19] Every time that's been tried pretty much. It's absolutely worked by lowering taxes because now people aren't trying to hide the money. They aren't do doing things. Uh, like moving their businesses out of the country, even Canada and the rest of Europe has lower corporate tax rates and that's part of what they're going for.

[00:06:42] But the manipulation that appears to have happened here is that they wanted to pass this chips act. And the chips act is another example of the federal government helping special interest groups at the expense of you and I, the expense of the taxpayers. So this special interest group came to them and, and they carved out some 50 something dollars.

[00:07:08] I think it was yeah, 52 billion in grant and 24 billion in tax credit. To the us semiconductor industry now at, at first glance, you look at that and say, well, okay, that's, that's actually really good because what can happen here is the semiconductor industry can use that money to build plants here in the us to build fabs chip Fabrica fabrication plants.

[00:07:33] I know I can talk and, and yeah, they probably could. And that could be a very, very good. But the devil is in the details. Yes. What else is new here? Right. So this, uh, last minute by partisan agreement that they agreed, they weren't gonna do build back better because of what mansion had said. Right. I, I'm not gonna support that cuz it's just going to increase inflation and increase our debt.

[00:08:00] And by the way, our federal government. Is barely gonna be enough to discover the interest payments on the debt. You know, no principle at all, which is an incentive for the federal government to cause inflation because then the federal government can pay back that debt with inflated dollars that cost them less.

[00:08:20] And then, uh, there goes the debt, right. And they can talk about how great it was. But if you are retired, if you're looking at your retirement account, With the type of inflation we have, which isn't the nine point, whatever that they've claimed in reality, if you use the same methods and metrics that were used in the 1980s where they're saying, oh, it's been 50 years, 40 years since we had this type of inflation.

[00:08:46] No, no, no. We have never ever had this type of inflation in modern America. Because in fact, the inflation rate of use, again, those same net metrics is supposedly in the 20% range. So what that means is the federal government's able to pay you back 20% less. Then they actually borrowed from you because of that inflation.

[00:09:12] It's it's just incredible. So here we go. Some $77 billion going to the us semiconductor industry, but, um, there's another little trick here that they played on all of us and that is. The lobbyist from the semiconductor industry who, by the way, themselves are spending tens of billions of dollars to build new fabs new plants.

[00:09:35] They're spending it out of their own pockets, not out of our pockets already. Okay. But they lobbied and Chuck Schumer introduced, uh, uh, cute little thing. Cute little thing. It, the bill had said, yeah, we have to use this. For American interest basically. Uh, so he removed that. So now yeah, those tax dollars that are supposed to rebuild our chip industry, they can be used to help China.

[00:10:01] Yes, indeed. They have already penciled in some of that 77 ish billion dollars to go to China. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that great. I, I thought China was part of what we're trying to protect ourselves from here. Certainly. not, not as a, you know, a hot war sort of a thing, but frankly, as our biggest competitor in the world, it is incredible.

[00:10:29] The us share of chip manufacturing globally has dropped from 12%. From 37%, just 30 years ago. Okay. So we've lost two thirds of our pros. If you will, on the world market in making chips, Hey, you should have received this, uh, on when was it this week? Uh, Wednesday, Tuesday, uh, my weekly insider show notes.

[00:10:56] There's links to a great article in here. From the semiconductor industry, themselves talking about what is going on, what really happened. And, uh, don't worry. It's only more than a trillion dollars. And then this on top of it, it's only another 250 billion. Don't worry about it. You'll be able to pay it back.

[00:11:18] Yeah. Yeah. stick around. We'll be right back.

[00:11:25] I don't know if you've heard of digital exhaust, it's kind of a new term. And it's talking about the things we leave behind the cookie crumbs, if you will, not cookies and browsers, but that's part of it. We're gonna talk about the browser you're using and the search engine.

[00:11:42] We have a lot of choices when it comes to browsers. We've talked about it before, and if you'd like a copy of my browser, special report, of course, this it's free.

[00:11:52] I wouldn't mention it. If it wasn't here and you can just get it by, go by emailing me, [email protected]. You actually can't just get it, but I'll be glad to email it to you or we'll have Mary or. Send it on off to you? Me M E Craig peterson.com. Well, people have been worried about their data. Many of us have been worried a very long time, and then remember the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal.

[00:12:23] It's amazing to me, how stuff gets politicized. I'm shaking my head. I just can't. People because bronch Obama got everything on everyone, on Facebook for his campaign. Not, not a beep, nothing. I, nothing. He had everything on everybody and Cambridge Analytica and there was just given to him by the way. And then Cambridge Analytica, uh, decided, okay, well here's what we're gonna do.

[00:12:47] We're gonna make. This little program, people can play it. We'll we will, uh, advertise on Facebook and then we'll gather data on people who are there on Facebook and we'll use it for orange man. Bad Trump. Yeah, this will be great. And so the the exact opposite of what they did with president Obama. When he got all this information on tens of millions, I think it was actually hundreds of million.

[00:13:15] People, uh, they decided this was bad. and they started making a big deal about it. And so a lot of people at that point decided, Hey, uh, what's happening here? What, what is going on? Should, would they have my information? Because remember this is an old adage. You've heard it a million times by now, but it bears repeating.

[00:13:39] If you are not paying for something you or your information are the product. And that's exactly true. Exactly. True. If you are using Google maps, for instance, to get around, to do your GPS navigation, you are the product cuz Google is selling information. They collect information, right? That's what they. Do and you might have noticed recently you probably got an email from Google saying, uh, we're gonna be flushing, uh, your location, or at least some of your location information soon.

[00:14:13] Did you, did you get that email from Google? I, I got it right. And I don't use Google very much, but I, I obviously I need to, I need to know about Google. Google's good for certain things, and I understand what it's doing. But it decided all of a sudden after the, again, left stuff, right. People were all worried that because there was no longer a national law on abortion, uh, by the way, there never has been a national.

[00:14:46] Law on abortion. And in fact, that's what the Supreme court said. You can't make up a law in the court. You can rule on the application of the law in the court. They've gone, they've stepped over that boundary and decided they can rule on whether or not there should be a law. And so the court said, Hey, listen, this is a, at this point, a state's rights issue, right?

[00:15:11] The 10th amendment to the us constitution, uh, the state should decide this. And the Congress didn't act there. There's no federal law about this. So the, these rulings were bad and people say, oh no, that's terrible. It was the first time it's ever no, there've been over 200 times where the Supreme court changed its mind.

[00:15:34] Think of the dread Scott decision. If, if you even know what that is, well, you guys do cuz you're the best and brightest, but these people complaining probably have no clue about any of this stuff, right? None at all. So they're all upset because now, oh my gosh, my golly, um, because Roe V Wade, et cetera, was overturned.

[00:15:55] Now they're going to be tracking me. Because my data is being sold. Cuz you remember that's how they came after these January six protestors, right. That were down in, in Washington, DC by using the GPS data that came from the apps that were there on their phones. Yeah. And, uh, that's also how it was proven that the election.

[00:16:19] Uh, may have been stolen, but certainly had substantial fraud because they were able to buy the data. Look at the data show. What was pretty, obviously the, uh, acts of at least a thousand people that were completely illegal in ballot harvesting and. Box stuffing. Right? So again, GPS data, you can buy it. The federal, government's not allowed to keep data on us.

[00:16:49] It's not allowed to spy on the citizens at all. Right. So what do they do? They go to these same data brokers and they buy the data. I sold it now. Well, we're not tracking, but people are you kidding me? We would never do that. But they're buying the tracking data from third parties. So they are tracking. Oh no, no, it's not us.

[00:17:11] It's it's other people. So now they're worried. Well, if I go to an abortion clinic, are the state's attorneys general. That do not allow abortions in their states where the law does not allow it. Are they going to buy data and see that I went to an abortion clinic, even if I went to an abortion clinic out of state.

[00:17:35] Now you can see their concern on that one. Right? So a again, now all of a sudden they're worried about tracking data. I, I just don't understand why they trust the government on one hand and don't trust it on another hand, I guess, that. People say right. The ability to hold two conflicting thoughts has truth in your mind at the same time, but they're concerned and it's legitimate.

[00:18:00] So what happens. Google decides we're not going to, uh, keep location data on you. And that way none of the attorneys general can ask us forward or subpoena it cuz we just don't have it. And that was all because of the overturn of the court ruling on abortion, the federal court. So it, it, to me, it it's just so disingenuous for these people to only care about privacy when it's about them.

[00:18:36] And I, I, I, again, I, I just don't understand it. My mother is that same way. I know she doesn't listen to this, so , I can say that, but it it's, uh, absolutely absolutely incredible to me that, uh, that, that happens. So what do you use. There there's a number of major search engines, real in the, in the world.

[00:18:59] Really what you're looking at is Google. It's like the, the 800 pound gorilla out there. And then you also have Bing Microsoft search engine. There have been a few that have come and gone. There's some that I liked better. Like I loved Alta Vista much better. Because it had ING algebra operations that you could do much better than Google.

[00:19:23] So I've ended up with Devon, think that I use now for searching if I need to, uh, to get real fancy searches going on, but I gotta mention duck dot go. Now it got a bit of a black eye recently, but the reality is if you want to keep your searches, private duck dot go is a way to go. Well, we talked about the top 100 hospitals in the country and how they were tracking you using Facebook or Google, uh, trackers cookies.

[00:19:59] And they would know, oh, you just registered an appointment with an oncologist or, or whatever it might. B right. Which is private information, duck dot go does not have any tractors on it. They do not keep a history of what you've been searching for and they do not sell that stuff to advertisers. Now behind duck dot go is Bing.

[00:20:23] But Bing does not get access to you. Only duck dot go does, and they don't keep any of that. So check it out online that kid's game used to play duck dot, go.com. Obviously I don't, uh, don't make any money off of that. Oh. And by the way, they have apps for Android and iOS and browser extensions stick around will be right back and visit me online.

[00:20:49] Craig peterson.com.

[00:20:52] I got a question from a parent whose son was serving over in the middle east and they were asking what was a safe messaging app to use. And they asked about what's app. So we're gonna talk about that right now.

[00:21:08] There are a lot of different messaging apps that people are using and they all have different features, right?

[00:21:17] Uh, there have different ways of doing things and the top are WhatsApp. Facebook messenger. Why would anyone use that? Uh, we chat again. Why would anyone use that vibe line telegram and IMO, which I'm not familiar with? This is according to ink magazine, the top seven messenger apps in the world. So why would people use those?

[00:21:47] Okay. So let's, let's just talk about them very briefly. The, the two top ones in my mind that I want to talk about, but WhatsApp has 2 billion active users. It's the number one messaging app followed by WeChat, which is a Chinese messaging app with 1.2 billion. Users and WeChat is also used to make payments.

[00:22:12] And they've got this whole social, social credit system in China, where they are tracking you deciding whether or not you posted something or said something in a chat that, uh, they don't like. And so you, you just, you can't get on the train to get to work and you lose your job, right. Yeah, they, they do that regularly.

[00:22:32] And there are people in the us here that are trying to do very similar things. This Congress has, uh, not been the best. Let me put it that way. So should you use that of. We chat now, obviously, no, the next one is Facebook messenger also called messenger by meta. And it has close to a billion users. And again, they are watching you.

[00:23:01] They are spying on you. They are tracking what you do, WhatsApp. I I use for, uh, one of my masterminds. The whole group is in on what's happened. I'm okay with that. Nothing terribly private that I'm worried about. There, there are things that are said or discussed that, that I'm not, uh, Perhaps happy that they're privy to, but in, in reality, WhatsApp is pretty good.

[00:23:29] Now you have to make sure that when you're using something, something like WhatsApp that you have to turn on their privacy features. For end to end security because that's been a, a historical problem with WhatsApp. Yeah. They can have end to end encryption, but you have to turn it on. So what is end to end encryption and why does it matter?

[00:23:57] Well, end to end encryption means if you are sending a message to someone or someones. They have, obviously have to have the same app that you do. And when it gets to the other side, uh, they can decrypt. So anyone in the middle. We'll just see a whole bunch of encrypted data, which just looks like trash. If, if it's encrypted properly, there's no real distinguishing, uh, portions to it.

[00:24:30] If you will, or identifying factors that it's anything other than just random data, really good, uh, encryption does that, right? It does a, and. compression first and, and then messes with, we're not gonna get into how all of that works. I helped way back when to put PGP together at, uh, Phil. Zimmerman's pretty good privacy.

[00:24:55] I actually still used some of that stuff today. And then PGP became G G, which is the GNU privacy, uh, G G and is well worth it as well. But that. Um, exactly what we're talking about. We're talking about regular messaging apps that regular people can use. I do use G G by the way, those of you who email [email protected], if it's actually me responding to you, it will be.

[00:25:26] A message. That's cryptographically signed by G G so that you can verify that it was me and it wasn't Mary, or it wasn't Karen. So I, I do that on purpose as well. All right. I'm sorry, wander around a little bit here. WhatsApp is pretty commonplace. And is pretty good. Well, WhatsApp, as I mentioned, end end encryption.

[00:25:50] But it's using the encryption from another project that's out there. And this is an open source project called signal. If you want to be secure. End to end if you don't want to leave any digital exhaust around use signal. It's very, very good. Um, Mo what is his name? Um, Moxi Marlin spike is the guy that founded it.

[00:26:15] He ran that company for quite a while. It's a foundation. And, uh, as I recall, early 20, 22, he stepped down as the head of that foundation and other people have taken over, but he's even threatened to, and I assume he actually did build in some things into signal. That will make some of these Israeli programs that are used to crack into cell phones.

[00:26:43] It'll make them fail. They'll crash because of bugs in their it's. Well, again, that's not what we're talking about right now, but signal. Again, if you're gonna send a message just like with WhatsApp, the other person, the receiver has to have signal on their device signals available for smartphones again, Android and iOS, you know?

[00:27:07] What I feel about Android, which is don't use it. You're much better off. If you don't have much of a budget buying an older model iPhone, they're gonna be a lot safer for you. So signal, it will also run on your windows, computer, or your Mac, the same thing with WhatsApp, by the way. So WhatsApp more common, not the worst thing in the world for privacy signal, less common and definitely very good for privacy.

[00:27:37] Now I mentioned apple here. I use max and I have ever, since they switched over to a Unix base, they actually put a mock microkernel and a free BSD user land, if and kernel on top of them. Um, the mock microkernel. So if, if you're total geek, you know what I'm talking about? It's designed to be safe and secure from the beginning.

[00:28:02] Whereas with windows and with Android, it was shoehorned in the security, the privacy, right. It just wasn't there. So what should you do? Well, I, I, as I mentioned, you should be. Apple iOS devices. I'm not the world's apple fan. Okay. Don't get me wrong, but they are a lot more secure and the max are also very secure again.

[00:28:32] Nothing's perfect. Uh, they have not been attacked as much as windows computers because of course, windows is more common, but having worked in the kernel and the network stack on both windows. Uh, the actual kernel, the actual source code of windows and Linux and BSD and system five. So all of the major core, uh, Linux distributions over the decades, I can tell you that.

[00:29:05] The Unix world is far, far more secure. Now you don't have to worry about it. People look at it and say, well, what should I use? Well, if you are a geek, you should probably be using Linux. I do use Linux, but I, I will admit my main workstation is a 10 year old Mac. 10 years old. Uh, how long do your windows machines last?

[00:29:31] Right. And, and it's still working great for me very fast. Still. It's a great little machine and we still have Mac laptops that are, uh, 20 years old. So they, they are designed and made to last same thing with the phones, but they can be more expensive. So look at refurbed, look at older models because it will save you.

[00:29:55] You can be in the same price range as windows. You can be in the same price range as Android, and you can have much, much better privacy and security stick around, cuz we'll be right back. And if you sign up for my email list, you'll get my free insider show notes every Tuesday or Wednesday morning.

[00:30:17] We're gonna talk about electric vehicles right now and what the wall street journal is calling the upside down logic of electric SUVs. And you know what? I agree with them here, but where are electric vehicles today and where are they going?

[00:30:34] Electric vehicles are an interesting topic because in reality, we're not ready for them.

[00:30:43] Our grid is not set up to handle electric vehicles. We are crazy what we're doing right now. Shutting down power plants. Germany is bringing nuclear plants that they had. Down back online. They're not fools. Nuclear is the cleanest right now, uh, source that we can possibly get don't fool yourselves by listening to people that tell you that, for instance, the solar cells you put on your roof are green because they are.

[00:31:14] Not highly toxic, the manufacturing, distribution, and disposal of those things, California, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago has a huge problem now because 90% of those solar panels on people's roofs are ending up in landfills and are leaking toxic metal. into what little, uh, underground water supply California still has left.

[00:31:42] And that's not just true of California. That's everywhere. So we are depending on more electricity, when we actually have less electricity, we're shutting things down. Look at Texas, right? They're oh, we're we're trying to be green, green, green, green, green, and people complain about Texas being conservative.

[00:32:01] It's not, it's just very independent. They have their own electric grid. The only state in the nation that has its own electric grid. That's not tied in. To anybody else. The whole rest of the country is composed of two grids. So if one state isn't producing quite enough, they can potentially buy it from another one here in the Northeast.

[00:32:24] We bring some of the power down from RI Quebec LAA, Leno. Over there in the north, right from the LG projects that they have up there. Of course it's from hydroelectric dams, but we, we exchange it all. We move it back and forth. But we're shutting down some of these relatively clean sources of energy, even cold now with all, all of the scrubbers and stuff.

[00:32:54] But if you look at nuclear, particularly the new nuclear, it is as safe. It's far safer than burning, uh, natural gas that so many grids burn look in New Hampshire, doubling doubled. It doubled the cost of electricity in new H. because we didn't bring on the second nuclear reactor in Seabrook. Right. And we're burning natural gas to generate most of our electricity.

[00:33:27] It doubled, it? It's absolutely crazy. The cost, the things that are happening in Washington and locally, like in New Hampshire, like in Texas, like in so many other states are making our lives much worse and. To top it all off. Now they're pushing electric vehicles, which again are not green. They are not safe.

[00:33:53] They are hazardous to the environment in so many ways, but particularly. By their manufacturing. So if consumers and businesses really cared about the carbon dioxide that they're emitting, right. That greenhouse gas that's, uh, you know, just absolutely terrible. Uh, they might buy what what's selling right now.

[00:34:19] Hmm. Not me. Look. Yeah, EVs electric vehicles like Ford Mustangs, mock E Hummers, EV that's from GM. The, uh, the wonderful new electric pickup. From Ford. Now these are huge vehicles. They are long range electric vehicles, which is what we want. Right. And they can be driven tens of thousands of miles before they rack up enough miles and save enough gasoline to compensate for the emissions created just to produce their batteries.

[00:34:56] And that's according to their fans. And when we're talking about the fans, their, their, uh, predictions, their estimates, their statistics typically are what? A little tainted. Right? We talked about that earlier. Yeah. So it, it, it gets to be a problem doesn't it gets to be real problem. So what are they doing in, instead of making the small electric vehicles, like the Nissan leaf?

[00:35:25] Which was a great little car. I've told the story of my neighbor, who has the, the leaves. He has a couple of them, and he installed a bunch of solar panels and he uses those to charge his leaves and to run around. Cuz most of what driving he does most driving, I do most of the driving, most people do is just short range, right?

[00:35:45] It's less than 30 miles. He just, he loves it. Right, but he's not doing it because it's green. He realizes that it harms the environment to have those solar cells and it harms the environment to drive those electric cars that were very harmful to be made the batteries right now from these electric cars, the outtakes they are storing just like nuclear waste, although there's far more of it than there is.

[00:36:15] The nuclear waste, a separate topic entirely, really? I guess there isn't a whole lot of correlation there, but they, they're not able to recycle so many of these batteries. We just don't have the technology for it. So why would you make these big electric vehicles, these sports utility vehicles, these trucks that have the long ranges.

[00:36:42] And not something that's nice and small th think European, right? Think of the stupid car from Merc. I mean the smart car from Mercedes, uh, that little tiny car that works great in European cities. Where you don't have a lot of space to park the roads. Aren't very wide. You can kind of zoom around zip in and out fine parking.

[00:37:02] And you're not going fast. Not going far makes sense. Right? Same thing with like a Prius with the smaller engines. And yet you see people whipping down the highway passing me. Doing the exact opposite thing that you'd think they'd wanna do. You're driving a small car with a small engine. Maybe it's a hybrid electric gas.

[00:37:24] Maybe it's a plug-in hybrid. To do what to stop CO2, supposedly to save the environment. And yet at the exact same time, you are causing more harm than you need to, to the environment by zooming down the highway. That's not what these things are made for, not what they're designed for, but that is what most people could use.

[00:37:45] And yet G. Ford Chrysler, none of them are making the vehicles that fit into that part of the marketplace. The other nice thing about the smaller vehicles is they don't require as long to charge cuz they don't have to charge up these big battery packs because you're not going that far. So it's less of a demand potentially on the grid.

[00:38:12] Because again, even if you drive that big electric SUV, 30 miles. You are hauling around a thousand pounds, maybe more of batteries that you don't actually need to haul around. See again, it goes back to how so many of us are looking at this stuff. Just like the original Prius poll that I've talked about.

[00:38:39] So many times where the number one reason people said that they drove a Prius. This was some 70% of the people was because of what they thought the purchaser of the Prius thought other people would think about them. , this is, this is a real, real problem. You know, the assumption that electric vehicle stops oil from coming out of the ground stops natural gas from coming out of the ground, stops coal from being mined.

[00:39:08] That assumption is problematic because it is not true. And when it comes to the carbon footprint, again, I obvious. Obviously the, the environment is changing. The temperatures are changing. It it's obvious, right? Climate denier, some might call me, but it's obvious that climate's changing. It has always been changing Mount Saint Helen's eruption, put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than mankind has since the beginning of.

[00:39:46] So look at these volcanic eruptions and say, oh, okay. So we've barely scratched the surface as humankind, far less than 1% of global warming is actually caused by humans. but it it's about control, but this isn't a political show. Uh okay. Uh, I guess I am. So let's talk about the next article I had in my newsletter that came out this week again, Tuesday or Wednesday, you can sign up for it.

[00:40:17] It's absolutely free. This is my free newsletter@craigpetersondotcomorjustsendmeanemailmeatcraigpeterson.com and ask to be signed up. It looks like president Biden is maybe thinking about going nuclear. I talked about this on the air earlier this week, cuz there's a couple of really interesting things happening.

[00:40:41] One is the federal government has authorized some of these new nuclear technologies. To go online. So they've got these different plants. There's a number of different types of plants that are out there and different technologies, but all of them hyper safe and they are actually in small production.

[00:41:07] Pretty darn cool. The second thing which I found particularly interesting is that at least. Three times over the last few weeks, president Biden has talked about nuclear power just in passing, right? He, I think he's trying to get his base to get used to the idea because he's been trying to eliminate all forms of energy consumption, but he does seem to maybe favor development of nuclear power or whoever is writing his speeches for him, you know, nuclear.

[00:41:41] Is carbon friendly, very carbon friendly, friendlier than windmills or solar parks. And it's a lot more reliable. So I'm, I'm happy about that new plants coming online, just small ones. And that frankly is the future of nuclear, not these huge, huge, and they, he he's talking about it. We'll see, it's absolutely green.

[00:42:07] Even as I mentioned, Germany is bringing nuclear plants back online and the European union has declared that nuclear is green technology. And. I'm shocked here because apparently I'm agreeing with the European parliament. Oh wow. What's going on? Hey, visit me online. Craig peterson.com. Make sure you get my insider show notes and the trainings that come out.

[00:42:39] Craig peterson.com.

[00:42:41] Hey, it looks like if you did not invest in crypto, you were making a smart move and not moving. Wow. We got a lot to talk about here. Crypto has dived big time. It's incredible. What's happened. We get into that more.

[00:42:58] Crypto currencies. It, it it's a term for all kinds of these basically non-government sanctioned currencies.

[00:43:08] And the idea behind it was I should be able to trade with you and you should be able to trade with me. We should be able to verify the transactions and it's kind of nobody's business as to what's happening behind the scenes. And yet in reality, Everybody's business because all of those transactions are recorded in a very public way.

[00:43:33] So crypto in this case does not mean secret or cryptography. It's actually referring to the way the ledgers work and your wallets and, and fact, the actual coins themselves, a lot of people have bought. I was talking with my friend, Matt earlier this week and Matt was saying, Hey, listen, uh, I made a lot of money off of crypto.

[00:43:59] He's basically a day trader. He watches it. Is it going up? Is it going down? Which coin is doge coin? The way to go? Cuz Elon must just mentioned it. Is it something else? What should I do? And he buys and sell and has made money off of it. However, a lot of people have. And held onto various cryptocurrencies.

[00:44:21] Of course, the most popular one. The one everybody knows about is Bitcoin and Bitcoin is pretty good stuff, you know, kind of bottom line, but 40% right now of Bitcoin investors are underwater. Isn't that incredible because of the major dropoff from the November peak. And this was all started by a problem that was over at something called Tara Luna, which is another cryptocurrency now.

[00:44:53] You know, already that there is a ton of vol a ton of, uh, changes in price in various cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin being of course a real big one where, you know, we've seen 5,000, $10,000 per Bitcoin drops. It, it really is an amazingly, uh, fluid if you will coined. So there's a number of different people that have come out with some plans.

[00:45:21] How about if we do kinda like what the us dollar used to do, which is it's tied to a specific amount of gold or tied to a specific amount of silver. Of course, it's been a while since that was the case. Uh, president Nixon is the one that got us off of those standards, but. Having gold, for instance, back in your currency means that there is going to be far less fluctuation and your currency means something.

[00:45:51] See, the whole idea behind currency markets for government is yeah, you do print money and you do continue to increase the amount of money you print every year. Because what you're trying to do is create money for the. Goods product services that are created as well. So if, if we create another million dollars worth of services in the economy, there should be another million dollars in circulation that that's the basic theory.

[00:46:22] Monetary theory really boiling it. Right. Down now of course, you know, already our government has printed way more than it. Maybe should have. It is certainly causing inflation. There's no doubt about that one. So they're looking at these various cryptocurrencies and saying, well, what can we do? How can we have like a gold standard where the us dollar was the currency of the world used and it all its value was known.

[00:46:48] You see, having a stable currency is incredibly important for consumers and businesses. A business needs to know, Hey, listen, like we sign a three year contract with our vendors and with our customers. And so we need a stable price. So we know what's our cost going to be, what can we charge our customer here?

[00:47:08] Can the customer bear the price increases, et cetera. The answer to most of those questions of course is no, they really, they really can't is particularly in this day and age. So having. Fixed currency. We know how much it's worth. I know in two years from now, I'm not gonna be completely upside down with this customer because I'm having to eat some major increases in prices.

[00:47:33] And as a consumer, you wanna look at it and say, wow, I've got a variable rate interest rate on my mortgage. And man, I remember friends of mine back in the eighties, early eighties, late seventies, who just got nailed by this. They had variable rate interest loan on their home because that's all they could get.

[00:47:52] That's all they could afford. So the variable rate just kept going up. It was higher than credit cards are nowadays. And I remember a friend of mine complaining, they had 25% interest and that's when they lost a house because 25% interest means if you have a a hundred thousand dollars loan, you got $25,000 in interest that year, you know, let alone principal payments.

[00:48:16] So it, it was a really. Thing. It was really hard for people to, to deal with. And I, I can understand that. So the cryptocurrency guys. I said, okay, well let's tie it to something else. So the value has a value and part of what they were trying to tie it to is the us dollar. That's some currencies decided to do that.

[00:48:41] And there were others that tried to tie it to. Assets. So it wasn't just tied to the dollar. It was okay. We have X dollars in this bank account and that's, what's backing the value of our currency, which is quite amazing, right. To think about that. Some of them are backed by gold or other precious metals.

[00:49:04] Nowadays that includes a lot of different metals. Well, this one coin called Tara Luna dropped almost a hundred percent last. Isn't that amazing. And it had a sister token called Tara us D which Tara Luna was tied to. Now, this is all called stablecoin. Right? The idea is the prices will be stable. and in the case of Tara and Tara S D the stability was provided by a computer program.

[00:49:39] So there's nothing really behind it, other than it can be backed by the community currencies themselves. So that'ss something like inter coined, for instance, this is another one of the, there are hundreds of them out there of these, uh, cryptocurrencies. The community backs it. So the goods and services that you can get in some of these communities is what gives value to inter Pointe money system.

[00:50:05] Now that makes sense too, right? Because the dollar is only worth something to you. If it's worth something to someone else, right. If you were the only person in the world that had us dollars, who, who would want. Like, obviously the economy is working without us dollars. So why would they try and trade with you?

[00:50:27] If you had something called a us dollar that nobody else had, or you came up with something, you made something up out of thin air and said, okay, well this is now worth this much. Or it's backed by that et. Because if again, if you can't spend it, it's not worth anything. Anyhow, this is a very, very big deal because on top of these various cryptocurrencies losing incredible amounts of money over the last couple of weeks, We have another problem with cryptocurrencies.

[00:51:01] If you own cryptocurrencies, you have, what's called a wallet and that wallet has a transaction number that's used for you to track and, and others to track the money that you have in the cryptocurrencies. And it it's, um, pretty good. Fun function or feature. It's kind of hard for a lot of people to do so they have these kind of crypto banks.

[00:51:23] So if you have one of these currencies, you can just have your currency on deposit at this bank because there's, there's a whole bunch of reasons, but one of the reasons is if. There is a, a run on a bank, or if there's a run on a cryptocurrency, currencies have built into them incredibly expensive penalties.

[00:51:47] If you try and liquidate that cryptocurrency quickly. And also if there are a lot of people trying to liquidate it. So you had kind of a double whammy and people were paying more than three. Coin in order to sell Bitcoin. And so think about that. Think about much of Bitcoin's worth, which is tens of thousands of dollars.

[00:52:07] So it's overall, this is a problem. It's been a very big problem. So people put it into a bank. So coin base is one of the big one coin coin base had its first quarter Ernie's report. Now, this is the us' largest cryptocurrency exchange and they had a quarterly loss for the first quarter of 2022 of 430 million.

[00:52:37] That's their loss. And they had an almost 20% drop in monthly users of coin. So that's something right. And they put it in their statement, their quarterly statement here as to, you know, what's up. Well, here's the real scary part Coinbase said in its earning earnings report. Last Tuesday that it holds the.

[00:53:03] 256 billion in both Fiat currencies and crypto currencies on behalf of its customers. So Fiat currencies are, are things like the federal reserve notes, our us dollar. Okay. A quarter of a trillion dollars that it's holding for other people kind of think of it like a bank. However, they said in the event, Coinbase we ever declare bankruptcy, quote, the crypto assets.

[00:53:33] We hold in custody on behalf of our customers could be subject to bankruptcy proceedings. Coinbase users would become general unsecured creditors, meaning they have no right to claim any specific property from the exchange in proceedings people's funds would become inaccessible. Very big deal. Very scary for a very, very good reason.

[00:54:00] Hey, when we come back, uh, websites, you know, you go, you type stuff in email address, do you know? You don't even have to hit submit. In most cases, they're stealing it.

[00:54:12] I'm sure you've heard of JavaScript in your browser. This is a programming language that actually runs programs right there in your web browser, whether you like it or not. And we just had a study on this. A hundred thousand websites are collecting your. Information up-front.

[00:54:29] I have a, in my web browser, I have JavaScript turned off for most websites that I go to now, JavaScript is a programming language and it lets them do some pretty cool things on a webpage.

[00:54:43] In fact, that's the whole idea behind Java. Uh, just like cookies on a web browser where they have a great use, which is to help keep track of what you're doing on the website, where you're going, pulling up other information that you care about, right? Part of your navigation can be done with cookies. They go on and on in their usefulness, but.

[00:55:06] Part of the problem is that people are using them to track you online. So like Facebook and many others will go ahead and have their cookies on other websites. So they know where you're going, what you're doing, even when you're not on Facebook, that's by the way, part of. The Firefox browser's been trying to overcome here.

[00:55:30] They have a special fenced in mode that happens automatically when you're using Firefox on Facebook. Pretty good. Pretty cool. The apple iOS devices. Use a different mechanism. And in fact, they're already saying that Facebook and some of these others who sell advertiser, Infor advertisers information about you have really had some major losses in revenue because apple is blocking their access to certain information about you back to Javas.

[00:56:07] It's a programming language that they can use to do almost anything on your web browser. Bad guys have figured out that if they can get you to go to a website or if they can insert and add onto a page that you're visiting, they can then use. Your web browser, because it's basically just a computer to do what well, to mind Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.

[00:56:33] So you are paying for the electricity for them as your computer is sitting there crunching on, uh, these algorithms that they need to use to figure out how to find the next Bitcoin or whatever. Be, and you are only noticing that your device is slowing down. For instance, our friends over on the Android platform have found before that sometimes their phones are getting extremely hot, even when they're not using them.

[00:57:00] And we've found that yeah, many times that's just a. Bitcoin minor who has kind of taken over partial control of your phone just enough to mind Bitcoin. And they did that through your web browser and JavaScript. So you can now see some of the reasons that I go ahead and disable JavaScript on most websites I go to now, some websites aren't gonna work.

[00:57:23] I wanna warn you up front. If you go into your browser settings and turn off JavaScript, you are going. Break a number of websites, in fact, many, many websites that are out there. So you gotta kind of figure out which sites you want it on, which sites don't you want it on. But there's another problem that we have found just this week.

[00:57:44] And it is based on a study that was done. It's reported in ours Technica, but they found. A hundred thousand top websites, a hundred thousand top websites. These include signing up for a newsletter making hotel reservation, checking out online. Uh, you, you probably take for granted that you nothing happens until you hit submit, right?

[00:58:10] That used to be the case in web 1.0 days. It isn't anymore. Now I wanna point out we, I have thousands of people who are on my email list. So every week they get my, my, uh, insider show notes. So these are the top articles of the week. They are, you know, usually six to 10 articles, usually eight of them that are talking about cybersecurity, things of importance in.

[00:58:38] The whole radio show and podcast are based on those insider show notes that I also share with the host of all of the different radio shows and television shows that I appear on. Right. It's pretty, pretty cool. So they get that, but I do not use this type of technology. Yeah. There's some JavaScript that'll make a little sign up thing, come up at the top of the screen, but I am not using technology that is in your face or doing.

[00:59:07] What these people are doing, right? So you start filling out a form. You haven't hit cement. And have you noticed all of a sudden you're getting emails from. Right. It's happened to me before. Well, your assumption about hitting submit, isn't always the case. Some researchers from KU LUN university and university of Lue crawled and analyzed the top 100,000 websites.

[00:59:37] So crawling means they have a little robot that goes to visit the webpage, downloads all of the code that's on the page. And then. Analyzed it all right. So what they found was that a user visiting a site, if the, the user is in the European union is treated differently than someone who visits the site from the United States.

[01:00:00] Now there's a good reason for this. We've helped companies with complying with the GDPR, which are these protection rules that are in place in the European union. And that's why you're seeing so many websites. Mine included that say, Hey, listen, we do collect some information on you. You can click here to find out more and some websites let just say no, I don't want you to have any information about me.

[01:00:25] We collect information just so that you can navigate the site properly. Okay. Very basic, but that's why European union users are treated differently than those coming from the United States. So this new research found that over 1800 websites gathered an EU user's email address without their consent. So it's almost 2000 websites out of the top 100,000.

[01:00:54] If you're in the EU and they found. About well, 3000 websites logged a us user's email in some form. Now that's, before you hit submit. So you start typing in your email, you type in your name and you don't hit submit. Many of the sites are apparently grabbing that information, putting it into the database and maybe even starting using it before you gave them explicit permission to do.

[01:01:27] Isn't that a fascinating and the 1800 sites that gathered information on European news union users without their consent are breaking the law. That's why so many us companies decided they had to comply with the GDPR because it's a real big problem. So these guys also crawled websites for password leaks and May, 2021.

[01:01:54] And they found 52 websites where third parties, including Yex Yex is. Big Russian search engine a and more were collecting password data before submission. So since then the group went ahead and let the websites know what was happening, what they found, uh, because it's not necessarily intentional by the website itself.

[01:02:20] It might be a third party, a third party piece of software. That's doing it. They, they informed those sites. Hey, listen, you're collecting user data before there's been explicit consent to collect it. In other words, you, before you hit the submit button and they thought, wow, this is a very surprising, they thought they might find a few hundred website, but.

[01:02:44] Course of a year now they found that there were over 3000 websites really that were doing this stuff. So they presented their findings at Usenet. Well, actually they haven't presented 'em yet. Cuz it's gonna be at use N's. In August and these are what they call leaky forums. So yet another reason to turn off JavaScript when you can.

[01:03:08] But I also gotta add a lot of the forums do not work if JavaScript's not enabled. So we gotta do something about it. Uh, maybe complain, make sure they aren't collecting your. Maybe I should do a little course on that one so you can figure out are they doing it before even giving permission? Anyhow, this is Craig Peter son.

[01:03:29] Visit me online. Craig Peter son.com and sign up for that. No obligation inside your show notes.

[01:03:35] We are shipping all kinds of military equipment over to Ukraine. And right now they're talking about another $30 billion worth of equipment being shipped to what was the world's number one arms dealer Ukraine.

[01:03:52] I'm looking right now at an article that was in the Washington post. And you know, some of their stuff is good.

[01:04:00] Some of their stuff is bad, I guess, kinda like pretty much any media outlet, but they're raising some really good points here. One of them is that we are shipping some pretty advanced equipment and some not so advanced equipment to Ukraine. To help them fight in this war to protect themselves from Russia.

[01:04:24] Now, you know, all of that, that's, that's pretty common. Ultimately looking back in history, there have been a lot of people who've made a lot of money off of wars. Many of the big banks financing, both sides of wars. Going way, way back and coming all the way up through the 20th century. And part of the way people make money in war time is obviously making the equipment, the, and supplies and stuff that the armies need.

[01:04:57] The other way that they do it is by trading in arms. So not just the supplies. The bullets all the way through the advanced missile systems. Now there's been some concerns because of what we have been seen online. We've talked about telegram here before, not the safest web, you know, app to use in order to keep in touch.

[01:05:23] It's really an app for your phone and it's being used. Ukraine to really coordinate some of their hacker activities against Russia. They've also been using it in Russia, te telegram that is in order to kind of communicate with each other. Ukraine has posted pictures of some of the killed soldiers from Russia and people have been reaching out to their mothers in Russia.

[01:05:53] They've done a lot of stuff with telegram it's interest. And hopefully eventually we'll find out what the real truth is, right? Because all sides in the military use a lot of propaganda, right? The first casualty in war is the truth. It always has been. So we're selling to a country, Ukraine that has made a lot of money off of selling.

[01:06:18] Been systems being an inter intermediary. So you're not buying the system from Russia? No, no. You're buying it from Ukraine and it has been of course, just as deadly, but now we are sending. Equipment military great equipment to Ukraine. We could talk about just that a lot. I, I mentioned the whole lend lease program many months ago.

[01:06:44] Now it seems to be in the news. Now takes a while for the mainstream media to catch up with us. I'm usually about six to 12 weeks ahead of what they're talking about. And so when we're talking about Lynn Le, it means. We're not giving it to them. We're not selling it to them. We're just lending them the equipment or perhaps leasing it just like we did for the United Kingdom back in world.

[01:07:10] Wari, not a bad idea. If you want to get weapons into the hands of an adversary and not really, or not an adversary, but an ally or potential ally against an adversary that you have, and they have. But part of the problem is we're talking about Ukraine here. Ukraine was not invited in NATO because it was so corrupt.

[01:07:33] You might remember. they elected a new president over there that president started investigating, hired a prosecutor to go after the corruption in Ukraine. And then you heard president Joe Biden, vice president at the time bragging about how he got this guy shut down. Uh, yeah, he, he got the prosecutor shut down the prosecutor that had his sights on, of course hunter Biden as well as other people.

[01:08:00] So it it's a real problem, but. Let's set that aside for now, we're talking about Ukraine and the weapon systems we've been sending over there. There have been rumors out there. I haven't seen hard evidence, but I have seen things in various papers worldwide talking about telegrams, saying. That the Ukrainians have somehow gotten their hands on these weapons and are selling them on telegram.

[01:08:29] Imagine that, uh, effectively kind of a dark web thing, I guess. So we're, we're saying, well, you know, Biden administration, uh, you know, yeah. Okay. Uh, that, that none of this is going to happen. Why? Well, because we went ahead and we put into the contracts that they could not sell or share or give any of this equipment away without the explicit permission of the United States go.

[01:09:00] Well, okay. That, that kind of sounds like it's not a bad idea. I would certainly put it into any contract like this, no question, but what could happen here? If this equipment falls into the hands of our adversaries or, or other Western countries, NATO countries, how do you keep track of them? It it's very hard to do.

[01:09:22] How do you know who's actually using. Very hard to do so enforcing these types of contracts is very difficult, which makes a contract pretty weak, frankly. And then let's look at Washington DC, the United States, according to the Washington post in mid April, gave Ukraine a fleet of I 17 helicopter. Now these MI 17 helicopters are Russian, originally Soviet designs.

[01:09:55] Okay. And they were bought by the United States. About 10 years ago, we bought them for Afghan's government, which of course now has been deposed, but we still have our hands on some of these helicopters. And when we bought them from Russia, We signed a contract. The United States signed a contract promising not to transfer the helicopters to any third country quote without the approval of the Russian Federation.

[01:10:27] Now that's according to a copy of the certificate that's posted on the website of Russia's federal service on military technical cooperation. So there you. Russia's come out and said that our transfer, those helicopters has grossly violated the foundations of international law. And, and you know, what they, it has, right.

[01:10:48] Arms experts are saying that Russia's aggression Ukraine more than justifies us support, but the violations of the weapons contracts, man, that really hurts our credibility and the, our we're not honoring these contract. How can we expect Ukraine to honor those contracts? That's where the problem really comes in.

[01:11:13] And it's ultimately a very, very big problem. So this emergency spending bill that it, you know, the $30 billion. Makes Ukraine, the world's single largest recipient of us security assistance ever. They've received more in 2022 than United States ever provided to Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel in a single year.

[01:11:40] So they're adding to the stockpiles of weapons that we've already committed. We've got 1400 stinger anti-aircraft systems, 5,500 anti tank, Mitch missiles, 700 switch blade drones, nine 90. Excuse me, long range Howards. That's our Tillery 7,000 small arms. 50 million rounds of ammunition and other minds, explosives and laser guided rocket systems, according to the Washington post.

[01:12:09] So it's fascinating to look. It's a real problem. And now that we've got the bad guys who are using the dark web, remember the dark web system that we set up, the onion network. Yeah. That one, uh, they can take these, they can sell them, they can move them around. It is a real problem. A very big problem. What are we gonna do when all of those weapons systems come back aimed at us this time?

[01:12:40] You know, it's one thing to leave billions of dollars worth of helicopters, et cetera, back in Afghanistan is the Biden administration did with their crazy withdrawal tactic. Um, but at least those will wear out the bullets, missile systems, Howard, yours, huh? Different deal.

[01:13:00] It seems like the government calls war on everything, the war against drugs or against poverty. Well, now we are looking at a war against end to end encryption by government's worldwide, including our own.

[01:13:17] The European union is following in America's footstep steps, again, only a few years behind this time.

[01:13:26] Uh, but it's not a good thing. In this case, you might remember a few have been following cybersecurity. Like I have back in the Clinton administration, there was a very heavy push for something called the clipper chip. And I think that whole clipper chip. Actually started with the Bush administration and it was a bad, bad thing, uh, because what they were trying to do is force all businesses to use this encryption chip set that was developed and promoted by the national security agency.

[01:14:04] And it was supposed to be an encryption device that is used to secure, uh, voice and data messages. And it had a built in. Back door that allowed federal state, local law enforcement, anybody that had the key, the ability to decode any intercepted voice or data transmissions. It was introduced in 93 and was thank goodness.

[01:14:32] Defunct by 1996. So it used something called skip Jack man. I remember that a lot and it used it to transfer dilly or Diffy excuse me, Hellman key exchange. I've worked with that before crypto keys. It used, it used the, uh, Des algorithm, the data encryption standard, which is still used today. And the Clinton administration argued that the clipper chip.

[01:14:59] Absolutely essential for law enforcement to keep up with a constantly progressing technology in the United States. And a lot of people believe that using this would act as frankly, an additional way for terrorists to receive information and to break into encrypted information. And the Clinton administration argued that it, it would increase national security because terrorists would have to use it to communicate with outsiders, bank, suppliers, contacts, and the government could listen in on those calls.

[01:15:33] Right. Aren't we supposed to in United States have have a right to be secure in our papers and other things, right? The, the federal government has no right to come into any of that stuff unless they get a court order. So they were saying, well, we would take this key. We'll make sure that it's in a, a lock box, just like Al gore social security money.

[01:15:55] And no one would be able to get their hands on it, except anyone that wanted to, unless there was a court order and you know how this stuff goes, right. It, it just continues to progress. And. A lot worse. Well, there was a lot of backlash by it. The electronic privacy information center, electronic frontier foundation boast, both pushed back saying that it would not.

[01:16:20] Only have the effect of, of not, excuse me, have the effect of this is a quote, not only subjecting citizens to increased impossibly illegal government surveillance, but that the strength of the clipper trips encryption could not be evaluated by the public as its design. Was classified secret and that therefore individuals and businesses might be hobbled with an insecure communication system, which is absolutely true.

[01:16:48] And the NSA went on to do some things like pollute, random number generators and other things to make it so that it was almost impossible to have end-to-end encrypted data. So we were able to kill. Many years ago. Now what about 30 years ago? Uh, when they introduced this thing? Well, it took a few years to get rid of it, but now the EU is out there saying they want to stop end, end encryption.

[01:17:15] The United States has already said that, or the new director of Homeland security has, and as well as Trump's, uh, again, Homeland security people said we need to be able to break the. And, and we've talked about some of the stories, real world stories of things that have happened because of the encryption.

[01:17:36] So the EU has now got a proposal forward that would force tech companies to scan private messages for child sexual abuse material called CSAM and evidence of grooming. Even when those messages are, are supposed to be protected by end to end encrypt. So we know how this goes, right? It, it starts at something that's, everybody can agree on, right?

[01:18:04] This child, sexual abuse material, uh, abductions of children, all, you know, there's still a lot of slavery going on in the world. All of that stuff needs to be stopped. And so we say, yeah, yeah. Okay. That makes a whole lot of sense, but where does it end? Online services that receive detection orders. This is from ours Technica under the pending European union legislation would have obligations concerning the detection, the reporting, the removal and blocking of known and new.

[01:18:37] Child sexual abuse material as well as solicitation of children. So what we're starting to see here in the us is some apps, some companies that make smartphones, for instance, looking at pictures that are sent and shared to see if it looks like it might be pornographic in some way. because again, we're seeing younger kids who are sending pictures of each other naked or body parts naked to others.

[01:19:04] If you can believe that. Absolutely incredible. But what happens when you send them using an end-to-end encrypted app? Now, my advice for people who want to keep information private, you're a business person you're working on a deal. You don't go to Twitter like Elon Musk and put it out there for the world to.

[01:19:26] Although, I'm sure he's got some ulterior motives in doing that. You use an app called signal. That's certainly the best one that's out there right now. It provides a whole lot of encryption and privacy, and even has some stuff built in to break the software. That's often used to break into the end end encryption systems.

[01:19:47] So they're trying to get this in place here. They're calling it an important security tool. But it's ordering companies to break that end to end encryption by whatever technological means necessary. It it's gonna be hard because frankly it's gonna be impossible for them to enforce this because you can take encrypted data and make it look like almost.

[01:20:11] Anything, and man has that happened for a long time. Think of the micro dots, way back when Seline world, world war II and on, they were very popular there's techniques to encrypt data and embedded in a photograph and make it almost impossible to detect. So again, they're, they're not going to get to do what they're hoping to do.

[01:20:36] And, and I think that's an important thing for everybody. Pay pay close attention to, so they do want to get rid of end to end there's WhatsApp out there, which I don't really trust cuz is owned by Facebook, but that's supposedly end to end. There's end to end encryption on apple iMessage, although up.

[01:20:56] Apparently, there are some ways to get into that. I think apple is now maintaining a secondary key that they can use to decrypt, but the back doors that the us has called for and other people have called for. Have been pushed back by companies like apple Apple's CEO, Tim cook, opposed government mandated back doors.

[01:21:20] Of course, apple got a major backlash from security experts when unveiled a plan to have iPhones and other devices, scan user photos for child sexual abuse images. That's what I was referring to earlier. And apple put that plan on hold and promised to make changes. But this is apple all over again. And it's hard to say what's the least privacy intrusive way, because if the is S P can read them all, if the company that's providing you with the app that you're using to send the message.

[01:21:52] Can read them all, how much privacy is there and if they can read it, who else can read it and what can be done with it? Blackmail has happened many times in the past because someone got their hands on something. So what happens when a, a Congressman or the military or someone in the military uses that that's another problem.

[01:22:14] Because if we don't know the way the encryption is is, is, uh, being used or is made just like, was true with a clipper chip. And then we move on to the next step, which is okay. So what do we do now with this data that we're storing? Are they going to keep that data confidential? Can they keep it outta the hands of the criminals.

[01:22:38] We've certainly found that they just haven't been able to. And if you're talking about grooming, which is what the European union wants. In other words, someone that's trying to get a child to the point where they're doing something that would be abhorrent. Uh, you've got to. Look at all of the, all of the messages, you have to have them analyzed by some sort of an AI artificial intelligence, and then ultimately analyzed by people.

[01:23:04] It it's just gonna get worse and worse. Right? This is the most sophisticated mass surveillance machinery. That has ever been deployed outside of China in the USSR. It, it's absolutely incredible when you look at it from a cryptographic standpoint. And again, we understand protecting the children. We all want to do that, but how far will this end up going?

[01:23:28] I also wanna point out that my. New, uh, insider show notes that I've been sending out over the last few weeks have had some amazing responses from people. I I've had people saying that this is what they look for in their mailbox. It's the first piece of email they read that it's the most relevant news that they get.

[01:23:49] But you can only get it one way and that's by going to Craig peterson.com, you can sign up there. It's easy enough to do. There's no obligation on your part, right? This is not my paid newsletter. This is absolutely free. And it's incredibly valuable. Plus I'll also be sending you once a week-ish a small training, just, it takes you a few minutes to read.

[01:24:13] I just last week went through the firewall in your windows machine, the firewall in. And gave you step by step instructions. Is it turned on? What is it doing? What should it do? How do you turn it on and how do you use it? So you can only get that one way and that's, if you are on my email list, so it's important to be there.

[01:24:35] And if you have any questions, you can hit reply. Any of those emails, whether it's the training or if it's the insider show notes, just hit re reply. And I'll go ahead and answer your question. You might have to wait a few days cuz I can get pretty busy sometimes, but always answer. So me, [email protected].

[01:24:57] Anybody can send me email and you can also text me at 617-500-3221 with any questions. Well, that's it for right now, there is so much more. Make sure you sign up right now. And of course there's more coming right up. So stick around.

Solar Cells Are Polluting Our Groundwater The Resurrection of Coal Plans By MIT Latest Cyberattacks Will Elon Musk Beat Twitter?

We all want a green world. I can't think of anybody that doesn't want one, but there are people with ulterior motives. That's a different thing, but California has really caused itself a whole lot of non green. Rooftop solar, right? That's gonna be the solution to all of our problems.

[Automated transcript follows.]

Not the fact that the electric cars, people buy use three times as much electricity as our air conditioners yet. Not the fact that we have rolling blackouts because we don't have enough. Power cuz we've shut down plants before we were actually ready to replace that power. Not that Texas is right now having blackouts as is California having blackouts because of this stupidity.

[00:00:52] Of some of these regulators. It's absolutely crazy. You know, we are the greenest country in the world. All of our plants, our coal plants are cleaner than anybody else's anywhere in the world. And California's. Really got itself into a big problem here, because again of shortsightedness, I just don't get it.

[00:01:16] You know, maybe it is follow the money, maybe, you know, Nancy Pelosi's husband making millions of dollars and, and, uh, using inside information is, is absolutely true. And, uh, maybe it. To do with that, right? It's not really green it's to enrich the politicians. How can you go to Washington DC on the salary?

[00:01:37] Congress has as expensive as it is in Washington, DC and come out a multimillionaire. Uh, there's only one way that can happen. Right. I, I remember the, the trade that Hillary Clinton made, what was it? Beef or something. Right. And she made like $80,000. Well, you know, that sort of tip is a sort of thing.

[00:01:58] That'll put Martha Stewart in jail, but not our politicians. It's absolutely crazy. I don't get it. So California, they have been a pioneer in push. For rooftop, solar panels. Now I get it. They're cool. I get it. It's really nice to have the grid buy electricity back from you when there is plenty of sun and when the grid needs it, but the grids aren't really set up for this sort of stuff.

[00:02:31] But I, I know a few listeners that really love their solar panels. There's one guy. Who has put a whole bunch of panels up solar panels in a field, and he has some cattle and horses and stuff. And so they, they live with these solar panels in the field and he bought himself a couple of Nissan leaves.

[00:02:52] These are these electric cars from Nissan. You might remember them. They've been around for a while and he's just tickled pink that yeah. He had to buy the solar panels. Yeah. He had to install of them. Yeah. He has to keep the snow off of them. Yeah. He has to clean the dust off of them. Yeah. He has to clean, uh, all of the bird stuff off of them, but it's.

[00:03:14] Right. Yeah. Okay. So he gets to drive around and he says, you know, I don't usually go much further than the grocery store or maybe a quick under tractor supply. And it, it, it doesn't cost him anything incrementally. So California decided it was going to go green, green, green, green. Right. And what's one of the best ways to do that.

[00:03:36] Well, we need more electricity. Let's go for rooftop. Solar in. California decided it would go ahead and subsidize these wonderful solar panels on people's roofs all over the place. Not, not like one big central farm, uh, out in the Mohave desert, that's collecting all of the solar. It can possibly collect and then turn it into electricity that can feed into the grid.

[00:04:04] No, it's all decentralizes on all of these rooftops now. We're talking about 20 years later, there are 1.3 million rooftops estimated to have solar cells on them out there in California. And the real bill is coming due. It isn't cleaning the, you know, the bird increment off. Yeah. The real bill in California for the rooftop solar isn't getting the snow off of them.

[00:04:32] Keeping them clean. No, it has to. With completely non-green stuff here. 90% of all of these solar cells that were put onto roofs in California that have been taken down 90% of them have ended up in landfills. Yeah, absolutely. Now the lifetime expectant, uh, lifetime of these solar panels is, uh, 25, maybe 30.

[00:05:05] As long as they're not damaged, or if you really wanna keep up with the technology because solar panels are increasing in efficiency, as time goes on, might be a lot less, right. Might be like a 10 to 15 years cycle. If you have that much money out there. But many of these are now winding up in landfills.

[00:05:25] And the real concern is that they could contam. Groundwater. I've talked about this before. If these solar panels crack, what could happen while they have heavy toxic metals in them such as lead, we know how bad lead is, right. Can't have lead in your house anymore. A selenium cadmium. Right? All things you don't want to have mercury, mercury vapor, you don't want to go anywhere near mercury vapor.

[00:05:54] Uh, except for the fact that the federal government forced us to put them into our homes in the form of purely Q light bulbs. Remember those things? Yeah. Highly toxic breaking. One of those light bulbs, a fluorescent light makes your home a toxic waste site. According to EPA regulations. So I'm sure if you ever had a, a fluorescent light bulb break and that includes the bigger ones, right.

[00:06:21] You might have in the roof, uh, up on the, the top of your office, uh, you know, wherever it might be, you, you, you must have, um, went out and you, you bought, maybe you even had standing by for you some really wonderful. Plastic that you could put up, you know, tape up so that you can isolate the room that has the toxic waste in it, from breaking that light bulb that the federal government made you buy, because you couldn't buy regular incandescent bulbs that you wanted anymore.

[00:06:52] And, uh, they encouraged you and they gave you discounts on it and they subsidize. Yeah. Yeah. Those bulbs. And then, uh, of course you went in with a full respirator and a full suit on that, uh, you know, Tyvec and you taped it up, make sure that tape up around the gloves onto the Tyvec suit so that none of that mercury gets.

[00:07:12] Onto your skin. And, and then you obviously used a specialized vacuum cleaner for toxic hazardous waste and, and vacuumed up like the carpet or the floor, maybe it got onto your couch. Right? You, you did all of that. And then you put it all into a sealed, uh, container of some sort, typically like a glass bottle or something.

[00:07:36] So it's not gonna be able to. Out right. You, you must have done all of that because I I'm sure everyone knew what was going on with those fluorescent bulbs, those little curly Q bulbs. Right. Does that make sense to you? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So now, California. has 1.3 million rooftops with rooftops, solar power on them.

[00:08:04] Now it isn't like it's out in, as I mentioned a great place, but it out in the Mojave desert, right. They got more sun than they need out there. And so it's all one place and they can take those panels and they can recycle them. No, no, because it's illegal to recycle them in California. Because of the heavy metals, the toxic metals.

[00:08:26] So instead of that, people are just dumping them in their trash and taking them to landfills, et cetera, et C. We're talking about truckloads of waste, some of this stuff badly contaminated, and it really shows how short sight, uh, environmental policy can create incredible problems that were easily foresee right though, the industry's supposed to be green, but in reality, According to Sam Vanderhoff, who is a solar industry expert, chief executive recycled PV solar.

[00:09:01] He says the reality about this industry. is not that it's green, but in reality, it's all about the money. Wait a minute. Isn't no, there's not what I just said earlier. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So California came early with solar power. They granted $3.3 billion in subsidies for installing solar panels on rooftops.

[00:09:26] And yet, you know, barreling ahead with this renewable energy program, they are now at a point where they have rolling blackouts. They have problems with electricity generation. They have problems with the rooftop, solar, and as it is aged, getting rid of it. Have you seen those pictures of Hawaii with those windmill farm?

[00:09:50] that are just sitting there rusting away. Cuz the windmills aren't turning you'd think Hawaii, right? A lot of wind isn't that a great way to do it, but it takes a lot of space kills some birds and uh, it takes a lot of maintenance. They're very expensive to maintain. So they just let some of these, uh, wind farms just totally rested away.

[00:10:12] We need to elect people, send them to Washington, DC that don't touch things like this with a 5,000 foot pole. The, the reason is that you look at a great investor, a great business investor. That they make money, right? Oh, wouldn't it be great to be mark Cuban or one of the sharks, right? That are making money, investing money.

[00:10:39] Well, yeah, it, it certainly would be, uh, they at best, at best make money out of one out of 10 investments, federal government, it bats pretty close to zero. Zero, right. Oh, oh no, that's not true. Right. Uh, we talked about the millions of dollars that Congress people make. Yeah. Yeah. So they don't bat zero, the Congress and, uh, this political crack class bats, a thousand in their own pocket.

[00:11:13] Let's stop this stuff from Washington DC. It's insanity. Thank goodness California did this so we can see how insane these solar rooftop policies are. At least for the near future.

[00:11:27] Well, we've talked about solar cells. We've talked about the new nuclear, which is incredible stuff. Well, there is a new MIT spinout that's tapping into a million year energy supply right here.

[00:11:44] Government has been terrible about picking winners. It, it kind of reminds me of a quote from Henry Ford where you said, if I had asked people what they wanted, they would've said faster horses, and that's kind of the mentality of government, whatever they're investing in, or their friends, their buddies, their, their voters, their donors are investing in.

[00:12:07] That's what they'll push. So we haven't had a fair shake of some of these technologies, really, you know, the hydrogen who knows what else we could be powering our cars with that hasn't come forward because government's been putting just literally trillions of dollars of support into electric cars. Okay.

[00:12:29] And electric cars. Great. Don't get me wrong. They're the cool technology. I wouldn't mind owning one of them. The government should not be the one who decides the winners and losers. That's the communist way. That's central planning. Central planning does not work. I, I I'm really on a bit of a rampage today.

[00:12:52] It's it? This is just crazy, but this, this is a reason right now. What I'm gonna talk about, why central planning has failed us yet again. Right. Just because it's a big problem. Doesn't mean it's a federal government problem. And the big problem is okay. All of us want green stuff, right? Not this green movement.

[00:13:17] That's all about again, central planning, government control, not that stuff, but we want. Clean environment. We want good, healthy food. We want all of this stuff. That's going to make us healthy. The world healthy, the earth, healthy feed the population of the world. Everything everybody does. I don't get it. I don't know why they, well, anyways, we won't get into that.

[00:13:44] Right. Here's this here's an example. Government has been moving us directly towards solar panels, which we've talked about and, and how they really can and do hurt the environment very, very badly. We talked about the disposal of them. We've talked before about the manufacturing of solar panels and how it is horrific when it comes to the health of our.

[00:14:12] How about this one, this M I T group. These are, it's really kind of cool here. Qua energy is this company that they founded and it is a spin out from MIT. And what they're looking to do is use the power potential that's beneath our feet in order to create a literally a carbon free pollution, free energy source.

[00:14:39] Absolutely amazing. Now we've talked about this for a long time. You, you look at some of these countries in the world that have a lot of volcanic activity. I'm particularly thinking about Iceland right now and how they are taking all of this geothermal thermal potential and turning it into electric.

[00:15:02] Which is fantastic. Right? And when you look at the stability of geothermal, it is dead on it is there, it is always there. If you're looking at the stability of geothermal, for instance, doesn't think of a volcano. How often do the volcanoes move? It it's pretty solid, pretty long term. Certainly there's tectonic activity and the plates move, but it's at, at just an incredibly slow rate.

[00:15:32] You're talking about inches a year. Well, they've looked at a couple of things. One is this abandoned coal power plant in upstate new. And as overall people are looking at it saying, it's just, it's worth nothing. Right? It's a Relic from ages gone by heaven. Forbid we burn coal and I, I would rather not burn coal personally, but get down and think about this.

[00:15:57] Now you've got a cold power plant. What is planned? What does that have in it? That might be useful. It still has transmission lines that run to the grid, the power grid, it's a central producer of electricity, which is exactly how our power grid is set up. We're not set up for having every home or, you know, half of them or whatever it is, generating electricity with solar power or having windmills here and there we're set up for having centralized.

[00:16:32] Power generation Nicola, Tesla aside, right? That's how we're set up. So this old cow coal power plant has transmission lines. It still has a power turbine. How does a coal plant work? How does a nuclear plant work? It generates heat and that heat creates steam. And that steam is used to drive a tur. Much like what happens at a hydroelectric dam, the water drives a turbine, and then that turbine, ultimately of course drives a massive alternator of some sort, some sort of a, a generator, if you will.

[00:17:10] And that's hooked up to our power lines. Now, what's really interesting here. Is their technology. You might have heard about this place. I remember reading about this and all kinds of interesting stories, a about this hole that was drilled in, in Russia. I think it was, and they went down. What was it like 5,000 feet or something?

[00:17:37] Um, Uh, and they abandoned it. Right? Cause they were trying to do the whole thing, but here's the interesting part of what the MIT guys are saying that the crust anywhere in the world about it kind of varies a little bit, but basically about, uh, 10 to 20 kilometers deep has the enough geothermal energy.

[00:18:09] to drive something like this power plant, this old coal power plant in upstate New York. But the problem is how do you drill that deep? The Russians, a Soviet union had a hard time doing it and they didn't, they didn't reach their ultimate goal, uh, and interesting backs stories on all of that, that we don't have time for today.

[00:18:30] what these guys are doing is they have created an approach that vaporizes the rock. So they're not drilling. And if you've ever seen drilling operations, watched it on the discovery channel or something, which I have, it's really cool. You, you realize that when they start hitting hard rock granite bedrock, they stop.

[00:18:55] Cuz it becomes so slow. So they use the diamond. Tip drill heads and, and they drill and it's slow, but what's happening right now is they're using gyro trons to heat the material it's been done for years in nuclear fusion experiments, but they're taking that basic technology and using it for new geothermal drilling technique.

[00:19:23] That is cool. So these gyal trons, haven't been well known in the general science community fusion researchers know about it, but what they're saying is this is going to give them the ability to drill. These massive holes, you know, depth wise. And right now 400 feet is kind of as far as we can usually drill, but this is gonna let them go kilometers into the earth.

[00:19:52] They're gonna be able to tap into that, the energy here, basically, you're talking about what you get out of a volcano, right? That sort of energy, that heat bring it up and then boil the water and run it through that coal power. At least the infrastructure that's in there, the generators and everything else.

[00:20:13] So very, very cool. And this is something that's being done right now. They expect within a few years to have an actual functional demonstration of this blasting its way through melt. Rock and some of the hardest rock on the surface of the earth. Hey, you should have received my insider show notes Tuesday morning.

[00:20:38] If you didn't, you can get 'em for free. Just go to Craig peterson.com. And if you have any questions, just email me, me, Craig peterson.com.

[00:20:53] Do you remember this moment from the fifth element? Old tricks are the best tricks? Eh, yeah. Well, we're talking about attackers right now, cybersecurity and the old tricks are the best tricks. No doubt about that. They're back to the old ways. Yep. Oh, well,

[00:21:10] There are a lot of security firms out there. It's just absolutely amazing to me.

[00:21:16] I get ads all of the time, as you can imagine, from dozens and dozens of startups and big guys, and I'm looking at a page right now and there was what, six different ads on here for cybersecurity stuff. This is a site called dark reading. It's one. Pay some fairly close attention to, because they are talking about cybersecurity stuff.

[00:21:40] So I guess that makes sense. But attackers are doing things every day right now. What are they doing? That's what Robert Lamos is talking about. And he's looking at a report that was produced by yet another security firm called Tetra defense and they analyzed data from the first quarter 2020. Now, when you think about cybersecurity and the problems we have, what do you think about, what do you think of?

[00:22:12] Is it ransomware, fishing, maybe? What, what do you think it is? Well, what this Tetra defense found is that 54% more costs. From compromises caused by user actions comes from drum roll. Pete, please. I, I don't know if I said that very, very well. Let me just do that one more time. Okay. Take two. uh, compromises cost victims 54% more.

[00:22:47] When we're talking about unpatched servers. And vulnerable remote access systems like Microsoft RDP, remote desktop, 54% more. That is huge, absolutely huge. Who would've thought of that by the way, these unpatched vulnerabilities from the first quarter and exposing risky services, such as remote desktop protocol account for 82%.

[00:23:17] Of successful attacks while social engineering employees. And that includes things like fishing accounted for just 18%. Of successful compromises that my friends is a very, very big deal. And as I said, at the very beginning, it is, uh, no trick that they've been up to for a long time. So what I'm trying to get at here, I know I'm kinda wandering a little about a little here mentally, but I'm trying to get at the point that we.

[00:23:50] To patch our systems and we have to apply patches ASAP. We have to make sure those patches are in place because it's, it's an absolutely horrible situation out there. I know a lot of companies that use Microsoft's remote desk. Top. And it has been just a horrific battleground when it comes to hackers because of all of the bugs that have been found in there and major vulnerabilities, uh, the log four shell bug.

[00:24:21] This is the one that's tying into Java has been reported on a whole lot, but it is used in about 22% of breaches. So that's not bad for one vulnerability. And it's a crazy vulnerability. This is a problem with languages like Java, where you have people writing code that don't realize what's happening in all of these libraries are pulling in, you know, in Java you just say, okay, uh, write this out to a file for me.

[00:24:52] And don't realize that the code that's actually doing that is parsing what you send it, and it might have a command in it that you. To it and it'll execute the command and that's the basics of that particular problem. Okay. So we're expecting all of these tactics to continue. There are a finite amount today of vulnerable exchange servers, which is another problem that the attackers have been using to really cause a whole lot of problems for us.

[00:25:24] There will be new problems in the future. There's always new software introduced and the new software always has more problems. And there are a lot of people in the cybersecurity business that say, we should just assume that systems are compromised. So instead of trying to protect them as much, let's look for the compromises, which is an interesting way of doing things.

[00:25:46] Frankly. So cloud misconfiguration, that's another big one that's out there. And I'm seeing that all of the time right now, we're working with a client. That's using a lot of Microsoft Azure stuff and Microsoft Azure, Amazon. But in fact, Amazon S three buckets, which are a way to store files up in the cloud inside.

[00:26:10] Have really been hit hard because of misconfiguration. You see, when it gets very difficult to configure something, people tend to take shortcuts, don't think it through. And in this case they have lost a whole lot, but. It's hard to estimate the damages, but looking at it, we're talking about major cybersecurity in incidents, accounting for about two to 10% of annual revenue cost wise.

[00:26:40] So a company that has maybe a hundred million in annual revenue could be looking at as much as 10% of that. In other words, 10 million as a financial impact of a cybersecurity incident. Now it's probably not gonna cost them 10 million to secure everything, but it might cost them a million a year and they just don't do it.

[00:27:06] It's just, they don't bother doing it. Look at the huge breaches that we've had from some of these, uh, credit reporting agencies. If you will, that keep all this personal information and data on. that have lost data for 200 million Americans. Right. Really? They cared and yet they, they just rake in money.

[00:27:28] They just print money. It's it's absolutely crazy. By the way, there was another report that was released a little earlier this year from crowd strike and it has a report that's based on incident data. And the one they released earlier this year was from 2021. And it's showing the breaches related to ransomware attacks had grown by 82% and the data showed that mal.

[00:27:58] Had only been used in 38% of successful intrusions and 45% of attackers were manually conducting the attacks. So if you thought early on, when we started talking here that ransomware was maybe the biggest problem, you're not entirely wrong because ransomware is the biggest growing problem that we're seeing out there right now.

[00:28:22] So it's absolutely crazy. The average time to move from an initial compromise. Remember, they're doing these things automated up front to try and find vulnerable systems or to try and get the ransomware out into your hands. That might be through a fishing attack, which by the way, fishing attacks increased 29%, that cent, that, that, um, so from the time they get that initial compromise to the time they're attacking other systems on the network.

[00:28:55] It's still about one and a half hours, according to the data that came outta CrowdStrike. Now that is concerning too, because that means you basically have an hour and a half after you've been compromised to detect it and do something about it. And that's why we use automated systems with our clients that really keep a close tab on everything.

[00:29:18] Look for various types of compromises, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it's, uh, an important thing to do because if you can't tell if you've been compromised, you just can't defend yourself. Hey, if you sign up for my newsletter, I will send you my most popular. Special reports that includes password special reports, how to use password managers, what the best ones are absolutely free.

[00:29:44] Right. I got a couple of others that I'll send you and you will get my weekly show notes that come out Tuesday mornings most weeks. And that will allow you to keep up to date on all of this. Be a little bit ahead, in fact of the radio show, because I'm talking about stuff that was in my insider show notes on Tuesday.

[00:30:03] So you get it in. Of everybody else. Just go to Craig peterson.com, sign up right there and you will be well on your way. Hey, stick around, cuz we'll be right back. Any questions [email protected].

[00:30:21] We've got a couple of things to talk about right now. We've got Elon. Mokis gotta be worried about this lawsuit. That's coming up and we'll tell you about that. And then also TikTok is in the news here. We've got two different problems with TikTok that talk about today.

[00:30:42] Hi, you are not alone. At least when it comes to your security and privacy. Hi, I'm Craig Peter son, and you are listening to news radio, w G a N a M five 60 and FM 98.5. I'd like to invite you to join me Wednesday mornings at 7 34 with Mr. Matt, we'll keep you out to. You know, of course about this whole thing.

[00:31:11] Elon Musk said he wanted to buy Twitter for a measly. What was it? 44. Billion dollars, right. Real money. And that's a, you know, a problem, especially when Twitter is alleged to be not worth as much as Twitter appears to be. You see, Twitter has had to file with the securities and exchange commission reports about.

[00:31:39] Their income, obviously writing expenses and management, and they have forward looking statements about what they're gonna be doing in the future. And all of that goes into a pot and kind of gets stirred up. And once it's all stirred up the investors, look at it and say, yeah, okay. I, I wanna invest in Twitter.

[00:31:59] One of the big variables that goes into the pot has to do with advertising revenue, which is based on eyeballs, how many eyeballs can Twitter attract? And of course that means Twitter wants to keep as many eyeballs as possible on this site at once. Right. And for the longest time possible. So that all makes some sense, but Twitter's been reporting in its public reports that less than 5% of the users slash postings there on Twitter, but less than 5% of the users are actually bots.

[00:32:39] These bots are used by. Bad guys, evil companies. And, uh, there are a lot of those out there that are trying to promote themselves. Look at how great we are. Yes. Yes. Look at wow. We're trending on Twitter. You should buy our stuff. And in reality, what they're doing is they are paying people who have bought to post thousands of tweets from different accounts using the company's hashtag it, it makes me ill, frankly, to think about this stuff, but that's what they do.

[00:33:17] So. If Twitter has a lot of these bots that are fake and are just trying to drive up the investors' price for some random product, or maybe it's what happened during the last few election cycles where Russia, China were Medling and getting people to vote for Trump against Trump, for Hillary against Hillary Biden, etcetera.

[00:33:46] Is it worth as much as investors thought. So I've been worried about what's gonna happen here. Elon Musk. He he's got to be worried if he actually ends up buying it, what's gonna happen. Is the securities and exchange commission going to do an investigation? Are they already doing one? Frankly? Probably are.

[00:34:08] And is he going to be liable for it? So Twitter's value has dropped. Now, it, it obviously went up when Musk made that, uh, that generous $44 billion purchase offer, but it has gone down since then. And since there are so many analysts saying, well, there's at least 10% bots, others saying it's 40%, it's 60%.

[00:34:34] And, and that kind of is based on the traffic, right? The amount of traffic, the bots are generating versus the number of accounts that are bought accounts. What, what happens? What should they do? How should they do it? What, how should they account for it? And if, if it's that high and there's questions about how high it is, then Twitter stock value is going to go down.

[00:34:55] So Musk pulled out of this whole thing and yeah, I can see why he did. However Delaware is where a lot of these public companies ha are incorporated. That's where their, you know, corporate headquarters are, if you will. That's where they get their authority to operate as a company. And the reason a lot of them do that in Delaware is Delaware has laws and taxes that are very favorable to publicly traded companies.

[00:35:29] And that says something right there too. Doesn't it? Well, Delaware has this thing called the court of Chancery and the judge that's handling Twitter's lawsuit against Musk. Her name is Kathleen McCormick. She is the chief judge in this case is called the court's chance. Has what Reuters called a no nonsense reputation, as well as the distinction of being one of the few jus who has ever ordered a reluctant buyer to close a us corporate.

[00:36:06] Merger. And specifically she ordered last year, an affiliate of a private equity firm to close its $550 million purchase of a holding company that makes cake decorating products. But because of the lockdown, the value of that cake decorating company drop. Pretty dramatically cuz people just weren't going out and buying this stuff to make cakes.

[00:36:31] They weren't celebrating, they weren't having parties. They didn't have cake cakes. Right. So she forced them to buy. This other company at the original price, even though the value of the company that holding company had dropped. So this is going to be really rather interesting. If you look at her ruling.

[00:36:55] She said the buyers lost their appetite for the deal shortly after signing it as government entities issued, stay at home orders around the country and the weekly sales declined dramatically rather than use reasonable efforts to work around a definitive credit agreement. The buyers called their litigation council and began evaluating ways to get out of the.

[00:37:20] Without input from the management, they prepared a draconian reforecast of the projected sales based on uninformed and largely unexplained assumptions that were inconsistent with real time sales data. That's where Elon Musk may have an out. if he's played his card right now, what really kind of confused me about all of this is that they, the guys at Twitter have a pretty solid case because they were able to negotiate as part of this potential purchase or merger, whatever you might wanna call it really it's a purchase.

[00:38:01] They have a pretty solid case cuz they got some amazing language into this agreement. I, I just can't believe that Elon Musk and his attorneys allowed it to go in there. Now these cases here in the Delaware court of Chancery are decided by the presiding judge and not a jury. Although a judge can get an advers, uh, advisory, excuse me, jury, to help consult, but the judge's decision can be appealed to the state Supreme court.

[00:38:33] And then the decision is final and Twitter proposed a four day trial with a September 19th start. Date and the court, I believe said, we're gonna push it off to October. I'll try and keep an eye on this case, cuz I think it's fascinating to see what happens here as we go forward to our friend, Elon Musk now.

[00:38:57] TikTok, Ugh, man, if you didn't get my newsletter this week, which you should have had my insider show notes on Tuesday morning and follow through and read these two articles on TikTok, you really missed something, but I'll, I'll give you a quick summary here. Right now. We spoke. About TikTok and what they have done here with this blackout challenge.

[00:39:21] Now it's not TikTok. They, they're not the ones promoting the challenge, but they are making money off of it and they're promoting their site. It's just yet another challenge that to has. well, one of the things that's been happening in Ukraine with this Russian invasion is people have been making TikTok videos and they have been posting them and they include all kinds of stuff.

[00:39:47] Uh, I'm sure there's dead soldiers in there. Russian tanks that have been completely blown apart. What a bad design, by the way, and many other things, and TikTok says, Hey, wait, wait a minute. We, we, we, okay. Well, we, we can't keep these, even though they have been asked to preserve the Ukraine content for warm war crime investigations.

[00:40:13] What has come out recently, you remember orange man, bad said that, uh, TikTok needed to be shut down. They, they wanted it out. He wanted it out of the, and not just him, but other people, uh, out of the app stores, because it's being used by Chinese intelligence and they're doing all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:40:34] Well, it turns out that our friends at TikTok have been in fact sending. All of the stuff that you are filming to China now, TikTok is illegal to use in China. So they're not sending it to China to show the Chinese because China is smart enough to not allow people to use TikTok. They're using it for ESP espionage TikTok, even just a few weeks ago, changed its usage.

[00:41:06] Uh, document here, right? Terms of use saying, uh, oh, we we're going to use. The video that you submit, uh, we're gonna collect biometric information. We're gonna collect information about things and people in the foreground things and people in the background. In other words, they're now putting together what you might call a social matrix.

[00:41:29] So they know who your friends are or what you're doing. They know about you. They're doing facial recognition of you. It goes on and on and on very, very bad, but because it's so popular with these young Ukrainians and even Russian troops who are posting footage of the war, they've got some stuff that would be great for the war crime investigators.

[00:41:54] And re remember when president Trump said, oh no, we gotta cut out TikTok. And, and the left, his opposition was saying, no, no, you know, TikTok is great. It's wonderful. Oh. And TikTok said, yeah, we have, uh, us based servers, nothing to worry about here. I don't know what Trump is talking about. The guy an idiot.

[00:42:13] Uh, well, as I just mentioned, we found out absolutely that yeah, they're saving it. They're sending it to China. And remember now, The Chinese communist party is a friend of Russia's. They're buying oil for very cheap prices. They're providing Russia with a number of different things. They're being a little cautious about it, but they will not allow war crime investigators to look at TikTok videos that have to do with the war in Ukraine.

[00:42:48] Absolutely amazing. Absolutely amazing. Lot of data pulled from your device sent back to China biometrics, face prints, voice prints, keys, stroke patterns, rhythms, search, and browsing history, location information. Do not let your kids go to TikTok. And this week I got an email from a listener saying that one of her close friends.

[00:43:14] Child died because of the blackout challenge. If that's not enough.

[00:43:20] Facebook's about 18 years old coming on 20 Facebook has a lot of data. How much stuff have you given Facebook? You know, did you fall victim for that? Hey, upload your contacts. We'll find your friends. Well, they don't know where your data is.

[00:43:36] This whole thing with Facebook has kind of exploded here lately.

[00:43:42] There is an article that had appeared on a line from our friends over at, I think it was, yeah. Let me see here. Yeah. Yeah. Motherboard. I was right. And motherboards reporting that Facebook doesn't know what it does with your data or. It goes now, you know, there's always a lot of rumors about different companies and particularly when they're big company and the, the news headlines are kind of grabbing your attention.

[00:44:16] And certainly Facebook can be one of those companies. So where did motherboard get this opinion about Facebook? Just being completely clueless about your personal data? well, it came from a leaked document. Yeah, exactly. So I, we find out a lot of stuff like that. Right. I used to follow a, a website about companies that were going to go under and they posted internal memos.

[00:44:49] It basically got sued out of existence, but there's no way that Facebook is gonna be able to Sue this one out of existence because they are describing this as. Internally as a tsunami of privacy regulations all over the world. So of course, if you're older, we used to call those TIAL waves, but think of what the implication there is of a tsunami coming in and just overwhelming everything.

[00:45:19] So Facebook internally, they, their engineers are trying to figure out, okay, so how do we deal? People's personal data. It's not categorized in ways that regulators want to control it. Now there's a huge problem right there. You've got third party data. You've got first party data. You've got sensitive categories, data.

[00:45:42] They might know what religion you are, what your persuasions are in various different ways. There's a lot of things they might know about you. How are they all CATA categorized? Now we've got the European union. With their gen general data protection regulation. The GDPR we talked about when it came into effect back in 2018, and I've helped a few companies to comply with that.

[00:46:07] That's not my specialty. My specialty is the cybersecurity side. But in article five, this European law mandates that personal data must be collected for specified explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes. So what that means is that every piece of data, like where you are using Facebook or your religious orientation, Can only be collected and used for a specific purpose and not reused for another purpose.

[00:46:45] So there's an example here that vice is giving in past Facebook, took the phone number that users provided to protect their accounts with two factor authentication and fed it to its people, you know, feature as well as. Advertisers. Yeah. Interesting. Eh, so Gizmoto with the help of academic researchers caught Facebook doing this, and eventually the company had to stop the practice.

[00:47:13] Cuz this goes back to the earlier days where Facebook would say, Hey, find out if your friends are on Facebook, upload your contacts right now. And most people. Right. What did you know back then about trying to keep your data private, to try and stop the proliferation of information about you online and nothing.

[00:47:34] Right? I think I probably even uploaded it back then thinking, well, that'd be nice to see if I got friends here. We can start chatting, et cetera. Well, according to legal experts that were interviewed by motherboard who wrote this article and has a copy of the internal me, uh, memo, this European regulation specifically prohibits that kind of repurposing of your phone number of trying to put together the social graph and the leak document shows that Facebook may not even have the ability to limit.

[00:48:09] how it handles users data. Now I was on a number of radio stations this week, talking about this and the example I gave, I is just look at an average business from the time it start, you know, Facebook started how right. Well, you scrape in pictures of young women off of Harvard universities. Main catalog, right.

[00:48:34] Contact page, and then asking people, well, what do you think of this rate? This person rate that person and off they go, right. Trying to rate them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that matters to a woman, at least according to mark Zuckerberg or all that matters about a woman is how she looks. Right. Do I think she's pretty or not ridiculous what he was doing?

[00:48:54] I, it just, oh, that's Zuckerberg, right? That's. Who he is not a great guy anyways. So you go from stealing pictures of young ladies asking people to rate them, putting together some class information and stuff there at Harvard, and then moving on to other universities and then opening up even wider and wider.

[00:49:19] And of course, that also created demand cuz you can't get on. If you're not at one of the universities that we have set it up for. And then you continue to grow. You're adding these universities, certain you're starting to collect data and you're making more money than God. So what do you do? Well, you don't have to worry about inefficiencies.

[00:49:40] I'll tell you that. Right. One thing you don't have to do is worry about, oh, GE we've got a lot of redundant work going on here. We've got a lot of teams working on basically the same thing. No, you've got more money than you can possibly shake a stick at. So now you go ahead and send that, uh, money to this group or that group.

[00:50:02] And they put together all of the basic information, right. That, that they want. They are. Pulling it out of this database and that database, and they're doing some correlation writing some really cool sequel queries with some incredible joins and everything else. Right. And now that becomes part of the main code for Facebook.

[00:50:24] And then Facebook goes on to the next little project and they do the same thing. Then the next project, then the next project. And then someone comes along and says, uh, Hey, we. This feature, that feature for advertisers and then in that goes, and then along comes candidate Obama. And, uh, they, one of the groups inside Facebook says, yeah, yeah, yeah, here, here we go.

[00:50:49] Here's all of the information we have about everybody and it's free. Don't worry about it. Right. And then when Trump actually bought it and hired a company to try and process some of that information he got in trouble. No, no, no, but, but the Obama. The whole campaign could get access to anything they wanted to, again, because the data wasn't controlled, they had no idea who was doing what with the data.

[00:51:15] And according to this internal memo, they still don't know. They don't even know if they can possibly, uh, comply with these regulations, not just in Europe, but we have regulations in pretty much all of the 50 states in the us Canada of course, has their own Australia, New Zealand think about all the places.

[00:51:38] Facebook makes a lot of money. So here's a quote from that we build systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy. Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand, the bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data. You pour that ink into a lake of water.

[00:52:00] Okay. And it flows every. The document red. Right. So how do you put that ink back in the bottle, in the right bottle? How do you organize it again? So that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake? They're totally right about that. Where did they collect it from it? Apparently they don't even know where they got some of this information.

[00:52:24] This data from kind of reminds me of the no fly list. Right. You don't know you're on it and you can't get yourself off of it. Right. It is kind of crazy. So this document that we're talking about was written last year by. Privacy engineers on the ad and business product team, whose mission is to make meaningful connections between people and businesses and which quote sits at the center of a monetization strategy monetization strategy.

[00:52:51] And is the engine that powers Facebook's growth. interesting, interesting problems. And, and I see this being a problem well into the future for more and more of these companies, look at Twitter as an example that we've all heard about a lot lately. And I've talked about as well along comes Elon Musk and he says, well, wait a minute now.

[00:53:13] Now I can make Twitter way more profitable. We're gonna get rid of however many people it's well over a thousand, and then we are going to hire more people. We're gonna start charging. We're gonna be more efficient. You can bet all of these redundancies that are in Facebook are also there on Twitter. and Twitter also has to comply with all of these regulations that Facebook is kind of freaking out about.

[00:53:42] Well, it, for really a very good reason. So this document is available to anybody who wants to look at it. I'm looking at it right now, talking about regulatory landscape and the fundamental problems Facebook's data lake. And this is a problem that most companies have not. As bad as Facebook does, but most companies, right.

[00:54:06] You grow. I, I have yet to walk into a business that needs help with cybersecurity and find everything in place as it should be, because it grew organically. Right. You, you started out with a little consumer firewall, router and wifi, and then you added to it and you put a switch here and you added another switch behind that and move things around.

[00:54:29] This is normal. This is not total incompetence on the part of the management, but my gosh, I don't know. Maybe they need an Elon Musk. Just straighten them out as well. Hey, stick around. I'll be right back and sign up [email protected].

[00:54:49] Apparently looting is one of the benefits of being a Russian soldier. And according to the reports coming out of Ukraine, they've been doing it a lot, but there's a tech angle on here that is really turning the tables on these Russian looters.

[00:55:06] Thanks for being with me today. I really appreciate it. And I'm honored, frankly, to be in front of this microphone. , this is really something, you know, we, we know in wars, there are people that loot and typically the various militaries try and make sure, at least recently that that looting is kept to an absolute minimum.

[00:55:29] Certainly the Americans, the British, even the Nazis during world war II, the, the, uh, the socialists they're in. Germany, uh, they, they tried to stop some of the looting that was going on. I, I think that's probably a very good thing, right. Because what you end up with is just all of these locals that are just totally upset with you.

[00:55:57] I found a great article on the guardian and there's a village. Had been occupied for about a month by Russian troops and the people came back, they are just shocked to see what happened. They're giving a few examples of different towns. They found that alcohol was stolen and they left empty bottles behind food rappers, cigarette butts, thrown all over the place in apartments and homes.

[00:56:26] Piles of feces blocking the toilets, family photographs torn, thrown around the house. They took away all of the clothes. This is a code from one of the people, literally everything, male and female coats, boots, shirts, jackets, even my dresses and lingerie. This is really, really something. Uh, it, the Soviets didn't do this, but now Russian.

[00:56:50] Military apparently does. So over the past couple of weeks, there've been reporting from numerous places where Russian troops had occupied Ukrainian territory and the guardian, which is this UK newspaper collected evidences suggests looting by Russian forces was not merely a case of a few way, word soldiers, but a systematic part of Russian military behavior across multiple towns.

[00:57:18] And villages. That's absolutely amazing. Another quote here, people saw the Russian soldiers loading everything onto Euro trucks, everything they could get their hands on a dozen houses on the villages. Main street had been looted as well as the shops. Other villagers reported losing washing machines, food laptops, even as sofa, air conditioners.

[00:57:42] Being shipped back, just like, you know, you might use ups here, they have their equivalent over there. A lady here who was the head teacher in the school. She came back in, of course, found her home Lood and in the head teacher's office. she found an open pair of scissors that had been jammed into a plasma screen that was left behind because if they can't steal it, they're gonna destroy it.

[00:58:08] They don't only leave anything behind. They found the Russians had taken most of the computers, the projectors and other electronic equipment. It, it, it's incredible. So let's talk about the turnaround here. A little. You might have heard stories about some of these bad guys that have smashed and grabbed their way into apple stores.

[00:58:28] So they get into the apple store. They grab laptops on iPads, no longer iPods, cuz they don't make those anymore. And I phones. And they take them and they run with them. Well, nowadays there's not a whole lot of use for those. Now what they have been doing, some of these bad guys is, is they take some parts and use them in stolen equipment.

[00:58:55] They sell them on the used market, et cetera. But when you're talking about something specific, like an iPhone that needs specific activation. Completely different problem arises for these guys because that iPhone needs to have a SIM card in order to get onto the cell network. And it also has built in serial numbers.

[00:59:17] So what happens in those cases while apple goes ahead and disables them. So as soon as they connect to the internet, let's say they put 'em on wifi. They don't get a SIM card. They don't. service from T-Mobile or Verizon or whoever it might be. So now they disconnect to the wifi and it calls home, cuz it's gonna get updates.

[00:59:37] So on download stuff from the app store and they find that it's been bricked. Now you can do that with a lot of mobile device managers that are available for. All kinds of equipment nowadays, but certainly apple equipment where if a phone is lost or stolen or a laptop or other pieces of equipment, you can get on the MDM and disable it, have it remotely erased, et cetera.

[01:00:03] Now, police have had some interesting problems with that. Because a bad guy might go ahead and erase a smartphone. That's in the evidence locker at the police station. So they're, they're doing things like putting them into Fairday cages or static bags or other things to try and stop that. So I think we've established here that the higher tech equipment is pretty well protected.

[01:00:28] You steal it. It's not gonna do you much. Good. So one of the things the Russian stole when they were in, uh, it's called, uh, I think you pronounce it. Uh, Mela me pole, uh, which is again, a Erian city is they stole all of the equipment from a farm equipment dealership and shipped it to Chenia. Now that's according to a source in, uh, a businessman in the area that CNN is reporting on.

[01:01:01] So they shipped this equipment. We're talking about combines harvesters worth 300 grand a piece. They shipped it 700 miles. and the thieves were ultimately unable to use the equipment, cuz it had been locked remotely. So think about agriculture equipment that John Deere, in this case, these pieces of equipment, they, they drive themselves.

[01:01:27] It's autonomous. It goes up and down the fields. Goes any pattern that you want to it'll bring itself within a foot or an inch of your boundaries, right. Of your property being very, very efficient the whole time, whether it's planting or harvesting, et cetera. And that's just a phenomenal thing because it saves so much time for the farmer makes it easier to do the companies like John Deere.

[01:01:54] Want to sell as many pieces of this equipment as they possibly can. And farming is known to be a, what not terribly profitable business. It certainly isn't like Facebook. So how can they get this expensive equipment into the hands of a lot of farmers? Well, what they do is they lease it. So you can lease the equipment through leasing company or maybe directly from the manufacturer and now you're off and running.

[01:02:22] But what happens if the lease isn't paid now? It's one thing. If you don't pay your lease on a $2,000 laptop, right? They're probably not gonna come hunting for you, but when you're talking about a $300,000 harvester, they're more interested. So the leasing company. Has titled to the equipment and the leasing company can shut it off remotely.

[01:02:47] Right? You see where I'm going with this so that they can get their equipment in the hands of more farmers cuz the farmers can lease it. It costs them less. They don't have to have a big cash payment. Right? You see how this all works. So when the Russian forces stole this equipment, that's valued. Total value here is about $5 million.

[01:03:08] They were able to shut it all. And obviously, if you can't start the engine, because it's all shut off and it's all run by computers nowadays, and you know, there's pros and cons to that. I think there's a lot of cons, but, uh, what are you gonna do? How's that gonna work for you? Well, it. Isn't going to work for you.

[01:03:29] And they were able to track it. It had GPS trackers find out exactly where it was. That's how they know it was taken to Chenia and could be controlled remotely. And in this case, how'd they control it. Well, they completely. Shut it off. Even if they sell the harvesters for spare parts, they'll learn some money, but they sure can be able to sell 'em for the 300 grand that they were actually worth.

[01:03:56] Hey, stick around. We'll be right back and visit me [email protected]. If you sign up there, you'll be able to get my insider show note. And every week I have a quick five. Training right there in your emails, Craig Peter san.com. That's S O N in case you're wondering.

[01:04:21] If you've been worried about ransomware, you are right to worry. It's up. It's costly. And we're gonna talk about that right now. What are the stats? What can you do? What happens if you do get hacked? Interesting world.

[01:04:37] Ransomware has been a very long running problem. I remember a client of ours, a car dealership who we had gone in.

[01:04:48] We had improved all of their systems and their security and one of their. People who was actually a senior manager, ended up downloading a piece of ransomware, one of these encrypted ones and opened it up and his machine, all of a sudden TA, guess what it had ransomware on it. One of those big reds.

[01:05:10] Greens that say pay up is send us this much Bitcoin. And here's our address. Right. All of that sort of stuff. And he called us up and said, what what's going on here? What happened? Well, first of all, don't bring your own machine into the office. Secondly, don't open up particularly encrypted files using the password that they gave.

[01:05:33] and thirdly, we stopped it automatically. It did not spread. We were able to completely restore his computer. Now let's consider here at the consequences of what happened. So he obviously was scared. Uh, and within a matter of a couple of hours, we actually had him back to where he was and it didn't spread.

[01:06:01] So the consequences there, they, they weren't that bad. But how about if it had gotten worse? How about if they ransomware. Also before it started holding his computer ransom, went out and found all of the data about their customers. Right. Would, do you think an auto dealership would love to hear that all of their customer data was stolen and released all of the personal data of all of their customers?

[01:06:28] Right? Obviously not. So there's a potential cost there. And then how long do you think it would take a normal company? That thinks they have backups to get back online. Well, I can tell you it'll take quite a while because the biggest problem is most backups don't work. We have yet to go into a business that was actually doing backups that would work to help restore them.

[01:06:55] And if you're interested, I can send you, I I've got something. I wrote up. Be glad to email it back to you. Uh, obviously as usual, no charge. and you'll be able to go into that and figure out what you should do. Cause I, I break it down into the different types of backups and why you might want to use them or why you might not want to use them, but ransomware.

[01:07:19] Is a kind of a pernicious nasty little thing, particularly nowadays, because it's two, two factor, right. First is they've encrypted your data. You can't get to it. And then the second side of that is okay, well, I can't get to my data and now they're threatening to hold my data ransom or they'll release. So they they'll put it out there.

[01:07:43] And of course, if you're in a regulated industry, which actually car dealers are because they deal with financial transactions, leases, loans, that sort of thing, uh, you can lose your license for your business. You can U lose your ability to go ahead and frankly, uh, make loans and work with financial companies and financial instruments.

[01:08:08] It could be a very, very big deal. so there are a lot of potential things that can happen all the way from losing your reputation as a business or an individual losing all of the money in your operating account. And we, again, we've got a client that, uh, we picked up afterwards. That, uh, yes, indeed. They lost all of the money in their operating account.

[01:08:32] And, uh, then how do you make payroll? How do you do things? Well, there's a new study that came out from checkpoint. Checkpoint is one of the original firewall companies and they had a look at ransomware. What are the costs of ransomware? Now bottom line, I'm looking at some stats here on a couple of different sites.

[01:08:53] Uh, one is by the way, KTI, which is a big ransomware gang that also got hacked after they said we are going to attack anyone that. Uh, that doesn't defend Vlad's invasion of Ukraine, and then they got hacked and their information was released, but here's ransomware statistics. This is from cloud words. Uh, first of all, the largest ransom demand is $50 million.

[01:09:21] And that was in 2021 to Acer big computer company. Now 37% of businesses were hit by ransomware. In 2021. This is amazing. They're they're expecting by 2031. So in about a decade, ransomware is gonna be costing about $265 billion a year. Now on average, uh, Ransomware costs businesses. 1.8, 5 million to recover from an attack.

[01:09:53] Now that's obviously not a one or two person place, but think of the car dealer again, how much money are they going to make over the year or over the life of the business? Right? If you're a car dealer, you have a to print money, right? You you're selling car model or cars from manufacturer X. And now you have the right to do that and they can remove that.

[01:10:16] Right? How many tens, hundreds of millions of dollars might that end up costing you? Yeah. Big deal. Total cost of ransomware last year, 20 billion. Now these are the interesting statistics here right now. So pay closer attention to this 32% of ransomware victims paid a ransom demand. So about her third paid ransom demand.

[01:10:41] Last. it's it's actually down. Cuz my recollection is it used to be about 50% would pay a ransom. Now on average that one third of victims that paid a ransom only recovered 65% of their data. Now that differs from a number I've been using from the FBI. That's a little bit older that was saying it's it's a little, little better than 50%, but 65% of pain victims recovered their data.

[01:11:12] Now isn't that absolutely amazing. Now 57% of companies are able to recover the data using a cloud backup. Now think about the different types of backup cloud backup is something that can work pretty well if you're a home user, but how long did it take for your system to get backed? Probably took weeks, right?

[01:11:35] For a, a regular computer over a regular internet line. Now restoring from backup's gonna be faster because your down link is usually faster than your uplink. That's not true for businesses that have real internet service, like, uh, ours. It it's the same bandwidth up as it is down. But it can take again, days or weeks to try and recover your machine.

[01:11:58] So it's very, very expensive. And I wish I had more time to go into this, but looking at the costs here and the fact that insurance companies are no longer paying out for a lot of these ransomware attacks, it could be incredibly expensive for you incredibly. So here you. The number one business types by industry for ransomware tax retail.

[01:12:32] That makes sense. Doesn't it. Real estate. Electrical contractors, law firms and wholesale building materials. Isn't that interesting? And that's probably because none of these people are really aware, conscious of doing what, of keeping their data secure of having a good it team, a good it department. So there's your bottom line.

[01:12:59] Uh, those are the guys that are getting hit. The most, the numbers are increasing dramatically and your costs are not just in the money. You might pay as a ransom. And so, as it turns out in pretty much every case prevention. Is less expensive and much better than the cure of trying to pay ransom or trying to restore from backups.

[01:13:26] Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson. You can get my weekly show notes by just going to Craig peterson.com. And I'll also send you my special report on how to do passwords stick around will be right back.

[01:13:44] You know, you and I have talked about passwords before the way to generate them and how important they are. And we we'll go over that again a little bit in just a second, but there is a new standard out there that will eliminate the need for passwords.

[01:14:00] Passwords are kind of an, a necessary evil, at least they have been forever. I, I remember, I think the only system I've ever really used that did not require passwords was the IBM 360.

[01:14:17] Yeah, 360, you know, you punch up the cards, all of the JCL you feed the card deck in and off it goes. And does this little thing that was a different day, a different era. When I started in college in university, we. We had remote systems, timeshare systems that we could log into. And there weren't much in the line of password requirements in, but you had a username.

[01:14:47] You had a simple password. And I remember one of our instructors, his name was Robert, Andrew Lang. And, uh, his password was always some sort of a combination of RA Lang. So it was always easy to guess what his, what his password was. Today, it has gotten a lot worse today. We have devices with us all of the time.

[01:15:09] You might be wearing a smart watch. That requires a password. You of course probably have a smart phone. That's also maybe requiring a password, certainly after boots nowadays they use fingerprints or facial recognition, which is handy, but has its own drawbacks. But how about the websites? You're going to the systems you're using when you're at work and logging in, they all require passwords.

[01:15:39] And usernames of some sort or another well, apple, Google, and Microsoft have all committed to expanding their support for a standard. That's actually been out there for, for a few years. It's called the Fido standard. And the idea behind this is that you don't have to have a password in order to log. Now that's really kind of an interesting thing, right?

[01:16:07] Just looking at it because we're, we're so used to having this password only authentic. And of course the, the thing to do there is make sure you have for your password, multiple words in the password, it should really be a pass phrase. And between the words put in special characters or numbers, maybe mix.

[01:16:29] Upper lowercase a little bit. In those words, those are the best passwords, you know, 20 characters, 30 characters long. And then if you have to have a pin, I typically use a 12 digit pin. And how do I remember all of these? Cuz I use a completely different password for every website and right now, Let me pull it up.

[01:16:52] I'm using one password dot com's password manager. And my main password for that is about 25 characters long. And I have thirty one hundred and thirty five. Entries here in my password manager, 3,100. That is a whole lot of passwords, right? As well as, um, software licenses and a few other things in there.

[01:17:19] That's how we remember them is using a password manager. One password.com is my favorite. Now, obviously I don't make any money by referring you there. I, I really do like that. Uh, some others that I've liked in the past include last pass, but they really messed. With some of their cybersecurity last year and I lost, lost my faith in it.

[01:17:41] So now what they're trying to do is make these websites that we go to as well as some apps to have a consistent, secure, and passwordless sign in. and they're gonna make it available to consumers across all kinds of devices and platforms. That's why you've got apple, Google, and Microsoft all committing to it.

[01:18:05] And you can bet everybody else is going to follow along because there's hundreds of other companies that have decided they're gonna work with the Fido Alliance and they're gonna create this passwordless future. Which I like this idea. So how does this work? Well, basically you need to have a smartphone.

[01:18:24] This is, I'm just gonna go with the most standard way that this is going to work here in the future. And you can then have a, a. Pass key. This is kind of like a multifactor authentication or two factor authentication. So for instance, right now, when I sign into a website online, I'm giving a username, I'm giving a password and then it comes up and it asks me for a code.

[01:18:48] So I enter an a six digit code and that code changes every 30 seconds. And again, I use my password manager from one password dot. In order to generate that code. So that's how I log into Microsoft sites and Google sites and all kinds of sites out there. So it's kind of a similar thing here now for the sites for my company, because we do cyber security for businesses, including regulated businesses.

[01:19:16] We have biometrics tied in as. so to log into our systems, I have to have a username. I have to have a password. Uh, I then am sent to a single sign on page where I have to have a message sent to my smart device. That then has a special app that uses biometrics either a face ID or a fingerprint to verify who I am.

[01:19:41] So, yeah, there's a lot there, but I have to protect my customer's data. Something that very, very few it's crazy. Um, actual so-called managed security services providers do, but it's important, right? By the way, if you want my password. Special report, just go to Craig peterson.com. Sign up for my email list.

[01:20:07] I'll send that to you. That's what we're sending out right now for anyone who signs up [email protected]. And if you'd like a copy of it and you're already on the list, just go ahead and email me M E. At Craig peterson.com and ask for the password special report where I go through a lot of this sort of thing.

[01:20:25] So what will happen with this is you go to a website and it might come up with a QR code. So you then scan that QR code with your phone and verify it, authorize it on your phone. You might again have it set up so that your phone requires a facial recognition or perhaps it'll require a fingerprint. And now you are in.

[01:20:47] Which is very cool. They fix some security problems in Fido over the last few years, which is great over the coming year. You're going to see this available on apple devices, Google Microsoft platforms. And it really is simple, stronger authentication. That's what Fido calls it. Right. But it is going to make your life a lot easy.

[01:21:12] It easier. It is a standard and the passwordless future makes a whole lot of sense for all of us. Now I wanna talk about another thing here that has bothered me for a long time. I have a sister-in-law. who is in the medical field and, and, uh, gives prescriptions, you know, doctor thing. And, uh, I think she's not quite a doctor.

[01:21:35] I can't remember what she has or she's an LPN or something. Anyhow. So she. We'll get on a zoom call with someone and they'll go through medical history and what's happening right now and she'll make prescriptions. And so I warned her about that saying, you know, it is very bad to be using zoom because zoom is not secure.

[01:22:01] Never has been, probably never will be right. If you want secure, you. To go and pay for it from one of these providers like WebEx, that's what we use. We have a version of WebEx that is set up to be secure. So I talked to her about that and said, Hey, listen, you can't do this. You you've really got to go another way here.

[01:22:23] And so she started using one of these mental or. Medical health apps. What I wanna talk about right now specifically are some checks that were just performed some audits on mental health apps. That's why I messed up a second ago, but what they looked at is that things are a serious, serious problem there.

[01:22:50] And then in fact, the threat post is calling it, uh, creepy. Frankly, just plain old creepy. So they've got some good intentions. They want to help with mental health. You've probably seen these or at least heard them advertise. So you can get on the horn with, uh, mental health, professional, uh, doctor or otherwise in order to help you here with your psychological or spiritual wellbeing.

[01:23:15] And people are sharing their personal and sensitive data with third parties and of 32 mental health and prayer mobile apps that were investigated by the open source organization. 28, 28 of the 32 were found to be inherently insecure and were given a privacy, not included label, including, uh, others here.

[01:23:41] So this is a report. uh, that was released here by the open source organization, tied into Mozilla Mozilla. Those are the Firefox people. They have what they call their minimum security standards. So things like requiring strong passwords, managing security, updates, and vulnerabilities, et cetera. 25 of the 32 failed to meet.

[01:24:05] Even those minimum security standards. So these apps are dealing with some of the most sensitive men, mental health and wellness issues people can possibly have, right? Depression, anxieties, suicidal thoughts, domestic violence, eating disorders. And they are being just terrible with your security Mozilla researchers spent 255 hours or, or about eight hours per product pairing under the hood of the security, watching the data that was going back and forth, right.

[01:24:41] Between all of these mental health and prayer apps. It was just crazy. So for example, eight of the apps reviewed allowed week passwords. That range. One digit one as the password, 2, 1, 1, 1 while a mental health app called a mood fit only required one letter or digit as a password. Now that is very concerning for an app that collects mood and symptom data.

[01:25:11] So be very careful. Um, two of the apps better help a popular app that connects users with therapists and better stop suicide, which is of course a suicide prevention app have vague and messy. According to Mozilla privacy policies, they have little or no effect on actual. User data protection. So be very, very careful.

[01:25:35] And if you are a mental health professional, or a medical professional, don't just go and use these open video calls, et cetera, et cetera, find something good. And there are some standards out there. Again. Visit me online, get my insider show notes every week. Get my little mini training. They come out most weeks, just go to Craig peterson.com.

[01:26:00] Craig peterson.com. And I'll send you my special report on passwords and more.

Do You Know Anyone Who Uses TikTok? Kids Are Dying Because of It!

TikTok has been in the news for a lot of reasons. It is now confirmed. It is used for Chinese spy operations, but the big problem right now is the kids that are dying because of TikTok.

[Automatic transcript follows]

You are not alone. I'm Craig Peterson TikTok has been in the crosshairs for quite a while. This is a Chinese company. Tencent is the Chinese company that started them up and they really kind of got their foundation through what you'd call challenges probably.

[00:00:37] Everybody remembers the ice bucket challenge and that ice bucket challenge was floating around. They were doing it on YouTube, TikTok everywhere, and it was to benefit really ALS. Which is absolutely kind of fantastic. And this was eight years ago, I guess. I don't know, 10 years, 2014, I think actually, uh, a long time ago.

[00:01:03] I remember like it was yesterday and they raised apparently $115 million. The idea was that you would challenge someone else to do this ice bucket challenge and in, so doing, you would donate money to ALS. That is really kind of cool. What a great idea for ALS. So I would, for instance, get challenged by someone who dumped a bucket of ice water over their head.

[00:01:34] To do the same and donate to ALS Lou Gehrig's disease. That's kind of cool. Obviously they're not supporting Lou Gehrigs are supporting the research and due stopping it. Right. And people did it. And as I said, $115 million later, ALS research is probably a little further along. You kind of hope so it's easy in a big organization to chew up $115 million.

[00:02:00] That's for sure. But bill gates did it. Ton of celebrities did it. And ultimately people took that basic idea and, and tried to put it into other types of fundraisers. You know, that's all well and good, you know, it kind of kind of died down, uh, for a while. They did a whole bunch of other things I'm looking right now, by the way.

[00:02:28] Uh, let's see. Yeah, it was ALS association. This is Wikipedia, which is, uh, sometimes to believe be believed most of the time not. And a, the ALS site was where I was quoing from before Wikipedia is saying that. There was over 220 million worldwide raised for ALS research. So it's probably the difference between worldwide and in the us.

[00:02:54] So they wanted to make it kind of an annual event. It just didn't happen. And the cold water challenge. It started really in 1991. So they, they took it and they ran with it. Well, one of the things that TikTok has been doing a lot of is challenges and they they're different kinds of challenges. They have musical challenges where someone will.

[00:03:20] Post, uh, some music usually by a star of some sort. And they'll go ahead and have a, maybe a dance challenge and maybe a, you know, a challenge for your kitty cat or your dog, whatever, what, whatever it might be. But it's been really good for TikTok to grow. And a lot of people are doing it. Different, crazy things that they've done.

[00:03:45] You've got the gorilla glue girl. Do you remember her? she, she decided to use gorilla glue in her hair rather than I guess some sort of, uh, I don't know. Oil or something to hold her hair down. And it definitely held her hair down. She sued, she sued them. It's absolutely crazy what she did. So the gorilla glue girl, probably not really a challenge, but she, uh, this is CRA, this is when the New York post undoubtedly cemented her place on talk's most stupid Mount Rushmore.

[00:04:20] Because she slathered her hair with gorilla glue and she had to go in and get it. Surgically repaired. It took four hours, $20,000 in donations came in hundreds of free air products, even a full-time agent. The DIY vampire fangs. Uh, this is crazy. This is in Halloween a couple of years ago. Super gluing costume vampire fangs to your teeth.

[00:04:50] Uh, 9 million views on that one. Tooth filing. Oh, this is crazy, absolutely crazy. They I'm, I'm looking at a picture of it right now of the video, one of the videos. Anyway, anyways, it was on TikTok and, uh, you know, this is kind of the realm of toothless TikTok challenges, but. They, uh, they were attempting to fix their uneven smiles by using a nail file to sand their teeth down the incisors.

[00:05:24] If they were, were a little bit too big. Oh, man, the dentist got upset about that for very good reason. You're destroying the enamel on the outside of your teeth. Irreparable damage, the face wax challenge. Oh, look at this picture. This is crazy billions of videos in counting. Uh, they they're putting wax, although wax all over people's face.

[00:05:50] Oh, my goodness. So they caked the whole face, including the eyes with wax, like it's, you know, casting mold. Have you seen those things before they even have wax dip Q ticks tips stuck in their noses to get rid of those nasal hairs? Oh man. Very, very traumatic. Um, I'm not gonna talk about this one. It involves a sensitive body part, the corn cob challenge.

[00:06:22] Uh, this is, uh, cons eating corn by attaching the cob. That or to a spinning drill bit. If you can believe that. Oh man, 22 hamburgers. Here's another one. The cereal challenge. Uh, a person pours milk and cereal into the open mouth of a person laying down and eats breakfast from the human bowl. Choking hazards.

[00:06:50] Obviously there, the skull breaker challenge, this apparently started in Venezuela and it depicted three friends jumping next to each other as the book ending, Bud's kick in the middle guy's feet out from under him. So what ends up happening is that person crashes to the ground landing on their back, hitting.

[00:07:12] The head in the process injuries reported Miami, New York, New Jersey, Arizona, uh, Dayton beach, Florida police have charged two high school teens with misdemeanor, battery and cyber bullying, Mexico. The penny challenge. Oh my gosh. Um, This involves. And I talked about this one here on the radio, too, taking a penny and putting it on a plug.

[00:07:41] So you partially plug. A plug into the wall, into the socket and then you stick a penny behind it to shore out the leads. Yeah. So when the, when the penny or whatever coin you're putting in there hits those metal prongs there's sparks electrical system damage, and some cases fire, uh, them fire marshal down in, uh, one of the towns.

[00:08:08] Ostro key, I guess it is in mass. Uh, has a photo of a scorched outlet in Holden. Oh, there you go. Reportedly caused by the viral prank. The Benadryl challenge, Chacha slide, pee your pants. Uh,

[00:08:31] there's another one, the other side, verbal abuse challenge, mom and dads verbally abusing their kids. I color them a mistake in some cases mentioning the word abortion. Oh my goodness. Flash mobs. Uh, dipping challenge. Oh, that'll make you sweet eating and swallowing dip and the blackout challenge. That's the one we're talking about right now.

[00:08:54] There there's so many of these things. If you don't know what's going on on TikTok, this is it, right. I, I just told you a bunch that are dangerous. Absolutely crazy. Nobody should be doing that sort of stuff, but they are, well, parents are saying now the TikTok failed to act after the first reported death in this blackout challenge, as you can guess, the blackout challenge is where kids black out.

[00:09:25] They have to strangle themselves until they pass. This was in my emails this week, this whole thing, I've got a link to some of these articles. You'll find [email protected]. If you didn't get it on Tuesday morning, make sure you go to Craig peterson.com and sign up right now. But parents of two girls, these are two of the seven kids that are known to have died from this blackout challenge.

[00:09:53] Are suing these girls, their daughters that died were ages eight and nine nine. They're claiming according to ours, Technica that their kids became addicted to TikTok. They were fed a constant stream of seemingly harmless challenge videos, persuading them to participate and then died after attempting the blackout challenge.

[00:10:22] So they're seeking damages from TikTok for the product design. Now remember TikTok, isn't the one coming up with these challenges. It's the users who are on TikTok that are coming up with them. Now TikTok did respond. He told the New York, they told the New York times the spokesperson that the, the company would not comment on continuing litigation.

[00:10:45] And they also linked a prior company statement to people magazine about a 10 year old girl who also died after attempting the blackout challenge. At that time, TikTok said the disturbing challenge predated their platform and had never become a TikTok. Trend now we know TikTok just a few weeks ago.

[00:11:06] Confirmed has been sending all of the videos, all of the user information, everything to China. So there you have it avoid TikTok and man, don't let your kids on it. Stick around. We'll be right back.

[00:11:25] Hey, Microsoft is giving me nightmares again, and frankly, much of the cybersecurity community because of their change. They just change direction in a way that is much, much less safe. I, I don't know what's going on there.

[00:11:42] We over the years have seen Microsoft be just kind of the bane of our existence. Anybody that's trying to stay secure, it's been terrible.

[00:11:55] There's software, just horrible. It was not designed but frankly, find frankly. All it's just crazy. And then they brought Dave Cutler in and I worked on NT, the pre one, oh, versions, windows, NT, their new technology, which kind of underlines all of the modern versions of Microsoft windows. And what happens well, instead of doing things securely, really following in the footsteps of a.

[00:12:28] Call print system, digital equipment corporation. They decided to just go completely different direction and, uh, rip things out and must make this compatible with anything that's ever been written, kind of the Intel philosophy. And by doing all of that, they lost all of the wonderful security that VMs had.

[00:12:48] This operating system that Dave Cutler had kind of led up over in the deck world. we ended up with a piece of garbage, really? It was just terrible. Oh my goodness. And I I've been absolutely amazed since I got rid of bill gates and got rid of that other guy that was in there running things for a wild bomber, who was just incredibly, just terrible.

[00:13:18] Uh, and they've really come a long way. Their new CEO, the last few years has done some. Wonderful things. Some really amazing things here to increase. Microsoft's not just productivity for the users, but their profitability and their cyber security, which is why now I am so. Puzzled, because one of the things that has been a killer for cybersecurity has been this whole concept that micro has Microsoft has of well had anyways of, well, let let's make it so that you can write programs and put them into this spreadsheet.

[00:13:56] Visual basic visual C plus plus C. We'll make things ever so much better. And of course, what was visual basic used for in some of our word documents and our Excel documents, it was used to hack our computers. Yes, indeed. The bad guys used a programming language to cause. All kinds of havoc, who would've thought a, so Microsoft decided, well, Hey, listen, uh, we are going to turn off macros by default because they are too dangerous.

[00:14:35] Boy, are they too dangerous? Whatever programming language you're using. Come on, look at Java. Java has just been a nightmare as well. Over the years for cybersecurity, it's gotten better. Of course they've tightened it. But I can remember what, 15, 20 years ago, first using Java and seeing all of the problems.

[00:14:57] We still got them. I've got a new client that I've been helping. They're a startup and they are using Java for a lot of the stuff that they are writing. And it's a nightmare trying to get them to. Up to date on the Java engines that they're using and, and they're using some that have massive known vulnerabilities and that's kinda what happens with the macros.

[00:15:23] It, yeah. Great. Look at, you can write files to desk. You can do all kinds of really cool things. Isn't this just wonderful. Yeah. If the whole world was kind and generous and wasn't trying to break into our computer computers. Uh it's. It's incredible. So in February, 2022, Microsoft announced a major change.

[00:15:49] And it put this change in place to, as they said, combat the growing scourge of ransomware and other, uh, really malware attacks. So they're going to block the downloaded macros and office versions, going back to office 20. Team they're gonna be releasing patches for them. And you could still enable macros for these different files, PowerPoint, what, whatever you're doing here, but it's much more difficult to enable it because they are so dangerous.

[00:16:24] Absolutely. Dangerous and, uh, well, we can get into all of the details behind it. You know, the zone identifier tag. And if you have an NTFS volume, it can be in there market, the web it's already used in office. They're kind of emulating what apple has been doing for quite some time in order to really try and focus you saying, Hey, listen, you downloaded that app from the internet.

[00:16:50] Do you really, really. Really want to use it. Uh, you don't think this through a little bit and sure enough, you know, they decided, yeah, this is a bad idea. We can't let people just run macros willy-nilly uh, by the way, why, why were all these things happening? Well, if I was to boil it down, you probably could read between those lines.

[00:17:11] When I was talking earlier really bad. Product management inside Microsoft. Now they've got some great programmers, but, uh, and some great minds there. I, I know a few people, well, I mentioned Cutler who went over there, but I know a lot of other guys that went over there to work for Microsoft, but they just don't have the product management that frankly they need to have.

[00:17:35] And that is caused just all kinds of nightmares. So what's happened. Well, Microsoft made a very big announce. They have decided that they are going to let you know, nevermind. Nevermind. They have reversed course, and they're going to allow untrusted macros to be opened by default in word and other office applications.

[00:18:05] So, uh, they also said here just a few days ago that, Hey, um, Um, you know, the, nevermind. We said that we are gonna allow macros, uh, just by default in everything. Um, yeah, well that that's gonna be temporary, I guess. It's, you know, temporary in passing just like inflation, right? Don't don't worry about it. Uh, nothing is here.

[00:18:28] This is absolutely crazy. Make up your mind. Macros have been the bane of existence for so many. Of us cybersecurity people out there. And another thing too, that's just been really bad is their wonderful little scripting language, their, their power shell, which is being used all the time now by the bad guys to infect machines because your standard malware.

[00:19:00] You know, this antivirus software that you buy, the, you know, not the really good stuff, but the stuff that you buy as a consumer would buy you'd get at staples or Walmart or online does not work against it. And again, it's just like, they're stealing again. This one's from the Unix world. We've had shells in Unix since the seventies.

[00:19:25] and, uh, you know, they, they just, they do it, they do it wrong. They. And they make it, uh, just worse. I'm shaking my head. I, I, you can tell I am no Microsoft fan, right? Uh, people are using it mainly because businesses buy it. And why do businesses buy it? Because the purchasing guy. Looks for check boxes. Oh yes.

[00:19:48] Microsoft windows checks all these boxes and the purchasing guy doesn't care about the user interface. The purchasing guy doesn't really care about how secure it is. It doesn't care about how Des well designed it is. It doesn't care about its network connectivity. So yeah, that's why we have so many copies of windows out there.

[00:20:07] This is a sad decision blocking Microsoft office macros would do infinitely more to actually stop real threats out there than all of the Intel blogs that are out there that are telling us about the problems. I just don't get it. It's absolutely crazy. Everybody is criticizing the move that's in the cybersecurity space.

[00:20:36] Bad decision again from Microsoft. So make sure your macros are turned off. You can find this article. I sent it out my show notes on Tuesday. Craig peterson.com.

[00:20:52] There's been a lot of talked about Elon Musk, this whole Twitter deal. But I think everybody that I have read articles from is missing the boat here. So I'm gonna give you my view of what's happening as a business person, myself.

[00:21:08] Elon Musk made a $44 billion bid to buy Twitter. You've I'm sure you've heard of this.

[00:21:17] It's been talked about now for months and months and months. And I, I want to talk about what happened from my. Perspective with Elon Musk saying, no, um, this deal is over. I'm not gonna follow through on this. And again, this is my opinion. This is me doing a little bit of mind reading here of, of Elon MOS and maybe one or two of the things that.

[00:21:43] That he thought about when he canceled this deal. Now, remember, initially he's put that offer out. And the Twitter board of director said, no, no, no, we're not gonna take it for whatever reason. Right. What's the real reason they might. They, they they'll say what. They want you to hear about what the reason is, but it's not necessarily the reason.

[00:22:06] So initially Twitter said, no, we're not gonna do it. And then Twitter said, yeah. Okay. We'll do it because there was frankly, this is again, me, a lot of. People who were investors in Twitter that were pretty upset that this offer from Musk, that was a very good offer. He was offering more than the stock was trading for would go away.

[00:22:30] They wanted it. They wanted to get out of Twitter. You know is not what you're supposed to be doing. Right. You're making money. Even if you keep your stock, you're, you're gonna be well vested. And that's what you're trying to do is make some money for yourself or your investors. So many of us have retirement money that's in the stock market.

[00:22:52] Yeah. Like you haven't noticed that. Right. There's the, your retirement's gone down by 50% or more it's in the stock market. So you want the people who are running these companies to make good fiscal fiscal decisions so that your money that's invested in there, isn't going away. So you have some money for retirement.

[00:23:15] So that pressure on the Twitter board is really what got them to move and say, yeah, we'll accept the offer. Now Elon Musk made that offer based on the valuation of Twitter and its stock, because really what Musk had to do is buy at least a controlling interest in Twitter stock in order to take it over.

[00:23:42] So Elon's there saying, okay. I'm offering 44 billion and it is based on public information. How does this work? Public companies have to provide stockholders and investors and, and the general community out there in information about their company. So they'll have things you've probably heard terms like forward looking statements.

[00:24:11] They'll say things that Elon Musk has certainly got in trouble before for saying things that weren't done through the securities and exchange commission. So, yeah. Okay, great. Uh, we're not doing, we're not doing as well as we thought we would. Uh, you know, when these companies are making announcements, the, all of these, uh, analysts are looking at what they think they're going to announce and how much of earnings per share they'll have, and whether they're gonna pay dividends.

[00:24:45] You've heard about all of this. Well, one of the things that has to go into those security and exchange commission filings, the S E C is the number of actual eyeballs you have. So you see an advertisers interested in how many people are on Twitter and how many people are seeing the ads, cuz that's how they're paying.

[00:25:10] Right? That's how they justify paying Twitter to run ads. Makes sense. I think, well, the same thing is true for the investors. They wanna know how many eyeballs are on there because that is what the ads are worth and based on what the ads are worth, that is exactly, uh, what we value the company had. Right?

[00:25:35] So, so all of these things and of course more, but those are the core things that go into valuing a business such as Twitter. So Twitter's there, they're putting out the S E C filings and they're telling the securities and exchange commission. Yeah, we have 5% of our Twitter accounts are operated by bots as many as 5%.

[00:26:04] That's what they're saying. Now various experts who have looked for the behavior, that would be a bot have said, the number may be closer to 15%. And I've even, I've heard numbers that are saying that the traffic on Twitter could be. Gen bot generated, uh, at 40 to 60% rates. So obviously you have count accounts that are bots, and then you have the traffic that they generate different numbers in both cases.

[00:26:37] So you've got all of this traffic being generated by bots, and that means it's not legitimate traffic. now what's a bot, a, a bot is, and you know, I've explained this before. Apologize for people that have heard it, but a, a, a bot is a kind of a robot think of it that way. And these robots go ahead and they repost things.

[00:27:06] They post things using hashtags and they're used by evil people. Uh, yeah, I I'm, I'm using that term now. Evil people, people who are trying to get you to do something and are manipulating. so very frequently, we have seen evil people out there who are trying to manipulate the value of a stock by going ahead and using their hashtag their keyword and having bots mention it thousands of times.

[00:27:43] So now that keywords going up and you as a regular user on Twitter, you see that keyword, maybe you're doing some research based on that keyword. And you find that yes, indeed. Uh, these people really have, uh, got a great business and this is gonna be fantastic. So they get eyeballs. And hopefully you're clicking through to their website and maybe they're looking for investors.

[00:28:10] And so you invest in them. You, you see what they're doing. So instead of getting it organically, instead of doing it the way I've done business, and my, I have a friend that says, Hey, Craig, if you were a, as unethical as these other people, like Zuckerberg, like bill gates, like so many others, if you were unethical, you'd be a billionaire too.

[00:28:32] My ethics say that you should not be manipulating people, right? I, if I've got something to offer that you want great, but these bots are used for manipulation purposes only, only. So if it's 5% bots, as much as 5% Twitters has a certain value. And if it's 15%. It has a different value. And that's what Elon Musk has been saying.

[00:29:03] What's the real value of Twitter. Now that it's come out, that the number of bots on Twitter is probably much higher than Twitter's been saying. While now you get the securities and exchange commission upset with you, and I bet you, there are investigations underway, criminal and otherwise against Twitter.

[00:29:29] And more than we've even heard about. So Elon Musk would be a fool to buy Twitter. And when you buy a company, you inherit all of its problems, including its lawsuits and potential lawsuits. So can you imagine the tens hundreds of millions of dollars they're gonna be spent defending Twitter and its board of directors?

[00:29:55] If indeed these things are true. Yeah. Hey, I've got a great article this week from the orange county register, talking about this, explaining. It all out, not as well as I did, but make sure you get my newsletter. My insider show notes, Tuesday mornings, Craig Peter son.com.

[00:30:16] Our technology related businesses. Now this includes everybody from apple, all the way through, um, car manufacturers, like Ford or GM. They have a disaster scenario that we're gonna talk about right now. And hopefully it doesn't happen.

[00:30:33] I have been kind of warning about this for a while. And I definitely been thinking about this for a long while and a great article that came out in nine to five Mac this week that I have a link to in my newsletter.

[00:30:50] This is in my insider show notes newsletter that comes out Tuesday mornings. This is the, the same show notes that I use. For the radio show and for my radio and television appearances. So make sure you are subscribed to keep you up to date. And of course you can subscribe [email protected]. So this is a great little article it's titled Apple's disaster scenario is a real possibility.

[00:31:23] Say us and UK security services. What is the disaster scenario? It is the Chinese takeover of Taiwan, which would be very bad. We're about to explain why China, you probably have heard this before. Claims Taiwan is its own and Taiwan claims mainland China as its own, as they. Had, uh, the, the rulers, if you will, of China at the time of the communist takeover fled to Taiwan, basically a government in exile.

[00:32:00] So good luck Taiwan taking over China again, that that just isn't gonna happen. But the other side really. Could happen. So the heads of both the us and UK security services gave an unprecedented warning. This is I five and FBI heads. And, uh, of course that's director Christopher Ray. They're very, very worried.

[00:32:30] This is an unprecedented joint appearance in London. You probably did not hear about this anywhere else. This might be the first time you're hearing about it, but they said that China was quote the biggest long term threat to our economic and national. Security. They talked about how China's interfered in the politics, including recent elections.

[00:32:55] Of course, I've talked about that here. And of course, Russia also does some of that, but China, China, excuse me, is the real threat. I five's had said that they have more than doubled the work against Chinese activity in the last three years. They're going to be doubling it again. I five is now running seven times as many investigations related to China.

[00:33:21] Compared to 2018, uh, FBIs Christopher Ray warn that if China was to forcibly take Taiwan, it would represent one of the most horrific business disruptions the world has ever. Scene. And then China responded and said that the I five was trying to hype up the China threat theory, casting away imagined demon.

[00:33:48] Think about what happened with the lockdown. Have you heard about any sort of shortage shortage in semiconductors in computer chip? Yeah, of course you have. We've got major automobile manufacturers that have had to shut down lines, shut down shifts because they can't get the computers to control the cars.

[00:34:12] Cars are being shipped without seat heaters. They're being shipped without electric windows, even because they cannot get the chips. And that's because of a lock. Not a war, not China invading Taiwan. You see the problem is that Taiwan makes almost all of our chips that are used today in computers. and then China assembles much of the computer technology that we have today now.

[00:34:49] Yes, the, the top quality, the top technology manufacturing devices for chips comes from the

[00:35:01] United States, but it's sitting in Taiwan. So this becomes a very, very big problem. So let's talk about Apple's disaster scenario, cuz it's, it's absolutely horrifying because apple is hugely dependent on Taiwan. You've got the, a series M series S series chips all fabricated by TSMC that's Taiwan, semiconductor manufacturing company.

[00:35:30] Almost all of the apple production takes place in the company's plants. Within Taiwan, an armed conflict would have a devastating impact on Taiwan and its people and would cause massive disruption to manufacturing operations. What kind of manufacturing? Semiconductor who needs semiconductors? Pretty much everybody in the United States.

[00:35:58] Even if you are not reliant on high tech in your manufacturing, uh, you know, to include chips in your designs, which really light bulbs have computer chips in them nowadays, you are reliant on semiconductors for your manufacturing lines themselves, the controllers that are there, the robots that are. So the second point in this nine to five article is that it's inevitable that the us and most of the rest of the world would respond to the Chinese takeover of Taiwan.

[00:36:36] The same way that the world has responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And that is sanction. So think about that. Let's say that China just marches in and takes over. No bloodshed, no buildings destroyed no problem with shipping, but we would all implement sanctions. Now, if the sanctions are as wide ranging as the ones that have been imposed on Russia, apple could no longer give any business to Chinese companies.

[00:37:14] which is where the vast majority of the apple products are manufactured. That's your iPhones, your iPads, your apple watches, your Mac, you name. The greatest volume of every apple product is assembled in China with a lot of the components made there as well and made in Taiwan. So we just cannot overlook the threat that it's posing to apple.

[00:37:40] And the facts that the fact that the, uh, heads of the MI five and FBI have chosen for the first time ever to raise this scenario as a real and present danger. So it's something that's gotta be terrifying, apple senior execs. Now we've been talking about apple here, but we're really talking about every.

[00:38:03] Four GM Chrysler all have parts that are coming using just in time inventory techniques from China and from Taiwan. The same thing is true for our European partners. Look at VW. They're just in time manufacturing. Also relies on Taiwan and on China for the parts to arrive just in time. Now, many parts are coming from different parts of the world.

[00:38:35] Many of our companies are smartening up saying, well, maybe we don't want to make everything in China. A lot of it's moving to different parts of Southeast. and it it's helping a lot of people in Southeast Asia. Some of this stuff is actually moved from China to different countries in Africa, particularly when we're talking about textile operations.

[00:39:01] but you are not gonna be able to get your windows PC either because your windows PC needs those chips, whether it's made by Dell quote unquote made by Dell, right? Who, who gets parts and they're sitting in the parts bins, and they assemble your computer for you or HP or Cisco, or whoever makes your. So this is a huge, huge deal.

[00:39:28] Absolutely crazy deal. The Chinese takeover of Taiwan. And I think that this war in Ukraine that was started by Russia has been a blessing in disguise for every last one of us, because China's ambitions to take over Taiwan, I think have been stalled. because of what they have seen in Ukraine, but also because Russia is a partner with China in so many ways, China and India have been buying oil and gas from Russia at substantially discounted prices because of the Ukraine war.

[00:40:13] So China doesn't want to step on Russia's foot. They have seen what the sanctions have done to Russia. In some ways they've really helped the Russian economy because now they're getting people buying rubles so that they can buy the oil from Russia instead of using the us dollar, the petrol dollar that's been in place for so long.

[00:40:36] So it, you know, sanctions are a two edge sword. Ultimately I think they. Us more than they hurt Russia and they would hurt China more than they hurt us. But what we're looking at is a short period period of time, relatively speaking, transitory, that we would be hurt pretty badly because of the sanctions.

[00:41:00] I mean really badly. Oh, my goodness. The things that these, uh, modern administrations have been doing, right. Oh, I wish it was, was different. Uh, let's talk a bit about the Z. He has made what a ink magazine is calling a huge mistake and ink is predicting. It really could destroy meta and Facebook.

[00:41:26] Zuckerberg came out and said in public, realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who should not be here. Zuckerberg said he's turning up the heat. And he's really adding some unnecessary pressure, making a bad situation, worse and prioritizing ruthlessly. As he said, with stricter management and monitoring of employee performance is moving a lot of.

[00:41:57] People into second place, third place, it's prioritizing the bottom line while forgetting the people who are responsible for the company's success. So expect a real down environment as employees move, frankly, out of meta and Facebook. And then of course the whole thing that happened recently with Carol Sandberg over there a second in command.

[00:42:25] I guess it's kind of a mess. Hey, visit me online. Make sure you get my newsletters. Craig Peter san.com/subscribe.

[00:42:34] Facebook's about 18 years old coming on 20 Facebook has a lot of data. How much stuff have you given Facebook? You know, did you fall victim for that? Hey, upload your contacts. We'll find your friends. Well, they don't know where your data is.

[00:42:51] This whole thing with Facebook has kind of exploded here lately.

[00:42:56] There is an article that had appeared on a line from our friends over at, I think it was, yeah. Let me see here. Yeah. Yeah. Motherboard. I was right. And motherboards reporting that Facebook doesn't know what it does with your data or. It goes now, you know, there's always a lot of rumors about different companies and particularly when they're big company and the, the news headlines are kind of grabbing your attention.

[00:43:30] And certainly Facebook can be one of those companies. So where did motherboard get this opinion about Facebook? Just being completely clueless about your personal data? well, it came from a leaked document. Yeah, exactly. So I, we find out a lot of stuff like that. Right. I used to follow a, a website about companies that were going to go under and they posted internal memos.

[00:44:04] It basically got sued out of existence, but there's no way that Facebook is gonna be able to Sue this one out of existence because they are describing this as. Internally as a tsunami of privacy regulations all over the world. So of course, if you're older, we used to call those TIAL waves, but think of what the implication there is of a tsunami coming in and just overwhelming everything.

[00:44:33] So Facebook internally, they, their engineers are trying to figure out, okay, so how do we deal? People's personal data. It's not categorized in ways that regulators want to control it. Now there's a huge problem right there. You've got third party data. You've got first party data. You've got sensitive categories, data.

[00:44:57] They might know what religion you are, what your persuasions are in various different ways. There's a lot of things they might know about you. How are they all CATA categorized? Now we've got the European union. With their gen general data protection regulation. The GDPR we talked about when it came into effect back in 2018, and I've helped a few companies to comply with that.

[00:45:22] That's not my specialty. My specialty is the cybersecurity side. But in article five, this European law mandates that personal data must be collected for specified explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes. So what that means is that every piece of data, like where you are using Facebook or your religious orientation, Can only be collected and used for a specific purpose and not reused for another purpose.

[00:46:00] So there's an example here that vice is giving in past Facebook, took the phone number that users provided to protect their accounts with two factor authentication and fed it to its people, you know, feature as well as. Advertisers. Yeah. Interesting. Eh, so Gizmoto with the help of academic researchers caught Facebook doing this, and eventually the company had to stop the practice.

[00:46:27] Cuz this goes back to the earlier days where Facebook would say, Hey, find out if your friends are on Facebook, upload your contacts right now. And most people. Right. What did you know back then about trying to keep your data private, to try and stop the proliferation of information about you online and nothing.

[00:46:48] Right? I think I probably even uploaded it back then thinking, well, that'd be nice to see if I got friends here. We can start chatting, et cetera. Well, according to legal experts that were interviewed by motherboard who wrote this article and has a copy of the internal me, uh, memo, this European regulation specifically prohibits that kind of repurposing of your phone number of trying to put together the social graph and the leak document shows that Facebook may not even have the ability to limit.

[00:47:24] how it handles users data. Now I was on a number of radio stations this week, talking about this and the example I gave, I is just look at an average business from the time it start, you know, Facebook started how right. Well, you scrape in pictures of young women off of Harvard universities. Main catalog, right.

[00:47:48] Contact page, and then asking people, well, what do you think of this rate? This person rate that person and off they go, right. Trying to rate them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that matters to a woman, at least according to mark Zuckerberg or all that matters about a woman is how she looks. Right. Do I think she's pretty or not ridiculous what he was doing?

[00:48:08] I, it just, oh, that's Zuckerberg, right? That's. Who he is not a great guy anyways. So you go from stealing pictures of young ladies asking people to rate them, putting together some class information and stuff there at Harvard, and then moving on to other universities and then opening up even wider and wider.

[00:48:33] And of course, that also created demand cuz you can't get on. If you're not at one of the universities that we have set it up for. And then you continue to grow. You're adding these universities, certain you're starting to collect data and you're making more money than God. So what do you do? Well, you don't have to worry about inefficiencies.

[00:48:54] I'll tell you that. Right. One thing you don't have to do is worry about, oh, GE we've got a lot of redundant work going on here. We've got a lot of teams working on basically the same thing. No, you've got more money than you can possibly shake a stick at. So now you go ahead and send that, uh, money to this group or that group.

[00:49:16] And they put together all of the basic information, right. That, that they want. They are. Pulling it out of this database and that database, and they're doing some correlation writing some really cool sequel queries with some incredible joins and everything else. Right. And now that becomes part of the main code for Facebook.

[00:49:38] And then Facebook goes on to the next little project and they do the same thing. Then the next project, then the next project. And then someone comes along and says, uh, Hey, we. This feature, that feature for advertisers and then in that goes, and then along comes candidate Obama. And, uh, they, one of the groups inside Facebook says, yeah, yeah, yeah, here, here we go.

[00:50:03] Here's all of the information we have about everybody and it's free. Don't worry about it. Right. And then when Trump actually bought it and hired a company to try and process some of that information he got in trouble. No, no, no, but, but the Obama. The whole campaign could get access to anything they wanted to, again, because the data wasn't controlled, they had no idea who was doing what with the data.

[00:50:30] And according to this internal memo, they still don't know. They don't even know if they can possibly, uh, comply with these regulations, not just in Europe, but we have regulations in pretty much all of the 50 states in the us Canada of course, has their own Australia, New Zealand think about all the places.

[00:50:53] Facebook makes a lot of money. So here's a quote from that we build systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy. Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand, the bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data. You pour that ink into a lake of water.

[00:51:15] Okay. And it flows every. The document red. Right. So how do you put that ink back in the bottle, in the right bottle? How do you organize it again? So that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake? They're totally right about that. Where did they collect it from it? Apparently they don't even know where they got some of this information.

[00:51:39] This data from kind of reminds me of the no fly list. Right. You don't know you're on it and you can't get yourself off of it. Right. It is kind of crazy. So this document that we're talking about was written last year by. Privacy engineers on the ad and business product team, whose mission is to make meaningful connections between people and businesses and which quote sits at the center of a monetization strategy monetization strategy.

[00:52:06] And is the engine that powers Facebook's growth. interesting, interesting problems. And, and I see this being a problem well into the future for more and more of these companies, look at Twitter as an example that we've all heard about a lot lately. And I've talked about as well along comes Elon Musk and he says, well, wait a minute now.

[00:52:28] Now I can make Twitter way more profitable. We're gonna get rid of however many people it's well over a thousand, and then we are going to hire more people. We're gonna start charging. We're gonna be more efficient. You can bet all of these redundancies that are in Facebook are also there on Twitter. and Twitter also has to comply with all of these regulations that Facebook is kind of freaking out about.

[00:52:56] Well, it, for really a very good reason. So this document is available to anybody who wants to look at it. I'm looking at it right now, talking about regulatory landscape and the fundamental problems Facebook's data lake. And this is a problem that most companies have not. As bad as Facebook does, but most companies, right.

[00:53:21] You grow. I, I have yet to walk into a business that needs help with cybersecurity and find everything in place as it should be, because it grew organically. Right. You, you started out with a little consumer firewall, router and wifi, and then you added to it and you put a switch here and you added another switch behind that and move things around.

[00:53:44] This is normal. This is not total incompetence on the part of the management, but my gosh, I don't know. Maybe they need an Elon Musk. Just straighten them out as well. Hey, stick around. I'll be right back and sign up [email protected].

[00:54:03] Apparently looting is one of the benefits of being a Russian soldier. And according to the reports coming out of Ukraine, they've been doing it a lot, but there's a tech angle on here that is really turning the tables on these Russian looters.

[00:54:20] Thanks for being with me today. I really appreciate it. And I'm honored, frankly, to be in front of this microphone. , this is really something, you know, we, we know in wars, there are people that loot and typically the various militaries try and make sure, at least recently that that looting is kept to an absolute minimum.

[00:54:43] Certainly the Americans, the British, even the Nazis during world war II, the, the, uh, the socialists they're in. Germany, uh, they, they tried to stop some of the looting that was going on. I, I think that's probably a very good thing, right. Because what you end up with is just all of these locals that are just totally upset with you.

[00:55:12] I found a great article on the guardian and there's a village. Had been occupied for about a month by Russian troops and the people came back, they are just shocked to see what happened. They're giving a few examples of different towns. They found that alcohol was stolen and they left empty bottles behind food rappers, cigarette butts, thrown all over the place in apartments and homes.

[00:55:41] Piles of feces blocking the toilets, family photographs torn, thrown around the house. They took away all of the clothes. This is a code from one of the people, literally everything, male and female coats, boots, shirts, jackets, even my dresses and lingerie. This is really, really something. Uh, it, the Soviets didn't do this, but now Russian.

[00:56:05] Military apparently does. So over the past couple of weeks, there've been reporting from numerous places where Russian troops had occupied Ukrainian territory and the guardian, which is this UK newspaper collected evidences suggests looting by Russian forces was not merely a case of a few way, word soldiers, but a systematic part of Russian military behavior across multiple towns.

[00:56:32] And villages. That's absolutely amazing. Another quote here, people saw the Russian soldiers loading everything onto Euro trucks, everything they could get their hands on a dozen houses on the villages. Main street had been looted as well as the shops. Other villagers reported losing washing machines, food laptops, even as sofa, air conditioners.

[00:56:56] Being shipped back, just like, you know, you might use ups here, they have their equivalent over there. A lady here who was the head teacher in the school. She came back in, of course, found her home Lood and in the head teacher's office. she found an open pair of scissors that had been jammed into a plasma screen that was left behind because if they can't steal it, they're gonna destroy it.

[00:57:22] They don't only leave anything behind. They found the Russians had taken most of the computers, the projectors and other electronic equipment. It, it, it's incredible. So let's talk about the turnaround here. A little. You might have heard stories about some of these bad guys that have smashed and grabbed their way into apple stores.

[00:57:42] So they get into the apple store. They grab laptops on iPads, no longer iPods, cuz they don't make those anymore. And I phones. And they take them and they run with them. Well, nowadays there's not a whole lot of use for those. Now what they have been doing, some of these bad guys is, is they take some parts and use them in stolen equipment.

[00:58:09] They sell them on the used market, et cetera. But when you're talking about something specific, like an iPhone that needs specific activation. Completely different problem arises for these guys because that iPhone needs to have a SIM card in order to get onto the cell network. And it also has built in serial numbers.

[00:58:32] So what happens in those cases while apple goes ahead and disables them. So as soon as they connect to the internet, let's say they put 'em on wifi. They don't get a SIM card. They don't. service from T-Mobile or Verizon or whoever it might be. So now they disconnect to the wifi and it calls home, cuz it's gonna get updates.

[00:58:52] So on download stuff from the app store and they find that it's been bricked. Now you can do that with a lot of mobile device managers that are available for. All kinds of equipment nowadays, but certainly apple equipment where if a phone is lost or stolen or a laptop or other pieces of equipment, you can get on the MDM and disable it, have it remotely erased, et cetera.

[00:59:18] Now, police have had some interesting problems with that. Because a bad guy might go ahead and erase a smartphone. That's in the evidence locker at the police station. So they're, they're doing things like putting them into Fairday cages or static bags or other things to try and stop that. So I think we've established here that the higher tech equipment is pretty well protected.

[00:59:42] You steal it. It's not gonna do you much. Good. So one of the things the Russian stole when they were in, uh, it's called, uh, I think you pronounce it. Uh, Mela me pole, uh, which is again, a Erian city is they stole all of the equipment from a farm equipment dealership and shipped it to Chenia. Now that's according to a source in, uh, a businessman in the area that CNN is reporting on.

[01:00:15] So they shipped this equipment. We're talking about combines harvesters worth 300 grand a piece. They shipped it 700 miles. and the thieves were ultimately unable to use the equipment, cuz it had been locked remotely. So think about agriculture equipment that John Deere, in this case, these pieces of equipment, they, they drive themselves.

[01:00:42] It's autonomous. It goes up and down the fields. Goes any pattern that you want to it'll bring itself within a foot or an inch of your boundaries, right. Of your property being very, very efficient the whole time, whether it's planting or harvesting, et cetera. And that's just a phenomenal thing because it saves so much time for the farmer makes it easier to do the companies like John Deere.

[01:01:08] Want to sell as many pieces of this equipment as they possibly can. And farming is known to be a, what not terribly profitable business. It certainly isn't like Facebook. So how can they get this expensive equipment into the hands of a lot of farmers? Well, what they do is they lease it. So you can lease the equipment through leasing company or maybe directly from the manufacturer and now you're off and running.

[01:01:36] But what happens if the lease isn't paid now? It's one thing. If you don't pay your lease on a $2,000 laptop, right? They're probably not gonna come hunting for you, but when you're talking about a $300,000 harvester, they're more interested. So the leasing company. Has titled to the equipment and the leasing company can shut it off remotely.

[01:02:02] Right? You see where I'm going with this so that they can get their equipment in the hands of more farmers cuz the farmers can lease it. It costs them less. They don't have to have a big cash payment. Right? You see how this all works. So when the Russian forces stole this equipment, that's valued. Total value here is about $5 million.

[01:02:23] They were able to shut it all. And obviously, if you can't start the engine, because it's all shut off and it's all run by computers nowadays, and you know, there's pros and cons to that. I think there's a lot of cons, but, uh, what are you gonna do? How's that gonna work for you? Well, it. Isn't going to work for you.

[01:02:44] And they were able to track it. It had GPS trackers find out exactly where it was. That's how they know it was taken to Chenia and could be controlled remotely. And in this case, how'd they control it. Well, they completely. Shut it off. Even if they sell the harvesters for spare parts, they'll learn some money, but they sure can be able to sell 'em for the 300 grand that they were actually worth.

[01:03:10] Hey, stick around. We'll be right back and visit me [email protected]. If you sign up there, you'll be able to get my insider show note. And every week I have a quick five. Training right there in your emails, Craig Peter san.com. That's S O N in case you're wondering.

[01:03:36] If you've been worried about ransomware, you are right to worry. It's up. It's costly. And we're gonna talk about that right now. What are the stats? What can you do? What happens if you do get hacked? Interesting world.

[01:03:51] Ransomware has been a very long running problem. I remember a client of ours, a car dealership who we had gone in.

[01:04:03] We had improved all of their systems and their security and one of their. People who was actually a senior manager, ended up downloading a piece of ransomware, one of these encrypted ones and opened it up and his machine, all of a sudden TA, guess what it had ransomware on it. One of those big reds.

[01:04:25] Greens that say pay up is send us this much Bitcoin. And here's our address. Right. All of that sort of stuff. And he called us up and said, what what's going on here? What happened? Well, first of all, don't bring your own machine into the office. Secondly, don't open up particularly encrypted files using the password that they gave.

[01:04:48] and thirdly, we stopped it automatically. It did not spread. We were able to completely restore his computer. Now let's consider here at the consequences of what happened. So he obviously was scared. Uh, and within a matter of a couple of hours, we actually had him back to where he was and it didn't spread.

[01:05:16] So the consequences there, they, they weren't that bad. But how about if it had gotten worse? How about if they ransomware. Also before it started holding his computer ransom, went out and found all of the data about their customers. Right. Would, do you think an auto dealership would love to hear that all of their customer data was stolen and released all of the personal data of all of their customers?

[01:05:43] Right? Obviously not. So there's a potential cost there. And then how long do you think it would take a normal company? That thinks they have backups to get back online. Well, I can tell you it'll take quite a while because the biggest problem is most backups don't work. We have yet to go into a business that was actually doing backups that would work to help restore them.

[01:06:10] And if you're interested, I can send you, I I've got something. I wrote up. Be glad to email it back to you. Uh, obviously as usual, no charge. and you'll be able to go into that and figure out what you should do. Cause I, I break it down into the different types of backups and why you might want to use them or why you might not want to use them, but ransomware.

[01:06:34] Is a kind of a pernicious nasty little thing, particularly nowadays, because it's two, two factor, right. First is they've encrypted your data. You can't get to it. And then the second side of that is okay, well, I can't get to my data and now they're threatening to hold my data ransom or they'll release. So they they'll put it out there.

[01:06:58] And of course, if you're in a regulated industry, which actually car dealers are because they deal with financial transactions, leases, loans, that sort of thing, uh, you can lose your license for your business. You can U lose your ability to go ahead and frankly, uh, make loans and work with financial companies and financial instruments.

[01:07:22] It could be a very, very big deal. so there are a lot of potential things that can happen all the way from losing your reputation as a business or an individual losing all of the money in your operating account. And we, again, we've got a client that, uh, we picked up afterwards. That, uh, yes, indeed. They lost all of the money in their operating account.

[01:07:47] And, uh, then how do you make payroll? How do you do things? Well, there's a new study that came out from checkpoint. Checkpoint is one of the original firewall companies and they had a look at ransomware. What are the costs of ransomware? Now bottom line, I'm looking at some stats here on a couple of different sites.

[01:08:07] Uh, one is by the way, KTI, which is a big ransomware gang that also got hacked after they said we are going to attack anyone that. Uh, that doesn't defend Vlad's invasion of Ukraine, and then they got hacked and their information was released, but here's ransomware statistics. This is from cloud words. Uh, first of all, the largest ransom demand is $50 million.

[01:08:36] And that was in 2021 to Acer big computer company. Now 37% of businesses were hit by ransomware. In 2021. This is amazing. They're they're expecting by 2031. So in about a decade, ransomware is gonna be costing about $265 billion a year. Now on average, uh, Ransomware costs businesses. 1.8, 5 million to recover from an attack.

[01:09:08] Now that's obviously not a one or two person place, but think of the car dealer again, how much money are they going to make over the year or over the life of the business? Right? If you're a car dealer, you have a to print money, right? You you're selling car model or cars from manufacturer X. And now you have the right to do that and they can remove that.

[01:09:31] Right? How many tens, hundreds of millions of dollars might that end up costing you? Yeah. Big deal. Total cost of ransomware last year, 20 billion. Now these are the interesting statistics here right now. So pay closer attention to this 32% of ransomware victims paid a ransom demand. So about her third paid ransom demand.

[01:09:56] Last. it's it's actually down. Cuz my recollection is it used to be about 50% would pay a ransom. Now on average that one third of victims that paid a ransom only recovered 65% of their data. Now that differs from a number I've been using from the FBI. That's a little bit older that was saying it's it's a little, little better than 50%, but 65% of pain victims recovered their data.

[01:10:26] Now isn't that absolutely amazing. Now 57% of companies are able to recover the data using a cloud backup. Now think about the different types of backup cloud backup is something that can work pretty well if you're a home user, but how long did it take for your system to get backed? Probably took weeks, right?

[01:10:50] For a, a regular computer over a regular internet line. Now restoring from backup's gonna be faster because your down link is usually faster than your uplink. That's not true for businesses that have real internet service, like, uh, ours. It it's the same bandwidth up as it is down. But it can take again, days or weeks to try and recover your machine.

[01:11:13] So it's very, very expensive. And I wish I had more time to go into this, but looking at the costs here and the fact that insurance companies are no longer paying out for a lot of these ransomware attacks, it could be incredibly expensive for you incredibly. So here you. The number one business types by industry for ransomware tax retail.

[01:11:46] That makes sense. Doesn't it. Real estate. Electrical contractors, law firms and wholesale building materials. Isn't that interesting? And that's probably because none of these people are really aware, conscious of doing what, of keeping their data secure of having a good it team, a good it department. So there's your bottom line.

[01:12:14] Uh, those are the guys that are getting hit. The most, the numbers are increasing dramatically and your costs are not just in the money. You might pay as a ransom. And so, as it turns out in pretty much every case prevention. Is less expensive and much better than the cure of trying to pay ransom or trying to restore from backups.

[01:12:40] Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson. You can get my weekly show notes by just going to Craig peterson.com. And I'll also send you my special report on how to do passwords stick around will be right back.

[01:12:58] You know, you and I have talked about passwords before the way to generate them and how important they are. And we we'll go over that again a little bit in just a second, but there is a new standard out there that will eliminate the need for passwords.

[01:13:15] Passwords are kind of an, a necessary evil, at least they have been forever. I, I remember, I think the only system I've ever really used that did not require passwords was the IBM 360.

[01:13:32] Yeah, 360, you know, you punch up the cards, all of the JCL you feed the card deck in and off it goes. And does this little thing that was a different day, a different era. When I started in college in university, we. We had remote systems, timeshare systems that we could log into. And there weren't much in the line of password requirements in, but you had a username.

[01:14:01] You had a simple password. And I remember one of our instructors, his name was Robert, Andrew Lang. And, uh, his password was always some sort of a combination of RA Lang. So it was always easy to guess what his, what his password was. Today, it has gotten a lot worse today. We have devices with us all of the time.

[01:14:24] You might be wearing a smart watch. That requires a password. You of course probably have a smart phone. That's also maybe requiring a password, certainly after boots nowadays they use fingerprints or facial recognition, which is handy, but has its own drawbacks. But how about the websites? You're going to the systems you're using when you're at work and logging in, they all require passwords.

[01:14:54] And usernames of some sort or another well, apple, Google, and Microsoft have all committed to expanding their support for a standard. That's actually been out there for, for a few years. It's called the Fido standard. And the idea behind this is that you don't have to have a password in order to log. Now that's really kind of an interesting thing, right?

[01:15:22] Just looking at it because we're, we're so used to having this password only authentic. And of course the, the thing to do there is make sure you have for your password, multiple words in the password, it should really be a pass phrase. And between the words put in special characters or numbers, maybe mix.

[01:15:44] Upper lowercase a little bit. In those words, those are the best passwords, you know, 20 characters, 30 characters long. And then if you have to have a pin, I typically use a 12 digit pin. And how do I remember all of these? Cuz I use a completely different password for every website and right now, Let me pull it up.

[01:16:06] I'm using one password dot com's password manager. And my main password for that is about 25 characters long. And I have thirty one hundred and thirty five. Entries here in my password manager, 3,100. That is a whole lot of passwords, right? As well as, um, software licenses and a few other things in there.

[01:16:34] That's how we remember them is using a password manager. One password.com is my favorite. Now, obviously I don't make any money by referring you there. I, I really do like that. Uh, some others that I've liked in the past include last pass, but they really messed. With some of their cybersecurity last year and I lost, lost my faith in it.

[01:16:56] So now what they're trying to do is make these websites that we go to as well as some apps to have a consistent, secure, and passwordless sign in. and they're gonna make it available to consumers across all kinds of devices and platforms. That's why you've got apple, Google, and Microsoft all committing to it.

[01:17:20] And you can bet everybody else is going to follow along because there's hundreds of other companies that have decided they're gonna work with the Fido Alliance and they're gonna create this passwordless future. Which I like this idea. So how does this work? Well, basically you need to have a smartphone.

[01:17:39] This is, I'm just gonna go with the most standard way that this is going to work here in the future. And you can then have a, a. Pass key. This is kind of like a multifactor authentication or two factor authentication. So for instance, right now, when I sign into a website online, I'm giving a username, I'm giving a password and then it comes up and it asks me for a code.

[01:18:03] So I enter an a six digit code and that code changes every 30 seconds. And again, I use my password manager from one password dot. In order to generate that code. So that's how I log into Microsoft sites and Google sites and all kinds of sites out there. So it's kind of a similar thing here now for the sites for my company, because we do cyber security for businesses, including regulated businesses.

[01:18:31] We have biometrics tied in as. so to log into our systems, I have to have a username. I have to have a password. Uh, I then am sent to a single sign on page where I have to have a message sent to my smart device. That then has a special app that uses biometrics either a face ID or a fingerprint to verify who I am.

[01:18:56] So, yeah, there's a lot there, but I have to protect my customer's data. Something that very, very few it's crazy. Um, actual so-called managed security services providers do, but it's important, right? By the way, if you want my password. Special report, just go to Craig peterson.com. Sign up for my email list.

[01:19:21] I'll send that to you. That's what we're sending out right now for anyone who signs up [email protected]. And if you'd like a copy of it and you're already on the list, just go ahead and email me M E. At Craig peterson.com and ask for the password special report where I go through a lot of this sort of thing.

[01:19:39] So what will happen with this is you go to a website and it might come up with a QR code. So you then scan that QR code with your phone and verify it, authorize it on your phone. You might again have it set up so that your phone requires a facial recognition or perhaps it'll require a fingerprint. And now you are in.

[01:20:02] Which is very cool. They fix some security problems in Fido over the last few years, which is great over the coming year. You're going to see this available on apple devices, Google Microsoft platforms. And it really is simple, stronger authentication. That's what Fido calls it. Right. But it is going to make your life a lot easy.

[01:20:26] It easier. It is a standard and the passwordless future makes a whole lot of sense for all of us. Now I wanna talk about another thing here that has bothered me for a long time. I have a sister-in-law. who is in the medical field and, and, uh, gives prescriptions, you know, doctor thing. And, uh, I think she's not quite a doctor.

[01:20:50] I can't remember what she has or she's an LPN or something. Anyhow. So she. We'll get on a zoom call with someone and they'll go through medical history and what's happening right now and she'll make prescriptions. And so I warned her about that saying, you know, it is very bad to be using zoom because zoom is not secure.

[01:21:15] Never has been, probably never will be right. If you want secure, you. To go and pay for it from one of these providers like WebEx, that's what we use. We have a version of WebEx that is set up to be secure. So I talked to her about that and said, Hey, listen, you can't do this. You you've really got to go another way here.

[01:21:38] And so she started using one of these mental or. Medical health apps. What I wanna talk about right now specifically are some checks that were just performed some audits on mental health apps. That's why I messed up a second ago, but what they looked at is that things are a serious, serious problem there.

[01:22:05] And then in fact, the threat post is calling it, uh, creepy. Frankly, just plain old creepy. So they've got some good intentions. They want to help with mental health. You've probably seen these or at least heard them advertise. So you can get on the horn with, uh, mental health, professional, uh, doctor or otherwise in order to help you here with your psychological or spiritual wellbeing.

[01:22:30] And people are sharing their personal and sensitive data with third parties and of 32 mental health and prayer mobile apps that were investigated by the open source organization. 28, 28 of the 32 were found to be inherently insecure and were given a privacy, not included label, including, uh, others here.

[01:22:56] So this is a report. uh, that was released here by the open source organization, tied into Mozilla Mozilla. Those are the Firefox people. They have what they call their minimum security standards. So things like requiring strong passwords, managing security, updates, and vulnerabilities, et cetera. 25 of the 32 failed to meet.

[01:23:20] Even those minimum security standards. So these apps are dealing with some of the most sensitive men, mental health and wellness issues people can possibly have, right? Depression, anxieties, suicidal thoughts, domestic violence, eating disorders. And they are being just terrible with your security Mozilla researchers spent 255 hours or, or about eight hours per product pairing under the hood of the security, watching the data that was going back and forth, right.

[01:23:56] Between all of these mental health and prayer apps. It was just crazy. So for example, eight of the apps reviewed allowed week passwords. That range. One digit one as the password, 2, 1, 1, 1 while a mental health app called a mood fit only required one letter or digit as a password. Now that is very concerning for an app that collects mood and symptom data.

[01:24:25] So be very careful. Um, two of the apps better help a popular app that connects users with therapists and better stop suicide, which is of course a suicide prevention app have vague and messy. According to Mozilla privacy policies, they have little or no effect on actual. User data protection. So be very, very careful.

[01:24:49] And if you are a mental health professional, or a medical professional, don't just go and use these open video calls, et cetera, et cetera, find something good. And there are some standards out there. Again. Visit me online, get my insider show notes every week. Get my little mini training. They come out most weeks, just go to Craig peterson.com.

[01:25:15] Craig peterson.com. And I'll send you my special report on passwords and more.

What's With Those Strange Texts We've Been Getting?

PLUS

• Hackers Using Deepfakes to Get Jobs
• Autonomous Taxis Block Intersection
• This New Law May Make Your Medical Care Cheaper and Better
• Even the NSA is Being Spied On
• Do You Use the Best Search Engine?

What's the deal with those weird, wrong number texts. This is kind of a really big deal, frankly, when we get right down to it, because we are getting scammed, there's even a special name for these types of scams. and I don't even know what to start with this, cuz it's absolutely crazy.

[Following is an Automated Transcript]

[00:00:18] This is I'll follow on to a scam. Again, if you've been on the internet for a while, you're familiar with the Nigerian scam. You remember that? where there was a Nigerian prince. And of course there's a lot of variations of this scam, but he needed to get his money out of Nigeria. And the only way he could really do that is by using a us bank account.

[00:00:43] And, you know, if you had a us bank account, you could really help him. And sure enough people would respond because he said, Hey, listen, I I've gotta wire some money out in order to gain access to it. And you can keep some of that money. And that amount kind of varied. And most of us kinda looked at that and with, uh, kind of crossed ice and said, what the heck?

[00:01:08] How could this possibly work with anybody? The grammar was so bad. So much of it was just so out of reality, frankly, And really here here's the bottom line. It worked because it was poorly written. people kind of expected, oh my, this is a foreigner, right? You wouldn't expect someone that doesn't speak English as kind of their native language to be able to write really, really well.

[00:01:36] And then when it comes to the whole concept behind it, again, they were looking for people who were kind of on the gullible side that weren't thinking it through all of the way. Well, we're at that spot again, and this is now using text messages and what's. And it's, it's been a pain, right? Uh it's it's annoying.

[00:01:59] So what are they doing and why are they doing it? Well, they're going after you and me in this case, this isn't, uh, let's get tens of millions of dollars from this huge company. It's what can we get from the little. Quite literally, and you know, maybe some small businesses, because those are the people that are most likely to make some mistakes here.

[00:02:24] So what they're doing is sending a text message, trying to get you to engage. So it, it might be a text message. Hey, uh, remember me? Right? There's an example. And, uh, you know, this is so, and so's, uh, doctor's office and checking up on your appointment. I'm looking right now at my, uh, at my WhatsApp list here.

[00:02:52] I'm I'm not a WhatsApp fan, if you want some private communications use signal, but we use it for one of my masterminds. So here you go. This is, uh, Picture of a very pretty young lady and it says, hello, how are you today? Jason? Long time. No, see how's your family that came to me. Right? Course my name's not Jason.

[00:03:13] I know that you know that, but apparently whoever this is, doesn't know that here's another one. Uh, even pretier girl, uh, Dr. David, my puppy moves very slowly and doesn't eat dog food. Can you make an appointment for me? So here we go. That was from, uh, air code 9 0 1 as though that's legitimate. Here's another one you are invited to join the Bitcoin discussion group.

[00:03:39] Reply with the number one click to join another one. Oh, the same message. Different, different, uh, place. Here's another one. Are you Kevin? these, these are all coming into my WhatsApp and I I've been getting some similar ones on my phone, regular one here's one, it says, hello. And I said, hi there. And he said, hello.

[00:04:06] International one, there it's, uh, going on and on and on. And there's a great article from subs stack that I shared this last week. If you have my insider newsletter, you have a link to this article and you can see some of the text messages in there. Now, this is from max Reed. Hi Tony. Remember me? It's been a long time since our last charity gala ended.

[00:04:30] Mr. Wine, sorry for the traffic jam on the road. I may be 10 minutes late. Jason, my aunt tomorrow, I go to the airport to pick you up. You can tell me notes and flights. I have not been able to contact your phone. Uh, Duran, can you tell me how your handmade meatballs are made? It is so delicious. Hello, which is one of the ones I got here.

[00:04:53] And the, and max said, sorry, who is this? Aren't you Kevin? Sorry. I think I added the wrong person. I'm not Kevin. Yeah. You got the wrong number. I usually have a lot of business partners. Maybe the secretary said Kevin's number wrong. I hope you don't mind. No worries at all. I see he was a kind person.

[00:05:10] Acquaintance is fate. Where are you from? You see what happens? They like engaging another one. Hello. Nice to meet you. Who is this? I don't know why I have your number in my address book. Do we know each other? It is my business partner or broad. Who are you? I love traveling. Maybe we met in a certain city.

[00:05:30] Maybe it is a kind of destiny that makes us similar to each other. now you must be a fan of travel. No look at the blue sky and white clouds behind your head. A good day starts in the morning. Good morning. Good evening. The guy sent a few hours later. This is called pig butchering, which is kind of a sad name for this considering the poor victims.

[00:05:57] Um, I had one, I had a call from a radio station down in, not in a television station down in Florida. because one of their newscasters had received a message kind of similar to this. And it was an email and it was sent by someone else in the TV station and it had a phone number embedded in, it said, Hey, you know, text me here.

[00:06:24] We're gonna have a party. I need you to do something for me. So the email came in, looking like it was from the station manager. So, what are you gonna do at that point? Well, so they figured, Hey, listen, uh, I'm gonna ask a station manager. And he said, no, no, I didn't send that email, know what's going on. And I have seen that a lot lately, uh, people who have been faking my email address.

[00:06:49] They use a reply to header in the email in order to kind of fake that it's me. And so they called me up and said, Hey, Craig, uh, we're having an issue down here at the TV station. And could you help us out a little bit? And maybe we can do a story about it, which they ended up doing a story. So I started talking to this person and I used a throwaway phone number on my part.

[00:07:18] So I wouldn't just get. Hassled all the time. So off we go and I respond and their English again was pretty poor, but they said, Hey, listen, we wanna have a party. And I want to get gifts to everybody. And I said, okay, so what's what you want. They said, oh, I I'm thinking what we'll do is we'll get gift cards for everybody.

[00:07:39] So we went through, there was probably two dozen different messages back and forth, and it was pretty obvious that I was messing with them. If. Spoke English I guess, or spoke it. Well, I don't know how much to script these guys are running off of, but they wanted me. To go down to the late, the nearest drug store and buy a couple of dozen $50 gift cards.

[00:08:05] And the idea was, we'll give those out to the other people in the TV station here as we have a little party. And I, you know, I thought, well, okay, where are these guys going with this? Because, uh, that's weird. So they kept asking if I had picked up the gift card yet and I kept making up excuses. Oh no, I had a hot story.

[00:08:22] Come in. You know, we, we got this thing tonight. We gotta make sure it's on the six o'clock news and we kept going back and forth with them. And I finally said, okay, so I'm, I'm heading on out now, um, to buy them. And then, then what do you want me to do with them? And I said, okay, well, take a picture of the front of the cards, each one of the cards.

[00:08:43] And then on the back, scrape off the number. And take a picture of that as well. So you could immediately see where they're going, right? Yeah. This isn't for any sort of a party. They're not giving them away. They want these gift card numbers so they can use them and cash them in. It, it, to me, it was just amazing that they were doing this.

[00:09:02] It was so obvious. We kept. Playing with them there. There's another one called the romance scam, which is another one that, uh, kind of follows along the same lines it's got. So in this case, what they do is try and romance you, and it could be a lot of, uh, older people, right? They're lonely nowadays, a lot of younger people, a lot of divorces going on.

[00:09:26] So they kind of romance you and it, it can take weeks or months, and then they hit you up that a family member of theirs. Corps or something else has to happen. Hey, I'd love to fly to the United States and meet you, but I just don't have the money. And then ultimately you offer to help a bit and send them a few grand so they can come to the us and you guys can meet.

[00:09:50] And won't it be wonderful or yeah, you wire them the $20,000 for the operation. For their relative, which of course, none of which is really happening. None of it's true. Now this is called Shajuan or pig butcher, and it has been a very big deal in China because they string the victim along for weeks, for months before the swindle actually takes place.

[00:10:19] So the idea behind the. Pig B train is that you, the pig are being fated for slaughter. Isn't that just something. So most of the time it ends with people depositing money into gold trading, four X, right? Uh, fake cryptocurrency platforms, kinda like the one I was reading earlier with the cryptocurrency stuff and the common enough in and around China that there's Chinese language YouTubers who stock in trade is identifying and publicizing.

[00:10:58] The scam. So be very, very careful about this stuff. Look at the newsletter I sent out on Tuesday morning, this week, follow up a little bit, read this article from subs stack and be smart about responding or better yet not responding to these scams.

[00:11:16] It's hard enough to get a job nowadays, even with all of the supposedly open jobs and there's reasons for that, we should discuss it at some point. But right now the FBI is saying that bad guys are using deep fakes to apply for jobs.

[00:11:33] Hey, and thanks for all of your notes guys. FBI. This is quite the little article, this particular one's on Gizmoto again, it was in my insider show notes that you should have received Tuesday morning.

[00:11:47] This is a free service of the Craig Peterson show, and it does keep you up to date. It's all the show notes I send off to the radio stations and I use for my radio show on the weekend and you can get them right [email protected]. Just sign. There, and I'll be glad to send them to you. What's happening here is I think very clever.

[00:12:14] Now I've used deep fakes before you've heard me play them here on the radio where I have somebody's voice. And I, I use it in order to, uh, you know, either myself as my voice or it's somebody else. Here's an example. Just so you know, this isn't really me. This is a deep fake that I generated using a special software program.

[00:12:38] So I didn't spend any time editing that, you know, I could fix the tempo, obviously that deep, fake speaks more quickly than I typically do. I used to speak pretty fast like that, but I've slowed down and it is easy to do that. Just took me less than a minute to put. All together that that's how bad it's gotten or, or good it's gotten here.

[00:13:02] Here's another one you've reached the voicemail for Craig Peterson. He's on the road or out of the office right now. So please leave a message and I'll be sure to pass it along. Now that's actually my voicemail. If, if I don't answer the phone or I can't answer the phone and that's not a real person that that's even better than the deep fake of my voice, which I, you know, I had to feed it some audio in order to train it.

[00:13:27] And I had done that a long time ago, but that's just a stock voice that is not a real person. And I can have her say whatever I want. And there are sites out there that'll have, uh, a hundred or more of these. Deep fake voices that you can use. Male voices, female voices, et cetera. So what the FBI is warning about right now is that people are applying for it, positions that are bad guys.

[00:13:58] Real bad guys, like North Korea type bad guys. So the, in in fact I saw an article that said, uh, good luck hiring that new it guy. It might just be somebody from North Korea. So you're used to asking them questions, right? What's your worst quality. Tell me about a problem that you resolved at. Or probably you had with a, a coworker and you know, it's a little bit of a problem here because if you are talking to somebody on nowadays, a lot of people use zoom.

[00:14:31] I try not to. I use WebEx, we have a secure version of WebEx. Uh, we could go into this. I, I talked about it before, how zoom was being routed through China. But I, if the perspective higher kind of sneezes or coughs and doesn't move their lips, or they are not responding the way you'd think they should be responding, it could really be that they're actually not.

[00:14:58] Real. And we've seen stuff like this before. Have you ever seen the movie Simone and it's a simulated woman who was an actress? I, I think we're heading towards that by the way where ultimately the actors and actresses on movies that we watch are just pretty generic. People who are using a face that is owned and copyright copyrighted by the movie studio.

[00:15:25] I, I don't have any doubt about that. That'll be coming at sometime fairly soon right now, but the FBI put up on its internet crime complaint complaint center, just this last week that it's received complaints of people using stolen information and deep faked video and voice to apply for remote. Tech jobs.

[00:15:49] Now that's a pretty big thing to have to say, uh, when you get right down to it here, according to the FBI's announcement, and this is from an article in gizmo. More companies have been reporting people, applying to jobs, using video images or recordings. The are manipulated to look and sound like somebody else.

[00:16:11] These fakers are also using personal identifiable information from other people. In other words, stolen identities to apply for jobs at, in it programming database and software firms. Now many of these companies have access to sensitive information, things like customer data that can be used so they can steal your customers some of your intellectual property.

[00:16:41] it goes on and on. Just think about what they could steal from you. Of course, even cash, frankly. So I it's really not clear how many of these fake attempts at getting a job were successful versus how many were caught and reported. You never really know. Um, But, you know, how far did they get that? They start taking paychecks, et cetera.

[00:17:04] It's uh, it's a fascinating problem. So what do you do? Uh, the FBIs among several federal agencies. That's warning now of. People working for north Korean government who are applying for these remote positions. So be very, very careful about that. And it's not as easy to detect a fake videos as you might think.

[00:17:28] And that's particularly true if you're not looking for it. Artificial intelligence that is designed. To detect fake video. These deep fakes has accuracy from 30 to 97%. They have set up AI that compete with each other. One makes deep fakes. The other one tries to determine if it's a deep, fake or not, and they get better and better and better both sides over time.

[00:17:56] But there's ways that you can detect the fake video. And there are some visual glitches that you can keep an eye out for, like shadows that don't behave like. They should skin texture. That doesn't seem right the hair. Right. You might have noticed that in movies before, it's a kind of a, a, a glitch, if you will.

[00:18:18] Uh, water is a big one, but you're not gonna see that in a, an interview for someone looking for a job, but just like any other. Crime. If you see something like this online, if you are scammed and I'm helping a, a young lady, actually, a couple of different people right now that I think of it. Uh, who are I in the process right now of trying to recovers?

[00:18:44] Monies that were stolen from them. And one of them is actual cash that was stolen. The other one was cryptocurrency that was stolen. And the first thing you should do is go online, which is IC three.gov IC. three.gov. And this is the internet crime complete complete center. And you can file right there. If you think you've been a victim of an internet crime, you can also file on behalf of someone else you think has being a victim.

[00:19:19] And it has a lot of information that's asking from you. It has a whole form online they're they. The name of the victim address, telephone number, email, of course, financial transaction information, et cetera. The reality of it is they are very unlikely to do much about your individual case. If it's over a hundred thousand dollars involved, then they'll probably pay a little bit of attention to it.

[00:19:48] What they'll do is try and see if there's other people that have. Conor had stuff stolen from them in much the same way so that they then use that in order to put together a bit of a bigger case. But there are so many, so many of these things out there. Uh, but anyways, that's the way you want to go. Is I see three.gov.

[00:20:16] Keep that in mind because, uh, right now half of us are likely to become victims this year. That's how bad it's gotten. Make sure you get my weekly newsletter. My insider show notes. The free newsletter has so much great information to help you out. Craig peterson.com. And if you have a question or there's something you'd like me to talk about on the show, email me.

[00:20:42] [email protected].

[00:20:44] I'm sure you know about Tesla and their automated systems for driving assist. Right? Well, cruise Chevy cruises are out there on the roads in San Francisco. And have we got a story for you?

[00:21:00] If you have any questions, drop me an email. [email protected]. We have in some states seen a lot of active autonomous vehicles.

[00:21:14] I'm sure you heard about the accident that happened out in New Mexico and a lady with a bicycle was hit and killed a. By one of these autonomous vehicles that are being tested. Yes, they are out on the road and it is really in limited cities and states. No question about that one, as they try and figure out how can they make these things be reliable?

[00:21:39] Cause that's ultimately what we want here. When I'm in my eighties, I would love to have an autonomous vehicle to show for me around heck I'd love it when I'm in my twenties. Right. Uh, it just makes a whole lot. Sense, but that technology is not here yet. It's kinda like all of these government programs that are trying to make our electric vehicles, et cetera, be the wave of the future, which is true.

[00:22:05] They probably will be, but we're talking, uh, I'm really not in my lifetime. If not in any of our lifetimes, this will take decades to get this all done. We gotta build a whole new grid. We've gotta make sure we have reliable sources of electricity. And that might mean we need new battery technology. What some companies have been doing is for instance, out in Las Vegas.

[00:22:30] It's cheaper to get electricity at night, which makes sense because you and I are asleep and businesses for the most part, industrial and otherwise are, are shut down. So here we are at nighttime having a good nap. So what do some of the, uh, casinos other places in Vegas, or are there hot areas around the country?

[00:22:50] Do well, some of them have installed a massive. Pool of water with chillers in it. So at nighttime, they go ahead and freeze all of that water. And then in the daytime, they use that ice in order to cool the air. So they're saving money. It's it's one way of storing energy. Another way that we've seen around the world is they use a.

[00:23:18] Now, you know about that, you know, you've got the water pressure and it drives a turbine that then drives a generator, an alternator, and then that produces electricity. Well at nighttime, they run them in reverse. What they're doing is they take water and they pump it up into the reservoir when the electricity is cheap or the demand isn't as high.

[00:23:43] And then during the daytime, when the demand goes up, they reverse that process. And the water now behind the dam just goes through the normal method of creating electricity behind a dam. So that's another way to store. Electricity or to store power. Neither one of those ways is particularly efficient, but it is efficient enough that it's cheaper than having to buy a peak demand, electricity.

[00:24:13] So we could talk about this for a long, long time, but we're talking right now about this cruise system failure. There were, what was it like four or five cars? I'm looking at an, a, uh, article that was in my weekly insider show notes on Tuesday morning. that you can get for [email protected]. Just sign up right there.

[00:24:39] And this one is from the last driver license holder. Dot com kind of a cool name for somebody that follows these autonomous vehicles and these vehicles are all quite amazing cuz they're using the right technology, frankly. I'm not convinced that Elon Musk and Tesla are using the right technology. They are from a cost standpoint, right?

[00:25:04] It's way cheaper to have some cameras and have a couple of high speed computers on board. But it is not as effective as what's happening here, where they're using LIDAR, which is a laser radar, as well as in some cases using radar, they all have cameras on them. You should see the setup on the top of these cars.

[00:25:26] It it's probably 50 grand plus worth of sensors. On the car. So you're more than doubling the, the value, the cost of the car. So crews had a system failure and it is a problem. Now we've been saying Chevy Cruz. I'm looking at it right now. I don't know that it's the same guys. I'm thinking this is not Chevy.

[00:25:51] This is a different company. Okay. Sorry about that. But, uh, there's, there's two vehicles in this family. There's the poppy. And, and, uh, there is another one out there. I'm trying to remember what they called this thing. Uh, let me see if I can find out on the website anyways. A couple of cute names. Oh yeah.

[00:26:11] Poppy and the toda. And they've got others that are ready to roll that are ready to be out there on the streets. okay. There's another one called burrito. So they're out on the streets. They are driving themselves in the they're cabs. There's in fact, uh, lots of them on the streets in San Francisco and a dozen of them just over a dozen robot.

[00:26:36] Cabs that blocked an intersection in San Francisco for two hours before cruise employees were then able to arrive and drive them away manually or remotely in some cases. Uh, so Cruz gave this rather vague information or press release. They said we had an issue earlier this week that caused some of our vehicles to cluster together while it was resolved and, and no passengers were impacted.

[00:27:06] We apologize to anyone who is inconvenience to anybody, trying to get through the intersection. However, in further reports, it's clear, this is not the first time it's happened, nor is this type of behavior by vehicles. Something that's completely unknown. We saw one a couple of weeks ago or a couple of months now actually.

[00:27:28] That I, uh, talked about on the radio, where there was one of these autonomous vehicles, the police were trying to pull it over. It finally decided to pull over in an area, uh, right at the side of the road and the police car, I guess the car was expecting the police car to just pass it. Right. It was trying to get somewhere it wasn't trying to pull me over.

[00:27:51] And so they, it stopped. The police officer did not pass the car. It got right behind it and got, he got out of the car and walked up and looked in. There's no driver. And then all of a sudden the car took off on him again. And then the car was apparently looking for a safe spot by the side of the road. So it drove up the road a little bit.

[00:28:14] To where there was a, a, a nice kind of pull off area and it pulled over and stopped. Now the same type of thing happened here that on the display were the following sentences on. So you looked in the window, these people were looking in the window of these cabs that were pull, blocking this intersection over a dozen of them in San Francisco, and just said, pulling over to a safe stop.

[00:28:40] And then it also said something happened on your trip. A support specialist will explain what to do next. And of course it just didn't show up. There's also a telephone number for emergency responders to call in order to help rectify the situation and the number then also states the self-driving mode has been switched off and I'm, I'm looking at it right now.

[00:29:03] It's got kind of a. Grid and these messages on it, first responders should contact crews at, and it gives a toll free phone number. And it says a crew support specialist is on the way to help in person. And as it turns out they were, but it took a couple hours for them to show up. And it says we parked the car while the issue is resolved.

[00:29:24] So in other words, the cars got kind of confused, trying to figure out what to do. They were at a, an intersection and I don't know if they lost connection to the internet or what, but having a dozen of them failed at the same time makes me think that it was something outside of the cars that made this, uh, happen, frankly.

[00:29:43] So expect this to happen more and more. I'm glad it's happening in San Francisco and not in my hometown, frankly, but there've been cases where the primary and backup services have been down. So there's no way to communicate with the vehicles, get any information. It. Specifically and directly violates the terms granted by the DMV.

[00:30:07] Interesting stuff stick around will be right back a lot more to talk about here, about health insurers and a new law.

[00:30:19] The internet promised us a whole bunch of transparency information access. While as of July 1st health insurers and self-insured employers are now required to do something that should have been around a while.

[00:30:36] This is a moment that is going to be remembered by a lot of people, particularly in the medical healthcare business.

[00:30:45] I've been just shocked sometimes at how much. We get charged for some things. I'm also just amazed at what great medical care we have here. My family, most of them live in Canada and I have horror stories from pretty much every member of my family in Canada, about how terrible socialized medicine in Canada is.

[00:31:13] I mean, Terrible. Now you might know that I was a volunteer EMT. I D P uh, you know, basically a paramedic for about 10 years in my hometown. And we took care of a lot of people. I was, as I said, volunteer, it wasn't a call department. We didn't get paid a dime. We had to provide our own equipment and transportation, everything else.

[00:31:37] Right. So true volunteers. And I got to see some interesting sides of medical care here in the us. And as I kind of an exchange program, got to see some of it in Canada, as well as talking with people and the, the horror stories I can tell you about my family is just incredible. My, my brother was using a table saw and the wood kicked back and ripped off one of his fingers.

[00:32:09] This is in Toronto Brampton to be exact, just one of Toronto's many suburbs. And so here comes the ambulance and he sat in the back of the ambulance. They were driving from hospital to hospital. They couldn't even reach the hospitals beforehand to find out who might take him. And he was holding his severed finger in his hand for three hours, driving around in the back of the hospital before they could find somebody to re a hospital to reattach his finger or do something right.

[00:32:44] He actually says he wishes they hadn't reattached him. You, you wouldn't believe what they did to him and, and his finger. Uh, my father had a heart attack. Right there, Toronto, right? The biggest city in the country. And, uh, he has a heart attack and he's driving around for hours in the back of an ambulance before anybody will bother to have a look at someone who is in the midst of a heart attack.

[00:33:11] Now we're, we're lucky he didn't die. My grandmother, they would not give her medication for her atrial fibrillation. My grandfather. They had called and told his doctor, my mother did this when she was visiting him, that his foot was, uh, looking really bad and she was worried it would get gang ness. So they set up, uh, an appointment six months out.

[00:33:36] She said, no, no, no, no, no. No, it it's go it's gang us. Uh, you know, pretty soon here we gotta do something. So since it was an emergency, they, you know, they set it up for six weeks out and he ended up having to have his whole foot amputated. Um, so don't ask me about socialized medicine, unless you want to hear even more.

[00:33:54] Horror stories it's really, really bad. And just like, uh, schools, public schools in most states costing somewhere around $12,000 a year per student, and yet private education costs a fraction of that, like less than half in almost every case. Uh, You know, which is, which would you rather do send your kid to a private school that, uh, you know, education's probably better.

[00:34:22] I don't know. It's cheaper, so it's probably not as good as public school education. He said with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, or do you wanna send him to the public schools? Anytime you get government involved or any big organization efficiencies start dropping, but particularly with government cuz they don't have competition and they will point guns at you.

[00:34:47] If you don't do what you're told ultimately right. As you get arrested. So, uh, what's happening here I think is a plus a very, very big plus I am a member of a health share. And so what we do is instead of having health insurance, we help each other pay our medical bills. So one of the things we're supposed to do when we go in there is ask for a self pay discount.

[00:35:16] So, this is a kind of an interesting thing, because what I have found is that the self paid discount shaves off. Typically at least 50% of the cost. If you look at what Medicare will reimburse hospitals, For, or doctor's offices again, it's a fractious way, less than half of what they want to bill you for.

[00:35:40] So they, the hospitals in other places will take people who don't have insurance and you can charge, uh, it'll charge you a whole lot less. It's kind of the bottom line here. So what does that mean to you and me, if you can tell in advance. What the costs might be. And I'm [email protected].

[00:36:08] And they're talking about one of these people who needed to have some, uh, medical care here in x-ray. And you saying that you can see that you can do it for 250 at the hospital, but if you go to the imaging center down the road, it's 75 bucks. or a specialist might be able to do it in their office for 25 bucks.

[00:36:32] What a difference, say a 10th of the cost and that is not abnormal. So what this law is now requiring. As of July 1st is that health insurers and self-insured employers must post on websites pretty much any price they've negotiated with providers for healthcare services item. By item. But the only things that are excluded from these price lists are prescription drugs, except for those that are administered in the hospitals or doctors' offices.

[00:37:09] So this is now federally required data release, and I think it is going to affect future prices because even if you have health, Insurance looking at these numbers is going to ultimately save you money because your monthly health insurance premium could be less. If the health insurance company isn't having to pay as much for all of this stuff, right.

[00:37:32] You, you see how that works. So it's to everyone's advantage. And when you start doing the math. you're talking about trillions of records that are gonna be published. Every physician in network, every hospital, every surgery center, every nursing facility, and every last charge that they have, this is gonna take a little bit of time.

[00:37:57] Isn't it? And the federal government is going to be imposing penalties for non-compliance. And they are going to be Heier than penalties that many hospitals are facing. If you are a small provider, uh, basically insurers self-insured employers could be fined as much as a hundred dollars a day for each violation.

[00:38:23] So let's say you have hundreds of procedures that you could potentially do a hundred dollars a day for each one of those procedures that's not listed or properly priced. Yeah, this could be millions of dollars, very fast for individual organizations, you know, per usual, right. Government is, is just power and they don't consider everything.

[00:38:46] They well, we had a hearing on, well, really you think everybody can attend a hearing that might be affected by this it's it's anyways, I'm not gonna get into that anymore. Right? It's not one of those days. Um, but these databases are gonna be enormous. Most people are gonna find it very hard to use the data in ways that are really going to help them or affect them.

[00:39:09] At least at first here, ultimately I think it's going to be something that we can use certainly is gonna be something that these, uh, PPOs and HMOs are going to be using to figure out where you should go in order to get. Something done or to buy something. And the biggest value of this July data release may well be to shed light on how the different insurers are able to negotiate prices with their providers.

[00:39:46] No. That's interesting. This article on K hn.org is saying that a recent study by the Rand corporation shows that employers that offer job based insurance plans paid on average. I hope you're sitting down here. Okay. This is employers. What do they pay? 224% more than Medicare for the same services.

[00:40:10] Fascinating. Isn't it. Tens of thousands of employers who buy insurance coverage for their workers will get this more complete pricing picture, which I think is really good. There's a whole lot of information here. If you want to find out more about it, just look at this, week's a newsletter, the insider actually show notes.

[00:40:29] I've got a link to this article. There is a lot of detail here. If you are a medical provider of any sort, if you work in a doctor's office, you are going to want to make sure you peruse this. I know most people I've spoken to in the medical business just aren't even aware of this yet. Although I think a lot of the hospital to the bigger organizations are aware of it, but.

[00:40:53] This is, uh, this is gonna be interesting. Uh, the people ultimately you make your medical choices based on money, or maybe it's based on who the doctor is and the bedside manner, and maybe the manner of their staffs. There's a lot of reasons other than price that people choose different medical providers.

[00:41:17] And, uh, and this is going be interesting. So check it out again as in my newsletter this week, uh, K hn.org. Great little thing. Uh, there's also a problem right now with attacks on routers. This is really bad. It's called zero rat. It's a remote access Trojan and it's probably a sophisticated nation state, and it's very, very bad.

[00:41:47] It, it is affecting these routers, these cheaper ones, net gear, SES. There's. Cheaper, Cisco ones, uh, day tech, many others, but what they do is they take over that router, the edge of your network, and then the malware takes full control of connected devices or running windows, Mac OS. And Linux, according to researchers, just within the last couple of weeks, high level of sophistication.

[00:42:18] Hey, make sure you get that insider show notes that I mentioned here a few times today, Craig peterson.org or com, I should say Craig peterson.com. And also if you have any questions, just email me, me, Craig peterson.com. And I will try and get back with you. Take care.

[00:42:39] You're worried about surveillance. Hey, I'm worried about surveillance and it turns out that there's a secretive company out there that to prove their mustard hacked the NSA yeah. Fun thing.

[00:42:56] This is a company that is kind of scary. We've talked before about a couple of these scary guys.

[00:43:03] There's this Israeli company called NSO group. And this is ANSO group is absolutely incredible. What they've been doing, who they'll sell to these. Guys are a company that sells cell phones, smart phone exploits to its customers, and they alleged to have sold their software to a variety of human rights abusers.

[00:43:34] We're talking about NSO group coming up with what we would term kind of a zero day hack against iPhones against Android phones against pretty much anything out there. So in other words, a hack that no one's ever seen before, and then use that in order to get into the phone and find information. They've used things like the, I think it was WhatsApp and video that was sent and use that.

[00:44:03] To hack Saudi Arabian phones. You might remember Khashoggi this, uh, so-called journalist, I guess he kind of was who apparently was murdered by them. Right. Big, big problem. So this Israeli group. Yeah. Yeah. They sell to anybody that's willing to pay. At least that's what the allegations are. I've never tried to buy their stuff, but yeah, they're assisting government with hacks with.

[00:44:32] Ultimate in surveillance. Another one clear view. We've talked about them on the show before this is a company that has done all kinds of illegal stuff. Now, some of it's, uh, technically not illegal. They're against the terms of usage, what clear view has done. And now they've gotten involved in this Russian Ukrainian.

[00:44:56] War that's been going on here. They've gotten involved with a number of legal cases in the us. What they did is they said, okay, well, great. Let's do something. Well, you remember Facebook, right guys. You've heard of that before. And how Facebook got started muck Zuckerberg. muck, uh, went ahead and stole the pictures of the women that were in Harvard's catalog.

[00:45:26] Right now when I say catalog, okay, this isn't like a catalog of women, you know, order one male order type thing. We're talking about their index, their contacts, right. There is a catalog of all of the students that are there in the school. So Zuckerberg goes and grabs those against policy. Okay. Maybe it wasn't strictly against policy at the time.

[00:45:48] And then he puts up something. Called the Facebook where people can look at a picture of a girl and decide whether or not she should get a five or a 10 or a one. Right? Yeah. That sort of stuff, abusing people that that really is abuse. I, I can't imagine. The way people felt had seen their ratings by people that didn't know them, that somehow their Def definition of beauty really defined who they are.

[00:46:18] It's it's crazy what the stuff he did. Right. So he started his business by stealing stuff. Microsoft started his business by what. Well, by going ahead and misrepresenting, some would say lying to IBM about what he had as far as an operating system goes right. A again and again, and again, we're seeing dishonest people getting involved, doing dishonest things to get their companies off of the ground.

[00:46:44] And I have a friend who's an attorney who says, and Craig, that's why you will never be wealthy because you just wouldn't do any of that. So clear view is another example of these types of companies. In this case, clear view, went to Facebook and crawled any page. It could get its little grubby crawlers on.

[00:47:07] So it found your public fab, Facebook page. It went all. Over the internet. There's a number of websites. Some are outta business now, but that you upload your pictures too. You people can rate them, can share them. You can share them. Hey, you got your own photo gallery here that you can share with friends and a million other people, right.

[00:47:29] That that's what ended up happening. That's how those guys made the money. Right? They're selling you on, Hey, you can look at how convenient this. And you can have your own little, uh, photo gather gallery and you can take that full photo gallery and, uh, share it with your friends. And then if you read the fine print, it's Hey, and we'll make money off of showing your pictures and showing ads.

[00:47:51] Well, Clear view went and scanned every website. It could get its grubby little scanners on crawled through the mall, downloaded pictures of any face that it could find. And then went ahead and digitized information about people's face. So it spent years scraping and then it put together its technology, facial recognition technology, and went to the next level, which is, Hey police department, get my app so you can get the clear view app.

[00:48:31] And you encounter someone, you can take a picture of them and upload it, which now gives them another face. Doesn't it. And then once it's uploaded, it'll compare it and it'll say, okay, found the guy here he is. So with the Russia Ukrainian war, what they were doing is taking pictures of, of dead and injured, Russian soldiers, running them through this database online of all of these faces found out who they were and went so far as to use other.

[00:49:04] Stolen data online. Now this is war, right? The whole thing is crazy, but the stolen database online found out who their mothers were, the phone numbers for the mothers and have people all over the world. Sending text messages to mom about their dad's son. . Yeah. Okay. So Clearview sells it to police departments.

[00:49:29] They sell it to, um, pretty much the highest bidder they say, Hey, listen, we don't do that. Come on right now. There's other data brokers. And I've had a few on my show in the past who are using harvested information from phone apps to provide location data. To law enforcement so that they can then circumvent.

[00:49:54] What, what, well, you have a right to privacy. Don't you it's codified right in the bill of rights, those first 10 amendments to the us constitution. And it was also. Uh, defined by the Supreme court's carpenter decision. So we have protections in the constitution, natural rights that were confirmed by the Supreme court that say, Hey, the federal government, you cannot track all of the citizens.

[00:50:26] You can't track what they're doing. You can't harvest their information. And yet at the same time, They go to the data brokers that have put together all of these face pictures, figured out who your friends are, you know, you know, you sign up for Facebook and it says, Hey, you want me to find your friends?

[00:50:45] See if they're already on Facebook, just, just hit. Yes. Here, not blow your contact list. So up goes. Facebook says, oh, look at all your friends. We found isn't this exciting. And in the meantime, in the background, Facebook is looking at all of this data and saying, ha, we now know who your friends are. And so many people have wondered, well, wait a minute.

[00:51:07] I didn't talk about, um, I, I didn't do a search for product X online, and yet I'm getting ads for product X. Well, did you mention it to a friend who might have done a search for it? Because these search engines, these companies like Facebook know who your friends are, what they're interested in, and they'll sell ads to people who are going to promote to you the same items they're promoting to your friends.

[00:51:33] Right? It it's absolutely crazy. So this company. It's called a six and they're very, very quiet, very low key. The website doesn't say anything at all, but they took their software. That's pulling all of this data together and compiling it and. And a six pointed all of this technology towards the national security agency and the C I a and Jews, their own cell phones against them.

[00:52:08] Now, why did they do this? They didn't do it to prove something about how, you know, you shouldn't allow this sort of thing to happen and they didn't do it to prove that man, we gotta have tighter controls because look at what we can do if we can do what other people can do it. No, no, no, no. According to audio, visual presentations and recordings of an Asics presentation reviewed by the intercept and tech inquiry.

[00:52:37] Asics claimed that it can track roughly 3 billion devices in real time. That's equivalent to a fifth of the world population. You're not gonna find anything out about a six it's called anomaly six. Good luck online. If you find it, let me know [email protected]. I'd love to know more about these guys.

[00:53:00] The only thing on a website for them is email address and a six anomaly six in that presentation showed the nation spooks. Exactly what a six knew about. All right. Uh, apparently a six is also ignoring questions from journalists and will only respond to emails from people in upper levels of federal agencies, which means, and maybe this is a supposition from our friends over at tech dirt.

[00:53:36] I don't know. But there, what that means is they're looking to sell your information in real time. To the feds to get around the carpenter decision and the constitution just absolutely amazing. Hey, go online right now. Craig peterson.com. I'll send you my special report on passwords and my two other most popular Craig peterson.com.

[00:54:03] Stick around.

[00:54:07] Have you ever wondered about search engines? Which ones should you be using? You're not alone. It's probably the number one question I get from people. What should I use? Well, Google is falling behind, but we're gonna talk about the top engines and the whys.

[00:54:25] Google has been an amazing company moving up. Of course, you know, we were just talking about the cheats.

[00:54:33] So many companies have taken over the years and Google has certainly had its share of cheats. I haven't seen anything about them just doing completely underhanded things to get started. I think. They were pretty straightforward. They had a great idea back in the beginning, where they were just looking at links, how many sites linked into this one particular site?

[00:54:59] And that gave this concept of a page rank. Very simple, very easy to do, of course of problems with that. Because you would end up with pages that are older, having more links to them, et cetera. And they have over the years really improved themselves, but we also have some other problems right now with Google.

[00:55:24] If you do searches on Google for a number of different top. Uh, and you'll, you'll see that really Google search quality has deteriorated in recent years. We've talked before here about some of the problems with Google and elections and how they have obviously gone out of their way to influence elections.

[00:55:47] There a study down in done in orange county, California, or at least about orange county, California, and an election down there showed that Google had a major influence on that election and also tilted it a certain way on purpose. Absolutely amazing. So that's one way Google has kind of fallen behind, but you can.

[00:56:10] at all kinds of searches and hope you're gonna get a great response. And you don't have you noticed that it's gotten worse and then on top of it, you're starting to see more ads squeezed in it is not great. Uh, I have used it. A course for programming. In years past, before that I liked altar Vista, which was a digital equipment corporation product altar Vista was pretty darn good.

[00:56:38] And you could use boo and logic with it. Google says, well, you can use bullying with us, but it it's not the same. It's Google's is very, very simple. But at any rate they have not made any. Leaps here going forward. It it's been absolutely amazing. So let's go through the search engines. I'm gonna give you right now, the pros and cons to some of these search engines out there.

[00:57:04] So we started with Google. It is the 800 pound gorilla. And in case you didn't know this number two overall search engine is YouTube. Okay. But let let's stick with straight searches, not video searches. So what is great about Google? Well, one of the big things is they like fresh content. So if you're looking to do search engine optimization for your business, you are best off having some Keystone pages.

[00:57:37] So having these pages that are. Kept up to date. So you might have a page on whatever it might be hacking VPNs, right? Uh, and you make sure you update it. Cuz Google does favor the fresh content. They rank blogs and. Services, which is really nice and they're accessible in any device. They have apps. They work well on a browser and I'm I'm right now, I'm [email protected] on the best search engine.

[00:58:08] So you'll see some of this information there. What. They don't like about it is the same thing you don't. Right? Which is, it collects all kinds of data on you. They also have hidden content that, that, uh, might damage your ranking as a business or someone who has a website and the search deliver. Too many results, you know, you see millions of results.

[00:58:37] Well, yeah, there probably are millions of results for a single search, but what I want are the really relevant ones and Google learns over time. What kind of results that you want, which is kudos to them, but they are tone deaf sometimes, frankly as well. Okay. Our number two on our list of top eight. Is duck dot go.

[00:59:00] Now I've been talking about them for quite a while, and some people have been kind of disparaging duck dot go lately. And the, the reason is they say, well, those search results maybe are a, a little wrong, right? They are, uh, maybe student little. Cing not as much as Google does, but some, [email protected] is where you'll find them online named after that kid's game.

[00:59:30] Is a privacy search engine. So it is not tracking or storing any information about you. That's a very big one. Their searches are very fast, but their backed, the actual backend search engine is Bing. Which is Microsoft. We're gonna get to that in a couple minutes here. That means that if Microsoft is deciding to do some waiting on search results, based on their political views, then that's gonna show up in duck dot go.

[01:00:03] But it's nowhere near as bad. And I've talked about it on the show before we've done some examples. So it is also now giving you the option to restrict your searches to the last month worth of results, which is really nice. That keeps a little more up to date. They also aren't graded image searches, no personalized results, and it is free, which is nice.

[01:00:27] You might also wanna look at quant Q w a N T. If you're looking. A private or privacy browser quant is a French company, but it, it does English as well. Okay. English results. They like the older and well-established web pages, they rank home pages. They do not rank blogs. They crawl all kinds of hidden content and non hidden, equally, unlike Google, which is really great.

[01:00:59] Uh, Bing is not great at forums. As I mentioned blogs, they're not as fast as Google. And they have some seriously heavy search results, screened dog pile they've been around for quite a while. You might want to check them out. They have something called fetches and favorite fetches. So you can have a home screen when you go to dog pile and you'll see right there.

[01:01:26] Uh, your favorite searches and they're right there for you. You can just keep going to them. They use multiple databases so they can get broad results, multiple backend search engines, and there's no home screen personalization available with it. And lots of sponsored results, which isn't a real big deal, but you'll find them [email protected], Google scholar search.

[01:01:50] I've used this a number of times. If you are looking for scholarly articles, it is really good. You can get citations and various styles. If you are working on your master's PhD, whatever it. Be, and they're imposing a style in the document that you're writing, so you can put it into the bibliography. And, uh, they, they got a lot of great stuff.

[01:02:14] Google scholar you'll find [email protected]. Web EDIA search. It focuses on technical terms and applications, which is kind of good, friendly to non-tech users. And it is only searching weed's 10,000 word and phrase database. So that's pretty good. To, uh, to understand too Yahoo search, they have a home screen has news trending topics I I've used Yahoo of course is not what it used to be, but it does have everything right there.

[01:02:52] Even your horoscope. And the ads are not marked out clearly. And then there's the internet archive search. This is actually a site that I fund. I, I donate money to them every month and you'll find [email protected], but it is really, really cool. You can search based on timeframes again, if you are doing papers, if you are a journalist, et C.

[01:03:19] You can find what was the internet like? Or what was this webpage? Like? What was it like around hurricane Katrina in 2005, right there. We'll find it [email protected]. Hey, stick around. We'll be right back.

[01:03:37] You already know that hackers are coming after you we've talked about how they are out there, scraping web pages, putting together stuff. Well, I wanna bring up again, the Ukraine, Russian war and Russia leaking data like a S.

[01:03:54] Hi, if you've ever wondered who I am. I'm Greg Peterson. We met before. I'm your chief information security officer, well, Russia, Russia, Russia. It, it is of course in the news again, it seems like it's been in the news for how long now, six years, maybe longer in this case, we're gonna talk about what the hackers are doing because they're not just doing it to Russia.

[01:04:22] They're doing it. us. And it's a problem. We're gonna explain why you've heard of doxing before do XX. I N G to docs someone, which is basically to find documentation about people and to release it. That that's really a part of it, frankly. So you've seen some political operatives who have gone online and, and docked people.

[01:04:50] For instance, uh, one of them is libs of TikTok. You might have heard of that one, and this is where they take all of these crazy things, that crazy people, uh, on TikTok, go ahead and publish and just put excerpts of them together. They don't like cut it up to make them look crazy. No, no, no. They let them be crazy.

[01:05:12] All all by themselves and put it online. So some libs decided, Hey, we don't like this. And, uh, a so-called journalist who had been complaining about doxing before that shouldn't be done and it's unethical. It should be illegal. Yeah. What does she do? She goes and docks. The lady that was running libs of TikTok and I, I, it just, it blows my mind here.

[01:05:44] How can these people be so two faced? They really are just crazy, crazy two-faced. So she went ahead and did what she said should never be done. And I'm sure she had some form of justification for it and put it out online. So, uh, online comes this lady's home address her name. Kinds of stuff and that's available online right now.

[01:06:10] Now you might wanna try and do something that I've done before, which is, if you go to one of these data brokers, you see ads for these things, right? Like a, do a search for yourself with us. And have a look at how accurate that information is. When I looked last time I looked cuz I had a few data brokers on the radio show.

[01:06:32] I would say less than a third of the information that they claimed was information about me was actually accurate less than a third, frankly. And I don't think that's a particularly, what's the word I'm looking for, but. unique situation. Let me put it that way. I don't think it's unique at all. I think they get a lot of it wrong because remember, they're trying to piece together this piece together that and put it all together.

[01:07:03] So you, you can't a hundred percent rely on any of that stuff. And as I said, for me, it wasn't particularly accurate. Well, now let's move into war. Ukraine has claimed to have docked Russian troops, as well as FSB spies. You remember them from the Soviet union, they still exist. Right. And activists actually have official scheduled meetings and are leaking private information from various Russian organizations and Russian people.

[01:07:39] So we're talking about things like their names, birth dates, passport numbers, job titles, and the personal information that they have released about these Russian companies. And people goes on for pages here. It looks like frankly, any data breach, you'll find a great article about this that I'm referring to in wired.com, but this particular data.

[01:08:04] Can change personal information on 1600 Russian troops who served in BKA a Ukrainian city, that's been attacked by Russia. And by the way, you've probably seen these things. There were all kinds of, uh, accusations here of multiple potential war crimes. What was going on over there? So this data, set's not the only one.

[01:08:29] There's another one that. Allegedly contains the names and contact details of 620 Russian spies who are registered to work at the Moscow office of the F S B. That is Russia's main security agency. Now this information wasn't released by hackers in North Korea or hackers in the us or Russia, because we already know Russian hackers.

[01:09:02] Don't attack Russia. They're not stupid. Okay. They don't want Booton coming after them, but this was published by Ukraine's intelligence services. So all of these names, all of these personal details, birthdates passport numbers, job titles, where they're from all kinds of stuff. Uh, freely available online to anyone who cares to look now, Ukrainian officials wrote in a Facebook post that as they published the data that every European should know their names.

[01:09:36] So you've got to bet there are a lot of people kind of freaking out over there. Absolutely, absolutely freaking out, uh, in Russia that is. Since the Russians invaded Ukraine, there have been huge amounts of information about Russia itself, the Russian government's activities and companies in Russia. These are all the GARS that are over there and it's all been made public.

[01:10:02] So it's very interesting, cuz these are been closed off private institutions in the us. Yeah, we do do some hacking of potential adversaries, but they don't release it. All right. Uh, not at all, but there's really two types of data here. First of all, you've got the information that the Russian authorities are publishing.

[01:10:25] Their allies are publishing, and then you've got the activists, these companies, these groups, I should say, like, Anonymous hundreds of gigabytes of files and millions of emails have been made public, including some of the largest companies within Russia. I mean the big guys, oil and gas companies, uh, or lumber companies, et cetera, cetera.

[01:10:51] So there's a former British Colonel in the military intelligence. Wired is quoting here, his name's Philip Ingram. And he said, both sides in this conflict are very good at information operations. The Russians are quite blatant about the lies that they'll tell we're used to that aren't we, and much of the Russian disinformation has been debunked, but they.

[01:11:19] They have to make sure that what they're putting out is credible and they're not caught telling outright lies in a way that would embarrass them or embarrass their international partners. So it it's really quite interesting. We've started seeing the stuff coming out in March 20, 22, of course. Right.

[01:11:39] and it's hard to tell how accurate the data is. It looks probably pretty accurate. It has been scooped up. As I mentioned on the show before. uh, some activists, one of whom has put together an app that anyone can download and allows you to send text to this mothers of Russian soldiers, some alive, some dead, and it automatically translated into Russian.

[01:12:08] I, I assume it's kind of a crude translation, but whatever. Right. So you can. Harass some poor, uh, babushka over there in Russia, whose grandson is out there fighting. This is just incredible. We've never seen anything like any of this before, but doxing very toxic online behavior. And when it comes to war, the gloves are off.

[01:12:34] Right. And by the way, these groups that I mentioned, these hacktivists have official meetings, Tuesday mornings on telegram, and they talk about who the next target is. Absolutely amazing. Make sure you visit me online. Craig, Peter son.com. And don't go anywhere because we've got more coming up here about organizations in general, here in the us breaches are up stolen.

[01:13:03] Data are. And the number of bankruptcies are up because of it.

[01:13:10] Hacks are up now, you know that we've, we've known that for a while, but did you know that that is not necessarily the number one reason businesses are suffering breaches? So we're gonna talk about that right now. What else you have.

[01:13:26] We've talked before about some of the websites that I keep an eye on.

[01:13:31] One of them is called dark reading and they've got a lot of good stuff. Some of this stuff I don't really agree with, but you know, who agrees with everybody or another person? Just one, even a hundred percent of the time. Like no one. Okay. So in this case, we're talking. Organization suffering a breach. And the stat that they're quoting here is that more than 66, 0% of organizations have suffered a breach in the last 12 months.

[01:14:04] That's huge. And the breaches have gotten more expensive. Global average breach cost is $2.4 million. And if you are unprepared to respond to a compromise, that price tag increases to 3 million. Yeah. That's how bad it is. That's what's going on out there right now. But the point that really they're trying to make here at dark reading in this article, by Robert Lemo.

[01:14:36] Is that our organizations are focused to narrowly on external attackers when it's insiders third parties and stolen assets that cause many breaches. That's what this new study is showing from Forester research. Now I've had them on the show a few times in the past, you might be familiar with them. They are a research company.

[01:15:02] That charges a lot for very little information, but you know, they've, they've got the research to back it up, right. They're, they're really one of the leading, if not the leading research company out there. So last month they came out. with the 20, 21 state of enterprise breaches report. And they found that the number of breaches and the cost of breaches varied widely, depending on where the organization is based.

[01:15:33] And. The big one that you have control over is whether they were prepared to respond to breaches. Now, companies in north America had the largest disparity between the haves and have nots. Listen to these numbers. They're bad for businesses. These numbers and're worse for individuals. The average organization required 38 days.

[01:16:00] 38 days over a month on average to find eradicate and recover from a breach, but companies that were not prepared for security challenges took 62 days. Now the good news here is that this is down. It used to take nine months on average, and now we're down to two months, but here's the big question for you.

[01:16:30] Can you, or can a company survive 62 days or is it gonna be out of business? Right? Do you have enough money to make payroll for the next two months? That's where the problem. Really starts to come in. That's why small businesses that are hacked small businesses that are using things like Norton or some of the other real basic software without having a, a good firewall and, and good security practices.

[01:17:02] Uh, and same thing with individuals here. Uh, you are going to be out of business odds. Right. That's what they're showing right now. And your insurance policy that you have for cybersecurity insurance will not pay out. I did a presentation for an insurance industry group. Uh, this was in Massachusetts and it was a statewide group.

[01:17:29] And we talked about how. Are not paying out the companies. Aren't right. And why, and if, if you are not prepared, if you are not doing the right things and I can send you a list of what you need to be doing, if you'd like, just email [email protected]. Be glad to send it to you. Me, me at Craig Peterson, P E T E R O n.com.

[01:17:54] and just ask for it and I'll, I'll respond to you or we'll get Mary or someone else to forward it to you because I've already got it. Okay. This isn't a big deal for me. Okay. it's ready to go. But, um, that list is an important list because if you don't meet the standards, That the insurance industry has set forward and you are a hack.

[01:18:16] They're not going to pay you a dime, even if you Sue them. And we've seen this with very large companies as well, where they're trying to recover tens of millions of dollars from the insurance policy, and they didn't get a dime. They had to also pay who knows how many millions to lawyers to Sue the insurance companies.

[01:18:36] And they lost. Okay. It's a very, very big deal. So there's of a huge misalignment, according to Forester, between the expectation and the reality of breaches on a global scale, there's a big disparity of about $600,000 between those who are. Prepared to respond to a breach and those who are not. And, uh, we can talk about that as well, because there there's things you need to do obviously backup, but backup means you've got to check the backup.

[01:19:08] You've gotta make sure it's valid. You should be spinning up the backups on, in a virtual environment in order to make sure the backups are good. There's a lot of things you should be doing. Okay. And, uh, that's just a part of it. Plus, do you have your PR people ready? Are you able to respond to the state requirements?

[01:19:29] A lot of states. Now, if you are hacked require you to report it to the state, in some cases in as little as 72 hours. So do you have that paperwork ready? Do you have the phone numbers of all of the people that are on the team? Okay. All of these things now, the threats are not just the external hackers.

[01:19:52] anybody who's trying to protect their data is focused on obviously the external hackers. That's where we tend to focus part one part two is we focus in on the people that are working inside. The company, right? It's kind of a zero trust narrative here. Why is this guy in sales, trying to get into the engineering files?

[01:20:19] Why are they trying to get into payroll? Right? You, you understand where I'm going with this? You buying what I'm selling. You don't want them to have access to stuff that they don't need access. So. Attacks that Forrester found were spread over external attacks, internal incidents, third party, and supply chain attacks, which is really big nowadays and lost or stolen.

[01:20:50] Assets globally. Half of companies consider external attacks to be this top threat, but in reality, only a third of the incidents come from external actors. Nearly a quarter of them are traced back to an internal event while 23% consisted of lost or stolen assets and 21% involved, a third party. Partner, interestingly.

[01:21:15] So we've got to keep an eye on this. These external attacks are a very big deal and that's where they have success with what are called zero day attacks. But your internal people can be a problem. Now I have. Put together 20, uh, 2022. This is something really, really important. A what we call a POA and M it's a plan of action and milestones of what you need to be doing.

[01:21:50] For your cyber security. Okay. This is available absolutely free. You have to email me M E Craig peterson.com. But the idea behind this is it's a spreadsheet that you can use in numbers on a Mac or Excel on windows. And it has all of the key items. Now we follow what's called the. 801 71 standard. This is the national Institute of standards and technology, and they've laid out, uh, all of the different things.

[01:22:23] That you should be doing now. We've broken them down into eight cyber security. Activators is what we called them. And we have, you should have already gotten an email this week from me. If you're on my email list, just talking about cuz we we're starting now getting into those cyber security activators.

[01:22:42] I'm showing you what. To do about each one of them. So you can do it yourself. Right? So many of us are stuck with being the, the CTO or the guy or gal in charge of it just because we like computers or we know more than somebody else. Right. So if you're on my email list, you will be getting these things automatic.

[01:23:03] We're gonna be going through them in the weeks ahead. Little, little quick mini micro trainings, if you will, but you gotta be on the email list in order to get them. These are also appropriate for home users right now. You're gonna have to make your decisions as to what you're going to do, but home users have the same exposure, the same basic problems that they have in bigger organizations out there.

[01:23:30] so I follow the national Institute of standards and technologies. They have broken it down into a number of different sections. They actually require it. And if you are compliant with this with thisness standard, uh, you are going to be able to recover your money from the insurance company. If you are hacked.

[01:23:55] I dunno. I was gonna say if or when, but, um, hopefully you won't get hacked because of this. So it it's an important thing to follow. So make sure you go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe right now and get subscribe a lot of stuff for home users. You know, my business is focused on securing businesses.

[01:24:15] Particularly regulated businesses, right? If you have intellectual property, you don't want to have stolen. If you do government contracts where they're requiring you to be, uh, uh, compliant with thisness standard or some of the others, but it's. Basic stuff that every business should be following. So just email me, me, Craig peterson.com with your questions.

[01:24:40] We've been really good at answering them. We've probably lately been averaging about a dozen a day. Which is quite a few. So it might take us a little bit to get back to you, but we've gotten much better. Mary, her, her number one responsibility right now is making sure that we answer all of your emails.

[01:24:59] We'll send out this plan of action and milestone spreadsheet for you. So you know what to do. This is updated. This is 2022. Everything you need right there. Me at Craig Peterson dot. All right. You'll also find my podcast there. Craig peterson.com. And I wanna point out that I'm not doing the show on video anymore.

[01:25:26] It just wasn't getting enough traction with it and it just takes too long. Anyways, Craig peterson.com.

Saving 79% on PrescriptionsMicrosoft Outlook Attack in Progress! Does Your Business Use eMail? FBI Warning

About one-third of Americans are taking a prescription drug -- And this is kind of the scary part. The average person who is on a prescription has four prescriptions and we're paying dearly for it. But mark Cuban has an answer.

[Following is an automated transcript]

Well, you know, I do a lot of stuff in cybersecurity and I've got a few different courses coming up.

[00:00:22] And of course, we do a little bit of weekly training for anybody who's on my email list, you know, on the free list. Absolutely free as well as you get my insider show notes. And if you got my show notes, you probably noticed this. Tidbit here on Tuesday when I sent it out. And that is mark Cuban. Now for those who don't know mark Cuban, he started way back in the internet.

[00:00:48] Boom days he lucked out. He had a, a company called broadcast.com. and he was able to turn that into, I think it was well over a billion dollars. I don't remember the exact amount, but it, it was a very, very big chunk of money. And then he's gone on to become an investor. You might know him as the owner of a basketball team.

[00:01:10] You might have seen him on a TV show called shark tank. He's been out there and he's a bright guy. He's been helping a lot of people and causing a lot of problems too. Right. But he has a new business that he has started with his billions of dollars only. He has at least 1 billion and it's called. Cost plus drugs.

[00:01:35] Now this is where it comes into affect every American, because I mentioned, you know, how many Americans are on various prescriptions? Well, many of the prescriptions that we could be taking are actually generics. So for instance, if you go to the Walmart pharmacy or Walgreens or wherever it. Be you'll find that they have options for you.

[00:02:00] If the doctor says, yeah, generic's okay. They'll say, Hey, listen, I'll give you the generic and you can save a whole lot of money. I don't know if you've looked at good RX at all. But good RX. I have saved a ton of money with that. And what they do is help you find free coupons. Compare the prices at, at Walmart Walgreen, CVS Rite aid, you know, at the major pharmacies.

[00:02:24] And we'll tell you where you can go to get your best deal. Plus. They also have some really cool discounts. So it, it acts kind of like a discount card. So I'm on their site right now. Good rx.com. And I look, I'm looking up their number one drug, which is Lipitor, apparently it's used for coronary art or coronary disease and high cholesterol.

[00:02:51] So they're saying, well, wait a minute. Now here. You can get a few different, uh, options. I'm looking now, for instance, CVS pharmacy nor normal retail, by the way is $126 at CVS. You can get it using a good rx.com card. 76% off for $30 instead of $126. Walmart, $15. Uh, Walmart neighborhood market, $15 now, Walmart, that's what they consider to be their retail price.

[00:03:27] Although, as I mentioned, some of these other ones have much, much higher retail prices. So you can see that going. For instance, for Lipitor, you might be. Paying a premium for a brand name. Now there, there's a good reason for that. There's a reason why prescription drugs can be expensive and, and they're called patent drugs.

[00:03:48] And the reason they're call patent drugs is they've put a lot of money in. They've put a lot of research time. They've, they've put up with a whole lot of regulation and going back and forth with various government agencies. And they finally were able to come forward with a drug that works. Put all of that together.

[00:04:09] And you've got a very expensive research and development product, right. Or project, frankly. So I don't, I don't really hold it against them. If we're having some of these drugs being rather expensive. You might remember that, uh, epi epinephrine a few years ago, this guy got a hold of the company that made epinephrine and the, um, You know, the, the whole problem with I'm looking it up right now, like EpiPens, they used to be expensive and then they became crazy expensive.

[00:04:44] So let me see here, EpiPens, EpiPens, and who needs it? There's a whole lot of information. It's not telling how much they are, but he raised the price. Like what was it? 2000% or something insane, again, a prescription drug and one that some people really need in order to save their lives. You know, I'm a beekeeper, right.

[00:05:08] And I used to have a really bad reaction to be stings, wasp stings. Now we just. Reaction, right. We thought at the time I was allergic, but no, it was just a bad reaction, which I still have. Right. It gets stung multiple times a year, but, uh, it still swells up. When, when, uh, our friend mark Cuban started looking at this, he said that this is kind of crazy.

[00:05:31] So what he's done now is mark Cuban has built, uh, I think it's all up and running just outside of Dallas. Let's see here. Yeah. Okay. Just outside of Dallas, a huge, huge building. It's a 22,000 square foot plant. Now most of the pharmaceuticals are actually easy to make and. To make. And that's what kind of gets confusing because you've got all of the R and D and the government regulations, everything else that's expensive, but actually making them is pretty cheap, but he's built this $11 million plant near downtown Dallas.

[00:06:14] And he says right now, looking at what the expenses are that Medicare could have saved as much as are you ready for this? 3.6 billion per year. Now that's where we're talking about everybody. Because if you pay taxes, you are paying for some of this Medicare money, 3.6 billion per year in savings. By buying it from cost plus drugs.

[00:06:46] So there's something else I want you to check out. So the first one was good. rx.com. The second one is cost plus drugs. They have over a hundred generic prescription medications right now. And what they're doing is they're taking the actual cost of production. And I'm sure that includes right. The loan on the building, et cetera, but the cost of production, plus a 15% margin because you need to keep the lights on.

[00:07:13] You need to be able to expand. Profit is not a bad word. That's how people save for retirement by investing in companies, buying stocks, and that profit then becomes their money for retirement. I think that's an important thing. So. 15% margin and an $8 pharmacy dispensing and shipping fee. That is absolutely cheap.

[00:07:41] So this is, uh, Husain Liani who did the research on this? And he published it in the annals of internal medicine. Looking at that just absolutely amazing. And that's something you can do too. One third of Americans, again, we are on prescription drugs and the average person is on four. Wow. So researchers compared the price charge by cost plus drugs for 89, generic medications to the cost for the same drugs paid.

[00:08:17] Medicare in 2020, they found the government program could have saved 37% on 77 generic drugs by buying from Cuban's company cost plus drugs. Once in January drug to consumer bypasses, wholesalers bypasses, pharmacies bypasses, I PA passes insurance. All of those are driving up the cost of medicine. So direct to consumer.

[00:08:43] Uh, how easy could that be? And I'm on their website right now, looking at a couple of things here. Let me see, let me go back there. Cost plus drugs, and I'm believing this go to cost plus drugs.com. Yes you can. I am there as we are talking. So he's got, oh, here's one tib. Uh, which is the generic for gleek I'm.

[00:09:08] Now I'm not familiar with that myself retail price, $2,502. cost. Plus, are you ready? $14. Can you believe that that is crazy. Yeah. Wow. And it'll look, it'll look different obviously, cuz it's a generic. So you saved $2,488 for a 30 count supply. That is just amazing. So when I, I, I was talking about the savings here, where.

[00:09:41] Okay. They could have saved 37% on 77 generic drugs. But when you start getting into these really expensive drugs, that's where the 3.6 billion really, really starts to add up in savings. This is something so what you can do once you're on cost plus drugs.com, you can contact your doctor for a prescription.

[00:10:04] They've gotta get started button. They have the strength that you want in this case, a hundred milligrams or 400, the quantity you want. And then all that has to happen is your doctor has to approve it. You pay $14 instead of $2,500 and it gets shipped straight to you. Wow. Now, is that cheaper than Medicare part B right?

[00:10:28] Or your regular insurance? Wow, sure. Is just absolutely amazing. So you can find all of this stuff. This is mark Cuban doing this, and I gotta say, I am impressed. He is going to help a whole lot of people. Yeah, I'm, I'm just looking at this. Wow. Here's another one retail price. $9,600. And at cost plus drugs, you can get it for 39.

[00:10:57] So there you go. Two options, mark Cuban's new venture, which is online now at costplusdrugs.com and goodrx.com. Wow. It's just amazing, right? This world. What's it coming to? Great little great little drug company. So we're gonna talk if you are a user of outlook, this is important to you because a major attack is underway.

[00:11:26] Major scam underway. If you are an outlook customer, you are in the crosshairs of a very successful credential stealing campaign. So I'm gonna tell you about that, what it means, what you can do and, uh, how you can stay safe.

[00:11:43] This is a very big problem for people who are using Microsoft 365, that is really common, used to be called office 365 and you pay a, a flat monthly fee, 20, 25 bucks.

[00:11:59] It kind of depends on what level you get. They have some real cheap ones as well, and it lets you use all of what Microsoft used to call Microsoft office applications. And one of those applications is outlook. And I've never particularly liked. they have gotten better in recent years. And I actually do use it right now, as well as MacMail I use both of them, but there is a hack going on against Microsoft 365 and outlook customers in the us.

[00:12:34] Here's what's happening. They are sending you an email and the email really does look like it's ti voicemail that somebody left. This is called a voicemail fishing attack and it follows, what's kind of a classic fishing flow. If you will, the ways they've been doing fishing here over the years, and what fishing is, is basically.

[00:13:02] Getting you to bite at something that you shouldn't bite on. You, you will respond to an email. You'll click on a link. You might call a phone number. You might click on a text message. That's another one that's going around right now. How do you tell a fake text message from a real text message? And I'm afraid to say nowadays you tell by just not clicking on the links that are in text messages.

[00:13:30] It's, it's so disappointing. I was talking on the radio this week. It, it, it, because it just, it bothers me so much about this very thing. I've been on the internet for decades now. Right? I, I started back in 81. I think it was maybe 80. Two and we had email and it was the best thing ever. If you had somebody's email address, you could send them a note and you'd be pretty darn sure they'd get it.

[00:13:58] In fact, they probably would get it within just a few minutes and respond to you. And there, there wasn't any spam. Back then the idea was, Hey, listen, the internet is for research government research, university research, and that's the way it should stay. And indeed, we were kind of keeping it that way for, for quite a while.

[00:14:21] And then some people who were marketers got on the internet. And they would start to advertise, Hey, we have a special session for you at, uh, UC Berkeley this week only $500. And of course that went be beyond what the internet was for. In fact, at the time you could not use it legally. For any sort of financial purposes.

[00:14:47] So what we would do back then is we would send the script to the Monty Python routine of spam. Remember that spam, spam, and egg spam, and hands spam, spam. Uh, yeah, we would send them the whole. And they, sometimes, if somebody sent out a little thing that was trying to sell something that they should not be selling online because it was illegal to use the internet for business in case you didn't know until about 1991.

[00:15:20] And that's when I started. Putting businesses online and really started focusing in on cyber security because almost immediately the bad guys started getting on there. So this is, uh, this is really what happened. This was the script, right? Uh, well, what have you got waitress? Well, there's egg and bacon, egg, sausage, and bacon, egg, and spam, egg, bacon, and spam, egg, bacon, spam, sausage, and spam spam, bacon sausages, and spam spam eggs, spam spam, bacon spam.

[00:15:51] Do you remember that? So. We would send this to people who kind of broke the rules written or unwritten on the internet. And sometimes somebody would get just a hundred of these things, maybe even more. And what would happen back then of course, is it would fill up your mailbox and it would slow down your check connection.

[00:16:10] Cuz a lot of us were just connected to the internet via dial up modems. So it, it really kind of hurt you to get all kinds of spam. Emails coming in. That's where the term comes from. I remember it well, so I don't care what they say on some of these websites or they're trying to do little research on it and figure it out.

[00:16:31] Well, now things have gotten a lot worse because it isn't just marketers that are trying to solve something. And I don't have a problem with marketers, I guess, in a way I am one myself. Right. I, I have a business and I provide cybersecurity services. For a high net worth individuals and for businesses.

[00:16:50] And if you are a regular person, you have a question. Please ask, just send an email to me, me Craig peterson.com, no matter who you are. And I will try and answer the question for you. And I have a lot of stuff that I've written over the years. That'd be more than glad to forward to you. There are some training courses that I.

[00:17:10] Put together that I will be more than glad to share with you. And you probably know I did all of the training for the FBI's Ingar program for a couple of years. I, I ran that online, all of their webinars. So I've been doing this for a long time and I'm more than glad to help. That's why I am here. Right.

[00:17:31] But now we got bad guys. and the bad guys are trying to get you to do something against your best interest. So in this case, what happens is you get a missed voicemail notification via email, and a lot of times it'll look pretty legitimate. It might even be coming from someone inside your company, whose account they have hacked.

[00:17:57] Now on that email, there is an HTML attachment. Now HTML attachments can get past a lot of email gateway filters because they aren't in and of themselves malicious. So they're not raising big red flags for users in a, in a voicemail notification setting because that's how office Microsoft office sends you legitimate notifications.

[00:18:24] Anyways. Now, these from fields are set up specifically using the organization's name. As I said, sometimes even a valid email address. Now, if you go ahead and click on that attachment, it will run a program on your computer using a language called JavaScript and that's embedded in every browser out there nowadays.

[00:18:47] And that JavaScript code is going to redirect you to an attack. Controlled website. Now this website set up to get you to give up your credentials. So, what they'll do now is as you go to the website and the website might look like it's Microsoft office and it might look like it's your business website, and it'll ask you to log in.

[00:19:15] It might ask you for other information as well. It is trying to get your username and password that it can then use to go after other people. You see what's happening here. So each of the URLs, these guys are creating these websites that they're sending you to are created to match the targeted company.

[00:19:39] It's it's incredible how good they're getting, and they even have one of those Google recapture. Pop ups. Now this is a, an increasingly popular technique to evade these auto mail, automated URL analysis tools. So for instance, with my client, an email comes in, it goes through Cisco's. Email filter. We have an advanced email filter from Cisco, but we run our client's emails through.

[00:20:10] And what happens is they look at the URLs, they visit the website that the URL PO points to, they try and verify if it's legit or not. And you you've had captures, you know, it's, um, click every box that has a bicycle in it, sort of a thing. It's kind of a touring test, test puzzle. So once this is solved, We'll tell you what happens next, cuz we're out of time right now.

[00:20:36] Uh, make sure you visit me online. Craig Peter son.com. I'll keep you up to date. You can get my free newsletter and trainings. Craig Peter son.com. And I want to talk too about businesses in the, the big business of email compromise.

[00:20:55] Yeah, I think most of us know what a big business is. Well, how about a business, an industry that has racked in 43 billion, according to the FBI. That's what we're talking about right now and what you can do about it.

[00:21:11] We were talking about, what's been happening with Microsoft outlook users right now, a major campaign underway that has been extremely successful because these bad guys are using some rather advanced technologies. Absolutely crazy. So they get you to click. HTML link that is there while filed that is there as part of what looks to be a voicemail notification for you.

[00:21:43] And then it takes you to a website that's specially crafted for you and your company. So you [email protected] and you click on that HTML and it'll take you to big co.com. Well, at least that's what it looks like, but it distracts you now because it wants to give you this capture as well. So this Google captures, you know, these things, these little mini touring tests, click on all of the trees in the picture, sort of a thing, right?

[00:22:18] And you've got the nine things well with, uh, or maybe it's some blurred or distorted text and you have to type that in. And the whole idea behind that is normally to weed out these bots on eCommerce sites, online account sites. But what they're doing here is. They're making sure that the email, the, the software that checks the emails to make sure they are legitimate, that is going out to the big co dot or big co fake.com website.

[00:22:54] They wanna make sure that that email checker does not find out that it's not the real site that you wanted to go. So the computer that's doing the checking will go to the site and it'll say, oh, there's a capture on there. And then it'll stop because it can't solve the capture. It needs you, it needs a human, right.

[00:23:15] So this is kind of cool here. Uh, Eric. K. He's a security awareness advocate with no before. No. Before is a company that does training for people, for employees here about some of these, uh, these hacks and things are going on. When faced with a login prompt, it looks like a typical. Office 365 login. The person is likely to feel comfortable entering their information without looking at the browser's URL bar to ensure they are at the real login site, this familiarity and the high odds in an attended victim regularly uses office 365 for something in the Workday makes this a great Lu.

[00:24:02] For attackers, this is from an article over on dark reading.com. This isn't, uh, a new technique, but let me tell you, it is B a very successful one. They have seen a resurgent, uh, resurgence of this starting a couple of years ago, back in July, 2020. And it is really targeting human nature. And of course, Microsoft 365 is quite the target.

[00:24:29] So I mentioned. $43 billion industry. I'm looking right now at a public service announcement from the F FBI and they are calling business email compromise the $43 billion. Scam. This is crazy. A sophisticated scam. It targets businesses and individuals who are performing legitimate transfer funds requests.

[00:25:00] It's carried out by people who are compromising legitimate businesses and individuals. Now, what they're trying to do with this business email compromise is get someone who has. Control of funds to do a transfer. What happens is they will do a little research on the business that might go to the website and see on the website.

[00:25:25] Oh, let me see here. Okay. The president's name is Craig Peterson. Uh, the CFO is Mary Jane and, uh, the accounting department head is manly. And, uh, so now they got that information. So they'll go online. And to look at LinkedIn, find out who all else is at the business. Maybe things have changed, you know, maybe try and find an email address by doing an open source search for the email address of people there at the business.

[00:25:57] You see where this is going here? Yeah, it, it gets pretty bad. So, uh, let's say they befriend the CEO on Facebook or on LinkedIn, but Facebook more likely, uh, and now. They're they can see on Facebook or maybe they don't even have to because your Facebook profile and posts are not hidden from the public.

[00:26:20] So they just go there and, oh, let me see. Okay, great. He's gonna be out of town next week. And then what they'll do is they'll get into somebody's email account at the business. And once they're into somebody's email account, they can start looking through the emails and sending emails that look perfectly legitimate to other people within the organization.

[00:26:43] Now, I, I did a whole story on television about this one on news program, and one of the people on staff, one of the talking. received an email like this, and it asked him to, uh, to buy some gift cards. This is very, very common scam right now, the gift card scam, and they try and get you to go ahead and. Buy gift cards for other people in the office are gonna have a little party and we don't want anybody else to know about it.

[00:27:15] It's supposed to be a surprise. And I had some real fun with him. One of these days, I should probably share all of this in one of my newsletters. I think you guys would really appreciate it, enjoy it a little bit, but, uh, we really led them on and sure enough, you know, it was a total scam and we kept playing with them and it, it was something, any.

[00:27:38] That was one thing. This is another because they will eventually get to the CFO, somebody who has the authority to transfer funds and get them to transfer funds to. Them. And then they use mules to move the money around these, uh, useful idiots who will sign up. And yeah. Yeah. It's kinda like the Nigerian scam.

[00:28:05] All I need is access to your bank account and I'm gonna wire in, uh, $10,000. And I, and what I need you to do is transfer 8,000 of it over here to this PayPal account because my grandmother's dying and she needs the money. There's similar scams that are going after lonely people and getting them to send money because somebody needs an operation, et cetera.

[00:28:33] So in this case with the business email compromise and the 43. Billion dollars that have been stolen from businesses. They'll usually get to the CFO and send a story like, Hey, uh, we have this new vendor and we've had 'em for three months and we haven't been paying them and we gotta make sure we pay them.

[00:28:54] And, uh, we need to wire 43 million to this account that actually happened. And they did wire the money. It happened to Barbara cran, another person who wa is on shark tank. Uh, it, it happens to a lot of companies out there. And I've got a couple in the last month that we've worked with the FBI on the, these companies hear me on the radio.

[00:29:21] They sent an email to [email protected] and they had had their operating account. Emptied. Uh, the latest one is a, a lady 77 years old who had her retirement money stolen from her over $70,000. This stuff's real people. We've got to pay attention. We can't let this continue to happen. Make sure you sign up online.

[00:29:48] Craig peterson.com so that you can get my insider show notes and we can keep you ahead of the bad guys. When we come back, we're gonna talk about this row overturned and what senators are asking the FTC.

[00:30:05] We've got some senators who are saying they were spurred on by the row overturned. And they're asking the FTC to probe, apple and Android, and what's happening with tracking. Now I have a suspicion. That's not really right.

[00:30:21] We've got, of course the recent overturn of Roe. You, you of course heard about that. it was pretty much impossible to miss if you pay any attention to the news.

[00:30:36] Well, we've got three Democrat, us senators and a Democrat us representative that asked. The federal trade commission to investigate apple and Google for engaging in unfair and deceptive practices by enabling the collection and sale of hundreds of millions of mobile phones, users, data, the FTC should investigate apple and Google's role in transforming online advertising into an intense system of surveillance that incentivizes and facilitates the UN.

[00:31:11] Train collection and constant sale of Americans' personal data. These companies have failed to inform consumers of the privacy and security dangers involved in using those products. It is beyond time to bring an end to the privacy harms, forced on consumers. Buy these companies. Now I have been talking about this on the

[00:31:38] radio for 20 years. Because do you remember when Congress forced telephone manufacturers and cell phone companies to put GPS coordinates into the receivers, into the phones? Do you remember that you could no longer use your analog phone? You had to use digital phones under federal law. right. It, it's just amazing.

[00:32:09] We can go into all of the reasons that they've given for that in the past, but anyhow, that's what they did. So immediately decades ago, now, many years ago, they started collecting data. Now it's okay for the government to collect it, even though it's illegal. For them to collect this data. So what's happening here?

[00:32:30] Why have the Democrats for so long? Well, and frankly, a lot of Republicans been big on collecting data on all of us. Now, I I've gotta say when I've looked at the stats, the biggest. Purveyors of the surveillance society have been president Obama followed by president Biden. Now you could argue that president Bush was won too, because of course they passed an act that allowed for all kinds of changes in surveillance.

[00:33:02] So, okay. So we'll put him in there too. So we got a Republican in there. Obama put that program that president Bush had put in place on steroids and then president Biden did the same thing. President Trump tried to cut it back because he was a victim of some of the surveillance that they were doing. So what's going on here?

[00:33:25] Well, these Democrat senators are saying, uh, we don't want people who are trying to get abortions to be. okay. I can see that. Uh, I can also see that I don't want to be tracked and you don't want to be tracked. And it's one thing to have an advertiser know a little bit about us, you know, Hey, we just visited the Ford dealer and the Chevy dealer and the Honda dealer.

[00:33:52] So maybe he's looking for a car let's let's try and advertise a car. Right. So Honda and Chevy and Ford all start putting ads up for you. Okay. So that's. Thing if I'm in, if I'm interested in buying a truck. Okay, great. Show me ads on a truck, but we've seen already misuses of this data over the years, one of the earliest ones I talked about here on the radio was this guy who went to an emergency room and all of a sudden started seeing ads for what you might call ambulance, chasing lawyers saying, have you been injured?

[00:34:30] right. You've seen those types of ads before, but once he was in the emergency room and he was geolo geolocated in the emergency room, they started selling advertising to lawyers. I, I, I'm not real fond of that one either, but I think there's an ulterior motive here behind what these Democrats are saying.

[00:34:52] If you have seen the movie 2000 mules, you understand what I'm talking about here? what ended up happening here is they looked at trillions of data points. You see, they went out and bought databases of smartphone data where these smartphones were located. And then they started doing some serious analysis on it and they were able to say, okay, this smartphone went to.

[00:35:28] Different Dropboxes for the election for ballots. And in between each visit to the Dropbox, they went to a left wing organization where they did something. Right. So they, they go to a Dropbox drop off ballots and they're on video doing this, dropping off ballots. And then they go to a left wing organization and then they go drop off more ballots at a different Dropbox, and then they go back again and then it's on video.

[00:36:02] And some of these people are taking pictures of them, stuffing the ballots into the box, supposedly, so they can get paid. So now there are some criminal investigations that have been started. I don't know how far they've gotten yet over some of this information that was gathered. And that was documented in the film by Danes.

[00:36:24] Dusuza called 2000 mul. And if you haven't seen it, no matter what side of the aisle you want, you need to see it. Absolutely need to see. And whether you believe or not, when president Biden said that we have the best, uh, what was it? Um, election stealing organization that's ever been made? I can't remember his exact words right now.

[00:36:49] Uh, he was serious about it, right? So now all of a sudden, the Democrats are concerned that people who visit abortion clinics might be tracked, cuz they could be. Right. You could buy data geotagged with an abortion clinic's location, GPS coordinates. You absolutely could do that, but that's been true for a long time.

[00:37:15] Why now? Well, maybe because of Roe V Wade, but I look, of course it wasn't just that one decision that was overturned, but I, I look at some of this and really, really do wonder because it really looks like some number of people were caught illegally stuffing ballot box. So it's, it's fascinating to me that all of a sudden now out, they come with this.

[00:37:45] Now apple has stopped enabling the tracker identifiers. By default, if you have an apple smartphone, it is much more. Private than the Android phones are by far, right? Google makes its money by selling your information. That's how they make most of their money. Apple makes its money by selling you services and selling you hardware.

[00:38:13] so that should tell you something right there. And the fact that Senator Elizabeth Warren is one of the ones who is proposing this legislation makes you think even more about this. Now, Google, uh, this is an article from ours. Technical apparently responded to this whole concept in an article that ours was writing, saying that it's had all kinds of efforts to block apps and violate Google play policies.

[00:38:41] And. the bands it's imposed on companies that are apparently sold user data, and they say Google never sells user data in the play at Google, strictly prohibits a sale of user data by developers and, uh, goes into the advertising ID. So it it's fascinating to me that all of a sudden, now the Democrats are interested in stopping the data collection.

[00:39:08] It really is. I don't like it. As I said, I've talked about this for more than 20 years now on the radio. It, I think it's a real problem. This data collection, because also the federal government, even though it's illegal for them to collect information on American citizens, they do it every. And some of the largest, like the, um, immigration people, Homeland security are the biggest collector.

[00:39:37] They have more information about you than anyone else. Even if you're here legally, you were born in the United States, et cetera, etcetera, because they are buying all of this information from what are called data broker. So, yeah, they say, yeah, we're, we're not collecting it. You we're forbidden by law to collect it, which is absolutely true.

[00:39:59] But what they are doing is buying it from private businesses. So I think we've got to completely. Reconsider how this all works. Apple has been working on it. You can go into your apple phone and make a change, share identifier if you want to, which makes it harder to track apple also. And Google has this, as I believe is an option.

[00:40:25] But apple also will give you a different Mac address every time you're connecting to wifi networks so that you can't be tracked that way. Because just, if, if you connect to the network at target the wifi at target, for instance, they will know when you return because your phone has the same Mac address that's used for the wifi.

[00:40:49] So they know. They know where you go in the store. They know what you're looking at in the store, in some cases, depending on how the tracking works. So it's fascinating to me, this is a, a real privacy issue that could easily turn into something much worse because this data, this same data that's available to marketers is available to government is also available to bad guys.

[00:41:17] and you talk about the ability to potentially frame someone and it, it, it just gets extremely, extremely scary. Right now, last month, more than 40 members of Congress called on Google to stop collecting and retaining customer location data, the prosecutors could use to identify women who obtain abortions.

[00:41:37] Again, tied into this, uh, abortion anytime any day. Uh, and as the governor of Virginia said, even after the baby is born and delivered it, you should be able to abort it. Uh, so wherever you fall in that spectrum, obviously the Democrats in the us want abortions far more than the Europeans that every European country I can think of has much tougher restrictions on abortion than we have here.

[00:42:05] But. Privacy is not an abortion issue. Hey, join me online. Craig peterson.com. Make sure you are on my email list. And, uh, you can ask any question you want. Just email me,

[00:42:20] [email protected].

[00:42:26] I really appreciate all the emails I get from you guys. And it is driving me to do something I've never done before now. I've always provided all kinds of free information to share on my email list. Great stuff. But now we're talking about cyber punch lists.

[00:42:43] So they know what's hot because who really, really tracks technology, not too many people. And I get, uh, you know, a little off put by some of these other radio hosts that call themselves tech people, and they're actually marketing people, but you. That's me. Right. And that's why, if you are on my list, you've probably noticed I'm not hammering you trying to sell you stuff all of the time.

[00:43:09] It's good, valuable content. And I'm starting something brand new. Never done this before, but this is for you guys. Okay. You know that I do cybersecurity. As a business and I've been doing it now for more than three decades. I don't know if I should admit that. Right. They say, never say more than 17 years.

[00:43:30] Okay. So I've been doing it for more than 17 years and I've been on the internet now for. Oh, 40 years now. Okay. Back before it was even called the internet, I helped to develop the silly thing. So over the years, we've come up with a number of different strategies. We have these things that are called plan of action and milestones, and we have all kinds of other lists of things that we do and that need to be done.

[00:44:01] So what we're doing right now is we're setting it. So that you can just email me, me, Craig peterson.com. And I will go ahead and send you one of these punch lists. Now the punch lists are around one specific topic. You know, we got these massive. Punch list with hundreds and hundreds of things on them. And those are what we use when we go in to help clean up the cybersecurity in a company.

[00:44:28] So we'll go in, we'll do scans. We will do red team blue team where we're attacking. We do all, all kinds of different types of scans using different software, trying to break in. We use the same tools that the hackers use in order to see if we can. Into your systems and if the systems are properly secured, so we do all of this stuff, so, and, and then it goes into all of the paperwork that needs to be done to comply with whatever it might be.

[00:45:00] Right. It might be, they accept payment cards. It might be that they have hip. Information, which is healthcare information. And it might be also that they're a government contractor. So there are hundreds and hundreds of things that they have to comply with. Most of them are procedural. So we have all of this stuff.

[00:45:18] We do all of this stuff. And I was talking with my wife here this last week about it and said, you. So much of this could be used by small companies that can't afford to hire my team to come in and clean things up. Right. And I don't want them to suffer. So here's what we're doing. We're starting this next week.

[00:45:42] We have a punch list for you on email. So what are the things you can do should do for email? Just very, very narrow on email so that you can recognize a fishing. Email, what you might wanna do to lock down your outlook, if you're on windows or your Mac mail. So we're taking these massive spreadsheets that we have and we're breaking them up.

[00:46:10] So the first one that's available to you guys, absolutely. A hundred percent free. Is the one on email. So just send me an email. Me M E Craig peterson.com. Now, remember I am, my, my business is a business to business business, right. But almost everything in these various. Punch lists applies to individuals as well.

[00:46:34] So I got an email this last week from a guy saying, Hey, I'm 80 years old and, uh, retired and I don't know much about computers and that's kind of what got us thinking about this. You know, we need to be able to help him. We need to be able to help you out. Okay. And if you're a small business and we've dealt with a lot of them over the years, and as a small business, you just don't have the funds to bring in an expert, whether it's me or somebody else, although yeah.

[00:47:03] What you want the best. But anyways, , it, it, uh, it is gonna allow you to do it yourself. Okay. So absolutely free. All of these punch lists on all of these topics, we're probably gonna end up with more than a hundred of these punch lists. And all you do is email me, me, Craig peterson.com. Just let me know in there what you're interested in.

[00:47:29] So even if we haven't got that punch list broken down for you yet, we will go ahead and put that on the. To do right. We need the priorities. What kind of a priority should we have as we're putting these things together for free for people. Right. Uh, and the only way we know is if you ask, so the first one's on email, you can certainly ask for email.

[00:47:50] We've got, as I said, more than a hundred others, that we think we're gonna be able to pull out of the exact. Plan of action worksheets that we use so that you can go through this yourself, whether you're a home user or you are a small business or even a big business, right? We we're talking with, uh, a gentleman who's probably listening right now, who has a business.

[00:48:17] They have three offices, they have some requirement because of the military contracts for high level. Cyber security and it would work for him too. All right. So they, this is all of the punch list stuff. You probably know what a punch list is, right? It's using the construction industry a lot, but in our case, it's you need to do this.

[00:48:39] You need to do this, you need to do this. Okay. So that's what that's all about. So enough rambling on that. It's gonna take us some time to get 'em all together. I'm also. We're gonna do more video stuff again, training. So just like on the radio show where we're talking about what's in the news, we're gonna talk about what's what's in the news.

[00:49:01] When it comes to small businesses, what you should be paying attention to with of course, an emphasis on cybersecurity and we're. Putting those up on my [email protected]. In fact, we've already got some up there already, and then we are going to also be putting them on YouTube and rumble. So if you don't like YouTube and Google, then you can certainly go to rumble.

[00:49:25] You'll see them there. But if you're on the email list, I'm I'm. Starting to put links in the bottom of the emails. So you can go and watch those videos. If you are a video type person that you know, more visual. So it's, I think all good. And it's good news for everybody. And this is what happens, I think, as you get more mature, In the business.

[00:49:48] Right. Um, as I said, I've been on the internet for more than 40 years, helped develop some of that software that, uh, some of it's still in use today and now it's time to do more give back. And I really am trying to give back, okay, there's this isn't. This isn't a joke. So, uh, no joke. Right. So go ahead. Email me at Craig Peterson.

[00:50:12] Tell me which punch list that you would like. And I can also put you on my email list so that you get my insider show notes, and you can just do that yourself by gonna Craig Peterson dot. Com you'll see right up at the top of the page. If you scroll down a little bit, it'll kind of pop up. It's a big red bar that goes across the top.

[00:50:32] I try not to be too intrusive and you can sign up there for the newsletter. So you'll get some of these trainings automatically. You'll get my insider show notes, all of this stuff. It it's absolutely free. Okay. This is my giveback to help you out. It really is. Okay. I, as I mentioned at the very beginning, I, I.

[00:50:52] Peeve by some of these people that represent themselves as tech experts. And in fact, all they are are marketers. We've got a client that decided that, uh, I was too expensive. My team. So they went out and shopped around, tried to find the cheapest company they could. And so now the, the company that they're bringing in is saying, you're saying, uh, Hey, um, uh, so how does this work?

[00:51:15] How do you do zero trust? Uh, why do you have a firewall here? Uh, why do you bother to have a direct fiber link between the offices? All this stuff? Well, because they need it. Okay. I get it. You use. Barracuda spam firewalls and Barracuda firewalls. It, it, yeah, this is a different league. Okay. So you are gonna be getting these punch lists from me that are really gonna help you understand and secure your systems.

[00:51:47] Right? This isn't your average run of the mill so-called managed security services provider or managed services or break fix shop. You are getting it from the guy that the FBI. Ingar program went to, to do their trainings. That was me. Okay. So for two years I set up the program. I ran it. And if we ever are sitting down having a coffee or beer, sometimes I'll tell you why I left.

[00:52:13] Okay. Uh, but think about FBI and I, I think you might have a clue as to why I decided not to do that anymore, but I trained thousands of businesses, government agencies, state local. Federal, you name it. So you are getting what you really need, which is another problem. I keep hearing from people, you do a search for something on YouTube or Google and you get what a million, 5 million pages, right.

[00:52:43] As supposedly that it says are available and they give you, okay, here's the top one, but what you need is an integrated single way. To do things where everything works together. And that's what I'm trying to do for you guys, because there's so many little products, different products that just don't work so well together.

[00:53:06] So we'll, we'll be covering that as well in these, but you gotta be on that email list. Craig peterson.com. Craig Peterson. So n.com/subscribe will take you right to the subscription page. And I'll keep you up to date. This is not my paid newsletter. All right, stick around. We'll be right back. And I promise I'll get to Russia, Russia, Russia.

[00:53:33] Some of the high tech companies and others pulled out of Russia after the Ukraine invasion, but one stayed Google. What is going on with Google? And now they're in big trouble with the Russian government. Wow.

[00:53:50] Here's a list of companies according to CNET that have pulled out of Russia because you remember Russia invaded Ukraine, February 24, we had Adobe, these are the guys that make Photoshop, Adobe reader. Airbnb, Airbnb has kind of an interesting story too in Ukraine because a number quite a number of Airbnb customers went ahead and rented rooms and homes from Ukrainians, even though they had no intention of going and they told the Ukrainians, Hey.

[00:54:23] I'm not gonna show up, just take this money. I'm sure you need it. Can you, can you imagine that that's fantastic. Good for them, Amazon, they suspended shipments of all retail products of customers in Russia and Bella Russ, and also suspended prime video for users in Russia. Apple stops selling its product in Russia's it's halting online transactions, including limiting apple pay.

[00:54:50] It's also disabled. Some apple map features in Ukraine in order to protect civilians, Amazon web services. They don't have data centers or offices in Russia, but it's allowing new signups for the service in Russia. BMW four GM Honda. Have all scaled back their operations or stopped them. Ford suspended its operations in Russia effective immediately until further notice.

[00:55:19] GM is suspending business in Russia. Honda has suspended exports to Russia, Disney halted, all theatrical releases in Russia, including the new Pixar film, turning red, also pause content DJA. The drone company that's gotten in trouble here in the us for some of its practices of sending GPS information to China while they're not doing it over there.

[00:55:45] Uh, electronic arts. They make a bunch of very popular, uh, games, epic games, another one Ericson FIFA body band Russia from this year's world cup formula one canceled its plan planned Russian ground pre Fujitsu, Goldman Sachs. Now Google that's where I want to go. We'll stop at Google here for a minute.

[00:56:10] Google. Suspended their ad network in Russia. And the idea was okay. Uh, we're not sure how payments are gonna work because Russia of course has had this kind of this lockdown by foreign countries on their banking system. We're not sure we can get the money out. Right. Um, uh, that's what they're apparently doing now.

[00:56:36] They're still there. Google's YouTube. It's search engine on and on still running in Russia. Now that is really disturbing. If you ask me, why did they not pull out? It doesn't make sense. So Google did stop accepting new customers for Google cloud. In March. YouTube said it's removing videos at denier trivial trivialize, the Russian invasion, but what finally got Google.

[00:57:09] Out of Russia, Russia seized their bank accounts. They froze, they transferred their money out of the main bank account in Russia. We're talking about a 2 billion per year business, Google Russia, that that really upsets me. So I did a little more research online about all of this, and I was really surprised to see that Ukraine now has given the Ukraine peace prize to Google.

[00:57:40] and it says, uh, quote on the behalf of the Ukrainian people with gratitude for the support during this pivotal moment in our nation's history. So what is it? I, I, I'm not sure. Right? So there, uh, one of their foreign ministers, I guess, and, uh, Koran. Baha I think, uh, said thank you from the beginning of the war, Google has sought to help.

[00:58:05] However, however we can through humanitarian support of our tools will continue to do as long as needed. So I dug in a little more and tried to figure out what's up. Well rush or Google left its Russian search engine online and YouTube online and was using it in Russia in order to. Control the narrative in Russia.

[00:58:31] Now, unlike what they've done here in the us, where Google has been caught, many times controlling the narrative in various elections and taking certain ads and not taking others and taking certain business and not taking others, apparently in Russia, it has been. Blocking a lot of the stuff that Russia itself has been putting out.

[00:58:55] So the, the federal government there in Russia. Interesting. Hey, so they also have helped Ukraine out by providing them with mapping GPS and rumor has it satellite services. Yeah. Interestingly to track Russian troop movements, uh, Al also Ukraine saying the Google news component has also been tremendously valuable.

[00:59:24] Google's also helping to raise money for the cause of Ukraine. Like many companies are doing right now to help people displace due to the war and Poland. Wow. They've been doing Yemen's work and, and bringing. People in, by the millions, into Poland from Ukraine. It reminds me when I lived in Calgary, Alberta, my Cub, one of the Cub masters Cub troop leaders was a woman who came from Poland many years ago.

[00:59:52] This was back during Soviet occupation of. Poland. And I, I remember talking to her about what was happening over there. Why did she leave? And it is just so, so impressive. The polls have done so much impressive stuff over the years. So they're also saying that Google's done a lot of other things in order to.

[01:00:13] Help protect Ukraine, including Google's block domains. They've prevented fishing attacks against Ukraine. They've warn targeted individuals that they are being targeted. It's really something what they've done. So my first knee jerk was why is Google? Still doing business in Russia. Well, now it's become clear because they have a special page for Russians that gives correct information, at least, you know, Google's claiming it's correct.

[01:00:47] Uh, I don't know which fact checkers, checkers they're using, but. That gives Russians real information about the war what's going on in Ukraine. What's happening with the Russian soldiers. Did, did you see this just this last week, apparently Russia removed the age limit for volunteers for the military. It used to be, I think it was 40 years old.

[01:01:12] If you were a Russian citizen and 30 years old, if you were foreign national, now the Russian military will take anybody. Any age from anywhere. In other words, Russia is really getting kind of hard up if they want people like me, right. To fight, to fight their wars. I'm sure they don't really well. I don't know.

[01:01:32] Maybe they do want me, right. That every, every war needs cannon fodder. So it is fascinating to see good job Google. I am quite impressed. I did not expect them to be doing that. They've also. Uh, uh, provided over 45 million in donations and grants to various groups. They've done pro bono work for various organizations over there.

[01:02:01] So this is really, really cool. So that's it. That's what's happening over there in you? Crane and Google, you can of course, find out a lot more. Get my insider show notes. So you had all of this on Tuesday morning. You could have digested it all and be ahead of everybody else out there. And then also don't forget about my new offer here.

[01:02:27] Free, absolutely free for. Asks by emailing me Craig peterson.com. I'll go ahead and send them to you, which is I think a pretty cool thing now. What am I gonna send you? Well, you gotta ask first, right? You gotta ask. And what we're gonna be doing is taking what I have been using for years to help secure my customers.

[01:02:54] And we're making available for free my cyber punch lists. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

[01:03:02] Bit of a hubub here, a B Biden's infrastructure bill $1.2 trillion. And, and it's in there is this thing that Bob BARR is calling an automobile kill switch. Well, I did some more research and we'll tell you the facts right now.

[01:03:19] What are you supposed to do? If you are trying to pass a bill to stop drunk driving deaths, and you've got all of the money in the world, you know, well, I guess 1.2 trillion, isn't all of the money in the world.

[01:03:33] What are you gonna put in there? Well, I did a search on this and I I'm chuckling because this is craziness. This is the AP associated press. And they've got this article claim. President Joe Biden signed a bill that will give law enforcement access to a kill switch that will be attached to all new cars in 2026 APS assessment false.

[01:03:59] Okay, so we've got fact checkers here while the bipartisan infrastructure bill Biden signed last year requires advanced drunk and impaired driving technology to become standard equipment in cars. Experts say. Technology doesn't amount to a kill switch. Hmm. Let me see. So I can't start the car. If the car's computer thinks I might be drunk or impaired in some other way, but that's not a kill switch.

[01:04:31] What, what is that? Then if I can't start the car, because I have a disagreement with the computer. How about these people that I don't know, maybe their eyes can't open all of the way. Maybe they have problems with eyes on nystagmus, the eyes kind of jittering back and forth. Right. And now what are they gonna do?

[01:04:50] Argue with the computer? That's a kill switch. I can't believe these crazy people that are like AP here, coming up with fact checking on things. So, yeah, I'm sure there's some distortions in some articles out there, but they contradicted themselves in two paragraphs. I guess they figure people are just gonna see false.

[01:05:14] Okay. I'm done. They're not gonna bother reading the rest of the article. Yeah. Kind of crazy, isn't it? So according to an article written by remember former us representative Bob BARR in the infrastructure bill, is this kill switch. Now the, the big question is what is the kill switch? How far does it go?

[01:05:39] So I decided, well, let's look up something I remember from years ago and that is GM GM has the OnStar system it's yet another reason I won't buy GM, there are a number of reasons, but this is another one. OnStar system, you know, they've got an advisor, isn't that great. And if your car is in a car accident, a crash that advisor can hop on and ask if you're okay.

[01:06:08] And if you want emergency services coming, they'll come, uh, OnStar will call them for you. And if you are just fine, they won't bother calling. I mean, if there's no answer at all, they'll they'll call emergency services and let them know where the vehicle is. Cuz the vehicle has with OnStar built in GPS.

[01:06:30] Well, one of the features of OnStar is that it can send a signal to disable cars, engines, and gradually slow the vehicle to an idle speed to assist police in recovering the vehicle. Now they will only do that at least right now for vehicles that have been reported stolen and have been confirmed by the police.

[01:06:58] So in, in reality, that's kind of cool, right? It slows down. Hopefully the bad guy, if he's on the highway, makes it over to the side of the road and while the car slows down and eventually stops. So, uh, all of this stuff sounds good. This kill switch. Sounds good. Doesn't it? Because you know, we're gonna keep drunk drivers off the road.

[01:07:24] Now in reality, of course, they're not gonna be able to keep drunk drivers or other impaired drivers off the road. I really don't care what kind of technology they put in. And they're not talking about putting in one of these blow in the tube, things that checks your blood alcohol level. They're talking about having a camera facing you as the driver and probably other occupants of the vehicles and that internally facing camera.

[01:07:53] It's going to evaluate you. It's gonna look at you. It's gonna look at your face. Is something droopy. Are, are you kind of slow to respond? It might have a little test that it has you take right there. The, the law is very loosey goosey on any details. There really aren't any, so it's gonna be up to the manufacturer.

[01:08:15] So they put this in the car step. Just like OnStar, step one, put it in the car and they'll tell you when to turn. Remember how cool that was the GPS with OnStar. And you'd say, yeah, I want to go to this address. And then the, uh, the assistant goes ahead and sense programming to your car. And now you can go and if you lock your keys in the car, they can unlock the car for you.

[01:08:41] All, all kinds of cool stuff. And then next up what happens. Well, but they can stop the vehicle. So there's another technology story related to OnStar. And this is from 2009 from Kelly blue book book, OnStar stolen vehicle, slow down forts its first carjacking. So again, doesn't that sound fantastic. This was a Tahoe OnStar.

[01:09:10] And, uh, the driver and his passenger forced out of the vehicle robbed by a shotgun wielding perp who then drove off in the SUV. And the OnStar dispatcher was able to locate the vehicle using GPS advised police of exact location. And as soon as the police established visual contact, the stolen vehicle slow down system is activated available on a number of GM cars and trucks.

[01:09:36] Right? So this was over a decade ago. That this happened, but the technology's evolved hasn. so we initially have all of these car companies trying to decide, okay. So we've got this kill switch law, which AP says is not a kill switch law. Cuz they talk to experts just like the, what was it? 52 people, uh, heads of intelligence.

[01:10:01] Committees and agencies said that this wasn't a collusion hoax, right? So they talked to experts who said, no, no, no, this isn't a kill switch, but that's today you can argue, it's not a kill switch. I would completely disagree with you. Day one. It's a kill switch cuz you can't start your car. Right. It's a kill switch.

[01:10:21] A kill switch is often something you hide somewhere on the car so you can kill the engine. So it can't be stolen. It's a kill switch. Come on. People fact checkers aside. This could potentially allow law enforcement again, to shut down your car, remotely track the car's metrics, location, maybe the passenger load, because remember now cars are tracking all of this.

[01:10:46] They've already been. Tickets issued by police that did not see anyone speeding. The car was not caught on a traffic camera, but they hook up a device to your car's port that talks to its computer. And the computer says, yeah, he was doing 80 miles an hour or, uh, five minutes ago. And all of a sudden you got a ticket, right?

[01:11:08] Massachusetts wants to go ahead now and say, uh, yeah, yeah. Let's charge by the mile that you drive and mask. Because of course they're not getting enough revenue from gasoline because of the electric cars, right. Electric cars are not paying their fair share when it comes to road taxes. So let's do it that way.

[01:11:27] So how are they gonna collect the information while. They're gonna hook up to your car's computer. The next thing coming down the road, and it's already in most cars is wireless data connectivity. You might have found already. If you have a Nissan, a Honda, many other cars that. You have to get a major upgrade.

[01:11:49] It varies 600 bucks up to a few grand for an expensive car, but the two G data network, we talked about this on the show already is being completely shut down by the end of the year. So we've gotta replace it and switch you over. To the LTE data network, which of course eventually will go away as well, or at least 3g what happens once it's all hooked up?

[01:12:16] Well, the next easy step is just feed all of that information straight to the government. Craig, Peter son.com.

[01:12:27] If you've been afraid of ransomware before I I've got a good example for you where a whole country now has been ransom. Absolutely crazy. So we'll talk about that. What is the state of ransomware? And the NSA is asking us to trust them again.

[01:12:43] Of course staying up to date means that you get my insider newsletter pretty much every Tuesday morning and, and the only way to get that is to go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

[01:12:56] And I will keep you up to date. You'll get even more insight information. The Costa REAN government has declared a state of national emergency. And to the best of my knowledge, this is the first time a government has done this because agencies of the Costa Rican government have been hit so badly by the K ransomware.

[01:13:22] That the new incoming president immediately declared a state of emergency. So now the country has expanded law enforcement powers and they are trying to go after the KTI ransomware group. Now between you and me. Good luck on that one. They are based in Russia. There's a number of different articles out this week.

[01:13:44] This one from ADV Intel at tech target. But according to their research, the Kati ransomware groups attack on Costa Rican government was part of a rebranding effort. So this ransomware gang has seen a lot of their payments, just dry up. Because it's harder to get the money in. Right. And what are you gonna do with cryptocurrency?

[01:14:09] If you are the KTI group, can you turn it into anything useful? Well, it kind of depends on the country you're in, but for most people, no. Okay. Absolutely. No. So we were able to knock the KTI ransomware groups. Offline. And we talked about that before here. The us government did that, but now this is marking a new chapter for the cyber crime landscape.

[01:14:37] Interesting. Isn't it? So there are some investigations that have been going on. They've been trying to figure out what happened. What was the cause of the downfall of the county ransomware group? Are they really gone? Why did they pull their website offline and also. They declared publicly support for Russia in its invasion of Ukraine.

[01:15:00] And so now the Canti ransomware group got hacked and held ransom. They suffered major leaks. As a consequence. So other hackers went after KTI, which is a hacking group and they, they showed here from internal in documents that were stolen, that the KTI ransomware gang's primary Bitcoin address, which was found in the leak, showed that they had taken in over 2 billion in cryptocurrency over the last five years.

[01:15:34] Isn't that just amazing and anonymous leaker has published more of the gangs communications, but you know, that can help that's for sure. But you think with that much money, they'd be able to protect themselves right now on top of it, because of the hack of Costa Rica and the major damage it's caused, the us government has offered a couple of bounties here.

[01:16:00] Against the KTI ransomware group. So there's $10 million available. If you can provide the feds with information about the leaders of the KTI ransomware group and $5 million that you can get leading to the arrest of anyone involved with a cont ransomware attack. Isn't that something. So ransomware has been really outta control for years.

[01:16:25] There's no signs that things are actually slowing down. Definitely been enhanced law enforcement efforts to track them down. But ultimately here, the core members of these groups have been escaping these law enforcement activities. They've been using mules kinda like 2000 mules. Have you seen that movie?

[01:16:46] But the idea is they get people primarily in the us cuz that's where most of the money comes from. They do ran. Of people and businesses information here. In fact, last year, it's estimated that 60%, six, 0% of small businesses were hacked, which is just crazy. Right? Well, no wonder it's got $2 billion, but.

[01:17:09] What are, what are we supposed to do? What are they doing to, to, uh, really come after us? Well, they're doing many of the same things. These mules will, uh, be hired saying, Hey, I just need to, uh, use your PayPal account. And, uh, all you have to do is transfer some money. You can keep. 5%, 10% of the money I put in there.

[01:17:29] And they've always got these excuses, you know, think the Nigerian email scams from years past, and frankly still kind of go around a little bit here, but large bounties are really becoming a part of the toolbox, a law enforcement's been using in the us and abroad to try and track them down. And that's really what they're hoping for down in Costa Rica, because what are they gonna do?

[01:17:57] You know, frankly, really? What are they gonna do? Well, I don't know. And they obviously are relying on the United States to help them out with this. The internal structure of the K group has been highly organized. They've got the same type of structure of a legitimate corporation would have it takes its work that needs to be done.

[01:18:18] They hire contractors that may not even know who they're actually working for to write small pieces of, of, uh, code here that gets tied. so it's not too surprising that a KTI affiliate is going to go far enough to cause a national emergency to be declared. Uh, one of the things that KTI has done in some of these other ransomware companies have done companies, gangs is.

[01:18:47] They have ransomware as a service. So there's all of these people that are affiliated with KTI and all you have to do is get the KTI ransomware onto someone's computer and Taha. They will pay you. It's really that simple. They've got tech support for the people that are ran that got ransom to help them, uh, supposedly pay, right?

[01:19:13] How do I buy Bitcoin? And they'll walk you through. and then they will help you with restoring your files. Hopefully they can be restored. They, they can't always be restored. I think right now the latest number I saw. about 60% of people who have their data encrypted and ransom are in fact able to get that data.

[01:19:39] There's 60% of the data back. So that's not too, too, uh, big a deal, but KTI operates on affiliate model. and this affiliate that went ahead and ransom, our friends in Costa Rica is called UN C 1 7 56, uncle 7 56. They're also suspected in other attacks on government servers, including a theft of intelligence materials from.

[01:20:07] Peru. And this attacker has already leaked information stolen from Costa Rica and it's on the K ransomware dark web portal, which is online. And after the former president of the country refused to pay a $10 million ransom demand, they started leaking the data. So in this case, focus has been on the national government agencies.

[01:20:31] They are potentially looking at what might you might call espionage, but these K ransomware affiliates have become famous for really quickly exploiting new vulnerabilities as they're published and being indiscriminate in who they attack because $2 billion. Right. And then the other part that I think is really kind of interesting here.

[01:20:55] Well, the we're talking about money. We're talking about real money. Obviously KTI deals almost exclusively in Bitcoin, which can be hard to turn into hard currencies, but that our friends in Costa Rica said no, we're, we're not going to pay. Knowing what has been stolen and what they no longer have access to.

[01:21:18] In fact, the president said that the comp the country Costa Rica is effectively at war. Now. They got a foothold KTI did in 27 agencies at different levels of the go. And the, uh, yeah. Okay. So KTI is, see, I'm looking at an article in the register here. KTI is apparently is made more than 150 million from a thousand plus victims while we know it's actually 2 billion, but it depends on the timeframe that they're talking about.

[01:21:50] Uh, And, uh, the, the cont says that they are determined to overthrow the government by means of a cyber attack. We've already shown you all the strength and power. You have introduced an emergency. It it's, it's really quite something. Now I mentioned earlier today that I am now. Taking all of the cybersecurity stuff that we have been using here over the years.

[01:22:14] Things like our plan of action and milestones documents and, and all of this stuff we use to run our projects for our customers. It's the real stuff, people. And remember, I've been doing the cybersecurity. Since the early nineties, so we know what we're doing, I know what I'm doing and I'm making it available for free.

[01:22:40] Okay, guys, you just have to send me an email [email protected]. So the first cyber punch list that we have that a available and all you have to do is ask for it again. Me, me, Craig peterson.com is the. Email punch list. So with this punch list, I go through the things that you need to do. In order to secure your email and be more or less secure in your email.

[01:23:14] Now, I don't know about you. I do not like these long diatribes. I, I have a book behind me that is hardening windows 10 and it is in a four inch binder, double. Sided. There are thousands of recommendations in there from Microsoft. There's a lot that needs to be done. So what I've done is boiled it down to the most important things.

[01:23:43] And as I said, it's available for absolutely. Free for you. It really is. If you're a listener, just email me, me, Craig peterson.com. You can ask me to add you to my insider show notes and my little three minute trainings that we do every week. Uh, you can also ask for a cyber punch list that you might need, so it's just, okay.

[01:24:07] Need to do this. You need to do that. You need to do this. You need to do that. So it makes it very straightforward. I'm trying. To be OBT accused about any of this, but we have had amazing feedback on this from companies over the years, and now it's available to you for $0. Okay. So make sure you check it out.

[01:24:28] Craig peterson.com and you can always email me, [email protected] as well. Thanks for taking a little time with me today and look for me online. Look for my emails and if you would please give. Thumbs up on your favorite podcasting platform, YouTube or rumble or subscribe. Thanks.

Been to a Hospital Website Lately? Facebook May Have Your Personal Information!

Hey, Facebook isn't the only company doing this, but there's an article from the markup. They did a study and caught Facebook. This is absolutely crazy -- receiving sensitive medical information. We're gonna talk about that right now.

[Automated transcript follows]

This is really concerning for a lot of people. And, and for good reason, frankly, I've been talking about this.

[00:00:22] I, I think the first time I talked about it was over a decade ago and it has to do with what are called pixels. Now, marketers obviously want to show you ads and they want show you ads based on your interest. And frankly, as a consumer, if I'm looking for a new F one. I wouldn't mind seeing ads from competing car dealers or, you know, used car places, et cetera, to try and sell me that Ford truck.

[00:00:53] It makes sense, right? If I'm looking for shoes, why not show me ads for shoes, but what happens when we start talking about the medical business about the legal business things get murky and people get very upset. You see the way these pixels work is you'll put a pixel, like for instance, a Facebook pixel.

[00:01:15] If you go to Craig peterson.com, I've got this pixel on there from Facebook. And what it allows me to do now is retarget Facebook user. So you go to my site to go to a page on my site, and this is true for, uh, pretty much every website out there. And. I know that you went and you were looking for this, so I can retarget you in an ads.

[00:01:37] I'll show you an ad. In other words, on Facebook now I've never actually done that ever. Uh, I I'm like the world's worst marketer, frankly. Uh, and, uh, but I do have that on there because it gives me some other numbers, statistics, and, and really helps you to understand how the website's being used, which I think makes a whole lot of sense.

[00:01:58] So there are marketers that are using this for obvious reasons. Now, I think you understand what the pixel is. It is literally a little picture that is one pixel by one pixel, and it tends to blend in, I think even in most cases, now these pixels from different. Places like Facebook are actually transparent.

[00:02:19] So you, you don't even see it on the page, but the idea is now they have a foothold on a website that doesn't belong to them. In this case, Facebook now has access to information about a website that you visited that has nothing to do with Facebook. okay. So that's the basics of how these pixels work and they're almost impossible to get rid of because in reality, many websites, mine included will even grab graphics from other websites just because you know, it it's, I'm quoting another article I pull in their graphic.

[00:03:00] Of course, they'm gonna point to that other site. Why would I take that picture? Put it on my site. I don't own the rights to it. But if he'll let me that other website will, let me go ahead and show that graphic on my website, cuz there's ways to restrict it. If they don't want me doing that, they could stop me from doing it.

[00:03:18] Then I I'm going to just go to the original website so they can get the credit for it's their property still. I'm not violating any copyright laws, et cetera. Does that make sense to. So what's the difference between the Facebook pixel and a picture I'm pulling from another random website? Well, the obvious thing is it's coming from a Facebook domain of some sort.

[00:03:40] So, so there are ways to stop it, but there's just as many ways to get around stopping it, frankly. Well, Let's move on to something a little more sensitive. We have had problems that I reported on years ago of people going to an emergency room in a hospital. Now, when you're in that emergency room, your phone has GPS capabilities still.

[00:04:06] It knows you went in the emergencyentrance to the hospital and you are. Opening it up. Maybe you're looking around, maybe you're reading articles, maybe you're plotting your trip home using Google maps. You are being tracked depending on what apps you have on your phone. If you have an Android versus an iPhone, what you've enabled, what you haven't enabled.

[00:04:29] Right? All of that sort of stuff. well, this now has become a problem because as I reported there have been people who went to the hospital, went to the emergency room and started seeing ads from what you might call ambulance, chasing lawyers. Have you been injured? Is it someone else's fault? Call me right now.

[00:04:54] Do he cheat him in. if that sort of thing showed up on your phone, would you get a little upset, a little nervous saying, what are they doing, trying to cash in on, on my pain, maybe literal pain. And it's not as though those ads are just showing up while you are in the emergency room, because now they've tagged you.

[00:05:15] They know that you are in that emergency room. So off they'll. They will go ahead and track you and send you ads even after you leave. Hey, I wanna remind you if you want to get this, uh, this week's list of articles. I, I put out every week, my insider show notes. It has become very popular. Thousands of people get that every week.

[00:05:41] Go right now to Craig peterson.com. I'll also send out a little bit of training. I do that. I have special reports. I send out. I've got more stuff I'm doing, but you gotta be on the email list. Craig peterson.com to get on my free email list now. What's happened here now is markup went ahead and looked at Newsweek's top 100 hospitals in America.

[00:06:06] They went to their websites and they found about a third of the hospitals using what's called the Meel. That is the Facebook pixel I was referring to earlier. So it sends a little bit of data. Whenever someone clicks a button to let's say, schedule a doctor's appointment. Why does it do that? Well, because the Facebook pixel is on the scheduling page.

[00:06:33] Let's say there's scheduling page for oncology on the website. I guess who knows that you are going to see an oncologist? Facebook? Why? Well, because the hospital has put a Facebook tracking pixel on that page. So Facebook knows, Hey, he was on the oncologist page. Maybe he has cancer. I should start showing him ads from other hospitals and from cancer medications, et cetera, etcetera, that is happening.

[00:07:03] Right now, 33 of these top 100 hospitals in America. Th these are the top 100, according to Newsweek's list. Have that information. Now that data is connected to your internet. Address. So it's kinda like your computer's mailing address and they can link that back to usually to a specific individual or to a household.

[00:07:30] So now they have a receipt of the appointment request. that's gone to Facebook now. They don't have everything you filled out on the page or anything, you know, you added in your social security number, maybe other medical information. Facebook didn't get all of that, but they do know that you visited the hospital's website and which pages you visited on that website.

[00:07:56] So markup went ahead and contacted these hospitals. So, for example, John John's Hopkins hospital, they did find a Facebook pixel tracking on the appointment, scheduling page. They informed John's Hopkins of how that is a leak of personal information. And after being contacted by the markup, they did not remove the track.

[00:08:27] also, by the way, when the markup reached out to them, the hospital did not respond UCLA Reagan medical center. They had of course a pixel and they did remove it from the scheduling page. Although they declined to comment, New York Presbyterian hospital, all these hospitals have that pixel and they did not remove it.

[00:08:49] Northwestern Memorial hospital. Again, they got the tracking pixel did not remove it after they were informed about the security problems, duke university hospital, same thing. Most of these, by the way, did not respond to them. University of Pennsylvania, Houston Methodist hospital, the university of Chicago medical center.

[00:09:11] Uh, the last two of those did remove the pixel. Uh, Scripps Memorial hospital out in LA JOA, California. There are many Brigham and women's Faulkner hospital. They were informed that they had the tracking picture pixel on the, on the, uh, scheduling page. They did not remove it, but you know, the time of this article, a Tufts medical center, same thing did not remove it, uh, out in Sanford in San Diego.

[00:09:39] Same problem. John's Hopkins Bayview medical center, John Jefferson health, Thomas Jefferson university, hospitals, Loyola. These are big name hospitals. I'm looking at these that goes on and on sharp Memorial hospital, Henry Ford hospital. Uh, let's see some more, I'm trying to, oh, Massachusetts general hospital.

[00:10:00] They did not have the tracking pixel Brigham in women's hospital, no tracking pixel on the scheduling page. So some of these hospitals were already doing it right. They re they recognized that putting this Facebook. Pixel on may help them with some of the marketing and understanding the market a little better, which is what I do, but it's also giving personal information, personal health information to Facebook and Facebook's advertisers.

[00:10:32] So they didn't put it on so good for them. Again, mass general Brigham and women's, uh, Sanford Mount Sinai, university of Michigan hospital and, and others, of course. So very good news there in general. Again, don't be worried about a pixel on just a random website because it probably is being used to help with stats to know what's being used on the website.

[00:10:58] And maybe, maybe just maybe using it to send a little ad to you on Facebook later. Of course, you're listening to Craig Peter son. You can get my insider show notes for absolutely free. And my little mini trainings. Oh three to five minutes every [email protected]. Just sign up on the homepage.

[00:11:23] You know, I've got it on my homeowner's policy. I have a special business policy for it. And it's something that you should seriously consider, but you need to understand first. So we're gonna talk about it. What is cyber insurance? Uh, that's what's up now?

[00:11:41] Cyber insurance is something that many businesses have looked at, not all businesses have, which is kind of crazy. If you ask me according to the industry statistics right now, less than 1% market penetration for cyber insurance and is expected to.

[00:12:02] Into a $20 billion industry by 2025. That is some serious money. So what is this cyber insurance? For instance, there's a rider on my home insurance for, for cyber insurance and I have special cyber insurance from a, a big company underwritten, but it is for anything that happens. In my business, that's related to cyber security and it also covers my clients because that's what we do for living is cyber security.

[00:12:37] If they are following our guidelines. So it's pretty darn cool when you get right down to it, because these risks that we have in the digital world are really every. So if you're a large organization, if you're a small little enterprise, are you going to get hacked? You know, bottom line, anybody could potentially get hacked because the bad guys have gotten pretty good.

[00:13:06] And most of us in business have gotten pretty lax AADA because of all of this, but not everybody understands when we're talking about cyber insurance. What does cyber mean? Well, the idea is that cyber insurance is created to protect organizations and individuals against digital risks. So we're talking about things like ransonware malware fishing campaigns.

[00:13:34] So for instance, I got a call just this week from a listener who again, had their operating account emptied out, hated when that happens. And so they lost everything. They lost all of the money in the account and they're trying to get it back. I got an email this week and, uh, from a lady that I, there's not much I can do for her.

[00:13:56] I pointed her in the right direction, but her father, I think it was, had his digital wallet of cryptocurrency completely emptied, completely stolen. Can you believe this sort of stuff, right? It's happening every day. You might have insurance that covers that, but you might not. Traditional insurance policies are only looking at physical risks, so they will take the physical risk things like damage to equipment, or maybe you have livestock or you have stock an inventory, a building different locations.

[00:14:38] That's your standard stuff. But cyber insurance is to allow businesses to transfer the costs associated with recovery from the losses incurred when there's some form of cybersecurity breach. Now that's a pretty big deal. because the losses can be huge. It isn't just ransomware where maybe it, it costs you a million dollars in ransom payments.

[00:15:08] Or if you're an individual, a retiree, maybe it only costs you 25,000 in ransom payments. And I know that's a lot, especially for retiree. But there is loss of reputation. There's loss of business, cuz you couldn't conduct business cuz you couldn't use your computers. Right? All of that sort of stuff. You got people that you have to bring in, you have to bring in a special team to try and recover your data.

[00:15:33] Maybe try and figure out what had happened. Right. All of that sort of stuff. So be careful cyber insurance, a lot of people kind of mistake it for policy that pays off. Attackers to retrieve or unlock data. That's not what it's really for cyber insurance is something that allows you to, I guess the term in, in the industry is transfer risk when your online security controls fail and.

[00:16:01] Basically all of them could fail. It, it, it depends, right? If you're a huge company, you can hire a bigger team for a security operation center, but at the same time, you also have more employees that are causing more problems. So look at it entirely business interruption, payments to experts to recover the data.

[00:16:23] Compensation for bodily injuries, uh, depending obviously on the resulting damage and the particular policy and the rates are gonna vary based on the maturity of your cyber defenses. So this is something that I've been big on for a long time, the cyber security maturity CMMC and what that helps 'em to determine is.

[00:16:49] What are your rates gonna be? So if you went out and you're just using the cable modem that they, that the, uh, company, your cable company provided for you, or you go to a big box retailer, and that's where you bought your firewall and switches, and you've got your wonderful little Lenovo PCs or Dows or whatever, and you're running, uh, Norton antivirus.

[00:17:13] You are not well covered. You are not very mature from a cybersecurity standpoint. The other thing you need to be able to do is make sure you've got your asset management all in line, that you have policies and procedures in place for when things happen. You gotta have it all put together, but the average cyber insurance policy for a small to mid-size company in 2021 was about $1,600.

[00:17:41] For $1 million in cyber liability coverage. Now that's not really bad at all. Now there are limits to what the provider will pay. They will often, if you do get nailed, They'll come in and double check that, everything that you said, all of those boxes that you checked when you were applying for your cyber security insurance, make sure you actually did all of them.

[00:18:08] Okay. Yeah. Kind of a big deal. And you not only will they not pay out, if you didn't do everything that you said you were going to be doing. but the other problem is you might end up getting sued by. Okay. So expect a counter suit if you decide to soothe them. So don't lie on those fors people. Okay. All right.

[00:18:32] Um, cyber claims, unlike non-technical events, like again, a fire flood storm damage, the cyber insurance claim might be determined by means of attack and your ability or your effort to prevent it. As I was saying, make sure you've got the checklist and this is something I think I, I should probably put a course together on to help you guys with, or maybe even a little bit of consulting for people.

[00:19:01] Let me know, just send an email to me, [email protected]. And uh, if you're interested in more info about cyber insurance, you can either look at this week's newsletter that you can. By again, going to Craig peterson.com and a link to this particular article I'm looking at, or you can tell me, Hey, listen, I'd love a little course or little support, a little help.

[00:19:24] Okay. I think it makes a lot of sense. So does your business qualify for cyber insurance? Well, some do some don't, uh, you might not see yourself as a target. For the bad guys, but I'll tell you, my 85 year old father was conned by some of these cyber attack guys. Okay. And he doesn't have much money. He, he's not the bank of, uh, England bank of America.

[00:19:52] None of these big banks or anything. Oh. Is a retiree living at home trying to make ends meet. So the same, thing's true for you as a business, you as an individual now. You are vulnerable most likely to a cyber attack, but you've got to really manage your risk posture. You gotta do things, right. So that's the bottom line there.

[00:20:16] That's what we try and help you do. But you can find information about this again, you can just email me, me, Craig peterson.com and ask for the info on cyber insurance, or if you're already a subscriber to my newsletter. That went out Tuesday morning. So just check your mail. Maybe it's in the spam box from Tuesday morning and you'll find a lot more information linked right from there.

[00:20:42] Craig peterson.com stick around. We'll be right back.

[00:20:51] There are a lot of complaints about how some of these cryptocurrencies are very non green using tons of energy. And now the prices are going down. We're seeing a number of really weird things happening.

[00:21:07] Cryptocurrency, as you probably have heard, has taken a tumble. Now, some of the cryptocurrencies, particularly of course, someone you might know most is Bitcoin use a lot of computing power.

[00:21:20] You see, what they're trying to do is basically solve a very complex mathematical problem. And in order to do that, they need a lot of computing power. Now you can certainly run it on your little desktop computer, that program to compute those things. It's called mining. So you're mining for Bitcoin.

[00:21:42] You're, you're trying to solve these mathematical problems and there's a theoretical limit to how many Bitcoins could actually potentially be mind looking right now. They're saying that circulating Bitcoin right now. Is about 19 million Bitcoin that are out there. And Bitcoin is worth about $20,000 right now, down from its huge, huge, huge high.

[00:22:11] That was, uh, more than two and a half times. What it's worth right now. So, how do you mind? Well, if you take that computer and you run the software, it's gonna do some mining and it is probably going to cost you more in electricity nowadays to mine. One Bitcoin than that Bitcoin is worth. In fact, it certainly will cost you more now.

[00:22:37] Uh, that's why the people that are professional Bitcoin minors have taken a different tact and what they've done. Is they found places where they can get cheap electricity. For instance, Finland, where they're using geothermal produced electricity. They're also using the cold air outside in order to cool down.

[00:23:00] The computers themselves as they're trying to compute this, but there's another thing that they've been doing. And that is well, how about we buy a coal plant? That's been shut down and that's happened. So they take that coal plant. They bring it back online. They burn the coal, they produce electricity at a cheaper rate than they could buy it.

[00:23:23] but behind all of this is the computing power. And what miners found a long time ago is it's better to have thousands of compute units working on solving these problems than it is just having. I don't know how many CPUs are in your computer for eight. Com, um, CPUs. How many? Well, I, how far can you get with those?

[00:23:48] Yeah, they're fast, but we need thousands of computers. So what they found is that GPU's graphical processing units. Kind of met their goals. You see a GPU is actually composed of thousands of computers, little compute units. Now they can't do real fancy math. They can't do anything particularly fancy.

[00:24:13] They're really designed to move. Pixels around on a screen. In other words, they're designed to help gamers have a nice smooth game while they're playing. They can be used. In fact, they're used all of the time in desktop computers, just for regular display of a webpage, for instance, or if you're watching a video, all of that is part of what they're doing.

[00:24:39] With graphic processing units. And if you've been paying attention, you probably have noticed if you particularly, if you're a gamer that the price for GPUs has gone way up, not only has it gone way up and it isn't just due to the lockdown and the supply chain problems. but they're very, very, very hard to get now.

[00:25:02] Yeah. Some of that is due to supply chain problems. No doubt about it. But most of these GPUs, according to some of the numbers I've seen, have actually been bought by these professional mining companies. In fact, many of them have gone the next step and they have what called custom silicone. These are completely customized process.

[00:25:28] sometimes they're using Asics. Sometimes they're using other things, but these custom processors that are really good at solving that problem that they have to solve in order to mine, a bit Bitcoin or one of these other currencies. So you, you see how that all works. There's a number of GPU manufacturers and something else interesting has happened because of the drop in value of pretty much all of the cryptocurrencies.

[00:26:00] And that is these GPS are going byebye. Right. Do does a company that is now no longer trading. That's no longer operating. Uh, we've seen at least two of these crypto mining companies just completely disappear. So now all of their hardware is going up for sale. You'll find it on EBA. So I, I wanna warn you, if you are looking for a GPU of some sort for your computer, maybe if you're a gamer, be very, very careful.

[00:26:37] We've got a buyer beware situation here because you're not just buying a GPU. A graphics processing card, uh, that has been lightly used. It was sitting in a terminal. Maybe it's a GPU. Like I use them where, when I'm doing video editing, it does use the GPU, even some of the audio editing. It uses the GPU.

[00:26:59] I'm looking at it right now and I've got some, uh, GPU utilization going on. I've got about, uh, 6% of my GPU in use right now on this computer. So. What the problem is is that these minors who are selling their old GPUs have been running them full Bo 24, 7. That's hard on anything. Isn't it. So what, uh, what's happening here is that you are seeing a market getting flooded with GPUs.

[00:27:35] You really don't wanna. All right. Does that make sense? Uh, you know, there we've lost more than 50% this year already in some of these, uh, cryptocurrencies that are out there coin base has had an interesting year Celsius, a major cryptocurrency bank, suspended withdrawals, uh, just here in the last few.

[00:28:01] Coin based crypto exchange announced a round of layoffs. Also here, they paused their hiring a month or two ago. It it's not going very well and prices for new and used graphic cards are continuing to fall. The peak price was late in 2021, a little bit early in 2022, but now you can go to Amazon new egg, best buy and buy current generation GPUs for prices that really would seem like bargain six months ago.

[00:28:35] And pricing for used GPUs has fallen even further, which is the caveat aura URA thing here that I'm warning everybody about. You need to proceed. With caution. So there's a lot of scams, a lot of bait and switches. You know, that's been kind of normal for some things over the years on eBay. I'm afraid, but I've had pretty good luck with eBay, but any high value eBay purchase CPUs have been mining cryptocurrencies at full tilt for months or years have problems in new GPU.

[00:29:12] Would not have had, you know, this heat that they generate, the dust that gets into them, that the heat is messing with can really degrade the performance and degrade the usage of that GPU here over time. Dust can also, uh, cause problems with the thermal paste that's in them could be dried out thermal paste because of the heat and that causes them to crack and causes other problems.

[00:29:40] So if you buy a used GP that looks dirty or runs hot, removing and cleaning the fan and heat sink, reapplying, fresh thermal paste. Could potentially restore loss performance, and maybe you can even get that new Sony PlayStation because GPS are becoming available. Again. Visit me online Craig peterson.com and get my weekly insider show notes right there.

[00:30:07] Craig peterson.com. Sign up now.

[00:30:13] Self-driving is relatively new technology. And, uh, our friends at Tesla just fired an employee who posted videos of a full self-driving accident. Uh, he's done it before.

[00:30:30] Tesla has a very interesting background. In fact, Elon Musk has gotten more interesting over time. And particularly lately the stuff he's saying, the stuff he's doing, but his companies have really made some amazing progress.

[00:30:48] Now, one of the things that Elon did pretty well pretty early on was he decided he was going to start selling. A self-driving feature for his cars. And back in the day, you could buy it. This was before it was ready at all for, I think it was 5,000 and, uh, it was good for whenever they came out with it.

[00:31:15] And then it went up to 7,000 and then I think it went to 12,000 and now it's you pay him monthly, but in reality, There are no fully self-driving qualified Teslas on the road today. It will be a little while before that happens. So this ex Tesla employee by the name of John Burnell is quoted in ours Technica saying that he was fired for posting YouTube videos about Tesla's full self-driving beta.

[00:31:48] Now this is called F S D. And if you know, Computers, you know what beta is? Beta means, Hey, you know, should work, could work, probably has some problems. And that's exactly what it is. Now. Tesla told California regulators that the full self-driving beta lacks true autonomous features. And that's probably how they got by getting with putting this car on the road, these cars on the road.

[00:32:19] So this X employee. Says that Tesla also cut off access to the full self driving beta in the 2021 Tesla model three that he owns. Now. He said that he paid for it. He had it legitimately, and yet Tesla cut him off from, and I guess. Anybody can try and sign up for it. I don't know all of the details behind getting that beta code.

[00:32:46] If you wanted to, you probably could investigate a little bit further, but the video that he posted on February 7th provided a frame by frame analysis of a collision of his Tesla with a Ballard, a a Ballard. Those are those stanchions, those, uh, cement pillars. They usually have. Plastic on the outside that you'll see, you know, protecting sidewalks or in this case it was protecting a bike lane in San Jose.

[00:33:19] So he said, no matter how minor this accident was, it was the first full self-driving beta collision caught on camera. That is irrefutable. And he says I was fired from Tesla in February with my U YouTube being cited as the reason why, even though my uploads are for my personal vehicle off company, time or property with software, I paid for.

[00:33:45] And he has a, um, channel called AI addict that you can find over there on YouTube if it hasn't been taken down yet. Right. Uh, he said that he got a notice that his full self-driving beta was disabled be based on his recent driving data, but that didn't seem to fit because the morning I got fired, he says I had zero proper use strikes.

[00:34:10] On my vehicle. So yeah, I, I can't say as I really would blame him, uh, him being in this case, Elon Musk for firing this guy, but it's an interesting little video to watch. It's like two and a half minutes. You'll see. And it, the guy has his hand on the steering wheel and the car is steering. Itself down the roadway and there's no other traffic really on the road.

[00:34:38] I don't know when this was like a, a Sunday or something, but you can see on the screen, it is detecting things like the, the little, uh, construction pillars that are on the side of the road. And he's in a left. Turn only lane and his Tesla turns, left the steering. Wheel's kind of going a little back and forth, right?

[00:34:58] As it tries to make up his mind what it's going to do and he's driving down, he just passed a ups truck. Although I would not have passed personally, the way he passed, which is the. The car decided it was going to, um, get closer to that ups truck. I, I would've purposely gone further away. And then what happens is he goes around another corner where there's some Ballards.

[00:35:26] That are in the roadway. And of course the idea behind them is so the cars don't go in and accidentally strike a cyclist. But around that corner where there is a crosswalk crossing the street, there's no Ballard. So people don't have to kind of get around them. And then the Ballards start off again. So the Tesla got kind of confused by this and looking at the screen, it doesn't show the, these Ballards.

[00:35:56] Being recognized. So the driver of the car grabs the stern wheel takes over at the very last second, but did actually hit the Ballard. Uh, no two ways about it here. He hit it and the car is stopped and it's just a minor scratch. He's showing it on his, uh, on his screen here. But I gotta say overall, it looks like it performed quite admirably.

[00:36:24] And the fact that this apparently is the. Uh, the only time it was actually caught on video. That's interesting too, but the cars of course have cameras on them too. So I'm sure. In other cases it did record a video of it. So CNBC said it obtained a copy of Tesla's internal social media policy, and it says it makes no direct reference.

[00:36:48] To criticizing the company's product in public. So we'll see what happens. Uh, apparently too, they are saying that this is the first accident in a year of testing this full self-driving. So that is darn good, frankly. And, uh, he's saying, you know, some people are saying I should have reacted sooner, which I should have.

[00:37:09] But in my year of testing, the full stop driving is usually really good at detecting objects last minute and slowing to avoid. So I don't know. We'll see what happens here. Tesla's doing a very good job. Hey, and I got another car story for you. This one, I. Think is totally, totally cool. You might remember Congress passed a law back in the seventies saying that we had to have what these cafe standards for vehicles efficiencies.

[00:37:36] In other words, you had to have certain fuel efficiency across all of the cars that you manufactured, you know? Okay. It is good enough, whatever. And, uh, they, they weren't able to make. uh, the car manufacturers, they weren't able to hit it until they came up with a whole new ignition technology for the cars.

[00:38:00] And that of course is fuel injection. You might remember we had car braiders and all of the cars, not very efficient. The engines themselves aren't very efficient, but we came up with fuel injection. And that helped the car manufacturers to meet these new cafe standards. Now, unfortunately, car manufacturers have removed weight from the cars in order to gain fuel efficiency in order to meet these federal requirements.

[00:38:28] So they've done things like taking out the full size spare tire, right? You, you had that before and that full size spare tire is now replaced with. Stupid a little tire, right? That, you know, you can limp down the road a little ways, but not very far, but they've also removed steel and various metals from other parts of the car.

[00:38:47] And many people have said it's made the cars less safe. The same time they've added more safety features like the side impact airbags and, and other things and, and airbags that will Mame. But, but that's a different story entirely. Uh, but this is very, very cool because there's a company called transient plasma systems TPS, and they came up with this new advanced ignition system that uses plasma.

[00:39:17] They've designed it in such a way that it replaces your spark plugs in your. And now they put the ignition module in that uses nanosecond duration, pulses of plasma to ignite that air fuel mixture that's inside the cylinder. So you're still doing the fuel injection, but you're igniting it with a nanosecond worth of.

[00:39:43] Plasma. Isn't that just amazing. So they've tested that technology 2019 is when they came out with it and they did some bench testing, but now it's almost ready for production. So they're doing now with vehicle manufacturers, validation testing. It is frankly very cool. And they don't have to do it on brand new engines either.

[00:40:08] They will come up with retro Kitt fixed fixes. Now, imagine this getting 20% better mileage by basically replacing your spark plugs and a little more firmware changes in your engine controller. No question about that one, right. But this is frankly. Absolutely amazing. Now it's going to take a lot of years before we move to electric vehicles.

[00:40:34] For a lot of reasons. We're not ready. The country isn't ready. The infrastructure isn't ready. People aren't ready. The cars aren't ready. We don't even know what. To do with the batteries. People complain about nuclear waste while there are now huge fields full of these batteries while they're trying to figure out what do we do with the used batteries from these electric or hybrid cars, because man, they it's a huge problem.

[00:40:59] All kinds of toxic stuff in them. And they haven't been good at being able to recycle 'em it's not like the old lead acid batteries. That are very easy to recycle. So it's going to be years before they really stop selling any of these internal combustion engines and even longer before they ban internal combustion engines.

[00:41:21] From the roadways. So this plasma ignition system is going to really, really help 20%. That is darn good. And I am looking at the article right now. They used this Toyota engine. This is a 2.5 liter Toyota Camry Atkinson cycle, thermal efficiency around 40%, which is absolutely amazing. Good job Toyota. And.

[00:41:48] Replaced the spark plug with this. Ignition system, this new ignition system using of course plasma and they found some amazing, amazing, uh, statistics here improvements. So in some cases they're seeing. The spark plugs and the plasmas getting 6% increase in fuel economy and others are seeing 20% increases.

[00:42:17] Of course, they've got to do more testing, extreme heat, extreme, cold, wet, dry, but that's gonna be happening. And we might see this in our cars in the next couple of years. Make sure you sign up right now. For my newsletter, get my insider show notes for free Craig peterson.com.

[00:42:39] Hey, it looks like if you did not invest in crypto, you were making a smart move and not moving. Wow. We got a lot to talk about here. Crypto has dived big time. It's incredible. What's happened. We get into that more.

[00:42:56] Crypto currencies. It, it it's a term for all kinds of these basically non-government sanctioned currencies.

[00:43:06] And the idea behind it was I should be able to trade with you and you should be able to trade with me. We should be able to verify the transactions and it's kind of nobody's business as to what's happening behind the scenes. And yet in reality, Everybody's business because all of those transactions are recorded in a very public way.

[00:43:30] So crypto in this case does not mean secret or cryptography. It's actually referring to the way the ledgers work and your wallets and, and fact, the actual coins themselves, a lot of people have bought. I was talking with my friend, Matt earlier this week and Matt was saying, Hey, listen, uh, I made a lot of money off of crypto.

[00:43:57] He's basically a day trader. He watches it. Is it going up? Is it going down? Which coin is doge coin? The way to go? Cuz Elon must just mentioned it. Is it something else? What should I do? And he buys and sells and has made money off of it. However, a lot of people have. And held onto various cryptocurrencies.

[00:44:19] Of course, the most popular one. The one everybody knows about is Bitcoin and Bitcoin is pretty good stuff, you know, kind of bottom line, but 40% right now of Bitcoin investors are underwater. Isn't that incredible because of the major dropoff from the November peak. And this was all started by a problem that was over at something called Tara Luna, which is another cryptocurrency now.

[00:44:51] You know, already that there is a ton of vol a ton of, uh, changes in price in various cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin being of course a real big one where, you know, we've seen 5,000, $10,000 per Bitcoin drops. It, it really is an amazingly, uh, fluid if you will coined. So there's a number of different people that have come out with some plans.

[00:45:19] How about if we do kinda like what the us dollar used to do, which is it's tied to a specific amount of gold or tied to a specific amount of silver. Of course, it's been a while since that was the case. Uh, president Nixon is the one that got us off of those standards, but. Having gold, for instance, back in your currency means that there is going to be far less fluctuation and your currency means something.

[00:45:49] See, the whole idea behind currency markets for government is yeah, you do print money and you do continue to increase the amount of money you print every year. Because what you're trying to do is create money for the. Goods product services that are created as well. So if, if we create another million dollars worth of services in the economy, there should be another million dollars in circulation that that's the basic theory.

[00:46:20] Monetary theory really boiling it. Right. Down now of course, you know, already our government has printed way more than it. Maybe should have. It is certainly causing inflation. There's no doubt about that one. So they're looking at these various cryptocurrencies and saying, well, what can we do? How can we have like a gold standard where the us dollar was the currency the world used and it, its value was known.

[00:46:46] You see, having a stable currency is incredibly important for consumers and businesses. A business needs to know, Hey, listen, like we sign a three year contract with our vendors and with our customers. And so we need a stable price. So we know what's our cost going to be, what can we charge our customer here?

[00:47:06] Can the customer bear the price increases, et cetera. The answer to most of those questions of course is no, they really, they really can't is particularly in this day and age. So having a. Fixed currency. We know how much it's worth. I know in two years from now, I'm not gonna be completely upside down with this customer because I'm having to eat some major increases in prices.

[00:47:31] And as a consumer, you wanna look at it and say, wow, I've got a variable rate interest rate on my mortgage. And man, I remember friends of mine back in the eighties, early eighties, late seventies, who just got nailed by this. They had variable rate interest loan on their home because that's all they could get.

[00:47:50] That's all they could afford. So the variable rate just kept going up. It was higher than credit cards are nowadays. And I remember a friend of mine complaining, they had 25% interest and that's when they lost a house because 25% interest means if you have a a hundred thousand dollars loan, you got $25,000 in interest that year, you know, let alone principal payments.

[00:48:14] So it, it was a really. Thing. It was really hard for people to, to deal with. And I, I can understand that. So the cryptocurrency guys. I said, okay, well let's tie it to something else. So the value has a value and part of what they were trying to tie it to is the us dollar. That's some currencies decided to do that.

[00:48:39] And there were others that tried to tie it to actual. Assets. So it wasn't just tied to the dollar. It was okay. We have X dollars in this bank account and that's, what's backing the value of our currency, which is quite amazing, right. To think about that. Some of them are backed by gold or other precious metals.

[00:49:02] Nowadays that includes a lot of different metals. Well, this one coin called Tara Luna dropped almost a hundred percent last week. Isn't that amazing. And it had a sister token called Tara us D which Tara Luna was tied to. Now, this is all called stablecoin. Right? The idea is the prices will be stable. and in the case of Tara and Tara S D the stability was provided by a computer program.

[00:49:37] So there's nothing really behind it, other than it can be backed by the community currencies themselves. So that's something like inter coined, for instance, this is another one of the, there are hundreds of them out there of these, uh, cryptocurrencies. The community backs it. So the goods and services that you can get in some of these communities is what gives value to inter Pointe money system.

[00:50:03] Now that makes sense too, right? Because the dollar is only worth something to you. If it's worth something to someone else, right. If you were the only person in the world that had us dollars, who, who would want. Like, obviously the economy is working without us dollars. So why would they try and trade with you?

[00:50:24] If you had something called a us dollar that nobody else had, or you came up with something, you made something up out of thin air and said, okay, well this is now worth this much. Or it's backed by that, et cetera. Because if again, if you can't spend it, it's not worth anything. Anyhow, this is a very, very big deal because on top of these various cryptocurrencies losing incredible amounts of money over the last couple of weeks, We have another problem with cryptocurrencies.

[00:50:59] If you own cryptocurrencies, you have, what's called a wallet and that wallet has a transaction number that's used for you to track and, and others to track the money that you have in the cryptocurrencies. And it it's, um, pretty good little. Fun function or feature. It's kind of hard for a lot of people to do so they have these kind of crypto banks.

[00:51:21] So if you have one of these currencies, you can just have your currency on deposit at this bank because there's, there's a whole bunch of reasons, but one of the reasons is if. There is a, a run on a bank, or if there's a run on a cryptocurrency, currencies have built into them incredibly expensive penalties.

[00:51:45] If you try and liquidate that cryptocurrency quickly. And also if there are a lot of people trying to liquidate it. So you had kind of a double whammy and people were paying more than three. Coin in order to sell Bitcoin. And so think about that. Think about much of Bitcoin's worth, which is tens of thousands of dollars.

[00:52:05] So it's overall, this is a problem. It's been a very big problem. So people put it into a bank. So coin base is one of the big one coin coin base had its first quarter Ernie's report. Now, this is the us' largest cryptocurrency exchange and they had a quarterly loss for the first quarter of 2022 of 430 million.

[00:52:35] That's their loss. And they had an almost 20% drop in monthly users of coin. So that's something right. And they put it in their statement, their quarterly statement here as to, you know, what's up. Well, here's the real scary part Coinbase said in its earning earnings report. Last Tuesday that it holds the.

[00:53:01] 256 billion in both Fiat currencies and crypto currencies on behalf of its customers. So Fiat currencies are, are things like the federal reserve notes, our us dollar. Okay. A quarter of a trillion dollars that it's holding for other people kind of think of it like a bank. However, they said in the event, Coinbase we ever declare bankruptcy, quote, the crypto assets.

[00:53:31] We hold in custody on behalf of our customers could be subject to bankruptcy proceedings. Coinbase users would become general unsecured creditors, meaning they have no right to claim any specific property from the exchange in proceedings people's funds would become inaccessible. Very big deal. Very scary for a very, very good reason.

[00:53:57] Hey, when we come back, uh, websites, you know, you go, you type stuff in email address, do you know? You don't even have to hit submit. In most cases, they're stealing it.

[00:54:09] I'm sure you've heard of JavaScript in your browser. This is a programming language that actually runs programs right there in your web browser, whether you like it or not. And we just had a study on this. A hundred thousand websites are collecting your information up-front.

[00:54:26] This is not a surprising thing to me. I have a, in my web browser, I have JavaScript turned off for most websites that I go to now, JavaScript is a programming language and it lets them do some pretty cool things on a webpage.

[00:54:44] In fact, that's the whole idea behind Java. Uh, just like cookies on a web browser where they have a great use, which is to help keep track of what you're doing on the website, where you're going, pulling up other information that you care about, right? Part of your navigation can be done with cookies. They go on and on in their usefulness, but.

[00:55:06] Part of the problem is that people are using them to track you online. So like Facebook and many others will go ahead and have their cookies on other websites. So they know where you're going, what you're doing, even when you're not on Facebook, that's by the way, part of. The Firefox browser's been trying to overcome here.

[00:55:31] They have a special fenced in mode that happens automatically when you're using Firefox on Facebook. Pretty good. Pretty cool. The apple iOS devices. Use a different mechanism. And in fact, they're already saying that Facebook and some of these others who sell advertiser, Infor advertisers information about you have really had some major losses in revenue because apple is blocking their access to certain information about you back to Javas.

[00:56:07] It's a programming language that they can use to do almost anything on your web browser. Bad guys have figured out that if they can get you to go to a website or if they can insert and add onto a page that you're visiting, they can then use. Your web browser, because it's basically just a computer to do what well, to mind Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.

[00:56:34] So you are paying for the electricity for them as your computer is sitting there crunching on, uh, these algorithms that they need to use to figure out how to find the next Bitcoin or whatever. Be, and you are only noticing that your device is slowing down. For instance, our friends over on the Android platform have found before that sometimes their phones are getting extremely hot, even when they're not using them.

[00:57:01] And we've found that yeah, many times that's just a. Bitcoin minor who has kind of taken over partial control of your phone just enough to mind Bitcoin. And they did that through your web browser and JavaScript. So you can now see some of the reasons that I go ahead and disable JavaScript on most websites I go to now, some websites aren't gonna work.

[00:57:24] I wanna warn you up front. If you go into your browser settings and turn off JavaScript, you are going. Break a number of websites, in fact, many, many websites that are out there. So you gotta kind of figure out which sites you want it on, which sites don't you want it on. But there's another problem that we have found just this week.

[00:57:45] And it is based on a study that was done. It's reported in ours Technica, but they found. A hundred thousand top websites, a hundred thousand top websites. These include signing up for a newsletter making hotel reservation, checking out online. Uh, you, you probably take for granted that you nothing happens until you hit submit, right?

[00:58:11] That used to be the case in web 1.0 days. It isn't anymore. Now I wanna point out we, I have thousands of people who are on my email list. So every week they get my, my, uh, insider show notes. So these are the top articles of the week. They are, you know, usually six to 10 articles, usually eight of them that are talking about cybersecurity, things of importance in.

[00:58:39] The whole radio show and podcast are based on those insider show notes that I also share with the host of all of the different radio shows and television shows that I appear on. Right. It's pretty, pretty cool. So they get that, but I do not use this type of technology. Yeah. There's some JavaScript that'll make a little sign up thing, come up at the top of the screen, but I am not using technology that is in your face or doing.

[00:59:08] What these people are doing, right? So you start filling out a form. You haven't hit cement. And have you noticed all of a sudden you're getting emails from. Right. It's happened to me before. Well, your assumption about hitting submit, isn't always the case. Some researchers from KU LUN university and university of Lue crawled and analyzed the top 100,000 websites.

[00:59:37] So crawling means they have a little robot that goes to visit the webpage, downloads all of the code that's on the page. And then. Analyzed it all right. So what they found was that a user visiting a site, if the, the user is in the European union is treated differently than someone who visits the site from the United States.

[01:00:01] Now there's a good reason for this. We've helped companies with complying with the GDPR, which are these protection rules that are in place in the European union. And that's why you're seeing so many websites. Mine included that say, Hey, listen, we do collect some information on you. You can click here to find out more and some websites let you say no, I don't want you to have any information about me.

[01:00:26] We collect information just so that you can navigate the site properly. Okay. Very basic, but that's why European union users are treated differently than those coming from the United States. So this new research found that over 1800 websites gathered an EU user's email address without their consent. So it's almost 2000 websites out of the top 100,000.

[01:00:54] If you're in the EU and they found. About well, 3000 websites logged a us user's email in some form. Now that's, before you hit submit. So you start typing in your email, you type in your name and you don't hit submit. Many of the sites are apparently grabbing that information, putting it into the database and maybe even started using it before you gave them explicit permission to do.

[01:01:27] Isn't that a fascinating and the 1800 sites that gathered information on European news union users without their consent are breaking the law. That's why so many us companies decided they had to comply with the GDPR because it's a real big problem. So these guys also crawled websites for password leaks and May, 2021.

[01:01:55] And they found 52 websites where third parties, including Yex Yex is. Big Russian search engine a and more were collecting password data before submission. So since then the group went ahead and let the websites know what was happening, what they found, uh, because it's not necessarily intentional by the website itself.

[01:02:21] It might be a third party, a third party piece of software. That's doing it. They, they informed those sites. Hey, listen, you're collecting user data before there's been explicit consent to collect it. In other words, you, before you hit the submit button and they thought, wow, this is a very surprising, they thought they might find a few hundred website, but.

[01:02:45] Course of a year now they found that there were over 3000 websites really that were doing this stuff. So they presented their findings at Usenet. Well, actually they haven't presented 'em yet. Cuz it's gonna be at use N's. In August and these are what they call leaky forums. So yet another reason to turn off JavaScript when you can.

[01:03:09] But I also gotta add a lot of the forums do not work if JavaScript's not enabled. So we gotta do something about it. Uh, maybe complain, make sure they aren't clutching your data. Maybe I should do a little course on that one so you can figure out are they doing it before even giving permission? Anyhow, this is Craig Peter son.

[01:03:29] Visit me online. Craig Peter son.com and sign up for that. No obligation inside your show notes.

[01:03:36] We are shipping all kinds of military equipment over to Ukraine. And right now they're talking about another $30 billion worth of equipment being shipped to what was the world's number one arms dealer - Ukraine.

[01:03:53] I'm looking right now at an article that was in the Washington post. And you know, some of their stuff is good.

[01:04:01] Some of their stuff is bad, I guess, kinda like pretty much any media outlet, but they're raising some really good points here. One of them is that we are shipping some pretty advanced equipment and some not so advanced equipment to Ukraine. To help them fight in this war to protect themselves from Russia.

[01:04:24] Now, you know, all of that, that's, that's pretty common. Ultimately looking back in history, there have been a lot of people who've made a lot of money off of wars. Many of the big banks financing, both sides of wars. Going way, way back and coming all the way up through the 20th century. And part of the way people make money in war time is obviously making the equipment, the, and supplies and stuff that the armies need.

[01:04:57] The other way that they do it is by trading in arms. So not just the supplies. The bullets all the way through the advanced missile systems. Now there's been some concerns because of what we have been seen online. We've talked about telegram here before, not the safest web, you know, app to use in order to keep in touch.

[01:05:24] It's really an app for your phone and it's being used. Ukraine to really coordinate some of their hacker activities against Russia. They've also been using it in Russia, te telegram that is in order to kind of communicate with each other. Ukraine has posted pictures of some of the killed soldiers from Russia and people have been reaching out to their mothers in Russia.

[01:05:53] They've done a lot of stuff with telegram it's interest. And hopefully eventually we'll find out what the real truth is, right? Because all sides in the military use a lot of propaganda, right? The first casualty in war is the truth. It always has been. So we're selling to a country, Ukraine that has made a lot of money off of selling.

[01:06:19] Been systems being an inter intermediary. So you're not buying the system from Russia? No, no. You're buying it from Ukraine and it has been of course, just as deadly, but now we are sending. Equipment military great equipment to Ukraine. We could talk about just that a lot. I, I mentioned the whole lend lease program many months ago.

[01:06:45] Now it seems to be in the news. Now takes a while for the mainstream media to catch up with us. I'm usually about six to 12 weeks ahead of what they're talking about. And so when we're talking about Lynn Le, it means. We're not giving it to them. We're not selling it to them. We're just lending them the equipment or perhaps leasing it just like we did for the United Kingdom back in world.

[01:07:10] Wari, not a bad idea. If you want to get weapons into the hands of an adversary and not really, or not an adversary, but an ally or potential ally against an adversary that you have, and they have. But part of the problem is we're talking about Ukraine here. Ukraine was not invited in NATO because it was so corrupt.

[01:07:33] You might remember. they elected a new president over there that president started investigating, hired a prosecutor to go after the corruption in Ukraine. And then you heard president Joe Biden, vice president at the time bragging about how he got this guy shut down. Uh, yeah, he, he got the prosecutor shut down the prosecutor that had his sights on, of course hunter Biden as well as other people.

[01:08:00] So it it's a real problem, but. Let's set that aside for now, we're talking about Ukraine and the weapon systems we've been sending over there. There have been rumors out there. I haven't seen hard evidence, but I have seen things in various papers worldwide talking about telegrams, saying. That the Ukrainians have somehow gotten their hands on these weapons and are selling them on telegram.

[01:08:30] Imagine that, uh, effectively kind of a dark web thing, I guess. So we're, we're saying, well, you know, Biden administration, uh, you know, yeah. Okay. Uh, that, that none of this is going to happen. Why? Well, because we went ahead and we put into the contracts that they could not sell or share or give any of this equipment away without the explicit permission of the United States government.

[01:09:01] Well, okay. That, that kind of sounds like it's not a bad idea. I would certainly put it into any contract like this, no question, but what could happen here? If this equipment falls into the hands of our adversaries or, or other Western countries, NATO countries, how do you keep track of them? It it's very hard to do.

[01:09:22] How do you know who's actually using them? Very hard to do so enforcing these types of contracts is very difficult, which makes a contract pretty weak, frankly. And then let's look at Washington DC, the United States, according to the Washington post in mid April, gave Ukraine a fleet of I 17 helicopter.

[01:09:49] Now these MI 17 helicopters are Russian, originally Soviet designs. Okay. And they were bought by the United States. About 10 years ago, we bought them for Afghan's government, which of course now has been deposed, but we still have our hands on some of these helicopters. And when we bought them from Russia, We signed a contract.

[01:10:16] The United States signed a contract promising not to transfer the helicopters to any third country quote without the approval of the Russian Federation. Now that's according to a copy of the certificate that's posted on the website of Russia's federal service on military technical cooperation. So there you.

[01:10:38] Russia's come out and said that our transfer, those helicopters has grossly violated the foundations of international law. And, and you know, what they, it has, right. Arms experts are saying that Russia's aggression Ukraine more than justifies us support, but the violations of the weapons contracts, man, that really hurts our credibility and the, our we're not honoring these contracts.

[01:11:06] How can we expect Ukraine to honor those contracts? That's where the problem really comes in. And it's ultimately a very, very big problem. So this emergency spending bill that it, you know, the $30 billion. Makes Ukraine, the world's single largest recipient of us security assistance ever. They've received more in 2022 than United States ever provided to Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel in a single year.

[01:11:40] So they're adding to the stockpiles of weapons that we've already committed. We've got 1400 stinger anti-aircraft systems, 5,500 anti tank, Mitch missiles, 700 switch blade drones, nine 90. Excuse me, long range Howards. That's our Tillery 7,000 small arms. 50 million rounds of ammunition and other minds, explosives and laser guided rocket systems, according to the Washington post.

[01:12:10] So it's fascinating to look. It's a real problem. And now that we've got the bad guys who are using the dark web, remember the dark web system that we set up, the onion network. Yeah. That one, uh, they can take these, they can sell them, they can move them around. It is a real problem. A very big problem. What are we gonna do when all of those weapons systems come back aimed at us this time?

[01:12:40] You know, it's one thing to leave billions of dollars worth of helicopters, et cetera, back in Afghanistan is the Biden administration did with their crazy withdrawal tactic. Um, but at least those will wear out the bullets, missile systems, Howard, yours, huh? Different deal.

[01:13:01] It seems like the government calls war on everything, the war against drugs or against poverty. Well, now we are looking at a war against end to end encryption by government's worldwide, including our own.

[01:13:18] The European union is following in America's footstep steps, again, only a few years behind this time.

[01:13:27] Uh, but it's not a good thing. In this case, you might remember a few have been following cybersecurity. Like I have back in the Clinton administration, there was a very heavy push for something called the clipper chip. And I think that whole clipper chip. Actually started with the Bush administration and it was a bad, bad thing, uh, because what they were trying to do is force all businesses to use this encryption chip set that was developed and promoted by the national security agency.

[01:14:04] And it's supposed to be an encryption device that is used to secure, uh, voice and data messages. And it had a built in. Back door that allowed federal state, local law enforcement, anybody that had the key, the ability to decode any intercepted voice or data transmissions. It was introduced in 93 and was thank goodness.

[01:14:32] Defunct by 1996. So it used something called skip Jack man. I remember that a lot and it used it to transfer dilly or Diffy excuse me, Hellman key exchange. I've worked with that before crypto keys. It used, it used the, uh, Des algorithm, the data encryption standard, which is still used today. And the Clinton administration argued that the clipper chip was.

[01:14:59] Absolutely essential for law enforcement to keep up with a constantly progressing technology in the United States. And a lot of people believe that using this would act as frankly, an additional way for terrorists to receive information and to break into encrypted information. And the Clinton administration argued that it, it would increase national security because terrorists would have to use it to communicate with outsiders, bank, suppliers, contacts, and the government could listen in on those calls.

[01:15:33] Right. Aren't we supposed to in United States have have a right to be secure in our papers and other things, right? The, the federal government has no right to come into any of that stuff unless they get a court order. So they were saying, well, we would take this key. We'll make sure that it's in a, a lock box, just like Al gore social security money.

[01:15:55] And no one would be able to get their hands on it, except anyone that wanted to, unless there was a court order and you know how this stuff goes, right. It, it just continues to progress. And. A lot worse. Well, there was a lot of backlash by it. The electronic privacy information center, electronic frontier foundation boast, both pushed back saying that it would not.

[01:16:20] Only have the effect of, of not, excuse me, have the effect of this is a quote, not only subjecting citizens to increased impossibly illegal government surveillance, but that the strength of the clipper trips encryption could not be evaluated by the public as its design. Was classified secret and that therefore individuals and businesses might be hobbled with an insecure communication system, which is absolutely true.

[01:16:48] And the NSA went on to do some things like pollute, random number generators and other things to make it so that it was almost impossible to have end-to-end encrypted data. So we were able to kill. Many years ago. Now what about 30 years ago? Uh, when they introduced this thing? Well, it took a few years to get rid of it, but now the EU is out there saying they want to stop end, end encryption.

[01:17:16] The United States has already said that, or the new director of Homeland security has, and as well as Trump's, uh, again, Homeland security people said we need to be able to break the. And, and we've talked about some of the stories, real world stories of things that have happened because of the encryption.

[01:17:37] So the EU has now got a proposal forward that would force tech companies to scan private messages for child sexual abuse material called CSAM and evidence of grooming. Even when those messages are supposed to be protected by end to end encrypt. So we know how this goes, right? It, it starts at something that's, everybody can agree on, right?

[01:18:05] This child, sexual abuse material, uh, abductions of children, all, you know, there's still a lot of slavery going on in the world. All of that stuff needs to be stopped. And so we say, yeah, yeah. Okay. That makes a whole lot of sense, but where does it end? Online services that receive detection orders. This is from ours Technica under the pending European union legislation would have obligations concerning the detection, the reporting, the removal and blocking of known and new.

[01:18:38] Child sexual abuse material as well as solicitation of children. So what we're starting to see here in the us is some apps, some companies that make smartphones, for instance, looking at pictures that are sent and shared to see if it looks like it might be pornographic in some way. because again, we're seeing younger kids who are sending pictures of each other naked or body parts naked to others.

[01:19:04] If you can believe that. Absolutely incredible. But what happens when you send them using an end-to-end encrypted app? Now, my advice for people who want to keep information private, you're a business person you're working on a deal. You don't go to Twitter like Elon Musk and put it out there for the world to.

[01:19:26] Although, I'm sure he's got some ulterior motives in doing that. You use an app called signal. That's certainly the best one that's out there right now. It provides a whole lot of encryption and privacy, and even has some stuff built in to break the software. That's often used to break into the end to end encryption systems.

[01:19:48] So they're trying to get this in place here. They're calling it an important security tool. But it's ordering companies to break that end to end encryption by whatever technological means necessary. It it's gonna be hard because frankly it's gonna be impossible for them to enforce this because you can take encrypted data and make it look like almost.

[01:20:11] Anything, and man has that happened for a long time. Think of the micro dots, way back when Seline world, world war II and on, they were very popular there's techniques to encrypt data and embedded in a photograph and make it almost impossible to detect. So again, they're, they're not going to get to do what they're hoping to do.

[01:20:37] And, and I think that's an important thing for everybody. Pay pay close attention to, so they do want to get rid of end to end there's WhatsApp out there, which I don't really trust cuz is owned by Facebook, but that's supposedly end to end. There's end to end encryption on apple iMessage, although up.

[01:20:57] Apparently, there are some ways to get into that. I think apple is now maintaining a secondary key that they can use to decrypt, but the back doors that the us has called for and other people have called for. Have been pushed back by companies like apple Apple's CEO, Tim cook, opposed government mandated back doors.

[01:21:20] Of course, apple got a major backlash from security experts when unveiled a plan to have iPhones and other devices, scan user photos for child sexual abuse images. That's what I was referring to earlier. And apple put that plan on hold and promised to make changes. But this is apple all over again. And it's hard to say what's the least privacy intrusive way, because if the is S P can read them all, if the company that's providing you with the app that you're using to send the message.

[01:21:53] Can read them all, how much privacy is there and if they can read it, who else can read it and what can be done with it? Blackmail has happened many times in the past because someone got their hands on something. So what happens when a, a Congressman or the military or someone in the military uses that that's another problem.

[01:22:14] Because if we don't know the way the encryption is is, is, uh, being used or is made just like, was true with a clipper chip. And then we move on to the next step, which is okay. So what do we do now with this data that we're storing? Are they going to keep that data confidential? Can they keep it outta the hands of the criminals.

[01:22:38] We've certainly found that they just haven't been able to. And if you're talking about grooming, which is what the European union wants. In other words, someone that's trying to get a child to the point where they're doing something that would be abhorrent. Uh, you've got to. Look at all of the, all of the messages, you have to have them analyzed by some sort of an AI artificial intelligence, and then ultimately analyzed by people.

[01:23:05] It it's just gonna get worse and worse. Right? This is the most sophisticated mass surveillance machinery. That has ever been deployed outside of China in the USSR. It, it's absolutely incredible when you look at it from a cryptographic standpoint. And again, we understand protecting the children. We all want to do that, but how far will this end up going?

[01:23:29] I also wanna point out that my. New, uh, insider show notes that I've been sending out over the last few weeks have had some amazing responses from people. I I've had people saying that this is what they look for in their mailbox. It's the first piece of email they read that it's the most relevant news that they get.

[01:23:49] But you can only get it one way and that's by going to Craig peterson.com, you can sign up there. It's easy enough to do. There's no obligation on your part, right? This is not my paid newsletter. This is absolutely free. And it's incredibly valuable. Plus I'll also be sending you once a week-ish a small training, just, it takes you a few minutes to read.

[01:24:14] I just last week went through the firewall in your windows machine, the firewall in. And gave you step by step instructions. Is it turned on? What is it doing? What should it do? How do you turn it on and how do you use it? So you can only get that one way and that's, if you are on my email list, so it's important to be there.

[01:24:36] And if you have any questions you can hit reply to. Any of those emails, whether it's the training or if it's the insider show notes, just hit re reply. And I'll go ahead and answer your question. You might have to wait a few days cuz I can get pretty busy sometimes, but always answer. So me, [email protected].

[01:24:57] Anybody can send me email and you can also text me at 6 1 7 503 2 2 1 6 1 7 500. 3, 2, 2, 1 with any questions. Well, that's it for right now, there is so much more. Make sure you sign up right now.

How Private is Crypto? What About WhatsApp and Signal?

Cryptocurrencies were thought to be like the gold standard of security, of having your information stay private. Maybe you don't want to use regular currency and transactions. It's all changed.

[Automated transcript follows.]

[00:00:14] We have had such volatility over the years when it comes to what are called cryptocurrencies.

[00:00:21] Now I get a lot of questions about cryptocurrencies. First of all, let me say, I have never owned any cryptocurrencies and I do not own any crypto assets at all. Most people look at crypto currencies and think of a couple of things. First of all, an investment. An investment is something that you can use or sell, right?

[00:00:42] Typically investments you don't really use. It's like a house. Is it an investment? Not so much. It's more of a liability, but people look at it and say listen, it went from what was a 10,000. Bitcoins to buy a pizza to, it went up to $50,000 per Bitcoin. There's a pretty big jump there.

[00:01:03] And yeah, it was pretty big. And of course, it's gone way down and it's gone back up and it's gone down. It's gone back up. But the idea of any kind of currency is can you do anything with the currency? You can take a dollar bill and go and try and buy a cup of coffee. Okay. A $10 bill and buy a cup of coffee in most places anyways.

[00:01:26] That sounds like a good idea. I could probably use a cup of coffee right now and get a tickle on my throat. I hate that. But if you have something like Bitcoin, where can you spend it? You might remember Elon Musk was saying, yeah, you can use Bitcoin to buy a Tesla. Also Wikipedia would accept donations.

[00:01:45] Via Bitcoin, there were a number of places online that you could use. Bitcoin. In fact, there's a country right now in south central America that has Bitcoin as its currency. That's cool too. When you think about it, what is, so what are you gonna do? Latin American country? I'm trying to remember what it is.

[00:02:05] Oh yeah. It's all Salvador. The first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin is an official legal tender. Now there's a number of reasons they're doing that and he can do it basically. If you got a dictator, you can do almost anything you want to. So in El Salvador, they've got apps that you can use and you can go and buy a tree taco using Bitcoin using their app.

[00:02:31] So there you go. If you have Bitcoin, you can go to El Salvador and you can buy all of the tacos and other basic stuff you might wanna buy. But in general, No you can't just go and take any of these cryptocurrencies and use them anywhere. So what good are they as a currency? we already established that they haven't been good as an investment unless you're paying a lot of attention and you're every day buying and selling based on what the movement is.

[00:02:59] I know a guy that does exactly that it's, he's a day trader basically in some of these cryptocurrencies, good for. But in reality, is that something that makes sense in a long term? Is that going to help him long term? I don't know. I really don't because again, there's no intrinsic value.

[00:03:18] So some of the cryptocurrencies have decided let's have some sort of intrinsic value. And what they've done is they've created what are generally known as stable coins. And a stable coin is a type of cryptocurrency that behind it has the ability to be tied to something that's stable. So for instance, one that really hit the news recently is a stable coin that is tied to the us dollar.

[00:03:46] And yet, even though it is tied to the us dollar and the coin is a dollar and the dollar is a coin. They managed to get down into the few pennies worth of value, kinda like penny. so what good was that, it has since come back up, some are tied to other types of assets. Some of them say we have gold behind us.

[00:04:09] Kinda like what the United States used to do back when we were on the gold standard. And we became the petrol dollar where countries were using our currency are us dollars, no matter which country it was to buy and sell oil. Things have changed obviously. And we're not gonna talk about. The whole Petro dollar thing right now.

[00:04:30] So forget about that. Second benefit. Third benefit is while it's crypto, which means it's encrypted, which means we're safe from anybody's spine on us, anybody stealing it. And of course that's been proven to be false too. We've seen the cryptocurrencies stolen by the billions of dollars. We've seen these cryptocurrencies lost by the billions of dollars as well.

[00:04:58] That's pretty substantial. We get right down to it, lost by the billions because people had them in their crypto wallets, lost the password for the crypto wallet. And all of a sudden, now they are completely out of luck. Does that make sense to you? So the basic. Idea behind currency is to make it easier to use the currency than to say, I'll trade you a chicken for five pounds of nail.

[00:05:25] Does that make sense to you? So you use a currency. So you say the chicken is worth five bucks. Actually chicken is nowadays is about $30. If it's a LA hen and those five pounds of nails are probably worth about $30. So we just exchanged dollars back and forth. I think that makes a lot of sense. One of the things that has driven up the value of cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin has been criminal marketplaces.

[00:05:53] As you look at some of the stats of ransoms that are occurring, where people's computers are taken over via ransomware, and then that person then pays a ransom. And what happens when they pay that ransom while they have to go find an exchange. Pay us dollars to buy cryptocurrency Bitcoin usually. And then they have the Bitcoin and they have to transfer to another wallet, whether or not the bad guys can use the money.

[00:06:25] Is a, again, a separate discussion. They certainly can than they do because some of these countries like Russia are going ahead and just exchanging the critical currencies for rubs, which again, makes sense if you're Russia. Now we have a lot of criminals that have been using the Bitcoin for ransoms businesses.

[00:06:49] Publicly traded businesses have been buying Bitcoin by the tens of millions of dollars so that they have it as an asset. In case they get ransom. Things have changed. There's a great article in NBC news, by Kevin Collier. And Kevin's talking about this California man who was scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency.

[00:07:15] Now this was a fake romance scam, which is a fairly common one. It. It tends to target older people who are lonely and a romance starts online and they go ahead and talk and kind of fall in love. And it turns out she or he has this really almost terminal disease. If only they had an extra, a hundred thousand dollars to pay for the surgery.

[00:07:45] You, you know the story, so he was conned out of the money. What's interesting to me is how the investigation and investigative ability has changed over the years. Probably about five years ago, I sat through a briefing by the secret service and. In that briefing, they explained how they had gone and very, quite cleverly tracked the money that was being sent to and used by this dark web operator who ran a site known as a silk road.

[00:08:22] And that site was selling illegal things online. Oh, and the currency that they were tracking was Bitcoin. Yes, indeed. So much for cryptocurrency being secure it, five years ago, the secret service was able to do it. The FBI was able to do it and they couldn't do a whole lot about it. But part of the problem is all of your transactions are a matter of public record.

[00:08:52] So if someone sends you a fraction of a Bitcoin. That is now in a ledger and that ledger now can be used because when you then spend. Fraction of a Bitcoin somewhere else, it can be tracked. It is tracked is a hundred percent guaranteed to be tracked. And once it's tracked government can get in.

[00:09:15] Now, in this case, a deputy district attorney in Santa Clara county, California, was able to track the movement of the cryptocurrency. Yeah. So this district attorney, okay. Deputy district attorney, not the FBI, not the secret service, not the national security agency, a local district attorney in Santa Clara county, California, not a particularly huge county, but.

[00:09:44] She was able to track it. And she said that she thinks that the scammer lives in a country where they can't easily extradite them. And so they're unlikely to be arrested at any time soon. So that includes countries like Russia that do not extradite criminals to the United States. Now getting into the details.

[00:10:03] There's a great quote from her in this NBC news article, our bread and butter these days really is tracing cryptocurrency and trying to seize it and trying to get there faster than the bad guys are moving it elsewhere, where we can't. Grab it. So she said the team tracked the victim's money as it bounced from one digital wallet to another, till it ended up at a major cryptocurrency exchange where it appeared the scammer was planning to launder the money or cash out, they sent a warrant to the exchange.

[00:10:35] Froze the money and she plans to return it to the victim. That is a dramatic reversal from just a few years back when cryptocurrencies were seen as a boon for criminals. Amazing. Isn't it? Stick around. We get a lot more to talk about here and of course, sign up online Craig peterson.com and get my free newsletter.

[00:11:01] There have been a lot of efforts by many companies, Microsoft, apple, Google, to try and get rid of passwords. How can you do that? What is a password and what are these new technologies? Apple thinks they have the answer.

[00:11:17] Passwords have been the bane of existence for a long while. And if you'd like, I have a special report on passwords, where I talk about password managers, things you can do, things you should do in order to help keep your information safe, online things like.

[00:11:34] Bank accounts, et cetera. Just email me, Craig peterson.com and ask for the password special report and I'll get it to you. Believe me it's self-contained it's not trying to get you to buy something. Nothing. It is entirely about passwords and what you can do again, just email me, [email protected] and we'll get right back with you.

[00:11:56] Give us a couple of days, passwords are a problem. And over the years, the standards for passwords have changed. I remember way back when some of the passwords might be 2, 3, 4 characters long. and back then, those were hard to crack. Then Unix came along. I started using Unix and when was that?

[00:12:16] Probably about 81. And as I was messing around with Unix, I. They used to had a couple of changes in how they did passwords. They added assault to it. They used basically the same cipher that the Germans used in world war II, that enigma cipher, which again was okay for the times today, we have much more powerful ciphers and the biggest concern right now, amongst real cybersecurity people.

[00:12:43] Government agencies is okay. So what are we going to do when these new quantum computers come along with their artificial intelligence and other things, that's going to be a bit of a problem because quantum computers are able to solve problems in fractions of a second. Even that traditional computers cannot solve it.

[00:13:10] It's a whole different thing. I want you to think. Something here. I, if you have a handful of spaghetti now we're talking about hard spaghetti, not cooked spaghetti and they all dried out and they are a varying links. How could you sort those into the smallest to largest, if you will, how could you find which ones were the longest, perhaps?

[00:13:37] Which ones were the shortest? There's an analog way of doing that and there's a digital way of doing that. So the digital way for the computer would be. To measure them all and compare the measurements and then identify how long the longest one was. And then maybe you'd have to go back and try and find that.

[00:13:55] So you can imagine that would take some time, the analog way of doing that. Cuz there still are analog computers out there and they do an amazing job in certain tasks, but the analog way of doing that is okay. So you take that bundle of various length spaghetti and you slam it on the table. What's gonna happen while those pieces of dried spaghetti are going to self align, right?

[00:14:22] The shortest ones are going to be down at the bottom and the tallest one's gonna be sticking out from the top. So there you go. There's your tallest, your longest pieces of spaghetti, and it's done. Instantly. So that's just an idea here, quantum, computing's not the same thing, but that's a comparison really of digital and analog computers, but it's the same type of thing.

[00:14:45] Some of these problems that would take thousands of years for digital computer. To work out, can just take a fraction of a second. It's absolutely amazing. So when we're looking at today's algorithms, today's programs for encrypting things like military information, secret telegrams, if you will going back and forth in inside the secretary of state embasies worldwide.

[00:15:10] Today they're considered to be quite secure, but with quantum computing what's gonna happen. So there are a lot of people out there right now who are working on trying to figure out how can we come up with an algorithm that works today with our digital computers and can be easily solved by quantum computer.

[00:15:34] We have a pretty good idea of how quantum computers are going to work in the future, how they work right now, but this really gets us to the next level, which is cool. Franklin. That's a little bit here about cybersecurity. How about you and your password? How does this all tie in?

[00:15:51] There are a few standards out there that people have been trying to pass is it's no longer the four character password you might remember. Oh, it needs to be eight to 10 characters, random mix of upper lowercase, special digits, character numbers. You remember those? And you should change it every 30 days.

[00:16:09] And those recommendations changed about three or four years ago when the national Institute of standards and technology said, Hey guys pass phrase is much better than the, what we've been doing because people are gonna remember it and it can be longer. So if you are using I have some past phrases I use that are 30 characters or more.

[00:16:33] And I mix up the case and I mix up mix ins on special characters and some numbers, but it's a phrase that I can remember and I have different phrases for different websites. Cause I use a password manager right now. I have about 3,100 entries in my password manager. That's a lot. And I bet you have a lot more passwords or at least a lot more websites and accounts than you realize.

[00:17:03] And so that gets to be a real problem. How do you make all of this work and make it easy for people? One of the ways that that. They're looking at using is something called the Fido alliances technique. And the idea behind Fido is actually similar to what I do right now. Cause I use one password.com.

[00:17:24] I have an app on my phone and the phone goes ahead and gives me the password. In fact, it'll. Put it in. I have plugins in my browsers. It'll put it right into the password form on the website. And then it'll ask me on my phone. Hey, is that really you? And I'll say yes, using duo and TA I'm logged in it's really quite cool.

[00:17:48] Fido is a little different than that, but the same, the whole idea behind Fido is you registered a website and the website will send a request to the Fido app. That's on your phone. So now on your phone, you'll use biometrics or maybe one time pass key, those six digit keys that change every 30 seconds.

[00:18:13] And so now you on your phone, you say yeah. That's me. That's good. That's me. Yeah. Okay. And then the app will exchange with the website using public key cryptography. A public key and it's gonna be unique public key for that website. So it'll generate a private key and a public key for that website.

[00:18:35] And now TA a, the website does not have your password and cannot get your password. And anytime you log in, it's going to ask you on your smartphone. Is this. And there's ways beyond smartphones. And if you wanna find out more about passwords, I've got, again, that free, special report, just Craig peterson.com.

[00:18:59] Email me, just email [email protected] and I'll make sure we send that off to you and explains a lot about passwords and current technology. So Fido is one way of doing this and a few different companies have gone ahead and have invested some. Into final registration, because it requires changes on the websites as well in order to.

[00:19:25] With Fido. Now you might use a pin, you might use the biometrics, et cetera, but apple has decided they've come up with something even better. Now there's still a lot of questions about what apple is doing, but they are rolling it into the next release of iOS and also of Mac operating system. And you'll be able to use that to secure.

[00:19:48] Log into websites. I think Apple's gonna get a lot of traction on this and I think it's gonna be better for all of us involved here. We'll see. There's still a lot of UN unanswered questions, but I'll keep you up to date on this whole password technology stick around.

[00:20:08] There are ways for us to communicate nowadays easy ways, but are the easy ways, the best ways, the question here, frankly. And part of this answer has to do with WhatsApp and we'll talk right now.

[00:20:23] Many people have asked me about secure messaging. You probably know by now that sending text messages is not secure.

[00:20:34] In fact, it could be illegal if you have any personal information about. Patients or maybe employees, you just can't send those over open channels. So what apple has done for instance is they've got their messaging app and if the message is green, it's just reminding you that this is a text message. Now they stuck with green because that was the industry's standard.

[00:21:01] Green does not mean safe in the apple world when it comes to iMessage. Blue does. So they've got end to end encryption. So if the message is blue, that means the encryptions in place from side to side, there are on the other end of the spectrum. There are apps like telegram, which are not. Particularly safe.

[00:21:22] Now, telegram has pulled up it socks a little bit here, but in order to have end to end encryption and telegram, you have to manually turn it on. It is not on by default. I also personally don't trust telegram because of their background, things that they've done in the past. Avoid that.

[00:21:43] WhatsApp is something I've been asked about. I had a family member of a service member who was overseas, ask if WhatsApp was safe for them to communicate on cuz they didn't want third parties picking. Private messages, things you say and do online with friends and family are not necessarily things there are for public consumption.

[00:22:06] So the answer that I gave was yeah, you might remember Facebook getting WhatsApp. They bought it and deciding they were going to make some changes to the privacy settings in. now that was really a big mistake. They said we're gonna add advertisements. How are you going to effectively advertise?

[00:22:27] If you don't know what we're talking about, have you noticed advertising platforms? If you look up something or someone else in your house looks up something, if your neighbors are looking up, they assume that you might be interested in it as well. So what do they do? They go ahead and show you ads for that brand new pair of socks that you never really cared about, but because the algorithms in the background figured yeah, that's what you've been talking about.

[00:22:55] Let's pass out your pair of socks. So if Facebook is going to. Add into WhatsApp, what's going to happen. Are they going to be monitoring what you're saying? And then sending you some of these messages, right? These ads, because of that, a lot of people started looking for a more secure. Platform and that's frankly, where Moxi Marlin spike comes in a fun name, the bloom in this case, but he started a company called signal.

[00:23:30] He didn't just start it. He wrote the code for it, the server code, everything. And the whole idea behind signal was to have a guaranteed safe end to end way to communicate. A third party with a friend, a relative, et cetera. So signal is something that I've used in the past. And I used from time to time now, as well, depending on who I'm talking to.

[00:23:56] And it does allow you to send messages. It does allow you to talk. You can do all kinds of stuff with it. So now there's an issue with signal. It's disappointing. Moxi has stepped down from running signal. There's a company behind it in January, 2022. And he said, the company's begin off. They can run themselves.

[00:24:19] He's still on the board of direct. And the guy who's currently the head of signal is also a very privacy focused guy, which is really good too signal by the way is free. And you can get it for pretty much any platform you would care to have it for a very nice piece of software. I like what they've done.

[00:24:38] Now the problem is that some of those people at signal have decided that they should have a way of making payments inside signal. So a few months ago, they went ahead and added into signal, a piece of software that allows you to send. Payments online. Now this is a little concerning and the let's talk about some of the reasons for the concern.

[00:25:09] Basically what we're seeing is a cryptocurrency that Moxi himself helped to put in place now, I guess that's good cuz he understands it. It's supposedly a cryptocurrency that is privacy. Focused. And that's a good thing. What type of crypto is it? That's privacy focused. And how good is it going to be?

[00:25:34] Those are all good questions, but here's the biggest problem. I think that comes from this. We've got our friends at Facebook, again, trying to add crypto payments to their various messenger and other products. We're seeing that from a lot of these communication systems, cuz they can skim a little off the top legally, charge you a fee and then make their money that way. But. What happens when you put it into an encrypted messaging app? Bottom line, a lot of bad things can happen here because now all of a sudden you come under financial regulations, right? Because you are performing a financial. Function. So now potentially here, there could be criminal misuse of the app because you could have ransomware and they say, reach us on signal.

[00:26:33] Here's our signal account. And go ahead and send us crypto. it's called mobile coin by the way, this particular cryptocurrency. So now all of a sudden you are opening up the possibility of all kinds of bad things happening and your app signal, which was originally great for messaging now being used nefariously.

[00:26:57] I think that's a real problem. Now, when it comes to money transfer functions with cryptocurrencies to say that they're anonymous, I think is a hundred percent a misnomer because it's really pseudo anonymous. It's never completely anonymous. So now you've increased the legal attack surface here. So now the various regulators and countries around the world can say, Hey.

[00:27:26] This is no longer just a messaging app. You are using it to send money. We wanna track all money transactions. And so what does that mean? That means now we need to be able to break the encryption or need to shut down your app, or you need to stop the ability to send money. So the concern right now with signal is we really could have some legal problems with signal.

[00:27:53] And we could potentially cause some real life harm. On the other side of, this is what Moi Marlin spike has been really driving with signal over the years, which is we don't want anyone to be able to break into signal. So there's a particularly one Israeli based company that sells tools that you can buy that allow you to break into smartphone.

[00:28:20] And they're used by everybody from criminals. You can even buy some of these things on eBay. And they're used also by law enforcement agencies. So he found that there was a bug in one of the libraries that's used by this Israeli soft. To where that causes it to crash. And so he puts some code into signal, at least he threatened to that would cause any of the scanning software that tries to break into your smartphone to fail to crash.

[00:28:53] Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Greg Peterson here, online Craig peterson.com and really you are not alone.

[00:29:09] I got some good news about ransomware and some bad news about B E C business email compromise. In fact, I got a call just this just this week from someone who had in fact again, had their operating account emptied.

[00:29:27] Ransomware is a real problem, but it's interesting to watch it as it's evolved over the years.

[00:29:36] We're now seeing crackdowns driving down ransomware profits. Yes, indeed. Ransomware's ROI is dropping the return on investment. And so what we're starting to see is a drive towards more. Business email compromise attack. So we'll talk about those, what those are. And I have a couple of clients now that became clients because of the business email compromises that happened to them.

[00:30:10] A great article that was in this week's newsletter. You should have received it Tuesday morning from me. If you are signed up for the free newsletter. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. You'll get these usually Tuesday morning. It's my insider show notes. So you can get up to speed on some of the articles I'm talking about during the week that I talk about on the radio.

[00:30:38] And of course talk about here on the radio show and podcast and everything else as well. So what we're seeing here, according to dark readings, editor, Becky Bracken is some major changes, a pivot by the bad guys, because at the RSA conference, they're saying that law enforcement crackdowns try cryptocurrency regulations.

[00:31:05] We've been talking about that today and ransomware as a service operator. Downs are driving the return on investment for ransomware operations across the world all the way across the globe. So what is ransomware as a service? I think that's a good place to start because that has really been an Albert Cross around our next for a long time.

[00:31:30] The idea with ransomware is they get you to download some software, run some software that you really should not be running. That makes sense to you. So you get this software on your computer, it exfil trades files. So in other words, it takes files that you have sends them. Off to the bad guys. And then once it's done that, so it'll send like any word files, it finds Excel, other files.

[00:32:00] It might find interesting once it's done that, then it goes ahead and encrypts those files. So you no longer have access to them and it doesn't just do them on your computer. If you share a drive, let's say you've got a Gdrive or something else on your computer that is being mounted from either another computer or maybe a server.

[00:32:24] It will go ahead and do the same thing. With those files. And remember it, isn't just encrypting because if you have a good backup and by the way, most businesses that I've come into do not have a good backup, which is a real problem because their backups fail. They haven't run. I had one case where we helped the business out and it had been a year and a half since they had a successful backup and they had no.

[00:32:52] They were dutifully carrying home. These USB drives every day, plug in a new one in, and the backups were not running. Absolutely amazing. So anyhow, ransomware is a service then. So they've encrypted your files. They've exfiltrated. In other words, they've taken your files and then they demand a ran.

[00:33:14] So usually it's like this red screen that comes up and says, Hey all your files are belong to us and you need to contact us. So they have people who help you buy Bitcoin or whatever they're looking for. Usually it's Bitcoin and send the Bitcoin to them. And then they'll give you what's hopefully a decryption.

[00:33:38] Now what's particularly interesting about these decryption keys is they work about half of the time. So in other words, about half of the time, you'll get all your data back about half the time. You will not, it's just not good. So if you are a small operator, if you are just a small, bad guy and it's you and maybe somebody else helping you, you got your nephew there helping you out.

[00:34:03] How are you going to. Help these people that you're ransoming by the cryptocurrency. How are you going to threaten them with release of their documents online? Unless you have a staff of people to really help you out here? That's where ransomware's a service comes in. The whole idea behind RA is.

[00:34:25] You can just be a one man shop. And all you have to do is get someone to open this file. So you go ahead and register with the ransomware service provider and they give you the software and you embed your little key in there, so they know it's you. And then you send it off in an email. You might try and mess with those people to get them to do something they shouldn't do.

[00:34:49] And. That's all you have to do because once somebody opens up that file that you sent them, it's in the hand of these service guys and ransomwares the service guys. So the, these ransomwares of service people will do all of the tech support. They'll help people buy the Bitcoin. They'll help them pay the ransom.

[00:35:11] They'll help them recover files, to a certain extent. Does this make sense to you? Yeah, it's kinda crazy. Now I wanna offer you, I've got this document about the new rules for backup and again, it's free. You can get it. No problem. Just go ahead and email me, [email protected] [email protected] because the backups are so important and.

[00:35:38] Just like password rules have changed. The rules have changed for backups as well. So just drop me an email [email protected] and ask for it and we'll make sure we send it off to you and is not trying to sell you more stuff. Okay. It's really is explaining the whole thing for you. I'm not holding anything back.

[00:35:54] These ransoms, the service operators, then get the payment from you and then pay a percentage anywhere from 80% to 50%, sometimes even lower to the person who ransom due. Isn't that just wonderful. So our law enforcement people, as well as in other countries have been going after the ransomware as a service providers, because if they can shut down.

[00:36:21] These RAs guys just shutting. One of them down can shut down thousands of small ransomware people. Isn't that cool works really well. So they have been shut down. Many of them there's one that just popped its head back up again. After about six months, we'll see how far they get, but it is a very big.

[00:36:46] Blow to the whole industry, ransomware really because of these O as a service operators has become a centralized business. So there's a small number of operators responsible for the majority of these thousands of hundreds of thousands of attacks. Really. It's probably worse than. So couple of dis big groups are left the KTI group and lock bit, and they've got more than 50% of the share of ransomware attacks in the first half of 2022.

[00:37:18] But now they're going after them. The feds. And I think that makes a whole lot of sense, because who do you go for while you go for the people who are causing the most harm and that's certainly them. So I expect they'll be shut down sometimes soon, too. Ransomware had its moment over the last couple of years, still a lot of ransomware out there, still a lot of problems, but now we're seeing B C business, email compromise tactics, and I did a.

[00:37:50] At television appearance, where I was working with the the newsmaker or whatever they call them, talking heads on that TV show and explaining what was happening. And the most standard tactic right now is the gift card swindle. I should put together a little video on this one, but it was all, it's all about tricking employees into buying bogus gift cards.

[00:38:18] So this good old fashioned Grif is still working. And what happened in our case is it was actually one of the newscasters who got an email, supposedly from someone else saying, Hey we wanna celebrate everybody. And in order to do that, I wanna give 'em all gift cards. So can you go out and buy gift cards?

[00:38:42] And so we messed around with them. It was really fun and said, okay what denomination, how many do you think we need? Who do you think we should give them to? And of course we knew what we were doing. Their English grammar was not very good. And it was really obvious that this was not.

[00:38:59] The person they were pretending to be. So that happens and it happens a lot. They got into a business email account, the email account of that newscaster. So they were able to go through their email, figure out who else was in the business, who was a trusted source inside of the business. So they could pretend that that they were that newscaster and send emails to this trusted source.

[00:39:31] And today these business email compromise attacks are aimed at the financial supply chain. And once these threat actors are inside, they look for opportunities to spoof vendor emails, to send payments to controlled accounts. And the worst case I know of this is a company that sent $45 million. To a scammer.

[00:39:57] And what happened here is the, this woman pretended to be the CEO who was out of the country at the time and got the CFO to wire the money to her. An interesting story. We'll have to tell it to you sometime, but it's a real problem. And we just had another one. We've had them in school districts, look, 'em up online, do a duck dot, go search for them and you'll find them right.

[00:40:24] Left and center because social engineering works. And frankly, business email compromise is a clear threat to businesses everywhere. I, as I mentioned, we had one listens to the show, contact us just last week. Again, $40,000 taken out of the operating account. We had another one that had a, I think it was $120,000 taken out of the operating account.

[00:40:53] And another one that had about $80,000 taken outta the operating account. Make sure you're on my newsletter. even the free one. I do weekly free trainings. Craig peterson.com. Make sure you subscribe now.

[00:41:10] Facebook's about 18 years old coming on 20 Facebook has a lot of data. How much stuff have you given Facebook? Did you fall victim for that? Hey, upload your contacts. We'll find your friends. They don't know where your data is.

[00:41:26] It's going to be a great time today because man. This whole thing with Facebook has exploded here lately.

[00:41:35] There is an article that had appeared on a line from our friends over at, I think it was, yeah. Let me see here. Yeah. Yeah. Motherboard. I was right. And motherboards reporting that Facebook doesn't know what it does with your data or. It goes now, there's always a lot of rumors about different companies and particularly when they're big company and the news headlines are grabbing your attention.

[00:42:08] And certainly Facebook can be one of those companies. So where did motherboard get this opinion about Facebook? Just being completely clueless about your personal data? It came from a leaked document. Yeah, exactly. So I, we find out a lot of stuff like that. I used to follow a website about companies that were going to go under and they posted internal memos.

[00:42:38] It basically got sued out of existence, but there's no way that Facebook is gonna be able to Sue this one out of existence because they are describing this as. Internally as a tsunami of privacy regulations all over the world. So of course, if you're older, we used to call those TIAL waves, but think of what the implication there is of a tsunami coming in and just overwhelming everything.

[00:43:08] So Facebook internally, they, their engineers are trying to figure out, okay, so how do we deal? People's personal data. It's not categorized in ways that regulators want to control it. Now there's a huge problem right there. You've got third party data. You've got first party data. You've got sensitive categories, data.

[00:43:31] They might know what religion you are, what your persuasions are in various different ways. There's a lot of things they might know about you. How are they all CATA categorized? Now we've got the European union. With their gen general data protection regulation. The GDPR we talked about when it came into effect back in 2018, and I've helped a few companies to comply with that.

[00:43:56] That's not my specialty. My specialty is the cybersecurity side. But in article five, this European law mandates that personal data must be collected for specified explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes. So what that means is that every piece of data, like where you are using Facebook or your religious orientation, Can only be collected and used for a specific purpose and not reused for another purpose.

[00:44:34] So there's an example here that vice is giving in past Facebook, took the phone number that users provided to protect their accounts with two factor authentication and fed it to its people, feature as well as. Advertisers. Yeah. Interesting. Eh, so Gizmoto with the help of academic researchers caught Facebook doing this, and eventually the company had to stop the practice.

[00:45:01] Cuz this goes back to the earlier days where Facebook would say, Hey, find out if your friends are on Facebook, upload your contacts right now. And most people. What did you know back then about trying to keep your data private, to try and stop the proliferation of information about you online and nothing.

[00:45:21] I think I probably even uploaded it back then thinking that'd be nice to see if I got friends here. We can start chatting, et cetera. According to legal experts that were interviewed by motherboard who wrote this article and has a copy of the internal me memo, this European regulation specifically prohibits that kind of repurposing of your phone number of trying to put together the social graph and the leak document shows that Facebook may not even have the ability to limit.

[00:45:53] how it handles users data. Now I was on a number of radio stations this week, talking about this and the example I gave, I is just look at an average business from the time it start, Facebook started how right. You scrape in pictures of young women off of Harvard universities. Main catalog, contact page, and then asking people what do you think of this rate? This person rate that person and off they go, trying to rate them. Yeah. All that matters to a woman, at least according to mark Zuckerberg or all that matters about a woman is how she looks. Do I think she's pretty or not ridiculous what he was doing?

[00:46:35] I, it just, oh, that's Zuckerberg, right? That's. Who he is not a great guy anyways. So you go from stealing pictures of young ladies asking people to rate them, putting together some class information and stuff there at Harvard, and then moving on to other universities and then opening up even wider and wider.

[00:47:00] And of course, that also created demand cuz you can't get on. If you're not at one of the universities that we have set it up for. And then you continue to grow. You're adding these universities, certain you're starting to collect data and you're making more money than God. So what do you do? You don't have to worry about inefficiencies.

[00:47:20] I'll tell you that. One thing you don't have to do is worry about, oh, GE we've got a lot of redundant work going on here. We've got a lot of teams working on basically the same thing. No, you've got more money than you can possibly shake a stick at. So now you go ahead and send that money to this group or that group.

[00:47:41] And they put together all of the basic information, that, that they want. They are. Pulling it out of this database and that database, and they're doing some correlation writing some really cool sequel queries with some incredible joins and everything else. And now that becomes part of the main code for Facebook.

[00:48:02] And then Facebook goes on to the next little project and they do the same thing. Then the next project, then the next project. And then someone comes along and says Hey, we. This feature, that feature for advertisers and then in that goes, and then along comes candidate Obama. And they, one of the groups inside Facebook says yeah here we go.

[00:48:25] Here's all of the information we have about everybody and it's free. Don't worry about it. And then when Trump actually bought it and hired a company to try and process some of that information he got in trouble. No but the Obama. The whole campaign could get access to anything they wanted to, again, because the data wasn't controlled, they had no idea who was doing what with the data.

[00:48:50] And according to this internal memo, they still don't know. They don't even know if they can possibly comply with these regulations, not just in Europe, but we have regulations in pretty much all of the 50 states in the us Canada of course, has their own Australia, New Zealand think about all the places.

[00:49:12] Facebook makes a lot of money. So here's a quote from that we build systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy. Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand, the bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data. You pour that ink into a lake of water.

[00:49:34] Okay. And it flows every. The document red. So how do you put that ink back in the bottle, in the right bottle? How do you organize it again? So that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake? They're totally right about that. Where did they collect it from it? Apparently they don't even know where they got some of this information.

[00:49:58] This data from reminds me of the no fly list. You don't know you're on it and you can't get yourself off of it. It is crazy. So this document that we're talking about was written last year by. Privacy engineers on the ad and business product team, whose mission is to make meaningful connections between people and businesses and which quote sits at the center of a monetization strategy.

[00:50:22] And is the engine that powers Facebook's growth. Interesting problems. And I see this being a problem well into the future for more and more of these companies, look at Twitter as an example that we've all heard about a lot lately. And I've talked about as well along comes Elon Musk and he says wait a minute now.

[00:50:41] Now I can make Twitter way more profitable. We're gonna get rid of however many people it's well over a thousand, and then we are going to hire more people. We're gonna start charging. We're gonna be more efficient. You can bet all of these redundancies that are in Facebook are also there on Twitter. and Twitter also has to comply with all of these regulations that Facebook is freaking out about.

[00:51:09] It, for really a very good reason. So this document is available to anybody who wants to look at it. I'm looking at it right now, talking about regulatory landscape and the fundamental problems Facebook's data lake. And this is a problem that most companies have not. As bad as Facebook does, but most companies, you grow. I have yet to walk into a business that needs help with cybersecurity and find everything in place as it should be, because it grew organically. You started out with a little consumer firewall, router and wifi, and then you added to it and you put a switch here and you added another switch behind that and move things around.

[00:51:54] This is normal. This is not total incompetence on the part of the management, but my gosh, I don't know. Maybe they need an Elon Musk. Just straighten them out as well. Hey, stick around. I'll be right back and sign up [email protected].

[00:52:13] Apparently looting is one of the benefits of being a Russian soldier. And according to the reports coming out of Ukraine, they've been doing it a lot, but there's a tech angle on here that is really turning the tables on these Russian looters.

[00:52:30] This is really something, we know in wars, there are people that loot and typically the various militaries try and make sure, at least recently that looting is kept to an absolute minimum.

[00:52:45] Certainly the Americans, the British, even the Nazis during world war II the the socialists they're in. Germany they tried to stop some of the looting that was going on. I think that's probably a very good thing, because what you end up with is just all of these locals that are just totally upset with you.

[00:53:10] I found a great article on the guardian and there's a village. Had been occupied for about a month by Russian troops and the people came back, they are just shocked to see what happened. They're giving a few examples of different towns. They found that alcohol was stolen and they left empty bottles behind food rappers, cigarette butts, thrown all over the place in apartments and homes.

[00:53:39] Piles of feces blocking the toilets, family photographs torn, thrown around the house. They took away all of the clothes. This is a code from one of the people, literally everything, male and female coats, boots, shirts, jackets, even my dresses and lingerie. This is really something. It, the Soviets didn't do this, but now Russian.

[00:54:02] Military apparently does. So over the past couple of weeks, there've been reporting from numerous places where Russian troops had occupied Ukrainian territory and the guardian, which is this UK newspaper collected evidences suggests looting by Russian forces was not merely a case of a few way, word soldiers, but a systematic part of Russian military behavior across multiple towns.

[00:54:29] And villages. That's absolutely amazing. Another quote here, people saw the Russian soldiers loading everything onto Euro trucks, everything they could get their hands on a dozen houses on the villages. Main street had been looted as well as the shops. Other villagers reported losing washing machines, food laptops, even as sofa, air conditioners.

[00:54:53] Being shipped back, just you might use ups here, they have their equivalent over there. A lady here who was the head teacher in the school. She came back in, of course, found her home Lood and in the head teacher's office. she found an open pair of scissors that had been jammed into a plasma screen that was left behind because if they can't steal it, they're gonna destroy it.

[00:55:19] They don't only leave anything behind. They found the Russians had taken most of the computers, the projectors and other electronic equipment. It's incredible. So let's talk about the turnaround here. A little. You might have heard stories about some of these bad guys that have smashed and grabbed their way into apple stores.

[00:55:38] So they get into the apple store. They grab laptops on iPads, no longer iPods, cuz they don't make those anymore. And I phones. And they take them and they run with them. Nowadays there's not a whole lot of use for those. Now what they have been doing, some of these bad guys is they take some parts and use them in stolen equipment.

[00:56:03] They sell them on the used market, et cetera. But when you're talking about something specific, like an iPhone that needs specific activation. Completely different problem arises for these guys because that iPhone needs to have a SIM card in order to get onto the cell network. And it also has built in serial numbers.

[00:56:26] So what happens in those cases while apple goes ahead and disables them. So as soon as they connect to the internet, let's say they put 'em on wifi. They don't get a SIM card. They don't. service from T-Mobile or Verizon or whoever it might be. So now they disconnect to the wifi and it calls home, cuz it's gonna get updates.

[00:56:45] So on download stuff from the app store and they find that it's been bricked. Now you can do that with a lot of mobile device managers that are available for. All kinds of equipment nowadays, but certainly apple equipment where if a phone is lost or stolen or a laptop or other pieces of equipment, you can get on the MDM and disable it, have it remotely erased, et cetera.

[00:57:11] Now, police have had some interesting problems with that. Because a bad guy might go ahead and erase a smartphone. That's in the evidence locker at the police station. So they're doing things like putting them into Fairday cages or static bags or other things to try and stop that. So I think we've established here that the higher tech equipment is pretty well protected.

[00:57:36] You steal it. It's not gonna do you much. Good. So one of the things the Russian stole when they were in it's called I think you pronounce it. Mela me pole which is again, a Erian city is they stole all of the equipment from a farm equipment dealership and shipped it to Chenia. Now that's according to a source in a businessman in the area that CNN is reporting on.

[00:58:06] So they shipped this equipment. We're talking about combines harvesters worth 300 grand a piece. They shipped it 700 miles. and the thieves were ultimately unable to use the equipment, cuz it had been locked remotely. So think about agriculture equipment that John Deere, in this case, these pieces of equipment, they, they drive themselves.

[00:58:33] It's autonomous. It goes up and down the fields. Goes any pattern that you want to it'll bring itself within a foot or an inch of your boundaries, of your property being very efficient the whole time, whether it's planting or harvesting, et cetera. And that's just a phenomenal thing because it saves so much time for the farmer makes it easier to do the companies like John Deere.

[00:58:58] Want to sell as many pieces of this equipment as they possibly can. And farming is known to be a, what not terribly profitable business. It certainly isn't like Facebook. So how can they get this expensive equipment into the hands of a lot of farmers? What they do is they lease it. So you can lease the equipment through leasing company or maybe directly from the manufacturer and now you're off and running.

[00:59:26] But what happens if the lease isn't paid now? It's one thing. If you don't pay your lease on a $2,000 laptop, right? They're probably not gonna come hunting for you, but when you're talking about a $300,000 harvester, they're more interested. So the leasing company. Has titled to the equipment and the leasing company can shut it off remotely.

[00:59:51] You see where I'm going with this so that they can get their equipment in the hands of more farmers cuz the farmers can lease it. It costs them less. They don't have to have a big cash payment. You see how this all works. So when the Russian forces stole this equipment, that's valued. Total value here is about $5 million.

[01:00:11] They were able to shut it all. And obviously, if you can't start the engine, because it's all shut off and it's all run by computers nowadays, and there's pros and cons to that. I think there's a lot of cons, but what are you gonna do? How's that gonna work for you? It. Isn't going to work for you.

[01:00:32] And they were able to track it. It had GPS trackers find out exactly where it was. That's how they know it was taken to Chenia and could be controlled remotely. And in this case, how'd they control it. They completely. Shut it off. Even if they sell the harvesters for spare parts, they'll learn some money, but they sure can be able to sell 'em for the 300 grand that they were actually worth.

[01:00:57] Hey, stick around. We'll be right back and visit me [email protected]. If you sign up there, you'll be able to get my insider show note. And every week I have a quick five. Training right there in your emails, Craig Peter san.com. That's S O N in case you're wondering.

[01:01:22] If you've been worried about ransomware, you are right to worry. It's up. It's costly. And we're gonna talk about that right now. What are the stats? What can you do? What happens if you do get hacked? Interesting world.

[01:01:38] Ransomware has been a very long running problem. I remember a client of ours, a car dealership who we had gone in.

[01:01:49] We had improved all of their systems and their security and one of their. People who was actually a senior manager, ended up downloading a piece of ransomware, one of these encrypted ones and opened it up and his machine, all of a sudden TA, guess what it had ransomware on it. One of those big reds.

[01:02:12] Greens that say pay up is send us this much Bitcoin. And here's our address. All of that sort of stuff. And he called us up and said, what's going on here? What happened? First of all, don't bring your own machine into the office. Secondly, don't open up particularly encrypted files using the password that they gave.

[01:02:33] and thirdly, we stopped it automatically. It did not spread. We were able to completely restore his computer. Now let's consider here at the consequences of what happened. So he obviously was scared. And within a matter of a couple of hours, we actually had him back to where he was and it didn't spread.

[01:02:59] So the consequences there they weren't that bad. But how about if it had gotten worse? How about if they ransomware. Also before it started holding his computer ransom, went out and found all of the data about their customers. Would, do you think an auto dealership would love to hear that all of their customer data was stolen and released all of the personal data of all of their customers?

[01:03:25] Obviously not. So there's a potential cost there. And then how long do you think it would take a normal company? That thinks they have backups to get back online. I can tell you it'll take quite a while because the biggest problem is most backups don't work. We have yet to go into a business that was actually doing backups that would work to help restore them.

[01:03:52] And if you're interested, I can send you, I've got something. I wrote up. Be glad to email it back to you. Obviously as usual, no charge. and you'll be able to go into that and figure out what you should do. Cause I, I break it down into the different types of backups and why you might want to use them or why you might not want to use them, but ransomware.

[01:04:15] Is a kind of a pernicious nasty little thing, particularly nowadays, because it's two, two factor, first is they've encrypted your data. You can't get to it. And then the second side of that is okay I can't get to my data and now they're threatening to hold my data ransom or they'll release. So they'll put it out there.

[01:04:38] And of course, if you're in a regulated industry, which actually car dealers are because they deal with financial transactions, leases, loans, that sort of thing you can lose your license for your business. You can U lose your ability to go ahead and frankly make loans and work with financial companies and financial instruments.

[01:05:00] It could be a very big deal. so there are a lot of potential things that can happen all the way from losing your reputation as a business or an individual losing all of the money in your operating account. And we, again, we've got a client that we picked up afterwards. That yes, indeed. They lost all of the money in their operating account.

[01:05:24] And then how do you make payroll? How do you do things? There's a new study that came out from checkpoint. Checkpoint is one of the original firewall companies and they had a look at ransomware. What are the costs of ransomware? Now bottom line, I'm looking at some stats here on a couple of different sites.

[01:05:44] One is by the way, KTI, which is a big ransomware gang that also got hacked after they said we are going to attack anyone that. That doesn't defend Vlad's invasion of Ukraine, and then they got hacked and their information was released, but here's ransomware statistics. This is from cloud words. First of all, the largest ransom demand is $50 million.

[01:06:11] And that was in 2021 to Acer big computer company. Now 37% of businesses were hit by ransomware. In 2021. This is amazing. They're expecting by 2031. So in about a decade, ransomware is gonna be costing about $265 billion a year. Now on average Ransomware costs businesses. 1.8, 5 million to recover from an attack.

[01:06:41] Now that's obviously not a one or two person place, but think of the car dealer again, how much money are they going to make over the year or over the life of the business? If you're a car dealer, you have a to print money, right? You're selling car model or cars from manufacturer X. And now you have the right to do that and they can remove that.

[01:07:03] How many tens, hundreds of millions of dollars might that end up costing you? Yeah. Big deal. Total cost of ransomware last year, 20 billion. Now these are the interesting statistics here right now. So pay closer attention to this 32% of ransomware victims paid a ransom demand. So about her third paid ransom demand.

[01:07:27] Last. It's actually down. Cuz my recollection is it used to be about 50% would pay a ransom. Now on average that one third of victims that paid a ransom only recovered 65% of their data. Now that differs from a number I've been using from the FBI. That's a little bit older that was saying it's little better than 50%, but 65% of pain victims recovered their data.

[01:07:55] Now isn't that absolutely amazing. Now 57% of companies are able to recover the data using a cloud backup. Now think about the different types of backup cloud backup is something that can work pretty well if you're a home user, but how long did it take for your system to get backed? Probably took weeks, right?

[01:08:19] For a regular computer over a regular internet line. Now restoring from backup's gonna be faster because your down link is usually faster than your uplink. That's not true for businesses that have real internet service ours. It's the same bandwidth up as it is down. But it can take again, days or weeks to try and recover your machine.

[01:08:39] So it's very expensive. And I wish I had more time to go into this, but looking at the costs here and the fact that insurance companies are no longer paying out for a lot of these ransomware attacks, it could be incredibly expensive for you incredibly. So here you. The number one business types by industry for ransomware tax retail.

[01:09:13] That makes sense. Doesn't it. Real estate. Electrical contractors, law firms and wholesale building materials. Isn't that interesting? And that's probably because none of these people are really aware, conscious of doing what, of keeping their data secure of having a good it team, a good it department. So there's your bottom line.

[01:09:40] Those are the guys that are getting hit. The most, the numbers are increasing dramatically and your costs are not just in the money. You might pay as a ransom. And as it turns out in pretty much every case prevention. Is less expensive and much better than the cure of trying to pay ransom or trying to restore from backups.

[01:10:06] Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson. You can get my weekly show notes by just going to Craig peterson.com. And I'll also send you my special report on how to do passwords stick around will be right back.

[01:10:24] You and I have talked about passwords before the way to generate them and how important they are. And we'll go over that again a little bit in just a second, but there is a new standard out there that will eliminate the need for passwords.

[01:10:40] I remember, I think the only system I've ever really used that did not require passwords was the IBM 360.

[01:10:49] Yeah, 360, you punch up the cards, all of the JCL you feed the card deck in and off it goes. And does this little thing that was a different day, a different era. When I started in college in university, we. We had remote systems, timeshare systems that we could log into. And there weren't much in the line of password requirements in, but you had a username.

[01:11:18] You had a simple password. And I remember one of our instructors, his name was Robert, Andrew Lang. And his password was always some sort of a combination of RA Lang. So it was always easy to guess what his password was. Today, it has gotten a lot worse today. We have devices with us all of the time.

[01:11:40] You might be wearing a smart watch. That requires a password. You of course probably have a smart phone. That's also maybe requiring a password, certainly after boots nowadays they use fingerprints or facial recognition, which is handy, but has its own drawbacks. But how about the websites? You're going to the systems you're using when you're at work and logging in, they all require passwords.

[01:12:10] And usernames of some sort or another well, apple, Google, and Microsoft have all committed to expanding their support for a standard. That's actually been out there for a few years. It's called the Fido standard. And the idea behind this is that you don't have to have a password in order to log. Now that's really an interesting thing, right?

[01:12:37] Just looking at it because we're so used to having this password only authentic. And of course the thing to do there is make sure you have for your password, multiple words in the password, it should really be a pass phrase. And between the words put in special characters or numbers, maybe mix.

[01:12:59] Upper lowercase a little bit. In those words, those are the best passwords, 20 characters, 30 characters long. And then if you have to have a pin, I typically use a 12 digit pin. And how do I remember all of these? Cuz I use a completely different password for every website and right now, Let me pull it up.

[01:13:21] I'm using one password dot com's password manager. And my main password for that is about 25 characters long. And I have thirty one hundred and thirty five. Entries here in my password manager, 3,100. That is a whole lot of passwords, right? As well as software licenses and a few other things in there.

[01:13:48] That's how we remember them is using a password manager. One password.com is my favorite. Now, obviously I don't make any money by referring you there. I really do like that. Some others that I've liked in the past include last pass, but they really messed. With some of their cybersecurity last year and I lost my faith in it.

[01:14:08] So now what they're trying to do is make these websites that we go to as well as some apps to have a consistent, secure, and passwordless sign in. and they're gonna make it available to consumers across all kinds of devices and platforms. That's why you've got apple, Google, and Microsoft all committing to it.

[01:14:32] And you can bet everybody else is going to follow along because there's hundreds of other companies that have decided they're gonna work with the Fido Alliance and they're gonna create this passwordless future. Which I like this idea. So how does this work? Basically you need to have a smartphone.

[01:14:50] This is, I'm just gonna go with the most standard way that this is going to work here in the future. And you can then have a, a. Pass key. This is like a multifactor authentication or two factor authentication. So for instance, right now, when I sign into a website online, I'm giving a username, I'm giving a password and then it comes up and it asks me for a code.

[01:15:14] So I enter an a six digit code and that code changes every 30 seconds. And again, I use my password manager from one password dot. In order to generate that code. So that's how I log into Microsoft sites and Google sites and all kinds of sites out there. So it's a similar thing here now for the sites for my company, because we do cyber security for businesses, including regulated businesses.

[01:15:41] We have biometrics tied in as. so to log into our systems, I have to have a username. I have to have a password. I then am sent to a single sign on page where I have to have a message sent to my smart device. That then has a special app that uses biometrics either a face ID or a fingerprint to verify who I am.

[01:16:06] Yeah, there's a lot there, but I have to protect my customer's data. Something that very few it's crazy. Actual managed security services providers do, but it's important, right? By the way, if you want my password. Special report, just go to Craig peterson.com. Sign up for my email list.

[01:16:29] I'll send that to you. That's what we're sending out right now for anyone who signs up [email protected]. And if you'd like a copy of it and you're already on the list, just go ahead and email me M E. At Craig peterson.com and ask for the password special report where I go through a lot of this sort of thing.

[01:16:47] So what will happen with this is you go to a website and it might come up with a QR code. So you then scan that QR code with your phone and verify it, authorize it on your phone. You might again have it set up so that your phone requires a facial recognition or perhaps it'll require a fingerprint. And now you are in.

[01:17:09] Which is very cool. They fix some security problems in Fido over the last few years, which is great over the coming year. You're going to see this available on apple devices, Google Microsoft platforms. And it really is simple, stronger authentication. That's what Fido calls it. But it is going to make your life a lot easy.

[01:17:33] It easier. It is a standard and the passwordless future makes a whole lot of sense for all of us. Now I wanna talk about another thing here that has bothered me for a long time. I have a sister-in-law. who is in the medical field and gives prescriptions, doctor thing. And I think she's not quite a doctor.

[01:17:55] I can't remember what she has or she's an LPN or something. Anyhow. So she. We'll get on a zoom call with someone and they'll go through medical history and what's happening right now and she'll make prescriptions. And so I warned her about that saying, it is very bad to be using zoom because zoom is not secure.

[01:18:20] Never has been, probably never will be right. If you want secure, you. To go and pay for it from one of these providers like WebEx, that's what we use. We have a version of WebEx that is set up to be secure. So I talked to her about that and said, Hey, listen, you can't do this. You've really got to go another way here.

[01:18:42] And so she started using one of these mental or. Medical health apps. What I wanna talk about right now specifically are some checks that were just performed some audits on mental health apps. That's why I messed up a second ago, but what they looked at is that things are a serious problem there.

[01:19:08] And then in fact, the threat post is calling it creepy. Frankly, just plain old creepy. So they've got some good intentions. They want to help with mental health. You've probably seen these or at least heard them advertise. So you can get on the horn with mental health, professional doctor or otherwise in order to help you here with your psychological or spiritual wellbeing.

[01:19:32] And people are sharing their personal and sensitive data with third parties and of 32 mental health and prayer mobile apps that were investigated by the open source organization. 28, 28 of the 32 were found to be inherently insecure and were given a privacy, not included label, including others here.

[01:19:57] So this is a report. That was released here by the open source organization, tied into Mozilla. Those are the Firefox people. They have what they call their minimum security standards. So things like requiring strong passwords, managing security, updates, and vulnerabilities, et cetera. 25 of the 32 failed to meet.

[01:20:19] Even those minimum security standards. So these apps are dealing with some of the most sensitive men, mental health and wellness issues people can possibly have, right? Depression, anxieties, suicidal thoughts, domestic violence, eating disorders. And they are being just terrible with your security Mozilla researchers spent 255 hours or about eight hours per product pairing under the hood of the security, watching the data that was going back and forth, between all of these mental health and prayer apps. It was just crazy. So for example, eight of the apps reviewed allowed week passwords. That range. One digit one as the password, 2, 1, 1, 1 while a mental health app called a mood fit only required one letter or digit as a password. Now that is very concerning for an app that collects mood and symptom data.

[01:21:23] So be very careful. Two of the apps better help a popular app that connects users with therapists and better stop suicide, which is of course a suicide prevention app have vague and messy. According to Mozilla privacy policies, they have little or no effect on actual. User data protection. So be very careful.

[01:21:45] And if you are a mental health professional, or a medical professional, don't just go and use these open video calls, et cetera, et cetera, find something good. And there are some standards out there. Again. Visit me online, get my insider show notes every week. Get my little mini training. They come out most weeks, just go to Craig peterson.com.

[01:22:11] Craig peterson.com. And I'll send you my special report on passwords and more.