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

Amazon Is In For a Rough Ride

Did you know that Amazon has a new CEO? I remember back in the nineties; I pledge that I would never use Amazon again because they filed and were awarded a patent on technology everybody was using. Jeff Bezos is out of a job.

[00:00:19] This is a guy that grew a company that all they did initially really was book sales, and they had a warehouse the size of the Amazon, right? Because they wanted to represent everybody. They had every book ever published, and to a large degree. They did. They had a whole lot of bucks, and then I've expanded, of course, beyond that.

[00:00:47]And beyond that, to the point today where they are doing some well, again, shady things I mentioned in the intro that I was concerned about what Amazon was doing with pat. They got a patent on this one-click purchase. Now I have been a fan of patents for a long time. I do not like the patent law as it exists today.

[00:01:14] And in fact, I haven't liked it for quite some time, but this patent law where you don't have to show that there was no prior art and frankly, the prior art does not matter at all. I think that's huge. And I've had a number of patent attorneys on my show, talking about it and talking about what we may want to change.

[00:01:37]Jeff Bezos grew it to today, where it really is the number one provider of online services is. You might, in fact, almost certainly are using Amazon's services, whether you realize it or not to go to most, any website, any of the big ones they're probably using Amazon's web services. They're probably using Amazon storage, and Amazon has dozens and dozens of different services.

[00:02:09] So it's a very big deal. And Jeff Bezos, who's the guy that started all of that, sat down stepped on. I should say. Now it's rare that the founder of a company ends up taking the company public. Public, basically, that just doesn't really happen because all of a sudden, when you're public, your whole job changes, and no longer can you make a decision, a snap decision about something, and then go ahead and do it.

[00:02:37] You've got to be very careful about what you do when you do it, how you do it, you have to announce it and everything, but just an amazing man being able to take it—all of that. And by the way, he have the largest settlement, a divorce settlement in history with his ex-wife. It's amazing, but he is still the world's richest human.

[00:02:59] Now he has this company called blue origin, which is his rocket company. He's got the Bezos earth fund, and he's still chairman of Amazon's board. So he's not going anywhere. However, we've got this new guy, Andy Jassy, who has stepped in as the CEO of Amazon. He was the head of Amazon's online services, which is absolutely huge. It's their most profitable arm by far. So he's taking this whole thing over when Amazon, frankly, is in a lot of trouble. Now they're basics of, Hey, there, the money that they're making, their profits and everything, that's all well and good, but there are ongoing antitrust investigations.

[00:03:52] There's a battle with labor. And we're talking about, of course, big labor here—the unions. There's increased competition in the cloud space. Just look at what happened with the US military in there. I think it was at least a billion dollar. I can't remember the exact number, a cloud contract because Amazon was battling Microsoft Azure and it was awarded.

[00:04:20] And then just a couple of weeks ago it was pulled back again. They're also seeing increased competition in their online services from Google. And I use some of those Google services. In fact, if you go to Craig peterson.com, it's actually right now using some of those Google services. So they are really getting nailed from a whole bunch of different directions.

[00:04:45] And this guy Jassy has worked there since 97. But he may be the perfect person to guide Amazon through. W really now we're talking about the middle-aged, that's the time when you're supposed to buy your convertible, buy your motorcycle, et cetera. The middle aged years. And in this case, there's some problems.

[00:05:10] Here's a quote I want to read from this Yahoo article is actually I think AP yeah. Yahoo finance. This Yahoo article and it's from Harvard business school, because we've got regulators who are circling, and this may be the main reason Jeff stepped down. I don't know, but quote, you may want somebody who has the confidence of the chair.

[00:05:35] And the board you want somebody who understands the strategy and was part of it and knows where the bodies are buried and the mistakes that have been made and how to move forward. This is from Harvard business school, professor of business administration. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and I think she's right.

[00:05:58] Absolutely because this road ahead for him is going to be tough. But the fact that he ran their most profitable division tells you something, it tells you a lot and he might be the exact right guy to be able to do that. Amazon's now got a market capitalization of about $2 trillion, which is huge.

[00:06:20] And it's certainly enough to get some of these regulators. Paint a lot of attention to what's going on. We've got the Washington DC attorney general, who has accused them of violating the district of Columbia's antitrust act. And that has to do with, for bidding third-party resellers, from offering cheaper rates for their products on competing sites.

[00:06:43] Cause remember what Amazon does. About half or more. In fact, I think now of their products are not actually sold by Amazon. They're certainly not Amazon products. They are products from resellers who are just selling on Amazon. They're using Amazon is their platform. And that way Amazon will manage the inventory.

[00:07:06] It'll warehouse a little ship it out. It'll handle the returns. Yeah. What Amazon is doing is charging these sellers for the space in the warehouses, which is perfectly legitimate and taking a percentage of the deals. Are there other websites that might give these sellers or resellers or stuff they're importing from China or wherever.

[00:07:31] Might there be other sites that give them better deals? Will you bet there are sites out there. So that's why she's suing them. Federal regulators look like they might be coming in as well. The federal trade commission's newly appointed chairman. She's a fierce critic of the. Amazon way of doing business and she made herself a name by publishing an article for Yale's law journal titled Amazon's antitrust paradox.

[00:08:01] So before she was even appointed to the federal trade commission, she was already calling for changes in the current antitrust regulatory framework. And that might be widely invited administration has appointed her, but there's six antitrust bills. Targeting big tech right now that are working their way through the house of representatives.

[00:08:24] And we've talked about some of those already, and, I do not like these huge tech companies that are making crazy profits and using those profits to keep other people out. And Amazon's one of the largest employers in the country. And after years of complaints from somewhere house workers, we've got the labor unions now in the mix trying to take action.

[00:08:49] Now, I don't have a single problem with labor unions while at some of their tactics, I have problems with, I don't have a problem with the labor union. In the private space. I have a huge problem with I'm in government space. And we could talk about that at some point, but I don't have a problem with them trying to organize inside Amazon.

[00:09:12] So the international brotherhood of Teamsters. Yeah. I remember the guys that drive the horses. They announced that they're going to begin working to organize Amazon workers. So that might succeed. There was another one in Alabama that had failed. So are you getting the hint here? This is huge. It's huge.

[00:09:32]By the way, Amazon's offering warehouse workers starting pay at $15 per hour plus benefits. So that doesn't seem too bad. If you ask them. But again, with the pandemic, all of the stuff going on there been a lot of calls for Amazon to quote, treat its workers better. So we'll see. We'll see what happens.

[00:09:53] Other problems with Amazon that we've talked about before are things like fake reviews. You and I, we look at the reviews, it's critical in us buying things. Isn't it. We look at the reviews and say, oh, wow. Jeepers. There's 500 reviews here and it's four and a half stars. Okay. So I can have confidence that this product is good.

[00:10:17] It's going to work. And yet some of these sellers, what they're doing is bribing people to give a good review. So they'll say, Hey, you buy my product. And then they send the product in with, along with the product is a little note saying, Hey, if you give me a review and send me a link, I'll send you an extra battery or whatever it might be.

[00:10:39] That has been a real problem for Amazon, even worse than that, because at least those people might give an honest review, right? Worse than that is that some of these reviews are paid for. So some of the sellers it's alleged are going out there. They are hiring. People and paying them to give reviews. Now, those ones are very obvious.

[00:11:04] If you look at the reviews, so don't just look at there's 500 and the average is 4.5. Look at some of the reviews in the wording. So I've seen reviews where it was for a massager, and there was talking about what a great. A set of wheels that has on it. And they work really well. And it's very smooth when you're out, riding it on the trails.

[00:11:27] Wait a minute wait, we're talking about a massager here. We're not talking about a bicycle, so that's one of the ways to tell if the reviews are fake, they're don't even talk about the product at all, or any of its real features. The other one is look at the wording because most of these fake reviews.

[00:11:45] Don't use English, so good. All right. Okay. Thanks for being with me. I want to make sure you stick around and visit me online. In the meantime, go to Craig peterson.com. If you sign up for my free newsletter, you'll be getting that every week with all of the details. I'll try and catch you up and you can listen to my podcast, right from there.

[00:12:09] CraigPeterson.com. That's Peterson with an O.

Kaseya and the Problem with Managed Service Providers

We have really in front of us, a critical warning. We're trying to figure out what should we do or to stop people from attacking us. That's a problem. What should we do? Many of us have gone out to managed services providers, and now they have let us down. Did you hear about the Kaseya hack?

It has had a huge impact on people. It's absolutely crazy. Or you heard about a thousand companies that got together and they have hired a negotiator in order to negotiate the ransom with the bad guys that have ransom there. It is huge. It's huge. But let's talk about why this happened, because I think there are many things that you and I have overlooked here over the years, this ransomware God guy, gang called REvil, R E V I L has targeted cause say, or customers through.

[00:01:04] Say, but it isn't just kissy customers. It's really cause say, is customers for the most part. Now your head might be spinning a little bit, but here's, what's happening. I'm a business owner. You guys know that right now. Let's say that I don't do cybersecurity for businesses. That's what I do.

[00:01:24] But let's say I make widget. I as a widget maker, do not have enough knowledge about computers to, to really do it myself. So let's say I've grown and I've got 20 employees. The odds are very good that my office manager is the one in charge of the computer. The office manager probably orders.

[00:01:49] Computers probably tries to figure out what's going wrong. By the time of it at 50 computers or 50 employees, I've probably got a full-time it person who goes around and tries to take care of things. But before I've got that, full-time it person I'm probably going to outsource it. And by the way, a lot of companies, it's more like a hundred to 200 employees before they get someone who's really dedicated to it.

[00:02:18] So then that awkward teenage stage between where the office managers trying to do it. And finally the office manager can try and hire an it professional. Is where they go and outsource it. You talk to various types of companies. What are in the industry called break, fix shops. That's usually the first stop which is calling them up saying I've got a broken computer.

[00:02:44] Can you fix it? And maybe they can, maybe they can't. And then a lot of break fix shops have tried to level out their income so that they have predictable monthly income so that they can hire the right number of people for the number of customers that they have. Although I've got to say most of them are badly overbooked.

[00:03:04]Now that they've hired those people, they this outsource break fix shop. They come in and say, okay here's what we can do for X amount per month per computer or employee, we will take care of those computers for you. One of the things that they'll promise to do is that they will take care of your cybersecurity for you.

[00:03:25] Now, cybersecurity is frankly, a specialty. It is not something that everybody can do. Even if you're using some of the best stuff in the world, like what we do, we have Cisco hardware, we have Cisco software that we run advanced malware protection. So that's the best of the top of the line.

[00:03:45] Most smaller businesses aren't going to want to pay for it, even though they might be able to afford it. Push those people out right now, because we're talking about, you were talking about a smaller business. So what does that outsourced it provider do for you? They might change their name and call themselves a managed services provider.

[00:04:06] And that's all well and good, but they need help as well. So I'm making widgets. I have this break fix shop that came in and fixed my computers a few times. And now they're handling my cyber security. Isn't that wall well, and goods was wonderful. So now they're handling, supposedly my cybersecurity. But they know they can't do it themselves and it would be too expensive to do it because they went cheap.

[00:04:33]You bought the least expensive option or, close to the least expensive option. So wait, and by the way, cheap in this case means that it's under $150 per. Person slash workstation per month. That's what it costs to get this stuff done. So you might be paying 25 or maybe even $50. They can't do it for that.

[00:04:57] So what do they do? They go to a company like. Now they also have some others. They have what are called arm AMS that keep track of some basic stuff for you, but they go to Garcia and say, okay, Casia we want you to monitor the computers, keep them up to date, et cetera for. Now did I, the widget manufacturer go ahead and hire to take care of stuff.

[00:05:23] Did Kasiah even do it themselves or did they outsource it? Do I even know the Kaseya exists because it's really Kaseya that is managing my computers doing. We have, there has a software that doing the upgrade on my computers. This is a real problem because the widget maker, Nope, I didn't hire KSA. I didn't even know they existed.

[00:05:49] I trusted my local. Your local guy is not taking care of your cybersecurity. Almost completely guaranteed. There's very few companies like mine out there that we actually do it ourselves because we have looked at Kaseya. We've looked at all of these platforms. Every last one of them has had major problems.

[00:06:12] So here comes Casia with over a hundred thousand customers that gets hacked and distributes the hack to all of its customers that are running some of these on-premise devices that are trying to manage the networks for not Cassias clients, but for KSA as clients, client. Okay. Do you see how this is the level of indirection?

[00:06:35] You see how this is going to affect? This is a huge problem. And Casia not only have we warned some of these companies, like Kaseya about major design flaws in their software, but cause say his own engineers apparently about three years ago, warned Cacia about major design flaws in the software that they were using.

[00:07:01] So they knew about this. They were warned months, if not years in advance about it. So what does it say you do? They're concerned about profit and features, so they just keep adding features as alleged by their former employees instead of fixing the security problems. Cause it would be too hard to fix, take too long cost too much, and it isn't going to increase our revenue.

[00:07:26] Are you sitting down? Can you believe this is one of the major operators out there, major operators that is, is behind your manager services provider and your break fix shop that's who's doing it out there. So there are probably far more than that this thousand Kaseya clients that have gathered together to try and negotiate the ranch.

[00:07:57] And I got to say, I, I would be extremely disappointed if Kaseya customers didn't gather together and Sue them in a very big way. Curly sins, people claiming to be former Cacia employees are saying they warned the company about major flaws in their software. And that is what hit all of Cassias customers.

[00:08:24] Customers. This is incredible here. This is a much different style of relationship that companies have typically, right? Yeah. Okay. Law firms they'll outsource stuff, right? So let's say there's some maritime law. They'll go to a maritime law firm. They'll outsource it. So yeah, there are some models where this is done, but this is done routinely.

[00:08:49] In the cybersecurity space. It's not something we do. We stuck our toe toes into that pond and we didn't like it. We didn't want our customers to be hurt by this sort of thing. But anyway, there you have it. Okay. There, you have it all about profit and not about you. And by the way, it's also about how much you're willing to pay.

Predictions About Olympic Cyberattacks

We're all excited about the upcoming Olympic games. And so are the hackers. Oh my goodness. I just finished reading a report by the cyber threat Alliance about what they're expecting to happen at these Olympic Games in Tokyo.

The Olympics have always been a huge target when it comes to the bad guys.

[00:00:23] You might remember there have been abductions at the Olympics before where some of the Olympic competitors were held at gunpoint. Of course, we're not going to forget that one anytime soon. And looking back through the last few Olympics, there have been many different types of attacks, some more successful than others, frankly, but looking at this report, they were talking about the 2008 Beijing Olympic.

[00:00:51] The attacks then were relatively limited. There were about a 12 million cyber alerts per day. Now this is part of the problem with cyber security. You get so many alerts. What do you do? How do you. Bond and none of those 12 million cyber alerts per day resulted in a successful attack. Now that was back in 2008, there were some scams like ticket scams are always are, but nothing big.

[00:01:23] The next one was the London Olympic. In 2012 and the London Olympic, they had pretty much low level attacks and they didn't result in any real high impact cyber security event. And the most significant event back in 2012 was evidence. Credible cyber threat against electrical infrastructure. That was of course in place for those Olympic games.

[00:01:50] There was a distributed denial of service attack on the power systems. Nothing much really happened, no real impact. Then 2016 Rio de Janeiro. They were starting to pay more attention to cyber security for very good reasons. Frankly, there was a large scale denial of service attack that was carried out by this bot net.

[00:02:16] Let me explain what that is. A denial of service attack is where you might have a website for instance. Providing service to your customers that might be going there to look at your catalog, maybe buy some things. It might be a government agency. It might be an important part of the Olympics in this case and their critical infrastructure.

[00:02:37] So denied service means you either knock it off the air or so people can't get it. Or there's also the distributed denial of service attack. Now D dos are the distributed ones are where you have hundreds or thousands of computers out on the internet, all over the place that are trying to get to maybe the home page, maybe the purchase page.

[00:03:04] And because the coming from all over the internet, they're very hard to shut. And that's where we have the botnets coming in, too. Botnets are groups of computers that have been compromised by the hackers. So what they do now is they command, for instance, you're a home computer that you don't even know is under the control of one of these bad guys, your home computer now, issues or requests.

[00:03:33] Hey, yeah, give me the home page of Olympics 2020. And off it'll go dutifly and try and get the homepage. That's all well, and good. If the load on the server is what they're expecting. You've been to sites, right? You hear something mentioned on the radio and like Craig peterson.com. Now, because I mentioned my website, Craig Peterson, S O n.com.

[00:03:58] And there are people listening. Some of you guys are going to go to my website. Now the normal traffic of having dozens of new people go to my website is not going to bring the site down. However, here's the other side of this? What happens if maybe two or three times as much traffic as I expect is going to come to the site?

[00:04:22]I've compensated for that. We should be able to handle that just fine. But what happens if all of a sudden it's a thousand times what we're expecting because there's 20, 30, 40,000 cases. Peter is out there that are trying to get my homepage or in this case, the Olympic. Homepage. Obviously the server's not going to be able to respond and it's either going to crash or and I'm sure they set this up the right way.

[00:04:49] It's going to deliver a message saying the servers over loaded right now. Try again a little bit. And by the way, if you get that message on a website saying, Hey, try it in a few minutes, please try it in a few minutes. Don't just hit reload because that's going to put even more load on that poor little overloaded server.

[00:05:10] Now what they had here coming in 2016 at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics was a staggering 540 gigabytes. Per second worth of people requesting homepages. That is insane. That is a lot of bandwidth. And the fact that they apparently had that much bandwidth available coming in is also amazing, but also remember people are looking at videos.

[00:05:41] Am I. To get the insider scoop, add some stuff happening behind the scenes. Now, many of the attacks in 2016 started before the Olympic games, even. And what they were doing is attacking different parts of the Olympics infrastructure operationally. So it's a problem. It's a very big problem. They survived that whole thing.

[00:06:09] And by the way, the Brazilian government ended up trying to protect the world cup back in 2014 as well by spending a whole lot of money and time on this. But remember, Even back in 2008, we were talking about 12 million cyber alerts per day. How can you staff up for that back then? It was back then.

[00:06:32] We're seeing some of our clients being hit with hundreds of cyber attacks a minute and multiple per second, sometimes 10 20, 30. Per second. It's just incredible. What happens? In fact, divide those numbers out 12 million divided by how many seconds in a day. It just shows you how amazingly huge it is.

[00:06:56] Now we have seen time. Past where a country like North Korea, for instance, doesn't like what Sony pictures is doing. So North Korea then attacks Sony pictures. And in the case of Sony, they downloaded a bunch of confidential information. They released it. They embarrassed some people now, hardly anybody got fired.

[00:07:16] It's absolutely amazing. But anyway, What's happening right now is Russia. Think about all of the Russian attacks against our businesses and our critical infrastructure as a country, they have been huge, massive attacks. We have now Russia at a point where they are getting massive amounts of. built up.

[00:07:45] Why? Because they submitted doped samples in 2019 to the Olympic committee. Yeah. So this was a, the McLaren report released by the world anti-doping agency. Describe what we're really systematic effort by the Russian government to really undermine the drug testing process. We've also seen the Russians in the past because they've been caught doing this.

[00:08:14] And the Chinese as well, putting in some of the competitors, particularly into things like gymnastics that were too young to compete based on the Olympic rules that were in place. So we had all of this happen during, and after the 2014 Sochi winter Olympics. Guess what those restrictions on their athletes are still in place and in place in a very big way, they will not play the Russian national Anthem at the ceremonies at the Olympics.

[00:08:48] And they will not allow the Russian flag to be carried. In fact, their athletes have to carry a neutral. Flag. So expect some serious attacks from Russia against the Olympics. And remember the Olympics. There are no spectators. Everybody's going to be watching this thing on a line. So it's going to be interesting.

[00:09:14] We'll keep an eye and let you know how things go. Stick around. Visit me online. CraigPeterson.com.

Facebook Confirms Its Asking People to Report "Extremists"

Reporting on your neighbors is something you would expect from a socialist government, right? A communist government, a fascist government, any form of socialist government. Now Facebook is doing exactly that and it's going to interfere with our lives.

Facebook has now confirmed what it's calling a test of its "do-you-know" an extremist prompt and that's got me really rather worried.

And it has a lot of other people worried as well. I was talking to a friend of mine who was also in the media biz, who was saying just over the last couple of weeks. He's received this a bunch of times. And I mentioned this to another friend of mine who is not in the media business. And he said that he got it as well.

[00:00:48] And he said his was: are YOU an extremist? Which I think is interesting. First of all, extremist is not defined. And of course, with these people who are monitoring accounts on Facebook, announce where their definition of extremist is going to be. The definition of an extremist by the government going to very political parties is going to Berry very, and we're talking about this anti-extremist promt, not just asking you if you are an extremist, like my friend said he got, but it's asking if you know someone else who is an extremist or who may become an extremist.

[00:01:28] That is absolutely amazing to me. Amazing. It's bad enough that the government has picked winners. It has this whole section to 10, you've heard about before in the FCC rules that says we know if you're Facebook or Google, no one can Sue you for anything that you do. That is absolutely insane as far as I'm concerned, but there will be lawsuits on this they're already been filed.

[00:01:58] Why would Facebook block thought that it didn't think was appropriate? The whole idea behind the first amendment? Isn't just that it applies to the federal government. It is a code of conduct for all of us. It's a code of conduct for these massive multimedia platforms. We should be allowing all kinds of speech and we should not allow people to hide because what they've done now is they've moved to other platforms.

[00:02:29] The don't do this kind of monitoring and they are current carrying on their speed. If someone comes out and says something that is racist, that is violent, that is, is threatening to commit a crime. We know about it. If it's out there in the open, we all have the crazy neighbor that everybody in the neighborhood knows about because they are, and they're saying it, Facebook starting to block it.

[00:02:55]We're just not going to know. And then what do they do? If you report someone who is saying some things that you think might be extreme, things like you should check voter ID at the voting booth. There are people that think that's extreme and they report you what's likely to happen. We know already that one of the things that many people who have been doing online is reporting people.

[00:03:22] They don't like as someone who is posting things that are violent or extreme and getting their stuff blocked and demonetized in some cases, but just plain old blocked. It's a great little tool for people to shut up. Other people, just shut them down, shut them up. They can't say it anymore just because they disagree with the content that's already in place.

[00:03:48] Now what's going to happen. If someone is reported as being, not an extremist or on the road to extremism, what liability is there on Facebook's side? What liability is there with, for instance, the FBI or local one force. There are obvious things that should be reported to law enforcement. If someone's saying they're going to harm themselves or harm someone else then we need to have a closer look at that.

[00:04:14] If you actually have the belief that they will and can do that. I was as a mandated reporter for 10 years because I was in emergency medical services. If I thought someone was trying to commit harm to themselves or someone else, I was mandated to report, but I have to think that I can't just use the reporting tools as a way to shut up my political opponents.

[00:04:43] So someone reports another person as being an extremist of Facebook, Facebook then sends it to who are they going to send it to the FBI? What's the FBI going to do well. The FBI is mandated to report again in their reports and investigate. So what are they going to do for the investigation? It needs to rise to a level of the FBI thinks that this might be an illegal activity so that they can investigate it.

[00:05:11] They can hopefully stop something before it happens. Something violent, something nasty. But what does the investigation take ground? I'm taking you all the way down the road here. The investigation is going to include them having a look at what you said, looking at the people who are within your social network.

[00:05:32] So who do you. Two. Who do you follow? Who follows you? They may start looking at your phone. Who are you calling? What SMS messages are you receiving? Where are you hanging out? Where's your phone going every day? Who goes to that bar that you like to hang out at? Oh my goodness. You went to a gun range.

[00:05:50] Who's at that gun range and so very quick. The investigation is all of a sudden roping everybody and all of your family members, all of your closest friends, anybody that might've liked something that you had said recently, even though it might not have been extremist. And so now by having Facebook looking for extremists and people who might be on the road to extremism and counting on you to report them, they have opened up a can of worms.

[00:06:22] Huge can of worms and remember too, with the FBI and with others, including the NSA and the CIA, they have this multi hop rule. I think it's three hops now. So if they suspect you of something and what is suspect you, is it the fact that someone reported you as being an extremist, just because they disagree with you politically, they disagree with your religion.

[00:06:48] Is that enough for them to suspect it. So now they can monitor not just your stuff, but anyone that has talked to you or liked you and anyone that has talked to them or It doesn't take long. I think that whole Kevin bacon thing, right? Everybody in Hollywood's within five degrees of Kevin bacon. In fact, I think everybody in the United States is within five degrees of Kevin bacon.

[00:07:12] In other words, they can hop through opt to five people and connect to anyone in the country. That is absolutely huge. Absolutely huge. According to the verge. Facebook is doing this in response to the Christ church call for action campaign Christchurch. Remember in New Zealand and there was an atrocity that was committed there.

[00:07:41] These hate and dangerous organizations. That's what they're up to. They're trying to stop all of this. And it goes back to March in 2019. I think it was this attacking Christchurch. Obviously a terrible thing. People knew about this person and their radical approaches. The police have been informed, but nothing happened.

[00:08:05] So now we want even more monitoring to go on. At least Facebook does. This is really a problem. There's all kinds of bad behavior online. We hide behind our supposedly anonymity. Look at the terrible thing. Some people say online about you name it, right? Different people, kids in high school, either people in other walks of life.

[00:08:33] It is terrible. So Facebook has this support page titled what can I do to prevent rattling? Radek radicalization. There we go. I knew I could say it. It's a really good question. Yeah. They've got links on that page to life after hate exit USA program, which Facebook says help people find a way out of hate and violence.

[00:08:57] I'm all great with that. I think that's a good thing. It's not a bad thing, but now having them report people that someone. In their non-inferior wisdom decides might be hate speech or might be on a road to extremism because remember anybody that voted for Donald Trump is considered to be someone who's on the road to extremism, or is an extremist.

[00:09:22] For voting for him, the worst president ever. How many times have you heard that sort of thing? It has happened all of the time. And so we've got to be very careful about these open reporting things that are online. We have to be careful about reporting. Other people, it brings to mind two things.

[00:09:41] One is two TV shows. One is one. That apple produced and you can watch, and it's all about this guy. You were a reporter, a news anchor, and he was supposedly sexually harassing someone and yeah, he was to a degree, but the crime and the punishment was just totally out of whack. And one of my wife's favorite shows the It was the good wife and now it's a good fight.

[00:10:12] That's what it is in season five, episode three. It is delving into this in a very big way. What happens when you report someone? Should they be reported? You've got to think twice about that. Even when, again, I was in EMS, what happens if I report someone potential neglect potential child abuse here, they can go through hell.

[00:10:37] So be very careful. I don't like this move by. But you probably figured that out already, right? Hey, you stick around. We've got a lot more to talk about today and I also want to encourage you. If you haven't already go to my website, sign up for the newsletter. Craig peterson.com/subscribe and get all of the latest and most important technology news in your mailbox.

2021-07-17 1122

Craig Peterson (2): Reporting on your neighbors is something you would expect from a socialist government, right? A communist government, a fascist government, any form of a socialist government. Now Facebook is doing exactly that, and it's going to interfere with our lives.

[00:00:16] Facebook has now confirmed what it's calling a test of its "do-you-know" an extremist prompt, and that's got me really rather worried.

[00:00:28] And it has a lot of other people worried as well. I was talking to a friend of mine who was also in the media biz, who was saying just over the last couple of weeks. He's received this a bunch of times. And I mentioned this to another friend of mine who is not in the media business. And he said that he got it as well.

[00:00:48] And he said it was: are YOU an extremist? Which I think is interesting. First of all, an extremist is not defined. And of course, with these people who are monitoring accounts on Facebook, announce where their definition of extremist is going to be. The definition of an extremist by the government going to very political parties is going to Berry very, and we're talking about this anti-extremist prom, not just asking you if you are an extremist, like my friend said he got, but it's asking if you know someone else who is an extremist or who may become an extremist.

[00:01:28] That is absolutely amazing to me. Amazing. It's bad enough that the government has picked winners. It has this whole section to 10, you've heard about before in the FCC rules that say we know if you're Facebook or Google, no one can Sue you for anything that you do. That is absolutely insane as far as I'm concerned, but there will be lawsuits on this they've already been filed.

[00:01:58] Why would Facebook block thought that it didn't think was appropriate? The whole idea behind the first amendment? It isn't just that it applies to the federal government. It is a code of conduct for all of us. It's a code of conduct for these massive multimedia platforms. We should be allowing all kinds of speech, and we should not allow people to hide because what they've done now is they've moved to other platforms.

[00:02:29] They don't do this kind of monitoring, and they are currently carrying on their speed. If someone comes out and says something that is racist, that is violent, that is, is threatening to commit a crime. We know about it. If it's out there in the open, we all have the crazy neighbor that everybody in the neighborhood knows about because they are, and they're saying it, Facebook is starting to block it.

[00:02:55]We're just not going to know. And then what do they do? If you report someone who is saying some things that you think might be extreme, things like you should check voter ID at the voting booth. There are people that think that's extreme, and they report to you what's likely to happen. We know already that one of the things that many people who have been doing online is reporting people.

[00:03:22] They don't like someone who is posting things that are violent or extreme and getting their stuff blocked and demonetized in some cases, but just plain old blocked. It's a great little tool for people to shut up. Other people, just shut them down, shut them up. They can't say it anymore just because they disagree with the content that's already in place.

[00:03:48] Now, what's going to happen. If someone is reported as being not an extremist or on the road to extremism, what liability is there on Facebook's side? What liability is there with, for instance, the FBI or local one force. There are obvious things that should be reported to law enforcement. If someone's saying they're going to harm themselves or harm someone else, then we need to have a closer look at that.

[00:04:14] If you actually have the belief that they will and can do that. I was a mandated reporter for 10 years because I was in emergency medical services. If I thought someone was trying to commit harm to themselves or someone else, I was mandated to report, but I have to think that I can't just use the reporting tools as a way to shut up my political opponents.

[00:04:43] So someone reports another person as being an extremist of Facebook; Facebook then sends it to who are they going to send it to the FBI? What's the FBI going to do well. The FBI is mandated to report again in their reports and investigate. So what are they going to do for the investigation? It needs to rise to a level of the FBI thinks that this might be an illegal activity so that they can investigate it.

[00:05:11] They can hopefully stop something before it happens. Something violent, something nasty. But what does the investigation take ground? I'm taking you all the way down the road here. The investigation is going to include them having a look at what you said, looking at the people who are within your social network.

[00:05:32] So who do you. Two. Who do you follow? Who follows you? They may start looking at your phone. Who are you calling? What SMS messages are you receiving? Where are you hanging out? Where's your phone going every day? Who goes to that bar that you like to hang out at? Oh my goodness. You went to a gun range.

[00:05:50] Who's at that gun range and so very quick. The investigation is all of a sudden roping everybody and all of your family members, all of your closest friends, anybody that might've liked something that you had said recently, even though it might not have been extremist. And so now, by having Facebook looking for extremists and people who might be on the road to extremism and counting on you to report them, they have opened up a can of worms.

[00:06:22] Huge can of worms and remember too, with the FBI and with others, including the NSA and the CIA, they have this multi-hop rule. I think it's three hops now. So if they suspect you of something and what is suspect you, is it the fact that someone reported you as being an extremist, just because they disagree with you politically, they disagree with your religion.

[00:06:48] Is that enough for them to suspect it. So now they can monitor not just your stuff, but anyone that has talked to you or liked you and anyone that has talked to them or It doesn't take long. I think that whole Kevin bacon thing, right? Everybody in Hollywood's within five degrees of Kevin bacon. In fact, I think everybody in the United States is within five degrees of Kevin bacon.

[00:07:12] In other words, they can hop through opt to five people and connect to anyone in the country. That is absolutely huge. Absolutely huge. According to the verge. Facebook is doing this in response to the Christ church call for action campaign Christchurch. Remember in New Zealand, and there was an atrocity that was committed there.

[00:07:41] These hate and dangerous organizations. That's what they're up to. They're trying to stop all of this. And it went back to March 2019. I think it was this attacking Christchurch. Obviously a terrible thing. People knew about this person and their radical approaches. The police have been informed, but nothing happened.

[00:08:05] So now we want even more monitoring to go on. At least Facebook does. This is really a problem. There are all kinds of bad behavior online. We hide behind our supposed anonymity. Look at the terrible thing. Some people say online about you name it, right? Different people, kids in high school, either people in other walks of life.

[00:08:33] It is terrible. So Facebook has this support page titled what I can do to prevent rattling? Radek radicalization. There we go. I knew I could say it. It's a really good question. Yeah. They've got links on that page to the life after hate exit USA program, which Facebook says help people find a way out of hate and violence.

[00:08:57] I'm all great with that. I think that's a good thing. It's not a bad thing, but now having them report people that someone. In their non-inferior wisdom, decides might be hate speech or might be on the road to extremism because remember anybody that voted for Donald Trump is considered to be someone who's on the road to extremism or is an extremist.

[00:09:22] For voting for him, the worst president ever. How many times have you heard that sort of thing? It has happened all of the time. And so we've got to be very careful about these open reporting things that are online. We have to be careful about reporting. Other people, it brings to mind two things.

[00:09:41] One is two TV shows. One is one. That apple produced and you can watch, and it's all about this guy. You were a reporter, a news anchor, and he was supposedly sexually harassing someone, and yeah, he was to a degree, but the crime and the punishment were just totally out of whack. And one of my wife's favorite shows It was the good wife, and now it's a good fight.

[00:10:12] That's what it is in season five, episode three. It is delving into this in a very big way. What happens when you report someone? Should they be reported? You've got to think twice about that. Even when, again, I was in EMS, what happens if I report someone potential neglect potential child abuse here, they can go through hell.

[00:10:37] So be very careful. I don't like this move by. But you probably figured that out already, right? Hey, you stick around. We've got a lot more to talk about today, and I also want to encourage you. If you haven't already, go to my website, sign up for the newsletter. Craig peterson.com/subscribe and get all of the latest and most important technology news in your mailbox.

[00:11:04]Craig Peterson: We're all excited about the upcoming Olympic games. And so are the hackers. Oh my goodness. I just finished reading a report by the cyber threat Alliance about what they're expecting to happen at these Olympic Games in Tokyo.

[00:11:22] The Olympics have always been a huge target when it comes to the bad guys.

[00:11:28] You might remember there have been abductions at the Olympics before where some of the Olympic competitors were held at gunpoint. Of course, we're not going to forget that one anytime soon. And looking back through the last few Olympics, there have been many different types of attacks, some more successful than others, frankly, but looking at this report, they were talking about the 2008 Beijing Olympic.

[00:11:56] The attacks then were relatively limited. There were about 12 million cyber alerts per day. Now, this is part of the problem with cybersecurity. You get so many alerts. What do you do? How do you? Bond and none of those 12 million cyber alerts per day resulted in a successful attack. Now that was back in 2008; there were some scams like ticket scams are always are, but nothing big.

[00:12:27] The next one was the London Olympics. In 2012 and the London Olympics, they had pretty much low-level attacks, and they didn't result in any real high-impact cybersecurity event. And the most significant event back in 2012 was evidence. The credible cyber threat against electrical infrastructure. That was, of course, in place for those Olympic games.

[00:12:55] There was a distributed denial-of service attack on the power systems. Nothing much really happened, no real impact. Then 2016 Rio de Janeiro. They were starting to pay more attention to cybersecurity for very good reasons. Frankly, there was a large-scale denial of service attack that was carried out by this botnet.

[00:13:21] Let me explain what that is. A denial of service attack is where you might have a website, for instance. Providing service to your customers that might be going there to look at your catalog, maybe buy some things. It might be a government agency. It might be an important part of the Olympics in this case and their critical infrastructure.

[00:13:42] So denied service means you either knock it off the air, or so people can't get it. Or there's also the distributed denial of service attack. Now DDOS are the distributed ones where you have hundreds or thousands of computers out on the internet, all over the place that are trying to get to maybe the home page, maybe the purchase page.

[00:14:09] And because they coming from all over the internet, they're very hard to shut. And that's where we have the botnets coming in, too. Botnets are groups of computers that have been compromised by hackers. So what they do now is they command, for instance, you're a home computer that you don't even know is under the control of one of these bad guys, your home computer now, issues or requests.

[00:14:37] Hey, yeah, give me the home page of Olympics 2020. And off it'll go dutifully and try and get the homepage. That's all well and good. Suppose the load on the server is what they're expecting. You've been to sites, right? You hear something mentioned on the radio and like Craig peterson.com now, because I mentioned my website, Craig Peterson, S O n.com.

[00:15:03] And there are people listening. Some of you guys are going to go to my website. Now the normal traffic of having dozens of new people go to my website is not going to bring the site down. However, here's the other side of this? What happens if maybe two or three times as much traffic as I expect is going to come to the site?

[00:15:27]I've compensated for that. We should be able to handle that just fine. But what happens if all of a sudden it's a thousand times what we're expecting because there are 20, 30, 40,000 cases. Peter is out there that are trying to get my homepage or, in this case, the Olympic. Homepage. Obviously, the server's not going to be able to respond, and it's either going to crash or and I'm sure they set this up the right way.

[00:15:53] It's going to deliver a message saying the servers overloaded right now. Try a little bit again. And by the way, if you get that message on a website saying, Hey, try it in a few minutes, please try it in a few minutes. Don't just hit reload because that's going to put even more load on that poor little overloaded server.

[00:16:15] Now what they had here coming in 2016 at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics was a staggering 540 gigabytes. Per second worth of people requesting homepages. That is insane. That is a lot of bandwidth. And the fact that they apparently had that much bandwidth available coming in is also amazing, but also remember people are looking at videos.

[00:16:46] Am I. To get the insider scoop, add some stuff happening behind the scenes. Now, many of the attacks in 2016 started before the Olympic games even. And what they were doing is attacking different parts of the Olympics infrastructure operationally. So it's a problem. It's a very big problem. They survived that whole thing.

[00:17:14] And by the way, the Brazilian government ended up trying to protect the world cup back in 2014 as well by spending a whole lot of money and time on this. But remember, Even back in 2008, we were talking about 12 million cyber alerts per day. How can you staff up for that back then? It was back then.

[00:17:37] We're seeing some of our clients being hit with hundreds of cyber attacks a minute and multiple per second, sometimes 10, 20, 30 per second. It's just incredible. What happens? In fact, divide those numbers out 12 million divided by how many seconds in a day. It just shows you how amazingly huge it is.

[00:18:01] Now we have seen time. Past where a country like North Korea, for instance, doesn't like what Sony pictures are doing. So North Korea then attacks Sony pictures. And in the case of Sony, they downloaded a bunch of confidential information. They released it. They embarrassed some people now; hardly anybody got fired.

[00:18:21] It's absolutely amazing. But anyway, What's happening right now is Russia. Think about all of the Russian attacks against our businesses and our critical infrastructure as a country; they have been huge, massive attacks. We have now Russia at a point where they are getting massive amounts of. built up.

[00:18:50] Why? Because they submitted doped samples in 2019 to the Olympic committee. Yeah. So this was a the McLaren report released by the world anti-doping agency. Describe what we're really systematic effort by the Russian government to really undermine the drug testing process. We've also seen the Russians in the past because they've been caught doing this.

[00:19:19] And the Chinese as well, putting in some of the competitors, particularly into things like gymnastics that were too young to compete based on the Olympic rules that were in place. So we had all of this happen during and after the 2014 Sochi winter Olympics. Guess what? Those restrictions on their athletes are still in place, and in place in a very big way; they will not play the Russian national Anthem at the ceremonies at the Olympics.

[00:19:53] And they will not allow the Russian flag to be carried. In fact, their athletes have to carry a neutral. Flag. So expect some serious attacks from Russia against the Olympics. And remember the Olympics. There are no spectators. Everybody's going to be watching this thing on a line. So it's going to be interesting.

[00:20:19] We'll keep an eye and let you know how things go. Stick around. Visit me online. Craig peterson.com.

[00:20:27]We have really in front of us a critical warning. We're trying to figure out what we should do or to stop people from attacking us. That's a problem. What should we do? Many of us have gone out to managed services providers, and now they have let us down. Did you hear about the Kaseya hack?

[00:20:47] It has been a huge impact on people. It's absolutely crazy. Or you heard about a thousand companies that got together, and they have hired a negotiator in order to negotiate the ransom with the bad guys that have ransom there. It is huge. It's huge. But let's talk about why this happened, because I think there are many things that you and I have overlooked here over the years; this ransomware God guy, gang called REvil, R E V I L has targeted cause say, or customers through.

[00:21:32] Say, but it isn't just kissy customers. It's really cause, say, it is customers for the most part. Now your head might be spinning a little bit, but here's what's happening. I'm a business owner. You guys know that right now. Let's say that I don't do cybersecurity for businesses. That's what I do.

[00:21:52] But let's say I make a widget. I was a widget maker, do not have enough knowledge about computers, to really do it myself. So let's say I've grown and I've got 20 employees. The odds are very good that my office manager is the one in charge of the computer. The office manager probably orders.

[00:22:17] Computers probably tries to figure out what's going wrong. By the time of it at 50 computers or 50 employees, I've probably got a full-time it person who goes around and tries to take care of things. But before I've got that full-time IT person I'm probably going to outsource it. And by the way, a lot of companies, it's more like a hundred to 200 employees before they get someone who's really dedicated to it.

[00:22:46] So then that awkward teenage stage between where the office managers trying to do it. And finally the office manager can try and hire an it professional. Is where they go and outsource it. You talk to various types of companies. What are in the industry called break, fix shops. That's usually the first stop which is calling them up saying I've got a broken computer.

[00:23:12] Can you fix it? And maybe they can, maybe they can't. And then a lot of break fix shops have tried to level out their income so that they have predictable monthly income so that they can hire the right number of people for the number of customers that they have. Although I've got to say most of them are badly overbooked.

[00:23:32]Now that they've hired those people, they this outsource break fix shop. They come in and say, okay here's what we can do for X amount per month per computer or employee, we will take care of those computers for you. One of the things that they'll promise to do is that they will take care of your cybersecurity for you.

[00:23:53] Now, cybersecurity is frankly, a specialty. It is not something that everybody can do. Even if you're using some of the best stuff in the world, like what we do, we have Cisco hardware, we have Cisco software that we run advanced malware protection. So that's the best of the top of the line.

[00:24:13] Most smaller businesses aren't going to want to pay for it, even though they might be able to afford it. Push those people out right now, because we're talking about, you were talking about a smaller business. So what does that outsourced it provider do for you? They might change their name and call themselves a managed services provider.

[00:24:34] And that's all well and good, but they need help as well. So I'm making widgets. I have this break fix shop that came in and fixed my computers a few times. And now they're handling my cyber security. Isn't that wall well, and goods was wonderful. So now they're handling, supposedly my cybersecurity. But they know they can't do it themselves and it would be too expensive to do it because they went cheap.

[00:25:01]You bought the least expensive option or, close to the least expensive option. So wait, and by the way, cheap in this case means that it's under $150 per. Person slash workstation per month. That's what it costs to get this stuff done. So you might be paying 25 or maybe even $50. They can't do it for that.

[00:25:25] So what do they do? They go to a company like. Now they also have some others. They have what are called arm AMS that keep track of some basic stuff for you, but they go to Garcia and say, okay, Casia we want you to monitor the computers, keep them up to date, et cetera for. Now did I, the widget manufacturer go ahead and hire to take care of stuff.

[00:25:51] Did Kasiah even do it themselves or did they outsource it? Do I even know the Kaseya exists because it's really Kaseya that is managing my computers doing. We have, there has a software that doing the upgrade on my computers. This is a real problem because the widget maker, Nope, I didn't hire KSA. I didn't even know they existed.

[00:26:17] I trusted my local. Your local guy is not taking care of your cybersecurity. Almost completely guaranteed. There's very few companies like mine out there that we actually do it ourselves because we have looked at Kaseya. We've looked at all of these platforms. Every last one of them has had major problems.

[00:26:40] So here comes Casia with over a hundred thousand customers that gets hacked and distributes the hack to all of its customers that are running some of these on-premise devices that are trying to manage the networks for not Cassias clients, but for KSA as clients, client. Okay. Do you see how this is the level of indirection?

[00:27:03] You see how this is going to affect? This is a huge problem. And Casia not only have we warned some of these companies, like Kaseya about major design flaws in their software, but cause say his own engineers apparently about three years ago, warned Cacia about major design flaws in the software that they were using.

[00:27:29] So they knew about this. They were warned months, if not years in advance about it. So what does it say you do? They're concerned about profit and features, so they just keep adding features as alleged by their former employees instead of fixing the security problems. Cause it would be too hard to fix, take too long cost too much, and it isn't going to increase our revenue.

[00:27:54] Are you sitting down? Can you believe this is one of the major operators out there, major operators that is, is behind your manager services provider and your break fix shop that's who's doing it out there. So there are probably far more than that this thousand Kaseya clients that have gathered together to try and negotiate the ranch.

[00:28:25] And I got to say, I, I would be extremely disappointed if Kaseya customers didn't gather together and Sue them in a very big way. Curly sins, people claiming to be former Cacia employees are saying they warned the company about major flaws in their software. And that is what hit all of Cassias customers.

[00:28:52] Customers. This is incredible here. This is a much different style of relationship that companies have typically, right? Yeah. Okay. Law firms they'll outsource stuff, right? So let's say there's some maritime law. They'll go to a maritime law firm. They'll outsource it. So yeah, there are some models where this is done, but this is done routinely.

[00:29:17] In the cybersecurity space. It's not something we do. We stuck our toe toes into that pond and we didn't like it. We didn't want our customers to be hurt by this sort of thing. But anyways, there you have it. Okay. There, you have it all about profit and not about you. And by the way, it's also about how much you're willing to pay.

[00:29:41]Did you know that Amazon has a new CEO? I remember back in the nineties, I pledge that I would never use Amazon again because they filed and were awarded a patent on technology everybody was using. Jeff Bezos is out of a job.

[00:30:00] This is a guy that grew a company that all they did initially really was book sales and they had a warehouse the size of the Amazon, right? Because they wanted to represent everybody. They had every book ever published and to a large degree. They did. They had a whole lot of bucks and then I've expanded of course, beyond that.

[00:30:28]And beyond that, to the point today where they are doing some well, again, shady things I mentioned in the intro that I was concerned about what Amazon was doing with pat. They got a patent on this one click purchase. Now I have been a fan of patents for a long time. I do not like the patent law as it exists today.

[00:30:55] And in fact, I haven't liked it for quite some time, but this patent law where you don't have to show that there was no prior art and frankly, the prior art does not matter at all. I think that's a huge. And I've had a number of patent attorneys on my show, talking about it and talking about what we may want to change.

[00:31:18]Jeff Bezos grew it to today where it really is the number one provider of online services is. You might in fact, almost certainly are using Amazon's services, whether you realize it or not to go to most, any website, any of the big ones they're probably using Amazon's web services. They're probably using Amazon storage and Amazon has dozens and dozens of different services.

[00:31:50] So it's a very big deal. And Jeff Bezos, who's the guy that started all of that sat down stepped on. I should say. Now it's rare that the founder of a company ends up taking the company public. Public, basically, that just doesn't really happen because all of a sudden, when you're public, your whole job changes and no longer can you make a decision, a snap decision about something, and then go ahead and do it.

[00:32:18] You've got to be very careful about what you do when you do it, how you do it, you have to announce it and everything, but just an amazing man being able to take it. All of that. And by the way, have the largest settlement, a divorce settlement in history with his ex wife. It's amazing, but he is still the world's richest human.

[00:32:40] Now he has this company called blue origin, which is his rocket company. He's got the Bezos earth fund and he's still chairman of Amazon's board. So he's not going anywhere. However, we've got this new guy, Andy Jassy, who has stepped in as the CEO of Amazon. He was the the head of Amazon's.

[00:33:06] Online services, which is absolutely huge. It's their most profitable arm by far. So he's taking this whole thing over when Amazon frankly, is in a lot of trouble. Now they're basics of, Hey, there, the money that they're making, their profits and everything, that's all well and good, but there's ongoing antitrust investigations.

[00:33:33] There's battle with labor. And we're talking about, of course, big labor here. The unions. There's increased competition in the cloud space. Just look at what happened with the us military in there. I think it was at least a billion dollar. I can't remember the exact number, a cloud contract because Amazon was battling Microsoft Azure and it was awarded.

[00:34:01] And then just a couple of weeks ago it was pulled back again. They're also seeing increased competition in their online services from Google. And I use some of those Google services. In fact, if you go to Craig peterson.com, it's actually right now using some of those Google services. So they are really getting nailed from a whole bunch of different directions.

[00:34:26] And this guy Jassy has worked there since 97. But he may be the perfect person to guide Amazon through. W really now we're talking about the middle-aged, that's the time when you're supposed to buy your convertible, buy your motorcycle, et cetera. The middle aged years. And in this case, there's some problems.

[00:34:51] Here's a quote I want to read from this Yahoo article is actually I think AP yeah. Yahoo finance. This Yahoo article and it's from Harvard business school, because we've got regulators who are circling, and this may be the main reason Jeff stepped down. I don't know, but quote, you may want somebody who has the confidence of the chair.

[00:35:16] And the board you want somebody who understands the strategy and was part of it and knows where the bodies are buried and the mistakes that have been made and how to move forward. This is from Harvard business school, professor of business administration. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and I think she's right.

[00:35:39] Absolutely because this road ahead for him is going to be tough. But the fact that he ran their most profitable division tells you something, it tells you a lot and he might be the exact right guy to be able to do that. Amazon's now got a market capitalization of about $2 trillion, which is huge.

[00:36:01] And it's certainly enough to get some of these regulators. Paint a lot of attention to what's going on. We've got the Washington DC attorney general, who has accused them of violating the district of Columbia's antitrust act. And that has to do with, for bidding third-party resellers, from offering cheaper rates for their products on competing sites.

[00:36:24] Cause remember what Amazon does. About half or more. In fact, I think now of their products are not actually sold by Amazon. They're certainly not Amazon products. They are products from resellers who are just selling on Amazon. They're using Amazon is their platform. And that way Amazon will manage the inventory.

[00:36:47] It'll warehouse a little ship it out. It'll handle the returns. Yeah. What Amazon is doing is charging these sellers for the space in the warehouses, which is perfectly legitimate and taking a percentage of the deals. Are there other websites that might give these sellers or resellers or stuff they're importing from China or wherever.

[00:37:12] Might there be other sites that give them better deals? Will you bet there are sites out there. So that's why she's suing them. Federal regulators look like they might be coming in as well. The federal trade commission's newly appointed chairman. She's a fierce critic of the. Amazon way of doing business and she made herself a name by publishing an article for Yale's law journal titled Amazon's antitrust paradox.

[00:37:42] So before she was even appointed to the federal trade commission, she was already calling for changes in the current antitrust regulatory framework. And that might be widely invited administration has appointed her, but there's six antitrust bills. Targeting big tech right now that are working their way through the house of representatives.

[00:38:05] And we've talked about some of those already, and, I do not like these huge tech companies that are making crazy profits and using those profits to keep other people out. And Amazon's one of the largest employers in the country. And after years of complaints from somewhere house workers, we've got the labor unions now in the mix trying to take action.

[00:38:30] Now, I don't have a single problem with labor unions while at some of their tactics, I have problems with, I don't have a problem with the labor union. In the private space. I have a huge problem with I'm in government space. And we could talk about that at some point, but I don't have a problem with them trying to organize inside Amazon.

[00:38:53] So the international brotherhood of Teamsters. Yeah. I remember the guys that drive the horses. They announced that they're going to begin working to organize Amazon workers. So that might succeed. There was another one in Alabama that had failed. So are you getting the hint here? This is huge. It's huge.

[00:39:13]By the way, Amazon's offering warehouse workers starting pay at $15 per hour plus benefits. So that doesn't seem too bad. If you ask them. But again, with the pandemic, all of the stuff going on there been a lot of calls for Amazon to quote, treat its workers better. So we'll see. We'll see what happens.

[00:39:34] Other problems with Amazon that we've talked about before are things like fake reviews. You and I, we look at the reviews, it's critical in us buying things. Isn't it. We look at the reviews and say, oh, wow. Jeepers. There's 500 reviews here and it's four and a half stars. Okay. So I can have confidence that this product is good.

[00:39:58] It's going to work. And yet some of these sellers, what they're doing is bribing people to give a good review. So they'll say, Hey, you buy my product. And then they send the product in with, along with the product is a little note saying, Hey, if you give me a review and send me a link, I'll send you an extra battery or whatever it might be.

[00:40:20] That has been a real problem for Amazon, even worse than that, because at least those people might give an honest review, right? Worse than that is that some of these reviews are paid for. So some of the sellers it's alleged are going out there. They are hiring. People and paying them to give reviews. Now, those ones are very obvious.

[00:40:45] If you look at the reviews, so don't just look at there's 500 and the average is 4.5. Look at some of the reviews in the wording. So I've seen reviews where it was for a massager, and there was talking about what a great. A set of wheels that has on it. And they work really well. And it's very smooth when you're out, riding it on the trails.

[00:41:08] Wait a minute wait, we're talking about a massager here. We're not talking about a bicycle, so that's one of the ways to tell if the reviews are fake, they're don't even talk about the product at all, or any of its real features. The other one is look at the wording because most of these fake reviews.

[00:41:26] Don't use English, so good. All right. Okay. Thanks for being with me. I want to make sure you stick around and visit me online. In the meantime, go to Craig peterson.com. If you sign up for my free newsletter, you'll be getting that every week with all of the details. I'll try and catch you up and you can listen to my podcast, right from there.

[00:41:50] Craig peterson.com. That's Peterson with an O.

[00:41:56]If you look into buy a used Google pixel for a I got some news for you. The FBI has been very busy and they've conned the con man. I love this story. The FBI has, been trying to track bad guys for a very long time and there've been a number of ways they've done it.

[00:42:19] We know obviously about phone taps, right? We've seen those before the old days. I don't know if you've ever been to one of the original. Telephone switching stations, all not even original, but the types they had in the late sixties, early seventies. I remember going to see one and all of these switches were just going

[00:42:40] People were dialing the phones and everything. It was just so cool. And back then, in order to trace a phone call, what they had to do is find the original. Sore. So they would go to that row, that column, that exact little unit that was hooked up directly to your phone. And then they would see, okay, this is in position this, and then go to that next switch.

[00:43:04] Okay. Position that next switch, position that and go all the way through. That's the really older days, not the old days where you had somebody that was at a switchboard doing it. Nowadays, of course, it's all done by computers. The telephone company turns your voice into a digital signal and it's usually done right in your local neighborhood.

[00:43:26] It isn't even done at the central office anymore. So by the time your voice is outside the central office, it's digital it's hauled on nowadays, even partially an internet protocol. Network. They used to use different protocols back in the day. And so it makes it quite easy for them to tap your line. Now, of course, there's the legal side of this.

[00:43:50] Do they have the legal right to do it to the need a court order or what kind of a court order? Do they need right. All of that stuff. But that is side. It's very easy to find out where call went, where it came from and to listen in because it's just digital. Data's completely completely copyable with absolutely no particular problems at all in copying it.

[00:44:14]Last month. The FBI and the Australian federal police acknowledged that they had indeed been working on this encrypted device. And the company was called a nom, which is a fake company and a nom sole. 12,000 smartphones to criminal syndicates around the world. That's the wording that the police used.

[00:44:42] So these were being sold as secure devices. They did things like they removed the cell leader, modem functionality they'd changed the boot ROMs. They removed the GPS. So the idea was, Hey, you missed your badge. You can use one of our Anom phones and it's using a special version of the Android operating system and you can send messages back and forth.

[00:45:07] It's a completely secure messenger service end to end encryption, right? Like we're always being promised. And so what happened is bad guys started referring. Bad guys to this, right? Cause if they wanted to talk to the other guy, they both needed these Anom phones. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to talk to each other.

[00:45:28]And so they were recommending the use of these phones, to their friends that were in the illegal businesses as well. So this I'm just chocolate is so great. So the FBI weaponized. Android phones, at least this particular model of it. And there's a whole community in the Android world. It doesn't exist in the iPhone world because this is much harder to do in the iPhone world, but they call themselves the model.

[00:46:00] Community. And so they'll get a phone from some vendor. They'll make some changes to it that led to maybe change networks or do other fancy things. So they, after BI used some of this technology. The modding community and did some just amazing things with this custom rom. Now you're going to love this part.

[00:46:21] Okay. So when you boot this phone up, this is according to ARS Technica. The phone will have of course, a little boot screen and. The highest custom rom here, which is the boot loader as well as other things, but it showed an arcane, oh, S boot screen that's the name, arcane O S and every place, the normal Android distribution that comes from Google with the.

[00:46:48] B I's arcane. Oh, west green. It's just absolutely phenomenal that these guys would do this and would fall for it. So the FBI told the criminals, Hey alleged criminals, Hey, these are secure devices, the really focused on security and there is a pin scrambling fee. What would happen is on your phone?

[00:47:11]You might enter pin some phones, you might use a fingerprint, or he might use a face ID. This was a security feature. And what happened is normally you've got what, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0. And you type in your pin and off you go, what this did, is it scrambled it? So it might be nine to.

[00:47:31]Just the scramble of the digits up so that when you enter your pin, you're not always touching the screen in the same place so that people could not guess your code from the fingerprints you're leaving behind. Now, this is also interesting. It, this is a great way to do it. If you're doing it for real, having to run an anonymous phone, they had two different interfaces on the phone and it a different one would pop up depending on. Pin you typed into the lock screen. So the first pin would show a bunch of non-functional apps that are pretty popular in the app store, like Tinder, Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, candy crush games.

[00:48:15] So if somebody is checking out your phone, forcing you to unlock it, they're not going to find budge. And by the way, none of those things work. But. I would have, if I had designed it, I would have made them so that they would work. So you can fool some of us trying to Rob you and steal your phone.

[00:48:28] The second pin that you could enter in, tell you chose your pins, but it was supposed to be the secure section. She didn't have the phone. So it had a clock, a calculator, and the settings. But the calculator app actually opened a login screen to a nom as an anonymous. And that, again, the bad guys are told all that's a secure, encrypted way to chat.

[00:48:54]This is just amazing. So they will do use that. So they go into the calculator app and now allowed them to chat with their friends. But what they did not realize. Is, it was actually sending all of the messages also un-encrypted to the FBI. Okay, absolutely amazing. Amazing. So now some of these bad guys are selling their phones online.

[00:49:25] I remember I warned you at the very beginning. If you're going to buy a pixel for a you want to listen to this first because the bad guys are selling. Their phones online. And so a number of people have been trying to figure it out. Some posts on Reddit and elsewhere. You guys know how to deal with this arcane.

[00:49:44] S how can I reset this? What should I do? Okay. A lot of confused people. How do I fix this thing? You're not going to be able to fix it. Okay. By the way, this thing I think is really cool because the guy who he bought it legit guy bought it use. You said the installed operating system is arcane O S 10.

[00:50:03] The system updater says that Archana, YC 11 is available for download, but I don't want to do it in case it makes something even harder to fix. So maybe the FBI is bad. At sending out updates and fixes, then most of the Google Android vendors that are out there and I'm just laughing all the way through here.

[00:50:24]So there are some things that a tech savvy user should know. So I want you guys to pay attention to this, particularly if you're using an Android device. So the first thing is when you start up a newer Android phone, when it's made in the last few years, The first thing that happened is that Google runs something called verified boot, and that makes sure the operating system has not been modified.

[00:50:55] So the operating system from the manufacturer of the device will be signed using a cryptographically secured. What was happening here is these devices were failing verified boot of course, because FBI had modified the boot ROMs. And if your device fails, verified boot, your Android device either could be an unlocked boot loader or a relaunch boot loader with tampered software.

[00:51:24] It's going to show a message. And in, in this case, the FDA FBI devices just have a message that says your device is loading a different operating system, complete with their yellow exclamation point icon and a link for Google support pages. Absolutely phenomenal. And by the way, the article I'm sending this out in my newsletter, but it says.

[00:51:51] How resistance changes. Google has an order. So it sent them to the legitimate Google support. So there you go. There's a really good little piece of advice right now. The FBI changed a lot of the Android operating systems, tripped out a whole bunch of Android settings that might've revealed something about the fact that it really was a spy device system settings for app storage and accounts have been removed.

[00:52:19] So pay attention, right? If the machine, if your machine boots up, plane's about the bootloader, you've got a problem and it isn't just Android. Obviously apple will do that. The newer versions of windows are starting to do that as well with TPMS and windows 11 is really going to bring a lot of that to the forum.

[00:52:41] Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson and you can find me online. Craig peterson.com. Check it out and stick around.

[00:52:50]Work from home is a very big deal, especially for a couple of segments of our society. And I want to talk a little bit about that now, as employees are returning to work, should they be returning to the office?

[00:53:06] There is a great article here this last week in Forbes magazine by Dana Brownley. And it was one of their editors pick and it was picked I think for very good reason. And that is so many of us have been working from home. And for many of us.

[00:53:24] Bennett godsend. I've worked from home now for over 20 years. And for me, it's been a godsend because my priority was helping to raise our eight children. And it's hard to do that, and it's hard to homeschool to them if you are not at home. So that's what I had done. And I was very privileged to be able to do that.

[00:53:45] And our kids have all turned out amazingly. Many people are caregivers and it isn't necessarily just of kids. But right now I'm looking at a survey that was conducted. It's called the Prudential May, 2021 pulse of the American worker survey. And they're showing the 2000 respondents that 38% identified themselves as caregivers with nearly 40% of those providing care.

[00:54:16] For school, age children when you are starting to look at benefit packages, it is important for many families to be able to have some form of childcare. And what has snuck in because of the lockdown is that many of us actually can work from home. Many of us have been more productive at home. And then on top of it, all we can take.

[00:54:43] Of our family. So let's look at the stats. We told you about school age children. That's about 40%, 32% are taking care of young children. And this is the 40% of all workers. Okay. People 30% are caring for someone with a disability, some sort of a health issue. And 23% are taking care of an older adult.

[00:55:10] That's 40% of the workforce. That is a lot of people. A lot of people, 38% is the exact number. So there, many of these care givers are returning. Really a traditional work environment where they're going to the office, but they have very unique needs. And I think every last one of us have to consider that and have to look at it and figure out how can we make things work.

[00:55:41] And when we look at the numbers again for the caregivers, 45% say that they've considered leaving the workforce entirely. Due to personal demands. And 53% are saying that they would retrain for a career in a different field or industry. If they had the opportunity, we have some of our best people out there that are taking care of our kids of our loved ones.

[00:56:12] Our parents. And again, look at mine, a situation here where I was at home helping to take care of our kids along with my wife. Neither one of us could have carried on a regular job and homeschooled, eight kids. Neither one of us could have done that. What kind of talent might we be losing? By squeezing these people out of our workforce, particularly when we've now proven that most businesses can allow their workers to work from home.

[00:56:48] Now they found in the survey that there were three primary types of support caregivers and these types are looking for different types of flexibility. Number one, they're saying that 42% wanted increased workplace flexibility. No, that makes a whole lot of sense, right? So they can work from home.

[00:57:11]Maybe some of your best employees or people who want to work in another part of the country. I have a friend, his brother-in-law is a real good programmer in this one particular type of programming. I think it's sales and he is living there now in a completely different country on the other side of the world.

[00:57:33] And yet. He's still doing programming for these people here in the United States, talking about workplace flexibility. He is sitting over there not far from China and is enjoying himself. He loves it there. And of course his costs are much lower, et cetera, et cetera. So consider that, not just that there might be working from home, but maybe they want to take the kids over to Europe, live there for six weeks.

[00:58:01] There's a lot of things people want. So that's 42% of our people that are working. Okay. Increased workplace place. Flexibility. The number two increased paid time off 38%. Again, something we got to seriously consider. Now I know how hard it is to be able to fill in for someone that's on vacation or. Maybe they're caring for a loved one.

[00:58:28] Maybe they just had a baby, et cetera, but it's very important when you get right down to it. Because again, who's better for raising our children, us, or a stranger who's going to more or less warehouse them. You have to keep a look at that. There's a great article from the Harvard business school.

[00:58:50] It's titled. COVID killed the traditional workplace. What should companies do now? That's a very good question because now the lockdown is mostly behind us. Executives can't expect the offices to run the same way they did people to come in and do the same things that they always did. But in reality, Harvard business school, faculty members are saying there are ways to keep our employees happy and productive.

[00:59:22] And that is exactly what we're talking about. No for many caretaker takers caregivers, I should say paid time off is more valuable than a pay increase. And that's particularly true for those who are at the higher end of the pay scale. It gives them a lot more flexibility. They can get away sometimes from all of their responsibilities and obligations, which is just so important.

[00:59:48] There's here's another one. This is a job list survey from CNBC. The articles entitled here's how much money workers would give up for better. Life balance. And they go in, in that particular article and say that the average worker who says they currently have work life balance, it would take an extra $10,000 in pay per year for them to give up their personal time.

[01:00:11] I'm not sure that's right. I think it would be a lot more than that. And it also says just 30% of workers said, they'd give up part of their pay for better work-life balance. And the threshold varies by the type of worker that's where we, I think really get into it now. So those are the first two, the third one is 37%.

[01:00:32] So these are all within 4% of each other. Greater commitment to health and wellbeing. Now I've seen studies before that are saying businesses that put in a gym and put in workout rooms, et cetera. They never actually see them use. The way they expect for them to be used. And I don't think that's what people are talking about here, but we really are thinking a lot more about health and wellbeing since so many of us have been scared because of the COVID outbreak, but maybe I should be paying more attention to our health.

[01:01:07]But we also have the mental health look at all of the problems we've seen from so many mental health issues because of the. Down. So Harvard again, came out and said for employers, it means that we need to signal the health of facilities. It's crucial to attracting people back. So again, The right kinds of air filters, right?

[01:01:30] Kinds of lighting, make sure people feel safe while they're in the office and maybe cut back the number of days that they have to be there. Hey, stick around. We'll be right back. We got a lot more to cover. You're listening to Craig Peterson, of course, and visit me online. Craig peterson.com.

[01:01:50]Hey, we got another emergency patch out from our friends at Microsoft. And in this case, it has to do with printers and remote printer access. Do you have employees working from home?

[01:02:05] Microsoft has their big monthly patches that they release. They also have weekly patches that they released that are for slightly more critical vulnerabilities. And then they have. Patches that are released because there is a severe problem going on right now while that's what we are staring down.

[01:02:31] There is a vulnerability called print nightmare, and this is located in the windows print. Spooler serve. Now the windows print spooler services, what it sounds like. This is the service that handles all of your print jobs. So if you are using this service, Turns out there's a serious bug and Microsoft tried to patch it once and failed.

[01:03:01] And they've got another patch out right now seems to be working, but organizations are really urged to deploy these patches as soon as possible or deceased. Inbound remote printing until they can be applied. So that's why I said, if you have people who are working from home, because many of us turned on remote desktop and you better make sure that's properly patched up so that people could.

[01:03:28] Then and get a desktop. Although Microsoft has an interesting solution that is going to be announced in early August about having your own windows machine there in their cloud. So it looks like you'll be able to have windows machine for about 35 bucks a month. Microsoft will have to keep it up to date.

[01:03:47] I think that's a very cool thing, but they're coming out with that here very shortly. Within the next month or so, we'll see what happens, but this is a problem because if it's exposed to the internet, We're expecting to actually already be seeing active exploit. Now here's the problem Microsoft's trying to solve.

[01:04:10] We have three different types of patches. You have the monthly patches that they release. You have your, which of the patch Tuesday. You also have patches that are released every week, which are more critical. And then these types of patches, these are patches for what are called. Zero day attacks. There is nothing normal out there, a regular stuff that would catch this and stop it.

[01:04:37] Now, the advanced malware protection that we use from Cisco, it will catch this sort of thing, but it'll only catch it after it's been seen a few times and then identified, obviously by now it's been identified. So it's pretty darn cool. So Microsoft's monthly updates. Last month included a patch for another vulnerability in the windows print spooler service.

[01:05:02] And it was initially called a local privilege ex escalation issue. That means that you had to be on that computer in order to gain access to these advanced privileges and features. Turns out that it wasn't entirely just local. And now there is a new one where it can be exploited to get remote code execution and not just privileged privilege, escalation.

[01:05:30] That means that they can now run programs on your computer. And with privilege escalation, they can run those programs as whomever they might want to do. So this is pretty big Blackhat USA conference coming right up and they are going to be hosting one of their talks called diving into spooler and what they did to discover these local and remote.

[01:06:00] Vulnerabilities in the windows print spooler Hey, it's definitely a problem. There is a proof of concept exploit out there, and that means that the bad guys are not too long from coming up with their own. So there you go. Again, patch it up close and remote access, at least for the time being. To your print spooler because it could be a very big deal.

[01:06:25] Another thing you could do is disable the prince Pooler service. You can just use stop service dash name spooler dash force, and that will. Pop it right on down. Okay. And then by the way, in case your machine reboots, you probably wouldn't do a set service dash named spooler dash start-up type disabled in order to make sure it doesn't restart, but there'll a lot to worry about right now, a whole lot, frankly, to worry about right now because of the Russians are coming.

[01:06:57] Here's another one. This is Chevy bolt. Now, I have had some major complaints about Tesla and the way Tesla has these door handles that recess in entirely and how it has happened that during an accident, those door handles don't pop out and people cannot be extracted from cars. And the biggest problem you have in an accident with a car full of batteries is.

[01:07:24] Of course the high voltage and current that's stored in the batteries that now when they, it out, it starts a toxic fire. Very nasty. Just this week, the national highway traffic safety administration issued an alert for all 2017 to 2019 Chevy. Owners now I know a lot of these bolt owners are actually government agencies.

[01:07:50] They're not individuals, but I thought I'd bring it up. Anyways. There was a fire in a Vermont state representatives. Car's name's Timothy Brown. And his Chevy bolt decided it was going to catch on fire. Now, there was a recall by GM of these Chevy volts that had this problem, and apparently it doesn't entirely.

[01:08:17] Fix it, they are still plaguing GM. And man, in this particular case this rep of course in Vermont being a I don't know, leftist, I have to assume, but a fan of electric cars, his car. Sad they're burning, which is pretty bad, ironic, but this happened when was this? Oh, it looks like this happened just a couple of weeks ago.

[01:08:43] He's the state chairman in Vermont of the house committee on energy and technology. I've been supporting electric vehicles go sponsor bills relating to electric. And plug-in. So now his 2019 Chevy bolt course caught in fire, caught on fire, and there are others out there. 68,000 cars. All right. So two phases to the recall first phase is a temporary solution.

[01:09:11] The second one is a more permanent one. Apparently this has to do with the batteries spontaneous. Catching fire. So this isn't something that's related to a car accident. It's a spontaneous combustion problem. That's not too good. It's a defect in the LG chem battery packs that are in these cars. So here you go.

[01:09:34] If you drive to work every day and you charge your Chevy bolt every night, the United States, federal government is telling you to stop doing that. Yes. If you have a Chevy bolt, they're advising you to not charge it at night. I'm not sure when you're going to charge it. Cause the idea is you charge it at night.

[01:09:54] You drive in the day, right? So they're saying there's, you can't do that. If you have to charge it at night, make sure you park the car away from any structures and definitely do not park your Chevy volt. That might be part of this. Recall inside a garage. How's that for bad, the original recall, by the way, came out in November, 2020 for potential fire hazard in the, again, the high voltage battery pack, those cells could possibly heat up and ignite internally.

[01:10:26] Yeah. And if that fire spreads of the rest of the car and spreads to the building it's parked in or nearby building. Yeah. So keep an eye out. If you have a Chevy bolt, this is the type of problem in a phase as we start more and more to move into the electric vehicle realm. Yeah. Eventually it'll all get worked out, but it isn't perfect today.

[01:10:48] Hey, visit me online Craig peterson.com and keep up with the latest in what you have to do with technology.

[01:10:56]We talked earlier about Amazon and how much trouble they're in right now, Google apparently is in a similar boat. We had just this week, dozens of state attorneys, general suing Google on antitrust grounds.

[01:11:13] You can reach me online. Just me. M E Craig peterson.com or what most people do is they just hit reply to my newsletter.

[01:11:22] Hopefully you're on my newsletter, right? That goes out every week. If you're on that newsletter you can just hit reply and ask me questions. Any questions you want? I'm more than glad to answer them. I know most of you guys, you're not business people. I am still glad to answer your questions for you to keep you on the right track.

[01:11:39] The whole idea here is it's to keep you going. Safer. And if you're a business person, what the heck, maybe I can help you out as well while the here is a problem. And it's a very big problem. We have these absolutely huge companies that are using their market position in order to really control the entire world.

[01:12:06] Now it's a very big problem because you have companies that are sitting on billions of dollars in cash who can and do keep their competition out of the market. Now, one of the ways that keep them out, and I've mentioned this before, Microsoft has done this multiple times as lost lawsuits about it, particularly over in Europe, but they find somebody who might be a competitor and they basically squeeze them out of them.

[01:12:35] Even though they're not necessarily even a direct competitor. One of the things Facebook does is they buy companies for 10, a hundred times sometimes more. Then they're actually worth, would you take 50 million for your company? That's worth 50 million? You might not.

[01:12:53] Would you take 500 million for the company? How about a billion dollars? That's where it starts becoming very questionable about what they're doing. One of the things that Google is allegedly doing right now is preemptively squashing com competing app stores. When you look at Google and the Google Android ecosystem, who sells the most Android devices out there, right?

[01:13:21] The high-end devices, the number one seller of Android phones is of course, Sam. And Samsung started to put a store too. An app store. So you could buy Samsung, Sam sung apps now, apple and Google, both charge about the same rates as a general rule. It's 30% for these bigger companies that they have to pay the app store, okay. I'm okay with that. They both spent the time to build the platform, to monitor it, to try and keep the app store clean and guides. That's definitely worth something. But what if Samsung came along and said, okay, we're only going to charge 10% royalty. In our app store and the apps will run on all of our Samsung Android phones.

[01:14:10] So it's still using the Google operating system. It's still Android. It will probably run on other than Samsung phones as well. That's the whole nature of, but that hasn't happened. And why hasn't it happened? These state attorneys general are saying that what has happened is the Samsung galaxy store got squashed by Google.

[01:14:38] So it could maintain its monopoly on Android app distribution. So it says that Google engaged in a bunch of different anti-competitive practices. They offered large app developers, profit share, and agree. In exchange for exclusive exclusivity. Okay. I can see that the apple iPhone came out. Do you remember this exclusively on ATN T's network?

[01:15:05] Is that a problem? They're saying also the Google created unnecessary hurdles for what's called sideloading. So sideloading is where you might go to another app store in order to install something. Or maybe it's something that you want to put on your site. It's not fully approved by the Google play store.

[01:15:26] So that's the basics of what the side loaning is all about. So saying that they made that even harder. Okay. From Google standpoint, do we really want to. Allow anything to run on our phones. And here's the question, here's why, right? What do I do for living cyber security? What is one of the things you have to do for cybersecurity?

[01:15:48]You've got to put in special routers, special firewalls and software on servers and computers. Whoever touches a computer last owns the next problem. That's been my mantra forever. So if we installed some software on a computer or we had the customer installed some software on a computer, and there's a problem who they get.

[01:16:11] They're going to call me, right? Because I was the last one to touch their computer. And at that point now I have to show, okay, it wasn't me. It was this other piece of software. QuickBooks is a piece of junk, you know what, whatever it is, I'm going to have to justify it. And frankly, I'm probably going to have to fix it.

[01:16:30] So Google is saying. We don't want all of these app stores that might have apps that are not secure apps, that crash apps that might cause problems with the Android ecosystem. I think that's perfectly legitimate. Apparently these state attorneys general don't think it is. And here's the last one. This is a.

[01:16:53] Attempting to buy off Samsung to limit competition from the Samsung galaxy app store. Now, Google is saying that this lawsuit is merit lesson. I can see a whole bunch of legitimate argument on their part. They also said, quote, and this is an article from ARS Technica. It's a strange, it's strange that a group of state attorneys general.

[01:17:18] Chose to file a lawsuit, attacking a system that provides more openness and choice than the others. In other words, are taking a jab at apple because apple is very closed for the reasons I just decided to hear that Google I'm sure is going to argue as to why they are closed. Okay. Apparently the state attorneys general are saying, quote, Google promised repeatedly that Android would be the basis for an open ecosystem in which industry participants could freely compete.

[01:17:52] Google has not kept its word. Instead. Google has taken steps to close the ecosystem from competition and insert itself as the middleman between app developers. Consumers. Okay. Can, so can you see that they're also complaining this 30% commission. It's a monopoly rent that unfairly burdens consumers and developers, and K-12, you could argue that I don't fall for that one personally.

[01:18:21] Now the buy-off is where I think that there's a lot. Yep. Teeth in this particular lawsuit. Cause they're saying that we've got the commission rate argument, right? We've got those. It's not as open as you said, it would be. But these attorneys general have spent a lot of time dissecting Google's alleged efforts to keep competing app stores at bay by, and they said Google was willing to offer Samsung myriad benefits and concessions in order to prevent Samsung's galaxy store from being built out.

[01:18:57]Again, Is that a huge problem. If you've got a big customer or a potential partner coming to you and saying, okay, I want a few concessions here. I'm not going to pay 30%, or I want to have some of you, my developers in house with your people so that they can short circuit some of the problems that always develop those are.

[01:19:22] In the business in business period. And when it comes to software development, right? People, businesses have we'll use apple again as an example jam, which is a really great set of software to help manage your devices. Jan PF, you might want to check it out. So jam had their engineers camp out at Apple's headquarters, apparently four months while they were working on.

[01:19:49] Some of the, their software for the next release of Apple's iOS and Mac iOS. Is that unfair? Yeah, in a way it is right because here I am little Mr. Small developer and I'm not gaining access to Apple's top engineers and able to send mine out there to live with apple engineers and ask questions and help them debug my software.

[01:20:15] But it happens every day. Makes sense. So it says though the galaxy store was not nearly as popular as the play store. Google feared that Samsung would develop into a strong competitor, especially since the company sells a majority of high-end Android phones in the us ARS Technica says Google was particularly concerned that Samsung would get an exclusive game.

[01:20:40] For the store to attract more users, which Samsung did do in 2018, when it partnered with epic to launch fortnight exclusively on the galaxy store. And that one, move that one game. That one app. Costs Google millions of dollars in revenue. So we'll see what happens here. They make other claims in there. Apparently it even offered a Google offered to white label, the play stores, the galaxy store, so that Samsung could maintain its branding, all kinds of negotiations, the types of things I've seen before, the types of things that are.

[01:21:20] Particularly uncommon, but a European commission is also going after them with an antitrust investigation. They've done that a few years ago with this is a problem. These companies are huge and we don't let them fail. Look at what happened. GM and Chrysler, both got bail and the federal government Chrysler got bailouts twice.

[01:21:42] The free market. You never would have had that happen. The best part of Chrysler would still exist and those weak parts would have been gone. That's what bankruptcy law is all about GM. The same thing, the best parts of GM would have remained. We would have probably had better cars today. Then we have, if DM GM had been allowed to go bankrupt and yeah, it's going to hurt people, but guess what?

[01:22:07] It's hurting people right now from the other side. And when I see this happening as well at Google and Amazon, of course they haven't gone bankrupt, but they both along with Facebook and a few others, they're both huge. Huge and they control so much of the market. So what's the best way forward. What do you think I'd love to hear from you?

[01:22:29] Just drop me an email. [email protected]. What is the solution to this? Hey, make sure you get my newsletter. We got all of this information, of course, a whole lot more comes out every week. May be semi-weekly here fairly soon. See how it goes, but go to CraigPeterson.com/subscribe. You'll get my free newsletter and you'll keep up to date on what you need to do to keep yourself safe.

[01:22:59] CraigPeterson.com

The New Anti-Robocall Technology is Coming Online

I know everybody I talk to hates these robo calls. They're happening all of the time. What are we doing about it? The FCC has made some changes and they just went into place. So we're going to talk about STIR/SHAKEN, right?

Of course the government has to come up with some really cute acronyms and that's what's turned, shaken are, but here is what's happened. We have the ability to over TCPI P send phone calls. In fact, in my phone, I have a phone that's hooked up to T-Mobile and it is using wifi.

[00:00:38] So when I'm making a phone call, it is going over my wifi in the office or at my house or wherever. It doesn't even use the regular salad or network, unless it has to why? Because it's all TCP IP. And then on top of it, sometimes with LTE and now always with five G you are using TCP IP. So your voice is converted into a digital signal.

[00:01:10] Right there on your phone. And it is handled as data, just like pretty much any other data would be handled. Now our cell phones, of course, for a long time have been digital and have been in coding it, but they have not been using it as regular TCPI peop. So what the federal communications realized is since most of the tracks.

[00:01:35] That we have on our phone networks nowadays is actually internet traffic. It's TCP IP. Why don't we add a little bit to the protocol? And they came up with this whole new way of being able to track the originator of a phone call right now, if you have a landline, this is not going to benefit you at all.

[00:02:02] And we're going to talk about the different carriers here, but they don't have to comply these landline operators for another couple of years. Although the FCC right now is circulating a petition and is trying to make it so they have to comply. More quickly, but the nation's largest phone companies have met this deadline that was set by the FCC to put this new anti robocall technology in place.

[00:02:31] But I want to warn you guys that does not mean that it is going to stop all of these robo calls anytime. Soon where it's not going to stop, but you might have noticed that at the end of June, there was a noticeable cutback in some of these robocalls. Now these are the scammers that are calling us and are pretending that they are a local phone number, right?

[00:02:59] Their biggest trick is, yeah, I've got the same area code and first three digits, I'll call it a prefix as you do. So you should answer that phone. They announced at the FCC last Wednesday that quote, the largest voice service providers are now using stir shaken caller ID authentication standards in their internet protocol networks in accordance with the June 30th deadline set by the FCC.

[00:03:26] This widespread implementation helps protect consumers against malicious. Spoofed robo calls and helps law enforcement track the bad. So it, I think is a very good idea. It's a step in the right direction. It is going to help a whole lot at T and T Verizon T-Mobile and us cellular have all put these in place.

[00:03:54] In March, the FCC denied petitions for deadline extension from Verizon and us cellular are saying that they didn't meet the high standard of undue hardship. I think that makes sense. You've got to force these guys. Sometimes Verizon was saying that they had a small area of their fiber based home phone network that would not be able to meet it.

[00:04:17] So again, it's landline. Versus the home phone that work, many of us have it. Comcast provides it as well, but basically if it's it IP based, they didn't have any sort of exceptions. So Verizon is now exchanging the stir shaken enabled phone calls with wireless carer carriers. It represents about 80% of the U S wireless industry.

[00:04:45] Verizon said this week, so 80%. Yeah, you should have seen a bit of a drop more than 135 million calls a day are currently being exchanged between Verizon and the other carriers with the number of calls that are being exchanged using this tracking technology grow. It's also been deployed on IP enabled wire line phone networks operated by Comcast charter at and T Verizon and many others.

[00:05:17] So we're pretty happy about this. We'll see what ends up happening in general, but some care companies that carry a lot of robo calls are not yet required to follow the stir shaken technology and the rules around. Because there's an exemption for carriers with a hundred thousand or fewer customers. So that's going to be a bit of a problem, but think about how you have to roll out technology.

[00:05:46] Rolling it out via these big carriers and doing that first is seeing where the holes are in the technology. What's not working properly. That's the way to handle it. And then by having the big carriers do it, they're going to bear the brunt of the expense. Because always right. Those big screen TVs used to be five to 10,000.

[00:06:12] I remember $15,000. That's a very big deal. And then it goes down and down. Now you can buy them at Walmart for 300 bucks. So having the big guys do at first makes a lot of sense. It's going to prove the technology, improve the technology, drive the costs down, and then you can bet that these smaller carriers are also going to be required to do this fairly soon.

[00:06:38] So the way the protocols are working is they are using tokens and to verify. The accuracy of the caller ID. So they're using public key cryptology. For those of you who know what that is using digital certificate, getting major us companies to adopt. It really was very big milestone. I'm very glad they finally did it by the way.

[00:07:01] Stir, shaken. Ordered by Congress and FCC chairman as PI. You remember him? He did a lot of great things to help out communications, but he was only having voluntary compliance. And so it didn't lead to like widespread adoption. So this law really forced them into it. And they're now. So we'll see what happens.

[00:07:28] Small carriers are exempt for now. Landlines. Aren't doing it. There's a lot of the TDM based stuff out there, but it's going to happen. There's also a gap in, at and T network right now. So we'll see. What ends up happening? Hey, I want to encourage you guys. If you have not already to sign up for my newsletter, I don't spam you, right?

[00:07:50] I'm not one of these robo spammers that we see out there that are just sending all kinds of garbage all the time I put together. Usually six to eight, sometimes as many as 10 articles every week that I think you need to see. And when I put them together, make them available for you. It makes just a huge difference in people's lives.

[00:08:13] I get thank you notes. Everybody. Not everybody, but I get thank you notes every week from people who read that newsletter and thing. They thank me for my time and all of the effort that we put into this. This is an effort of love by my wife and I, so do that. It will help. I give all kinds of great advice and warn you about things that are happening right now.

[00:08:37] Just spend a minute, go to Craig peterson.com and you'll see right there in the home page, scroll down a little bit. There'll be a little red line at the top where you can put in your email address and I'll sign the app. And I will be sending you some special reports that are really going to help you out right away.

[00:08:56] So do that right now. CraigPeterson.com/subscribe

60% of Used Amazon Echos Can Be Compromised Don't Sell Used Google Home, Nest, Echos, etc.!

The majority of Americans, at least those of middle income and higher, have the smart devices in their homes. It's everything from the Amazon echo all the way up through our thermostats. Are these a good idea? And what do we do when we get rid of them?

IoT, you might've seen that before. And it stands for the internet of things, and these devices are actually computers on them. Have even more than one computer. Some of them have a lot of processing power. You look at some of these speakers, like the apple; the big apple speaker has some amazing processing belt right into it.

Of course, it also has a number of different ways that you can use it with Siri and everything else that's in it. But if you're going to sell these things, if you're going to sell your echo dot or other things, what should you be looking at? How can you do this? I had a listener who reached out to me.

[00:00:56] This was only a couple of weeks ago, and he had a problem. All of a sudden, he was getting charges from Amazon for things. Did not order. So he asked me what's the right way to go here. And, being the coach that I am, I pointed him in the right direction, which was pointed him at the Amazon security people.

[00:01:20] So he got a hold of them and spoke with them. It turned out that his Amazon echo that he had was what was used to order all of these items. And guess what? He didn't have that Amazon echo; he had sold that Amazon echo, and when he sold it if somebody bought it right, a used echo online and was using it to order things and have them shipped, not to his house.

[00:01:53] Elsewhere. So it is a really big potential problem that has been looked into, and there is a group of researchers on the Northeastern university who bought. 86 use devices. And this is an article from Ars Technica, Dan Gooden, who wrote this and what he, what they found over the 16 months is that 61% of these devices that they bought 61% had not been reset at all.

[00:02:33] No, that to me is not terribly surprising, but it's horrific. If you're trying to keep your data safe because think of what these smart devices have in them. They've got your location; they've got your wifi networks and passwords. They may have account information; what did you go ahead and link it to which accounts are on.

[00:03:00] There are a whole bunch of things that can be gleaned from them. Now he, this listener, said that he had reset his device, and you can and should do that if you're going to give it to someone in the family, which is what I would recommend as opposed to selling it. And I'll tell you why. These devices have inside of them a particular type of memory it's called NAND flash memory.

[00:03:32] And the memory is you can think of it in similar ways to your solid-state desk drive. Back in the old days, the operating system would say, go ahead and write this block of data. This 512 byte block out to Track 17 sector one, and it would go ahead and write it to track 17 sector. But the problem with NAND devices and most SSDs all of them, frankly, is that you can only write so many times before the memory goes bad and it can be 10,000 to a hundred thousand times.

[00:04:13] And if you've ever wondered, why is this solid state disc so much more expensive than the other ones? Usually it's because it's using better memory that can take more. Cycles read cycles, do it all you want all day long, cycles is the problem. So they have come up with some technology that they build into these that does a level.

[00:04:36] And what that means is track 17 sector. One is really located here at position X. And then if you right track 17 sector one, again, it's really located at a completely different position. Y so that the right now get leveled across the entire division. Okay. You don't really have to understand that in great detail, but I know there's a few of you guys being the best and brightest that really want to understand that a little bit better.

[00:05:05] So that's why certain flash memory, certain SSDs are more expensive than others. Now here's the problem. When we're talking about these smart home devices, they're using this type of memory and NAND flash memory has a problem in Ohio has a few problems, but the biggest problem is it's not terribly reliable.

[00:05:30] Especially the type of Nan flash they use in these inexpensive devices. So it's not terribly reliable. So it builds in check sums, right? So those out at the same time, so that when a treat him back, he can say, whoa, wait a minute. This is block is bad. And then it can recreate the block on that flash memory, which is really great.

[00:05:52] Now, when you erase your device, It doesn't really, excuse me. When you reset your device, it doesn't really erase your device. I want you to think of windows as an example. You might know that if you delete a file from your windows computer, it's not actually deleted. It's actually still there. It just reallocates the space that file was using.

[00:06:18] So it can use it for yet. Another file. So you you delete something it's still there. So when you're getting rid of that computer, what you used to do with a spinning hard disk is you would run multiple rights on that desk, solving entire desk. You'd drive zeros, you'd write ones, you'd write random patterns and you'd be.

[00:06:43] And there are fancier ways to do it, the government, and it, many of the government contractors actually shred the desks. They have shredding machines, you can feed a whole computer into these things are just amazing. And then they send it off for recycling. What we do is we remove the platters inside the desk, the aluminum platters, and we melt them down in a furnace that we.

[00:07:10] I still had furnace. Now there's nothing readable on it. Cause all comes out as a big blob of aluminum. One word. Resetting your device just like deleting a file on your windows. Computer does not actually remove it. And nowadays we're reusing this leveling technology in these SSDs and NAND chips.

[00:07:34] We are really not getting rid of it. It might not be rewritten for a very long time. Because again of the leveling technology. So there's another process you can do known as off chip, which will require you to completely just assemble a desalt or the flash memory, and then mess around with it a little bit more.

[00:07:57] But here's the problem. Even though the listener said that he had reset factory reset his device before he sold it. It still had all of his information on the device. So all of the bad guys had to do is remove those chips and. And right inside, there was his Amazon account information, password, everything, it needed, the key to make orders with Amazon.

[00:08:29] Now that is a problem. If you ask me and it isn't just Amazon, this isn't just echo devices. We're talking about. The same thing can be true for that smart thermostat that you bought that Google thermostat, that smart. Doorbell that you have on the front of your house, though, those all contain this type of memory.

[00:08:51] So what I tend to do is take a hammer to. If you don't have a, what do you call it now where you can melt it down a furnace where you can melt them down, specifically designed for doing this type of thing. Then here's what I advise you to do. Get a drill with L fairly large bit. You want at least a three-quarter inch metal bit that you can put on to that drill.

[00:09:16] I used to use a drill press that we have and drill three. Large holes into the platter. So you don't have to open up the disc drive at all, but you'll notice there's a round section of the drive. That's where you want to drill into that round section of the drive, three big holes. And that disc is for all intents and purposes unrecoverable.

[00:09:40] So the bad guys can't get your bank information. They ha they can't get it. That spreadsheet that you have with all your passwords, you not in person Best and brightest come on guys. And they can't get anything off of that. So when I'm talking about IOT devices, what do we do? What do we do?

[00:09:59]Basically, I would say don't sell them. They're cheap enough. You can get an accurate. For well, under 50 bucks, 80 bucks at the high end for the ones with the video and everything built into them. When you're done with it personally, I would destroy it, physically destroy it. Cause that's the only way to make sure your data is not going to be.

[00:10:25] Hey, stick around. You're listening to Craig Peter son. Make sure you get my newsletter. The free one is at CraigPeterson.com/subscribe.

FBI Using a "Honeypot" for a Massive Sting Operation & Olympic Cybersecurity

This time, the FBI didn't just set up a sting, they set up a honeypot. And I talked about it with Mr. Matt Gagnon coming right up. Along with a couple of other major points this week, including what has been happening with the Olympics and cybersecurity. So here we go.

[00:00:22] Matt Gagnon: Craig. Let's get into some of these topics, if you can.

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with some folks about tech policy what's been going on censorship, et cetera. It's obviously a pretty common topic when you talk to especially conservative minded folk they're pretty upset about what's going on there there. And one of the, one of the people I was talking to who said to me that that's, somebody must have dimed them out that they had a Facebook post that was blocked because Facebook.

[00:00:48] Was maybe notified that they did something and it was pulled down here that does that brings to mind this story about the, do you know an extremist prompt at Facebook? Are they testing something like that where you basically are diming out your neighbors and seeing stuff. And then all of a sudden you're reporting to the authorities at Facebook, that somebody has a opinion that is just not okay.

[00:01:08] Craig Peterson: [00:01:08] Yeah, this, where could this possibly lead? This is a crazy, they are doing that. Facebook has admitted it and you know what shocked me the most about this isn't that? Hey, the two known extremist, or are you an extremist? And the Alicia. People C N until you reported on this, which just shocked talk to me, frankly, but they say this is part of a, what they're calling a redirect initiative.

[00:01:35] So if you're looking at for something, they'll send you somewhere else. If they don't think what you're looking for is appropriate. And then they're asking you, are you an extreme Mister? True. Oh my gosh. People don't you read history? Where is this going to take us? I don't

[00:01:54] Matt Gagnon: [00:01:54] know. It's a good question, Craig.

[00:01:56]Clearly this is part of the evolving narrative here of exactly how social media companies are trying to moderate content and deal with their perception of what extremism is and whatnot. I, to me though, I have this question, maybe you can answer it. Is a market, just not at play here. With Facebook, continuing to do things like this and alienating like half the country, ha and beyond our country, right?

[00:02:21] I This is happening all over the world, right? Is there not a market for a company that doesn't do things like this, that doesn't moderate it's its content like that? Can we not have something out there? That clearly, takes out violent content and real threats and just like sick, disgusting racism or whatever, but more or less is a free speech zone.

[00:02:39] Otherwise you're telling me that couldn't survive. In today's world. What's wrong with that? Why can't it happen? Where's the market.

[00:02:46] Craig Peterson: [00:02:46] If you're going to survive something like that as a startup, you need, first of all, the seed information, you need people to start signing up and you need money coming in.

[00:02:56] And Facebook is doing everything that can anybody that's a startup that looks promising, whether it's WhatsApp or Instagram, they will be purchased. They'll be bought out. Now, these guys might be saying I'm going to have a free speech platform. It's going to be absolutely fantastic. We know what's happened with a couple of those already, but what Facebook does is they come along and say your company is worth about $50 million.

[00:03:23] How about, I give you a billion for it and wildly over overvalued. Then Microsoft does much the same thing with potential competitors and drives them out of business or buys them out of business. So the Facebook is in a very interesting spot. Plus then there's the whole section two 10. And w you can shoo newspaper out of existence, but if a newspaper publishes a story and that story is not factually accurate, they go out of business.

[00:03:55] So newspaper takes some time, tries to do some investigation, gets multiple sources to confirm, and then publishes in story. Facebook doesn't have to worry about any of that stuff. So why are they doing this in the first place? And they are wildly profitable to the terms of hundreds of billions of dollars.

[00:04:14] And they just don't care. They have what they have morals, is what they called. And they're saying we cannot allow this to happen. And they are leading the country down the Primrose path. Although the numbers seem to be showing a lot of people ditching Facebook, and there are some other platforms that are trying to get charted, trying to go.

[00:04:39] But it just isn't happening there. This is not a free market system and we don't have one in this country. We haven't had full free markets for over a hundred years now, entirely regulated. They pick the winners and specifically the government has picked Facebook and Google is to have those winners by providing them with legal cover.

[00:05:02] I think we've got to pull back the kimono and looked at what's really happening.

[00:05:07] Matt Gagnon: [00:05:07] Greg Peters on joining us as he always does on Wednesdays at this time, talking over tech topics, Craig, one of the other things that's happening in the world soon here is the Olympics. I've been watching a lot of Olympic trials, a lot of things on TV as we prepare for this, I'm an Olympics nerd.

[00:05:22] So I love this stuff and there's obviously a lot of competition at the Olympics, but there's a different darker background of competition out there. And it's the cybersecurity experts trying to protect the infrastructure at the Olympics. Again. The bad guys, as you might say. And how does that play out?

[00:05:36] Because this is, nobody's really reporting on it. Nobody talks about this much, but this is a really big part of this gigantic event.

[00:05:42]Craig Peterson: [00:05:42] Think about what's happening in Japan right now. They are having these Olympic kind of, trials things. If you will, where we're losing. Four out of five of the basketball games.

[00:05:53] I can't believe that part, but here's the bottom line. No rule be no spectators. Everyone in the world. That's interested in seeing the Olympics have to watch it online. Somehow all of the major news networks are getting their feeds and a lot of that going over the internet. There's a lot of exposure. We have all of the people who are competing, who are using special apps who have special electronic controls.

[00:06:22] We had a huge problem last time around in 2018 with the Olympic winter Olympics, because there were some cybercriminals that managed to bring the whole thing down. So we are really on our toes worldwide. Now, including here in the U S what a target. It's a beautiful place for the bad guys to go make a name for themselves, ransom, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:06:46] So there are whole teams. I've got a little bit of insight information here, but there's whole teams of people around the world that are monitoring. What's going on, are looking into everything that looks like they're being probed. Everyone. So 10 show hat. They are really staying on top of it. And these teams, Matt are some of the best in the world or teams I've worked with before.

[00:07:11] So knock on wood. It'll be okay. But the Olympics, they are a huge hacking targets.

[00:07:16]Matt Gagnon: [00:07:16] Finally, I want to also ask you about speaking of the bad guys and trying to take them on here. There's ways of trapping them and the FBI created an interesting one here. Google pixel is involved in this very interesting story here.

[00:07:26]Did they use a honeypot to basically entice some of these people in and then trap them and then get them out of this work?

[00:07:36] Craig Peterson: [00:07:36] It's Winnie the Pooh is such his head in there. He got the stock. The FBI came up with a real interesting concept that is a bad guys. Want to be able to communicate privately?

[00:07:47] So they modified some pixels now and they did it in such a way that they turn off the cellular. They turn off, they remove cellular, they remove the GPS trackers, they removed a bunch of things. And then they sold these phones on the black market or out on the dark web saying, no, these phones are going to keep you safe because of this, that, and the other thing.

[00:08:12] And we've got a special operating system. They called these devices and arm and the bad guys started using, and they didn't really do any research talking to them and they were recommending it to each other. These hacker groups, these criminal organizations that were smuggling people, right? Kidnapping people was selling arms on the dark web, et cetera.

[00:08:35] They started using it for Nona miscommunications. What they didn't know. Is everything that was sent on these devices, everything that was done with them was sent to the FBI. So what some of us went to Interpol and others. So the concept is great. Let's turn off the cell. Let's turn off the GPS that's to remove them from the device.

[00:08:58] The problem was they didn't know good law enforcement. Was in fact monitoring everything that was being said there more than 12,000 smartphones like this that were out in circulation and heavy use by the bad guys. And now you can buy one of your very own FBI monitored phones on eBay. People started to buy them because they are based on a Google pixel foray.

[00:09:22] Custom firmware in them, which is a bit of a problem. And they do have arcane OOS as well, but people are trying to figure out why can't I get my phone to work? I just bought on eBay, but they have been shutting down major criminal organizations worldwide. Because of this honey pot, they really got stuck.

[00:09:44] They got

[00:09:44] Matt Gagnon: [00:09:44] them. It makes it basically, it's a way of, it's a way of trying to learn from it and it works ultimately. So Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us on Wednesdays at this time. Unfortunately, Greg we're out of time, so we have to stop here, but again, you can hear them on Saturdays. Thanks a lot, Craig.

[00:09:57] And we will talk to you again. Next

[00:09:59] Craig Peterson: [00:09:59] week. All right. Take care. There's nothing that helps this show get out better than having you subscribe to the podcast. I appreciate you guys listening. I can't tell you how much, because it does help get the word out. And that's what I'm trying to do is help everybody understand what's going on.

[00:10:16] Please, whatever platform you're listening on. Go ahead and subscribe. And if you wouldn't mind, give me a five-star rating. And the 800 pound gorilla is still our friends over at apple iTunes. Believe it or not when it comes to the ratings of these different podcasts. So if you could go there the easy.

[00:10:38] Craig peterson.com/itunes. That'll automatically redirect you to my page on iTunes. Craig peterson.com/itunes. Oh, by the way, in case you didn't know, I'm also on YouTube now posting a lot of these podcasts as little videos. Yeah you'll see when you get there and that's at CraigPeterson.com/youtube.

[00:11:01] Take care everybody. Bye bye.

Facebook's Extremist Prompt Leads To... What to Do About Ransomware?

We got hacked again as a country and what's being done about it. What's the Biden administration doing? They sent us special Envoy over to Russia. Yeah, Senator former Senator John Kerry. But what's he talking about? The climate deal. This is hurting us badly here in the United States. It's hurting at least a third of our businesses every year.

Just this year alone. Ransomware payments have gone up threefold. It is incredible. What's happening and he's doing nothing about it. And then we, so we've got to talk about this Facebook protest prompt that they've come up with now. Hey, do you know someone. Might be an extremist or it might be, become an extremist.

Do you realize what's going to happen? If everybody's starts to reporting on everybody else? We already know that we've got these trolls out there that report people, that report posts just because they don't like the person. Now, what are we going to do? Start FBI investigations. Every time someone says someone is an extremist, just cause they don't like them.

What is an extremist? Anyways, we get into that. So here we go with Mr. Jim Polito.

[00:01:14]Jim Polito: Two things. I want to two things. I want to talk about one the weak and feckless response of Joe Biden to the latest hack by the Russians. But before we get into that, So Facebook really was asking you to rat out your neighbors like 1984, like George Orwell's, 1984, Facebook.

[00:01:39] Admitted that they were asking people to identify extremists using the social media website.

[00:01:47] Craig Peterson: [00:01:47] Yeah, they did. And you know what, Jim, this is shocking to me. We've looked at Google before and compared it to duck, duck go, and how Google just doesn't, it blocks things. CNN has been one of those similar, I don't even want to call it a news source.

[00:02:02] But even CNN business reported this, but some Facebook users here in the us were getting prompts. If they were worried about someone that they might know might be coming an extremist. This is shocking to me. Absolutely shocked. And show them my wife likes to watch the good fight where, which is these are the lawyers.

[00:02:28] And they tend to be very leftist. The latest episode, season five, episode three, she called me in, and then I had to look at this. They were dealing. This situation where we have now people reporting on other people and because someone who might've done something, and maybe you help them out a bit at one point in your life, all of a sudden the FBI is in your life to try to figure out what's happening.

[00:02:54] They are asking you now to report on other people. This is crazy what this is going to lead to. And yeah, Facebook's doing it. And even CNN reporter.

[00:03:05] Jim Polito: [00:03:05] Wow. We're talking with tech talk guru, Craig Peterson. So because people sent me screen grabs of it and things like that, that they were being asked if they knew I knew an extremist, and please define extra what's the definition of extremist.

[00:03:22]I just talked about Joe Biden and the DNC, wanting to team up with a phone carrier. To monitor and correct anti-vaccination messages. Did you hear this one? I'm sure you did actually. I'll send it to you. I'll send it to you. This is it was from political. And that's why it wasn't from a Craig Peterson type website.

[00:03:46] It was from Politico was Fred was running the websites. It dumb people like myself read. Okay. But anyway, Politico said that the DNC, the the Biden administration they want to scrutinize phone and social media messages for misinformation. And they're asking what do they call them? SMS short message service carriers.

[00:04:13] They want them to they wanna have fact-checkers more aggressively work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines. That's a quite, that's quite a little propaganda outfit you got going there. Remember

[00:04:28] Craig Peterson: [00:04:28] if you're sending a text message, that message is stored. Remember a Strzok and Paige, right?

[00:04:34] The whole thing with the FBI lovers and their text messages showing up. If you're using your apple phone. And you're using messages to send messages to other apple users. If it's blue, it means it's encrypted end to end and they cannot monitor. They cannot report to. If it's green, which is an unfortunate choice of colors, that means it's sending it by this old protocol.

[00:04:58] That was actually a hack of, for the cell phone industry. It's a green means it's in the clear, but the fact Tim there, they're going to monitor that. And then what are they going to do? Start prying into your life and everybody, it's. Wow.

[00:05:15] Jim Polito: [00:05:15] Yeah. This is not good between that, the messages, all of this I'm fine with.

[00:05:20]If the administration wants to get their message out there about vaccinations and this and that's fine but don't do it. Don't do it the way you're doing it. That's Orwellian truly is our Wellington.

[00:05:33]Craig Peterson: [00:05:33] It's. It sets things up. For, if let's say you love Biden and we've got the all have the stab of then okay, fine.

[00:05:44] What's so what happens if another Trump it's an, that you absolutely hate you want the next administration or the one after that to have this kind of information?

[00:05:53] Jim Polito: [00:05:53] I don't. Yeah. I know. All right, let's get to, let's get to the latest with Vladimir Putin and with Joe Biden. I don't know if you saw the clip.

[00:06:03] I don't have it here handy. Joe Biden. The other day, someone asked him a reporter, asked him about the latest cyber attacks and he tried to pull a card from his pocket, said, oh, I just got briefed on that. He was all over the place. Didn't know what to say. I'll have more to say about it later. That's.

[00:06:21] Twofold one, it speaks to his cognitive ability, but two, it speaks to what is the response been from this government? He had the summit with him and said, here's 14 things. I don't want you to touch. And yet Putin turns around and touches

[00:06:37] Craig Peterson: [00:06:37] them. Yeah, he sure does. The response.

[00:06:42] And we, of course, Biden just sends an Envoy over to Russia meeting with Putin. John Barry, he's talking about climate change.

[00:06:55] He's

[00:06:55] not

[00:06:56] Jim Polito: [00:06:56] talking about cyber attacks. He's talking about climate change.

[00:07:02] Craig Peterson: [00:07:02] We, yeah. And we now have as many, I've seen numbers as high as a hundred thousand businesses that were part of this latest attack that came from Russia. This cyber attack, this ransomware. In fact, I know of a thousand businesses that got together and they hired an attorney in order to try and negotiate.

[00:07:26] This is an attorney that negotiates with ransomwares right. We started the United States Navy to deal with ransoms coming in, out of the middle. Yeah, 200 years ago, the Marine Corps and the Navy, this is in saying what is happening. Trump of course put some pretty severe restrictions on Moscow in Russia to try and crack down on this.

[00:07:51] And we had to remember, again, the old Biden administration saying things like, oh, I told him to stop it right. We have to respond.

[00:08:06] Jim Polito: [00:08:06] I don't know. I'd like to think. Craig that there's some back channel stuff that your people, the guys like you understand and know about, and it's being done to slap him on the hand as the hand tries to reach over and grab again, I'd like to think that the really smart people on our side are doing that and send it the message without being public about it.

[00:08:29] Cause I would have not have a problem with that, but I don't even feel like I don't even feel like that's how. I don't even

[00:08:36] Craig Peterson: [00:08:36] feel like. We are a kind of slot them back at them. There, there aren't too many automated systems that'll do that. We're being hacked to hack back. The big problem with this is we're pretty darn insurers coming from Russia, but let's say that you're in the battle.

[00:08:55] And someone's shooting that too. First of all, someone shooting at you, where it's coming from inside of BAE systems has systems that are put onto our helicopters that notice exactly where the fire is coming from and return fire automatically. Okay. And wouldn't that be great. The problem is Jim that somebody hacked your home computer.

[00:09:17] It's now part of what's called a bot net. Somebody had somebody else's computer, same bot, and there may be a different one on and on. There are hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide that have been hacked. So the Russians go into a computer in Vancouver, BC, which is then connects to a computer in Vancouver, Washington that connects to Washington DC.

[00:09:38] And it took trying to hack. If you returned fire, you're going at somebody's home computer in Washington. And you get it. And then that home in Washington state, of course now let's say the FBI shows up and says, okay, something's coming from here. We've got to see your computer. They get on the computer.

[00:09:56]Guess what? It's now in Vancouver, BC, which is now an international problem. And who knows, maybe they went to China first. Maybe they went somewhere else. The only way we can do this is serious economic pressure. We have. Fight back that way, because this is the exact same type of thing that happens in a war with skirmishes going on.

[00:10:19] And they are winning by taking money. We're trying to negotiate with them right now and say, okay, we'll just pay you $70 million. If you unlock all of these computers, it's insanity. We keep doing the same.

[00:10:34] Jim Polito: [00:10:34] Over and over again, Craig I got to run. How can folks get more information from you? And I know that you talk about these things on the weekend show.

[00:10:42] Exactly.

[00:10:42] Craig Peterson: [00:10:42] Just visit Craig peterson.com. "Peterson", S O N.

[00:10:47] Jim Polito: [00:10:47] Craig and I guarantee you, I will celebrate Canada day next year. We won't let it. We won't let it be past Greg. Thanks so much for your time, buddy.

[00:10:56] Craig Peterson: [00:10:56] Thanks.

What Does the "Billionaire" Space Race Mean to You?

We have Sir Richard Branson up in space. The race of the billionaires, Jeff Bezos, of course being another one. What does this mean to us? Does this mean that space is solely for the rich? Is it going to help our businesses, our economy, what's behind all of this, and where are we going? That's exactly what I discussed this morning with Mr. Christopher Ryan. Let's find out how it's going to affect you and me.

[00:00:29] Chris Ryan: Yeah, Richard Branson is in the news day, Sir Richard Branson to you, Craig, as he reached the outer space and was able to bring individuals up there and do in your view, is this going to be a thing where commercial space travel is going to be something that we see and have access to. No average Americans.

[00:00:52] To me, I feel like it's taken decades for even this type of space flight to take place. And I feel we are still so far away from an average Joe, like you, or I will be able to afford to go into. The areas almost to outer space.

[00:01:12] Craig Peterson (2): [00:01:12] Yeah, the black-blue yonder, as it were. First of all, let's get something straight here. Sir Richard Branson made it almost into space, correct? They were 80 kilometers out. A hundred is generally considered. But where we're headed here is not really getting into space, which I think is totally cool. Where we're headed is being able to get up to those sorts of altitudes and then travel around the world.

[00:01:39] So we could see a trip from Boston to Tokyo taking just a few hours, rather than thinking the better part of a day.

[00:01:48] Chris Ryan: [00:01:48] Yeah. And very often, when we see these types of things, I mentioned this earlier, it leads to thoughts of what else is possible. And you may look at this and be like, oh, okay, it's these fancy-free billionaires trying to say they wanted outer space when they're actually, in the.

[00:02:04] Area between the black and the blue and achieving levels of weightlessness, et cetera. But the time that traveled took place and the propulsion of the flight indicates that higher speed. So travel is right around the corner. And to many, that may be as attractive as the actual joy ride aspect of it.

[00:02:25]You're going to be going at a great, at a greater speed. So some people that's not going to be what they want, maybe there'll be able to achieve elements within the aircraft in which people don't feel as though they're traveling at the speeds that they are certainly in this particular.

[00:02:40] A joy ride. That is exactly what they wanted. They want you to feel the propulsion. They want to feel the waitlist. They want all those elements. As we know, most commercial airline folks don't want to feel like they're dry; they're going 500 miles an hour. They want to feel.

[00:02:55] Relaxed during that.

[00:02:57] Craig Peterson: [00:02:57] And you have the problem of having the Sonic boom when you're lower in the atmosphere going those higher speeds you don't hear. But I think what we're ultimately looking at is as a whole change where our speeds really get into higher altitudes. And if we look at the history.

[00:03:15] In the tech business, we will remember when these flat-screen TVs, oh my gosh. 48 inches, only $15,000. And, of course, they'd never be achievable. We'd never be able to own those things, but people bought them. The people that had the money. Now you go to Walmart, and you can buy one of those for 150 bucks.

[00:03:35] That's where this is all going. All of these people competing with the billionaires in space. They are funding the research and development for the types of flights. You and I, Chris, will be able to afford it. It's not going to be as expensive as the Concord was. It's not going to be cheap, but it is going to provide real.

[00:03:57] And I think that's a fantastic thing. Yeah. Now

[00:04:00] Chris Ryan: [00:04:00] the 90 inch TV is something that is not out of the realm of possibility for individuals creating basically their own movie theaters to view sporting events, political shows, and movies, as they wish to in their home. And you're absolutely right. I The there, and as I mentioned before, this.

[00:04:16]Creates an environment where we start to think further about exploration and what is next; very often, people will look at the current state of technology and say this is where we're going to be. What more could we possibly do, but to scientists and inventors, it's always wondering what is next and what is possible, looking at the optimal, and figuring out a path to get here.

[00:04:42] Yeah.

[00:04:42] Craig Peterson: [00:04:42] And w where we're looking right now, NASA is working on this as are others, is having a space station in orbit that is designed for refueling and trips. So if a Virgin can get you up into lower space as work or one of these others, and then from there now you get onto another ship to go to Mars, or maybe the moon colony.

[00:05:06] The biggest problem we have in the largest expenditure of fuel is getting to. So point that at that edge. So we're going to be able to see tourism in space that normal people could afford. And that's going to allow us to colonize other planets, which of course, has been a wish of Elon Musk and many others for generations.

[00:05:28]What happens if we have another catastrophic event here that we. With the dinosaurs that wipes out everything, we're gone, but this is really the next step. And it's absolutely amazing. I'm so excited about what's ahead.

[00:05:46] Chris Ryan: [00:05:46] Do you think we are from that? Cause you mentioned this had been the talk of generations now at this point and decade after decade, even this type of space travel to lower space has been talked about.

[00:05:57] And two commercial flights have been talked about for decades. At this point, I feel like we're still really far away from anything of that nature taking place. And I'd be surprised to see colonization until the latter portion of my lifetime.

[00:06:13] Craig Peterson: [00:06:13] Yeah, you're probably right about that. However, as far as the moon goes, I think we will see.

[00:06:20] Stop starting, but it's not going to be your regular person. As you had mentioned, it's going to be the scientist. It's going to be the real explorers who are going there. But the original plan for the moon launch in the sixties was to have a refueling station in orbit around them. And that's been in the back of everybody's mind for a long time.

[00:06:38] I think that within the next 20 years, we will have that station up in space. That is the halfway point of here. That you can go to, and from there, continue onto the moon. And Elon Musk is really into Mars. And I don't know; he might just jump past everybody else who was there. There's a massive rocket that he's building to truly colonize Mars.

[00:07:03] He's thinking he's going to be doing this. You ask him, and it's within the next year or two, but the scientists are saying within the next five years, So we might be surprised because technology can jump just like

[00:07:15] Chris Ryan: [00:07:15] that. Yeah. Then, in conclusion, I think that this goes to a broader message about where we are at as Americans.

[00:07:24] And we spend all this time fighting over the political scraps instead of having a vision. Towards the future and the things that we can achieve together as Americans and whether it's a disease, whether it's expiration underwater into outer space the new inventions like we need to get back to a place where we're not focused on the little things that divide us as human beings but focused on what we want to achieve and talking about that.

[00:07:54] And not. Figuring out which Mame is the best to mock Trump or Biden, but to focus upon our society's mutual and shared goals. And to me, this type of stuff, that's talk about tech, the topic about inventions, the talk about what we could do, what we could optimize, optimize moving forward.

[00:08:14] That needs to be at the forefront. And that's what people are looking for in politicians too. They want somebody that's going to say; this is what we want to do. This is what we're going to do. And this is how we're going. I think we've

[00:08:25] Craig Peterson: [00:08:25] got to move towards looking to that future. Being excited about it rather than having the parties digging up.

[00:08:32] Tribalism.

[00:08:33] Chris Ryan: [00:08:33] I agree that Craig has always thank you so much. Take care. Craig Peterson host of tech talk on news radio six, 10 and 96, 7 Saturday and Sundays at 1130.