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

Good morning everybody! 

I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon. I went into a little detail about what a Zero Trust Security Model is and how it differs from a traditional network design and why you should be considering this type of system.  Then we discussed the future of computing and why Chromebooks are so popular. Here we go with Matt.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Morning, Craig Peterson here. 

Hey, if you've ever wondered about Chromebooks and if you should get one, talked with Matt about that. Matt Gagnon, of course, I'm on every Wednesday morning with him. Also zero trust. Why is the national security agency pushing a whole new way of thinking? When we're talking about our computers. So here we go. 

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:26] Seven 36 WGAN morning news on a Wednesday morning. That means it's time to talk to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. You hear him on this very station on Saturdays at one o'clock to hear more depth of detail about these very stories we'll be talking to him about right now. Craig, how are you this morning, sir?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:41] Hey, I am doing really quite well. I'm looking forward to spring. It's been actually a nice winter. 

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:48] What are you doing, man? You're tomorrow, there's going to be some sort of blizzard because you just said that you are now tempting fate. I already had to walk outside yesterday.

 I got gas in my car. Sadly, I had to, I had no choice. The wind hurt my face. Okay. That happened yesterday, 

Craig Peterson: [00:01:03] We were outside pouring diesel into our generator because there was no power and it was really cold. 

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:10] It really was. It was frozen. Terrible. I was actually reminded of my old college days. March in from the perimeter parking lot and the wind and the cold just beating me to death on my way in. It was not good yesterday. 

Craig Peterson: [00:01:24] I keep reminding people where that comes from. It comes from Russia. They blow it over the North pole in order to destroy our economy. 

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:31] Yes, they do. And there's so many things that those Russians do, those pesky Russians.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:34] Canada gets caught in the cross hairs. It's just not fair to them, 

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:38] You might say, Craig, that I have zero trust in Russia. See where I'm going with this one. Could you tell me what a zero-trust security model is and why it perhaps should be something that people embrace? 

Craig Peterson: [00:01:50] This is a concept that's relatively new, at least to most people. The whole idea behind it is we have. To assume in this day and age that our systems have already been compromised. Not just that they might get compromised, but they have.

So when we're setting up networks for businesses, we look at things in a much different way. It's no longer about the perimeter. Trying to keep people out. The NSA, the national security agency, used to call it no such agency. The NSA has come out with a warning to be bold and also a description of what to do.

 The idea is you've got things inside your network. You've got a printer, that's connected to the network. You've got laptops, desktops, a server. None of them should be able to talk to anything else on the network that it doesn't absolutely need to talk to. It's like the lowest privilege type thing.

So for instance what I do on my office network is the printers are on a completely different network that is firewalled from the servers, which are firewalled from the desktop which are firewalled from the laptops.  The printers can not get to anything else on the network unless first someone's trying to send them a print job. It's just an example of it. You don't want the laptops to be able to scan. 

We have a customer who just this week, he has a little SonicWall firewall and SonicWall's are okay, but he hasn't been updating it for three years. It hasn't been supported in years either. That little SonicWall firewall was then used to get into his network and start spreading. It got around the firewall because he was using it for a VPN controller.  Then it started crawling all the way through this network and playing all kinds of havoc, internally. Again. If that firewall couldn't have gotten to a machine and then that machine starts probing everything else, it couldn't have spread.

In other words, the zero-trust only allows machines to talk to each other that absolutely need to talk to each other and only using the protocols that they're supposed to.  I've seen many times, which is the sales guy is tinkering around and is getting into the accounting data.  Why are you doing that? They should not be allowed to, so that's the bottom line. 

This is a real big deal. We've got to start building our networks with the assumption that they have already been compromised. How are we going to control it? If it's compromised? 

Matt Gagnon: [00:04:34] Craig Peterson tech guru joins us at this time on Wednesdays going over to the world of technology.

Another interesting story that I saw here this morning, Craig, was that Chromebooks apparently outsold Macs worldwide in 2020. That's something that surprised me a little bit here. I didn't realize that the market penetration, if you will, of the Chromebook, was that deep, but apparently, it is. What does this mean for the industry?

Craig Peterson: [00:04:54] Yeah, it's interesting because you're talking about it surpassing the Mac and it sounds like maybe Chromebooks are leaning into Apple. In fact, these things are very lightweight computers. They're typically a tablet, maybe a laptop and they're running an operating system that comes from our friends at Google called Chrome OS.

It is really designed for being online, although you can store files locally. Where it's been eating into is people that have been running Windows for years. Those Windows machines have been getting more and more expensive. Intel is just not keeping up with everything, particularly from the price standpoint. Putting a chip into Chromebook that is a non-Intel chip.  It is way cheaper than Intel, we're talking to 10th or less of the price allows them to make these devices very inexpensive. You can go to a big-box retailer. You can get a little Chromebook device for 150 bucks at the low end. Now you've got a computer that can go online, get edit word documents, or spreadsheets, whatever you might want to do. Can talk to the grandkids or get on a business call, all right there from the Chromebook. 

 It is hurting the Wintel monopoly, which is the Windows-Intel, a monopoly, if you will, that has been around for so long.  It's a direction that Apple is following the Apple's computers will all be using non-Intel chips within the next two years, all of them. They already have computers out with these new chipsets. 

That's the bottom line, they really have gained some significant market share. People love them. I've got also mentioned here, not just regular people security researchers love the Chromebooks. They are very secure, but remember, we're talking about Google, their business is selling your information. They're not going to sell your files, but they're going to keep track of you.

The other big driver of the Chromebook sales is schools because now we have so many kids at home going to school, the school says, Hey, you got to buy a $300 Chromebook for your kid for school. That's much easier to swallow than a thousand-dollar Mac or a $700 Windows laptop.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning, everybody.

I was on this morning on WTAG with Jim Polito. We discussed his newest foray into the social media platform, TikTok, and some of the problems with using TikTok. Then we got into a question from one of his callers about Home Title Lock. Here we go with Jim.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Good morning, Craig on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning. He made his first TikTok videos just this week. Then he gets an email for me talking about some of the privacy issues now. Still with TikTok. Yes, they were not sold. We did double-check. We also took a few minutes to talk about a home title lock because he had a caller asking some questions. So here we go with Mr. Jim Polito.

Jim Polito: [00:00:28] I mentioned earlier that I published on TikTok for the first time. Look I'm not a kid. I'm on TikTok, the social media platform just because I wanted to register my name. I always like to get Jim Polito on every new social media one, so if I ever use it. I did it with Instagram a long time ago, when just the kids were on the gram and now I am a Jim Pollito on the gram at Jim Polito.

So I published a couple of videos. Now it's not me dancing. Now. I'm having second thoughts because our good friend tech talk guru, Craig Peterson says there's some issues with TikTok again, even though it's not owned by the Chinese. He joins us now.

Good morning, Craig.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:13] Hey, I thought the Chinese owned everything everywhere.

Jim Polito: [00:01:17] They do basically. You're absolutely right. They basically do own everything. But they don't own right. They don't own TikTok anymore. There was that big bidding war in the company. What's the name that, that nobody knew or that everybody thought was washed up?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:34] Yeah. There was a whole bunch of people. You had Microsoft on in with Oracle. They thought, okay, that's what's going to happen. I actually don't think that they sold it. It all got stopped when the Biden administration went in.

Jim Polito: [00:01:49] Listen, you would know better than it's still owned. Yeah. That they're trying to sell it to Oracle and Walmart, but it hasn't been sold yet. Oh, great. So the Chinese know what I'm doing.

So I published two videos on TikTok, and actually, they were funny what? No, they're not dance videos. Nobody needs to see that. They're not dance videos. They're funny little videos that I made in Boston the weekend before last. They're they're cute. They're funny. They're about the founding fathers. If you want to see them, they're funny. I think they're funny, but anyway, what's going on with TikTok.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:29] TikTok is a kind of newcomer. Of course, they've been around a while. There've been a lot of complaints about TikTok because it has been routing data to China, including location data. Remember, that's all part of the pictures and videos that we take.

It's amazing when you get right down to it. For instance, the number one manufacturer of these little drones with cameras on them that fly around is also Chinese-based. Apparently has also been sending stuff back. So we're giving them a very good map of the United States everything everywhere it is, which is scary.

We've got some consumer groups now complaining in the UK. We know under the Trump administration, they started looking into TikTok and found it lacking, if you will. There are complaints over there now about, okay, so people are making these videos. They're putting a lot of work in. Most videos, don't go viral. Most people don't have a real platform on it. Then some do go viral. If you look at the fine print of what TikTok has you click through, one of these groups. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with your terms, whatever the heck. They were, cause I didn't bother reading them. It says that you are giving TikTok an irrevocable right to use, distribute and reproduce the videos that you are publishing without any remuneration. So unlike YouTube, right? YouTube, if you're doing pretty well, they'll start paying you.

Then if you look at TikTok, even though there's some old guys on TikTok, It's largely kids who are using it. When we're talking about kids, of course, we're talking about under 18. They haven't reached the age of majority. In the US, and also the European Union, there are special rules for those younger adults. They cannot publish some of these things without the parents getting involved and unfortunately, parents haven't been getting involved. TikTok has no real policies on it. I expect that they will really come under some serious scrutiny.

Jim Polito: [00:04:44] We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. Here's the thing when a kid signs up for it, that's a contract, but if you sign a contract and you're under 18, it's generally not enforceable.

Then the second part of this is the Europeans are saying, you're allowing these kids access to inappropriate material. You're not doing a good enough job policing yourselves like Danny and I was talking during the break. How a group he was part of, a relatively benign group on Facebook got, as he said, Zucked, as in Zuckerberg, got caught because they didn't like what was going on there, which maybe Facebook is policing a little too much.

Whereas on the other end of the spectrum, TikTok is allowing kids access to this stuff that they shouldn't have access to.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:37] Then, of course, the videos, in this case, they're being uploaded. TikTok has a policy that users must be 13 years of age or older in order to join. Okay. There seems to be very little if any enforcement of it and that's where we're really starting to get concerned.

We're working to try and protect our kids and then things like this come along and it's concerning. Also, they don't have some of the defaults that other social media platforms have. So for instance, if the kid admits that they're 15 when they're signing up for TikTok, it does not automatically make that account private by default, which makes a whole lot of sense.

There's a lot of things we did as kids and as adults that we don't want to have following us around for the rest of our lives. This is exactly what could be happening.

Jim Polito: [00:06:31] Yeah. Not good. All right let's move on to something else. I want to ask you about this because a listener called about it.

We have LifeLock and all these services that say they will monitor for you. You have explained to us, Hey, look, you can go to the three major credit reporting bureaus. Turn off your credit and only turn it on when you want to use it. That's one way to protect yourself. That's inexpensive and you don't have to pay one of these companies. The question was brought up about a title for your home for your property. Now there were those services out there saying, we'll protect your title because people can steal your title, go out and get a mortgage, a second mortgage on that property and then disappear. All of a sudden you're saying, wait a minute. I know I didn't take out that mortgage. But my understanding was that all those agencies do is try to prevent that from happening. Ultimately if your title is stolen, are you're not going to be responsible for that loan, correct?

Craig Peterson: [00:07:33] You're going to have to do a little bit of fighting, but it's a rare occurrence that people's home titles are stolen. It certainly can happen. Frankly, it's a waste of money. They're probably a sponsor of the show.

Jim Polito: [00:07:46] No, I've heard the ads. I think Bill O'Reilly, he does his own stuff now. He does an endorsement for them and I certainly don't want to tell somebody wants extra protection or whatever. As you said, you're going to be protected. All it's saving you from is some work.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:02] You said that earlier, too, the caller as well, Jim.

What it is it's insurance. Insurance does not stop the tree from falling on your house. Insurance, once you have it, of course, it can help repair the damage caused. That's what most of the LifeLock types are in the world. These home lock companies are doing is making it so if the event, it's very rare when it comes to title lock, if that event happens, they help cover you.

There's another angle on this and that is most homeowners insurance policies have a rider on them that if your identity is stolen, then they start using your credit or if your home title is stolen, they will pay for all of the cleanups. That's just part of the normal home policy. So you might want to have a look at your home policy.

Then one other thing is specifically when we're talking about home title lock, and that is the caller was saying, Hey, the County used to let us know, cause you remember what happens is you buy a home all the paperwork is filed with the County. What happens when someone steals your home title. Typically, they file something called a quick claim deed. They basically say I just bought the house and here's his signature or her signature right here in the document then they file it with County. What the counties can do when you have to contact them is most of them have a system where you can register for notification on activity. They may not be doing it automatically, anymore. Double-check with the County and they will then notify you.

There's often a little charge it's not much. They'll notify you if there is any activity occurring on your title. So it makes sense. Our home is our biggest investment for many of us that's what we're hoping to use for retirement.

Jim Polito: [00:09:56] Wow. Interesting. Very interesting. Now, as usual. Folks, Craig Peterson's here every week, but that doesn't mean that you can't interact with the tech talk guru during the week.

How do people do that? Craig?

Craig Peterson: [00:10:12] Oh, we get a lot of people just send an email to me, [email protected]. I answer every one. It might take me a couple of days, but I answer every one of the emails. You should be on my email list. So you get the newsletters, the show notes, little bits of training that I do. Find out about courses that you need to know, and that you can find that my website @craigpeterson.com, craigpeterson.com

Jim Polito: [00:10:36] There you go.

Craig. Thanks so much for your time, buddy. We'll catch up with you next week.

Craig Peterson: [00:10:42] Take care, Jim.

Jim Polito: [00:10:42] You too. See a wealth of information there.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning, everybody.

I was on this morning on WTAG with Jim Polito.   We discussed his newest foray into the social media platform, TikTok, and some of the problems with using TikTok.  Then we got into a question from one of his callers about Home Title Lock. Here we go with Jim.

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

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Good morning, Craig on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning. He made his first TikTok videos just this week. Then he gets an email for me talking about some of the privacy issues now. Still with TikTok. Yes, they were not sold. We did double-check. We also took a few minutes to talk about a home title lock because he had a caller asking some questions. So here we go with Mr. Jim Polito. 

Jim Polito: [00:00:28] I mentioned earlier that I published on TikTok for the first time. Look I'm not a kid. I'm on TikTok, the social media platform just because I wanted to register my name. I always like to get Jim Polito on every new social media one, so if I ever use it. I did it with Instagram a long time ago, when just the kids were on the gram and now I am a Jim Pollito on the gram at Jim Polito.

So I published a couple of videos. Now it's not me dancing. Now. I'm having second thoughts because our good friend tech talk guru, Craig Peterson says there's some issues with TikTok again, even though it's not owned by the Chinese. He joins us now. 

Good morning, Craig. 

Craig Peterson: [00:01:13] Hey, I thought the Chinese owned everything everywhere.

Jim Polito: [00:01:17] They do basically. You're absolutely right. They basically do own everything. But they don't own right. They don't own TikTok anymore. There was that big bidding war in the company. What's the name that, that nobody knew or that everybody thought was washed up? 

Craig Peterson: [00:01:34] Yeah. There was a whole bunch of people. You had Microsoft on in with Oracle. They thought, okay, that's what's going to happen. I actually don't think that they sold it. It all got stopped when the Biden administration went in. 

Jim Polito: [00:01:49] Listen, you would know better than it's still owned. Yeah. That they're trying to sell it to Oracle and Walmart, but it hasn't been sold yet. Oh, great. So the Chinese know what I'm doing.

So I published two videos on TikTok, and actually, they were funny what? No, they're not dance videos. Nobody needs to see that.  They're not dance videos. They're funny little videos that I made in Boston the weekend before last. They're they're cute. They're funny. They're about the founding fathers. If you want to see them, they're funny. I think they're funny, but anyway, what's going on with TikTok. 

Craig Peterson: [00:02:29] TikTok is a kind of newcomer. Of course, they've been around a while. There've been a lot of complaints about TikTok because it has been routing data to China, including location data. Remember, that's all part of the pictures and videos that we take. 

It's amazing when you get right down to it. For instance, the number one manufacturer of these little drones with cameras on them that fly around is also Chinese-based. Apparently has also been sending stuff back. So we're giving them a very good map of the United States everything everywhere it is, which is scary. 

We've got some consumer groups now complaining in the UK. We know under the Trump administration, they started looking into TikTok and found it lacking, if you will. There are complaints over there now about, okay, so people are making these videos. They're putting a lot of work in. Most videos, don't go viral. Most people don't have a real platform on it. Then some do go viral. If you look at the fine print of what TikTok has you click through, one of these groups. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with your terms, whatever the heck. They were, cause I didn't bother reading them. It says that you are giving TikTok an irrevocable right to use, distribute and reproduce the videos that you are publishing without any remuneration. So unlike YouTube, right? YouTube, if you're doing pretty well, they'll start paying you. 

Then if you look at TikTok, even though there's some old guys on TikTok, It's largely kids who are using it.  When we're talking about kids, of course, we're talking about under 18. They haven't reached the age of majority. In the US, and also the European Union, there are special rules for those younger adults. They cannot publish some of these things without the parents getting involved and unfortunately, parents haven't been getting involved. TikTok has no real policies on it.  I expect that they will really come under some serious scrutiny. 

Jim Polito: [00:04:44] We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. Here's the thing when a kid signs up for it, that's a contract, but if you sign a contract and you're under 18, it's generally not enforceable.

Then the second part of this is the Europeans are saying, you're allowing these kids access to inappropriate material. You're not doing a good enough job policing yourselves like Danny and I was talking during the break. How a group he was part of, a relatively benign group on Facebook got, as he said, Zucked, as in Zuckerberg, got caught because they didn't like what was going on there, which maybe Facebook is policing a little too much. 

Whereas on the other end of the spectrum, TikTok is allowing kids access to this stuff that they shouldn't have access to. 

Craig Peterson: [00:05:37] Then, of course, the videos, in this case, they're being uploaded. TikTok has a policy that users must be 13 years of age or older in order to join. Okay. There seems to be very little if any enforcement of it and that's where we're really starting to get concerned.

We're working to try and protect our kids and then things like this come along and it's concerning. Also, they don't have some of the defaults that other social media platforms have. So for instance, if the kid admits that they're 15 when they're signing up for TikTok, it does not automatically make that account private by default, which makes a whole lot of sense.

There's a lot of things we did as kids and as adults that we don't want to have following us around for the rest of our lives. This is exactly what could be happening. 

Jim Polito: [00:06:31] Yeah. Not good. All right let's move on to something else. I want to ask you about this because a listener called about it.

We have LifeLock and all these services that say they will monitor for you. You have explained to us, Hey, look, you can go to the three major credit reporting bureaus. Turn off your credit and only turn it on when you want to use it. That's one way to protect yourself. That's inexpensive and you don't have to pay one of these companies. The question was brought up about a title for your home for your property. Now there were those services out there saying, we'll protect your title because people can steal your title, go out and get a mortgage, a second mortgage on that property and then disappear. All of a sudden you're saying, wait a minute. I know I didn't take out that mortgage. But my understanding was that all those agencies do is try to prevent that from happening. Ultimately if your title is stolen, are you're not going to be responsible for that loan, correct?

Craig Peterson: [00:07:33] You're going to have to do a little bit of fighting, but it's a rare occurrence that people's home titles are stolen. It certainly can happen. Frankly, it's a waste of money.  They're probably a sponsor of the show. 

Jim Polito: [00:07:46] No, I've heard the ads. I think Bill O'Reilly, he does his own stuff now. He does an endorsement for them and I certainly don't want to tell somebody wants extra protection or whatever. As you said, you're going to be protected. All it's saving you from is some work.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:02] You said that earlier, too, the caller as well, Jim. 

What it is it's insurance. Insurance does not stop the tree from falling on your house. Insurance, once you have it, of course, it can help repair the damage caused. That's what most of the LifeLock types are in the world. These home lock companies are doing is making it so if the event, it's very rare when it comes to title lock, if that event happens, they help cover you. 

There's another angle on this and that is most homeowners insurance policies have a rider on them that if your identity is stolen, then they start using your credit or if your home title is stolen, they will pay for all of the cleanups. That's just part of the normal home policy. So you might want to have a look at your home policy. 

Then one other thing is specifically when we're talking about home title lock, and that is the caller was saying, Hey, the County used to let us know, cause you remember what happens is you buy a home all the paperwork is filed with the County. What happens when someone steals your home title. Typically, they file something called a quick claim deed. They basically say I just bought the house and here's his signature or her signature right here in the document then they file it with County. What the counties can do when you have to contact them is most of them have a system where you can register for notification on activity. They may not be doing it automatically, anymore. Double-check with the County and they will then notify you.

There's often a little charge it's not much. They'll notify you if there is any activity occurring on your title. So it makes sense. Our home is our biggest investment for many of us that's what we're hoping to use for retirement. 

Jim Polito: [00:09:56] Wow. Interesting. Very interesting. Now, as usual. Folks, Craig Peterson's here every week, but that doesn't mean that you can't interact with the tech talk guru during the week.

How do people do that? Craig? 

Craig Peterson: [00:10:12] Oh, we get a lot of people just send an email to me, [email protected]. I answer every one. It might take me a couple of days, but I answer every one of the emails. You should be on my email list. So you get the newsletters, the show notes, little bits of training that I do. Find out about courses that you need to know, and that you can find that my website @craigpeterson.com, craigpeterson.com

Jim Polito: [00:10:36] There you go. 

Craig. Thanks so much for your time, buddy. We'll catch up with you next week. 

Craig Peterson: [00:10:42] Take care, Jim.

Jim Polito: [00:10:42] You too. See a wealth of information there.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome,

Craig Peterson here. This morning I was on with Chris Ryan on NH Today. He wanted to discuss what is the best technology to buy. We got into some details of the benefits and drawbacks of each. Here we go with Chris.

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit.

- CraigPeterson.com

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey, have you thought about whether you should get one of these Chromebooks, maybe Android tied into it, or a Mac or a Windows, computer laptop, or surface tablet or otherwise. That's exactly what I talked with Chris Ryan about this morning. So here we go with Chris. A little bit of insight on computers and the whole market behind it.

Chris Ryan: [00:00:23] I am Chris Ryan. Appreciate you joining us for the show. Craig Peterson joins us right now in the program. He hosts tech talk on Newsradio 610 and 96.7.

Craig Peterson: [00:00:32] Hey, good morning. Doing well.

Chris Ryan: [00:00:34] Good. Thanks for joining us for the show. I want to talk to you today about decision-making in regards to what tech to use. Whether it's a cell phone, whether it's a Chromebook versus a Mac and this off of a story from geek wire.com, which indicates that Chromebooks outsold macs worldwide in 2020. So in your view, why did that take place? How do you go about if you're a consumer differentiating using a Chromebook versus using a Mac versus using another type of tablet?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:09] Apple is moved to their own chips now really indicates what's going on in the marketplace.

Many years ago, there were just a few different chips that were competing manufacturers. Motorola was winning this game. IBM had their chips for the mainframes. Then along came this little startup, known as Microsoft and helped Apple out. In fact, in the very beginning and moved on from there to really focus in on one hardware platform and that's the Intel platform.

For years it was known as Wintel monopoly, meaning Windows and Intel. Those two were in lock step, went hand in hand. The default for people to buy was always Windows because that's what they knew. That's what they might've used at work. Although it might be a different version. So they just go ahead and use it at home.

Now we have options. Intel has been falling by the wayside for years. Even 64 bit chips, Intel lost the whole lead on that. AMD advanced micro devices beat them. So when we're looking at it, as a consumer, now we have more choices. We can decide that we want a simpler machine, a more secure machine and get something like a Chrome or web based tablet. This is an operating system that is designed for mobile devices.

We can get a chromo S based laptop, a desktop. There's even rumors that there's some more phones in the work. The Chrome OS will even run android and it's way cheaper because you don't have to use that expensive Intel chip, which is part of the reason Apple has decided to ditch Intel as well.

Now we're going to the real benefit of Unix machines. Unix has been around since the early seventies. It's what I've used in data centers and all big businesses use in data centers. The real benefit to Unix, Chris, is it will run on anything. So now you can go out for $150, buy a half decent little tablet or laptop using Chrome OSwhich of course is coming from Google.

Have that thing updated for you all the time, just automatically. It has all of the features on it you probably want, you can go online, obviously, you can edit document and it is cheap. Although, you can get more expensive ones. It's secure. Chrome OS is what many security researchers use. As you mentioned for the first time ever Chromebooks out sold Macs. That's a little misleading because it's not eating into Apple's market share. It's eating into Microsoft market share and along with that, of course, Intel.

Chris Ryan: [00:04:05] I want to ask you about. Where Google kind of caught up to to Mac. Most individuals purchased what the optimal item was the Apple phone. It was the different Apple products. That was pretty much seen as being the market's view of things.

Now, it seems that there's been a change and a lot of that has to do with, as you referenced, Google's technology and products and the alignment with Android and other types of phones. So at what point did Google get to the stage where they were on par with Mac, in your view, or perhaps surpassing it?

Craig Peterson: [00:04:38] There's really two different things here. The on-par right now, as far as sales go is in the Chrome OS side. When we're talking about phones it's a different thing. These smartphones smart devices. There are many more mobile, sometimes more android based smartphones out there, then there are I iPhones. The main reason for that has to do with price. Google made the operating system, the Android operating system, available effectively for free for any developer that wanted to use it

Chris Ryan: [00:05:13] The public perception is that the iPhone was the thing and kind of still is.

Has that changed at all? Or is the technology with obviously the Chrome OS different? Has the technology with Google caught up to where Apple is in the view of the public, and in actuality,

Craig Peterson: [00:05:28] In the view of the public, it's hard to. Say a lot of people you start using Windows, you say, you start using Android, you stick with it, et cetera.

That's a little hard to tell, but I can tell you what Google thinks, obviously, Google's beta right now for the Android operating system is trying to copy more and more features from Apple's iOS, which is their operating system for their smartphones.

Google thinks that Apple is still the market leader. They are still playing catch up. They are nowhere near, orders of magnitude, nowhere near Apple, when it comes to security. Android is far behind, still.

Justin McIssac: [00:06:06] When it comes to actual Chromebooks versus Macbooks. Do you think a lot of this on the sales side, Craig, is driven by schools? For my school system in Rochester, if they're looking at $300 Chromebooks versus a $1,700 Macbook for their students, no contest.

Craig Peterson: [00:06:19] Yeah, and that's absolutely true, Justin. The cost is something that a lot of people consider and it's a legitimate consideration. In the case of, should I get a cheap Windows machine or should I get a cheap Chromebook? The Chromebook is a much better option for most people. When you're talking about schools who have widely adopted the whole Chromebook and Chrome OS operating system. Schools, it's just a huge win. It's so much less expensive. It's much easier to tell Justin to buy a $300 Chromebook that the $1,800 Mac.

Where the Mac comes in useful, let's run through those three platforms really quickly. The Mac comes in useful when you want something secure, easy to use that can run bigger applications. If you have an app, like you're trying to do video editing, maybe more photo editing, you might want to use a Mac.

Windows is great, if the app that you need to use only runs on Windows. Or you only know Windows and you just don't want to bother learning an even simpler operating system. Then Chrome OOS is wonderful when you need primarily to go online. You're going to use a web browser. You need some simple applications. Maybe you want to edit some Word documents or Excel from time to time, nothing terribly fancy. That's where Chrome OS comes in. That's why it's been such a hit in schools, too.

Chris Ryan: [00:07:44] Well, Craig has always I appreciate you joining us for the show and we shall chat again soon.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:48] All right. Take care, Chris.

Chris Ryan: [00:07:49] All right. That is Craig Peterson joining us here on New Hampshire today. You can hear him on Saturday and Sunday on news radio 610 and 96.7 with tech talk. Always good to talk with him about what's taking place in the tech marketplace.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome,

Craig Peterson here.  This morning I was on with Chris Ryan on NH Today. He wanted to discuss what is the best technology to buy.  We got into some details of the benefits and drawbacks of each. Here we go with Chris. 

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit.

- CraigPeterson.com

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey, have you thought about whether you should get one of these Chromebooks, maybe Android tied into it, or a Mac or a Windows, computer laptop, or surface tablet or otherwise. That's exactly what I talked with Chris Ryan about this morning. So here we go with Chris. A little bit of insight on computers and the whole market behind it. 

Chris Ryan: [00:00:23] I am Chris Ryan. Appreciate you joining us for the show. Craig Peterson joins us right now in the program. He hosts tech talk on Newsradio 610 and 96.7. 

Craig Peterson: [00:00:32] Hey, good morning. Doing well. 

Chris Ryan: [00:00:34] Good. Thanks for  joining us for the show. I want to talk to you today about decision-making in regards to what tech to use. Whether it's a cell phone, whether it's a Chromebook versus a Mac and this off of a story from geek wire.com, which indicates that Chromebooks outsold macs worldwide in 2020. So in your view, why did that take place? How do you go about if you're a consumer differentiating using a Chromebook versus using a Mac versus using another type of tablet? 

Craig Peterson: [00:01:09] Apple is moved to their own chips now really indicates what's going on in the marketplace.

Many years ago, there were just a few different chips that were competing manufacturers. Motorola was winning this game. IBM had their chips for the mainframes. Then along came this little startup, known as Microsoft and helped Apple out. In fact, in the very beginning and moved on from there to really focus in on one hardware platform  and that's the Intel platform.

For years it was known as Wintel monopoly, meaning Windows and Intel. Those two were in lock step, went hand in hand. The default for people to buy was always Windows because that's what they knew. That's what they might've used at work. Although it might be a different version. So they just go ahead and use it at home.

Now we have options. Intel has been falling by the wayside for years. Even 64 bit chips, Intel lost the whole lead on that. AMD advanced micro devices beat them. So when we're looking at it, as a consumer, now we have more choices. We can decide that we want a simpler machine, a more secure machine and get something like a Chrome or web based tablet. This is an operating system that is designed for mobile devices. 

We can get a chromo S based laptop, a desktop. There's even rumors that there's some more phones in the work. The Chrome OS will even  run android and it's way cheaper because you don't have to use that expensive Intel chip, which is part of the reason Apple has decided to ditch Intel as well.

Now we're going to the real benefit of Unix machines. Unix has been around since the early seventies. It's what I've used in data centers and all big businesses use in data centers. The real benefit to Unix, Chris, is it will run on anything. So now you can go out for $150, buy a half decent little tablet or laptop using Chrome OSwhich of course is coming from Google.

Have that thing updated for you all the time, just automatically. It has all of the features on it you probably want, you can go online, obviously, you can edit document and it is cheap. Although, you can get more expensive ones. It's secure. Chrome OS is what many security researchers use. As you mentioned for the first time ever Chromebooks out sold Macs. That's a little misleading because it's not eating into Apple's market share. It's eating into Microsoft market share and along with that, of course, Intel.

Chris Ryan: [00:04:05] I want to ask you about. Where Google kind of caught up to to Mac. Most individuals purchased what the optimal item was the Apple phone.  It was the different Apple products. That was pretty much seen as being the market's view of things. 

Now, it seems that there's been a change and a lot of that has to do with, as you referenced, Google's technology and products and the alignment with Android and other types of phones. So at what point did Google get to the stage where they were on par with Mac, in your view, or perhaps surpassing it? 

Craig Peterson: [00:04:38] There's really two different things here. The on-par right now, as far as sales go is in the Chrome OS side. When we're talking about phones it's a different thing. These smartphones smart devices. There are many more mobile, sometimes more android based smartphones out there, then there are I iPhones. The main reason for that has to do with price. Google made the operating system, the Android operating system, available effectively for free for any developer that wanted to use it 

Chris Ryan: [00:05:13] The public perception is that the iPhone was the thing and kind of still is.

Has that changed at all? Or is the technology with obviously the Chrome OS different? Has the technology with Google caught up to where Apple is in the view of the public, and in actuality, 

Craig Peterson: [00:05:28] In the view of the public, it's hard to. Say a lot of people you start using Windows, you say, you start using Android, you stick with it, et cetera.

That's a little hard to tell, but I can tell you what Google thinks, obviously, Google's beta right now for the Android operating system is trying to copy more and more features from Apple's iOS, which is their operating system for their smartphones. 

Google thinks that Apple is still the market leader. They are still playing catch up. They are nowhere near, orders of magnitude, nowhere near Apple, when it comes to security. Android is far behind, still. 

Justin McIssac: [00:06:06] When it comes to actual Chromebooks versus Macbooks. Do you think a lot of this on the sales side, Craig, is driven by schools? For my school system in Rochester, if they're looking at $300 Chromebooks versus a $1,700 Macbook for their students, no contest.

Craig Peterson: [00:06:19] Yeah, and that's absolutely true, Justin. The cost is something that a lot of people consider and it's a legitimate consideration. In the case of, should I get a cheap Windows machine or should I get a cheap Chromebook? The Chromebook is a much better option for most people. When you're talking about schools who have widely adopted the whole Chromebook and Chrome OS operating system. Schools, it's just a huge win. It's so much less expensive. It's much easier to tell Justin to buy a $300 Chromebook that the $1,800 Mac.

Where the Mac comes in useful, let's run through those three platforms really quickly. The Mac comes in useful when you want something secure, easy to use that can run bigger applications. If you have an app, like you're trying to do video editing, maybe more photo editing, you might want to use a Mac.

Windows is great, if the app that you need to use only runs on Windows. Or you only know Windows and you just don't want to bother learning an even simpler operating system. Then Chrome OOS is wonderful when you need primarily to go online. You're going to use a web browser. You need some simple applications. Maybe you want to edit some Word documents or Excel from time to time, nothing terribly fancy. That's where Chrome OS comes in.   That's why it's been such a hit in schools, too. 

Chris Ryan: [00:07:44] Well, Craig has always I appreciate you joining us for the show and we shall chat again soon. 

Craig Peterson: [00:07:48] All right. Take care, Chris. 

Chris Ryan: [00:07:49] All right. That is Craig Peterson joining us here on New Hampshire today. You can hear him on Saturday and Sunday on news radio 610 and 96.7 with tech talk. Always good to talk with him about what's taking place in the tech marketplace.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

It was also another busy week on the technology front and we are going to delve into what actually caused the energy problems in Texas. There is a new type of malware that is affecting Macs and it is has a different MO. Then we are going to discuss Apple and their ventures into automated electric cars and what we can expect. Why are states having issues making appointments for vaccines? In a word, it is bureaucratic incompetence. Then we have a new type of hack out there. It is called Buy-to-Infect and there is more so be sure to Listen in.

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

---

Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read:

This Basic Math Shows How Wind Energy Failures Contributed To Texas's Deadly Power Loss

An Insider Explains Why Texans Lost Their Power

New malware found on 30,000 Macs has security pros stumped

Report: Nissan shot down Apple deal to avoid becoming Foxconn of cars

N.Y.'s Vaccine Websites Weren't Working

Apple is already working on developing 6G wireless technology

Owner of an app that hijacked millions of devices with one update exposes the buy-to-infect scam

Mount Sinai study finds Apple Watch can predict COVID-19 diagnosis up to a week before testing

Malware Exploits Security Teams' Greatest Weakness: Poor Relationships With Employees

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] You probably know I've been doing cybersecurity now for 30 years in the online world. Yeah, that long. I'm afraid I have some confessions to make about our relationships here, cybersecurity people, and employees.

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. I'm so glad to be here. I'm happy your here as well. There are so many ways to listen.

I got pulled into this whole business of cybersecurity quite literally, kicking and screaming. I had been already involved in the development of the internet and internet protocols for a decade before. In fact, one of the contracts that I had was with a major manufacturer of computer systems.

What I did there was design for Unix systems a way to check for malware, a way to manage them remotely. Yes indeed, I made one of the first RMM systems, as we call them nowadays. We also tied that RMM system, of course, into Windows and a few other operating systems. Unix was where I was working at the time.

I am what they called an OG in the industry. My gosh, my first job with computer networks was back in 75. Believe it or not a long time ago. Back then, of course, it was mainframe to mainframe basically and some of the basic protocols, the RJE, and stuff. I know I've got a lot of older people who are listening who are saying, yeah, I remember that. It brings back memories.

In fact, I got a note just this week from a listener who was saying his first computer was a Sinclair. Do you remember those things? Oh my gosh. It brought back so many memories for us older guys. But it was just such a cool little device with the keys and much different than I'd ever seen before. The XZ81. I just looked it up online so I can remember what the model number was. That was made by Timex. If you can believe that too. It's just. Wow. It had a Z 80 CPU, which of course was like an 8080, which was Intel's, big chip at the time, running at 3.25 megahertz. Yes, indeed. Very cool. I love that computer anyways. I digress.

The whole industry at the time was non-existent, yeah. You had antivirus software. We started seeing that in the eighties and we had some terrible operating systems that many people were running like Windows, just absolutely horrific.

Remember windows three-point 11 and XP and the millennial edition just some of the most terrible software ever. That's what happens when you have interns? A lot of the code, it came out in one of the lawsuits, for one of these versions of Windows.

It was a different world and I had to figure out what was going on because I had some servers that were Unix servers. This was the early nineties and I was hosting email for companies and websites and doing some filtering and things with some kind of precursor to SpamAssassin. It was really something. I had some DECservers, Digital Equipment Corporation. Remember those guys and all of a sudden customers started calling me because the email wasn't working. It turned out it was working, but it was extremely slow and I had to figure out why.

I telneted to my server. I got on, started poking around the servers.

I had a computer room and the first floor of the building that I owned and I was up on the second floor. Off we go looking around trying to figure out what is going on. It was me actually. I said us, but it was really me. Cause I knew the most about this stuff.

There were these processes that just continued to fork and I was trying to figure out why is it creating all these new processes. What's going on? What has happened here? Back then, The internet was a much different place. We trusted everybody. We had fun online. We would spam people who broke our almost unwritten rules of the internet about being kind to other people. What spam was, where the whole term comes from is you would send the script from Monty Python spam and eggs, spam and ham spam, spam, spam routine.

You just send it to somebody that was breaking these unwritten rules, like trying to sell something on the internet. Absolutely verboten. What a change to today.

I saw some of this stuff going on. I was trying to figure out what it was, but, we trusted everybody. So my mail server was Sendmail, at the time. We still maintain some instances of Sendmail for customers that need that.

Nowadays. It's usually more something like postfix in the backend. You might have Zimbra or something out front, but postfix in the backend. We allowed anybody on the internet to get on to our mail server and fix some configuration problems. They didn't have full access to everything. Firewalls weren't then what they are today.

In fact, one of our engineers just had to run out to a client who did something we told them not to do. They were using the Sonic wall firewall on their network as well as they had our stuff. So we had a really good Cisco firepower firewall sitting there, and then they have this SonicWall so that they're people, remotely could connect to the Sonic wall firewall, because it's good enough. SonicWall says it's compliant. The SonicWall firewall was being used to scan the network and load stuff. Does that sound familiar? Much to our chagrin.

So he had to run out and take care of that today. It sounds like we might have to do a rip and replace over there restore from backups. You have no idea what these bad guys might've done. We've seen Chinese into these networks before, Chinese malware. It's been really bad.

Boy, am I wandering all over the place?

Back to this, we would allow people to get onto our network to fix things. If something was wrong, if we were misconfigured, they could help us and they could get on and do it because Sendmail configuration was not for the faint-hearted.

In the days before Google, right? Eventually, we had Archie and Veronica, and Jughead. They did basic searches across FTP servers. That's my kicking and screaming story. I was trying to run a business where we hosted email for businesses, which we still do to this day, and where we had some, back then we didn't have websites. The web didn't come in into play until a couple of years later, but we did host FTP sites for businesses so that they could share files back and forth.

That's what I wanted to do. That was my business.

Later on, I ended up helping 80% of my clients find the other web hosts after, these $8 Gator hosting things. We just got a call on that this week. Somebody who'd been a client of ours 20 years ago, went with a guy that charges $5 a month for web hosting. They have personally identifiable information on that site if you can believe it. He was complaining because it wasn't working he was getting a C-panel error anytime he went to the site. We said, Hey, listen, this problem is the guy that you're hosting from. We did a little research and we checked the IP address and how many sites we're at that IP address. This guy that was charging them $5 a month had 150 different websites at that one IP address. Now that's not bad. He was hosting all of these 150 at a site, the charges, the eight to $10 a month for web hosting. He had all of these sites on top of a machine that was already split up hundreds of ways. It's just amazing what people do.

Man alive. We got rid of 80% of those customers, the ones that wanted cheap, that's fine, get cheap, and see what happens to you. Some of them, we still maintain a good relationship with and so we help them out from time to time, right?

What am I going to do? So somebody calls me, I gotta help them. That's precisely what we do now with this malware problem.

What's going on here? We talked already about the Great Suspender and how Google has said, Hey, this now has malware in it, so we're removing it from your web browsers. That to me makes a ton of sense. Why not do that?

This is another example of what happened with SolarWinds. This is an example of a supply chain infection. What happened with that? Somebody bought Great Suspender from the developer and then added in this basically malware to the Great Suspender. Just it's a terrible thing. Very surprising, but one of the biggest exploits that are being used by the bad guys right now is the security team's poor relationship with other employees within the organization.

I promise we'll get to this a little bit more and explain the bottom line here. What's going on and it goes back to this customer that we just had to run out to.

Why did they do what we told them not to do?

Stick around.

We're getting into the battle between cybersecurity senior officers in companies, owners, business owners, and the, even the employees. There has been such a battle going on. I saw two examples this week.

Hi, everybody, it's a difficult world out there, but I find some comfort in listening to, of course, news radio. It keeps me up to date on what's going on. It helps me to really understand the world a lot better.

I mentioned that one of my guys just had to run out to a client who did something we absolutely told them not to do. They had been using this company that was a break-fix shop, I guess is the way you would put it. They had a business that would respond to problems and they charge by the hour. I think right now their hourly rate is like 160 bucks or something. It is not cheap, but anyhow, That they would sell people equipment and then move on, right? Your problems aren't my problems. Just leave me alone, go away. It's a beautiful model because their employees at this break-fix shop don't have to understand much. They just have to know more than you do as a customer.

There's one level of understanding that you have, and for someone to appear to be an expert, all they have to do is have slightly more understanding.

That has bothered me so many times listened to the radio and they talk about somebody that's just this great expert, in reality, of course, they are not. But you don't know. That person talking about the expert doesn't know either because they just don't have enough knowledge. Of course, the person that's labeled the expert isn't going to say anything about it.

They were doing what most companies do, which is okay. We know we need a firewall, so let's get a firewall. They went out and they talked to this company and they did their Google research because of course, Dr. Google is an expert on everything. Even with those differing opinions, you're going to go with the opinion that you like the best. That's what they did.

They bought a Sonic wall firewall from this vendor, which was a break-fix shop. Now that's all well, and good. The sonic wall is not terrible stuff. They've got some amazing stuff as well.

The problem is this device has been out of support for more than two years now. Even though they're not as advanced as some of the systems we can install, not that we always use the most advanced systems. It's not a bad, a little thing for a small business. We warned them that because they were using an out-of-date firewall that they could not get fixes for known vulnerabilities. Now that's a big deal too. Most people are not aware of the vulnerabilities that are on their machines.

Do you go out every month and check the firmware versions on your firewall? You should be, even if you're a home user. Are you checking to make sure the firewall that the cable company provided you with is up to date, configured correctly? You've changed the password and the admin username, right? No?

Most people haven't. He hadn't, right. He didn't know. We told them we did a little research and said here's your problem.

That's part of his cyber health assessment. We told them what kind of firewall do you have? What's the version of software on it and we do that. We have a bunch of people that have asked for cyber health assessments. We've got them on a list because we're busy. So we have to schedule these and make them happen.

So we said, do not plug that machine in. Of course, what do they do? They plugged it back in again. So now all of a sudden this morning, we get a wake-up call from our monitors that are running they're on their Cisco firepower firewall, where we have their extensive suite of additional software. This isn't just an off-shelf, Cisco firewall.

It's telling us that the SonicWall or something through our, via the SonicWall. Is going through all this customer's network. It's actually attacking the Cisco firewall from inside the network. Absolutely amazing.

Why does that happen? In this case, the business owner, and it is a very small business. It has about 5 million in revenue per year, I would guess. It's a small business by every stretch. The owner just doesn't want to spend the money he doesn't absolutely have to spend. He's not looking at this saying I could lose all my intellectual property. I could get sued by these people. I could lose my clients who find out that their data was released. Their orders were released. Everything was stolen.

He looks at it and says, Oh wow. It's 200 bucks a month. Wait a minute guy, you have how many employees? You're worried about 200 bucks a month. I personally, I don't understand that. Why would you do that?

Now, you're in a poor country. Okay. I get it right. That's a lot of money to spend, but not here in the United States. Doesn't make sense.

A lot of this is really the reason I brought it up. It's showing how there is a disconnect between business owners, C-level people, and cybersecurity people. Basically, if you have less than 200 employees, you cannot afford to have your own cybersecurity team. It's impossible. It's way too expensive.

Then the numbers start to change outsourced cybersecurity, which is what we do. We do this for this customer and. The in-house cybersecurity people, but we all have the same basic problem. The owner has a problem too, right? He has to weigh the costs of cybersecurity against the risks involved, which is what Equifax did.

What so many of these big companies do, right? There's this, the norm Equifax said it's going to be way cheaper to just pay out $10 million in fines. When we get fined by the federal government for losing everyone in the country's personal financial information then it is to do this or we're not going to bother.

Man, I'd love to see the smoking gun email on that, where they made that final decision, probably doesn't exist. They're smart enough to know that they would get sued and they have been sued because of this.

We've got another problem right now because of people working from home. I mentioned, in fact, this week, you should have gotten an email from me on Thursday. That was a little audio thing that I put together. We call these things, audiograms, and it's a kind of a video that'll play.

This particular one is about part of this problem. We've talked extensively about that water plant in Florida, that was hacked for lack of a better term. It might've been an insider thing. It might've been someone external, et cetera, et cetera. The reason it happened is that business, the water plant for a town of 15,000 people, which would be in a normal world, a small business. That small government operation was all of a sudden faced with lockdowns. What do we do? They didn't have a plan. They didn't have a business continuity plan, which is so important. I talked about it extensively last week as well. They had no way to manage this. So what did they do? They went out and bought team viewer licenses for everybody in the business. That put, well not the business, in this case, the agency, that put the agency at risk.

That is putting our businesses at risk too, in such a big way. That's what the audiogram I emailed out on Thursday explaining this a bit.

So stick around. We're going to continue this conversation.

Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson [email protected].

We have people working from home. We didn't really plan for this. We're doing it because of the lockdown. Maybe, you found that it's actually better for your business, from whatever angle. What are the risks here of people taking computers home?

Hello. Everybody Craig, Peterson here. So glad to be with you today. Glad you're taking a few minutes out of your day as well to listen in.

Now I am very concerned about people using computers that they're taking home. I want to make a definition. Maybe there's a better way of saying this, computers that are used at home, home computers should never be used for work.

I'm going to explain why. Computers that are at work probably should not be taken home. We saw the example of this, just this last couple of weeks.

I was talking about this wonderful plugin that I've been using and recommending people use here for a very long time, called the Great Suspender. We've talked at length really about what happened there with the company being bought and then becoming evil, right? Just buying their way into 2 million people's computers.

Sometimes these Chrome extensions that are installed on personal computers get automatically installed and synchronized to your work devices. In fact, that's the default. If you log into Chrome and you're using Google Chrome as your browser and you log into it on your home computer, and when you log into your same account over on your business computer. All of a sudden, now it's syncing. It's syncing things like passwords, which you should not be having Google store for you. You should definitely be using a good password manager and there are a few out there.

If you're not familiar with them or don't know which one to use or how to use them. I have a great little special report on passwords and using password managers. I'd be glad to send it to you. Just email [email protected] and I'll send that on-off, right? I'm not making a dime off of that. I want to make you safer.

I don't want to have happened to you what's happened to millions of Americans, including my best buddy who had his information stolen. I've been after him to use password managers. He never did it. I don't know why.

Until his paycheck got stolen. Then he came over and I explained it and set it up with them and really helped him out.

Maybe we should do a whole webinar showing you how to use these password managers, how to get them set up because it is a little bit tricky. It's certainly different than you're used to. Many people are using their browser Chrome in this example, to save passwords. When you go to a website, you'll automatically have the password there. Maybe you've got it set up so that it'll automatically log you in with all kinds of cool stuff. But there is a very big problem and that is that there is a huge risk with running these extensions, like the Great Suspender. The Great Suspender was approved by Google. It was in the Google store. You could download it from their app store. Absolutely free.

In January of this year in 2021, we had someone out on Twitter, tweet that there was a problem with the security on the Great Suspender. It had been changed. It was being used now to send ads out and other things. That's pretty, pretty bad. The extension wasn't banned until about a month later and you as an end-user had no official notification that this extension was potentially malicious.

Apparently, they could, with this malicious software they embedded, not just show you ad, not just insert their own ads to generate revenue onto the webpage as you were visiting, they could also grab files from your machine. That's a very bad thing.

Now, presumably, if you're at work, you have a team that's helping you outright. The IT security team, there may be different teams and maybe the same person who also is the office manager, who knows. It does vary. Businesses cannot know what you're doing when you're starting to install those extensions and they are pushing their way onto your office computer because you're using the same Google account in both places.

Now, despite the risks, of course, I installed this Great Suspender used it for years and I was pretty happy using it. I know many other people who were in the same boat. Security teams have some great tools. I mentioned my son who's one of our team members got called out to a client. During the break, I was just chatting with him briefly. What had happened is they plugged in this firewall we told them not to plugin. It was apparently hacked from the outside. It had known security vulnerabilities. He had not, this small business owner had not yet paid for maintenance on his little firewall, so he was not getting security updates.

In fact, my team member looked at this and found that it had been three years since the firmware on his firewall had been updated. The bad guys got into his network through this secondary firewall, which we told them not to have not to plugin. Our firewall only noticed it because this malware started scanning everything on the network. Of course, it scanned two of our machines, one being the firewall.

Remember this isn't a regular firewall that we put in there. This is a firepower firewall with a whole bunch of extra software on top of it. In our data center, we have some huge machines that are sitting there watching what's going on remotely. On our client's networks via that firepower firewall.

We started getting all these notices as to what was going on, but this is a great example. We're not updating some of that software. He had a security team and he ignored the security team. We were the security team. We're outsourced cybersecurity that's what we do, but that happens many times.

Many business owners and others look at the cybersecurity situation as having many different shades of gray. What should you do? What shouldn't you do? The teams that are working in these businesses, including us. We have to tell them, Hey, don't use that firewall. Do not plug it in. You don't need it. If you plug it in, it's going to make it way easier for some of your people to work from home. This is not set up correctly and you're going to have problems. That's a difficult conversation to have with a business owner. We had it and he ignored it much to his peril.

In this case, this one is hard to tell how much data was stolen from his business. The impact from this could last for months, and there could be investigations who knows what's going to end up happening here. That business owner and I, because I spoke to him as well about this whole situation before this particular event happened just about two weeks ago. In fact, that was a reminder cause they had plugged it in again. Six months before that we had told the business owner, you can't plug this thing in, you cannot be using it.

How do you do that? How do you let an impacted employee, somebody who's working from home, maybe using their own computer to do work for the business? How can you approach them and tell them, Hey, you cannot use Google Chrome? You cannot save your passwords on your browser. You cannot install extensions. Even if you had a list of extensions today that were bad, that list is going to be out of date tomorrow, which is going to be a very big problem.

Individual users do not have the ability to check this. Frankly, most businesses don't either. Again, that's why a business under 200 employees cannot afford to do this yourself. You just can't. This is a specialty.

We were talking yesterday with a prospect who had been brought to us by a break-fix shop and trying to get this concept through. We're going to talk a little bit more about that. What should you be doing? How can you pay attention? How can you even be safe in this day and age?

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. We've been talking about supply chain problems. That's a technical term for it, but the software that we rely on becoming evil, and what can we really do about it?

Hello, everybody. You're listening to Craig Peterson.

How do you talk to a business owner and help them understand? That's a problem. Isn't it? Look at what happened a few years back with TJX stores. Them as maybe TJ max, that's one of their stores. They have a number of others.

Their cybersecurity guys did something I have seen done before. That is, they went to the management of this massive public company and said, Hey, TJX, we need to get this hardware. We need to get this staffing. The hardware course pretty expensive and it sits there and it does much the same stuff. Even back then. Nowhere as good as today. It's exponential, as to how much better it gets every year, but it was good hardware. It really could have stopped the hack that happened and it did.

Here's what it did. It noticed the hack was going on. The problem was they were able to say yes to the hardware, the senior management said yes. They got the hardware, but senior management would not get the security technicians that were needed to monitor and run that hardware. They were short-staffed.

That's another problem we're seeing. That's why the companies you're dealing with, whether it's Equifax, with who you do not have a direct business relationship with, and yet have all this information about you and sell that. Or maybe it's just some other website. That's why they lose your data. It's a real bad idea. The bad guys are just waiting out there just siphon all of your data. In many cases, when you're talking about a business and a business website, or even your home computer, they're looking to redirect you to malicious websites.

What they'll do is for instance, again, the Great Suspenders' an example, that they claim it's been fixed now. With something like an extension or a plugin that you put in your browser, they could rather easily code it up so that you are going to a website that's malicious.

It could look like Bank of America's website and you go there and you enter in your information. You put in your username, you put in your password, it asks you a security question. Maybe maybe not, but your username and password. Then it says incorrect. Then your screen refreshes while your screen just refreshed because you were not at the Bank of America, originally. You were at a malicious website and you entered in your username and password. Now the bad guys have your username and password to your banking system, to your login, to your bank accounts. They got that. That's all they needed. They didn't want you to know that this was going on so they just went ahead and redirected you over to the real bank website. Hence, the supposed reload.

It's a very big weakness here in how IT and security teams operate because too few security teams really can relate with the CEO and vice versa. I've seen that all of the time with people working for me in cybersecurity, you've got a really good idea of what needs to be done, how it needs to be done when it needs to be done. To you, it's the most important thing in the world, right? You don't want the business to go under, you're going to lose your job, maybe your pension retirement plan is tied to that business. You don't want it to happen, but have you got the trust built up with the senior management?

Then how about the other side of this relationship? How about if you're a cybersecurity person? Even if, again, you're not a professional, you're just the person tasked with it in the office or you're the person tasked with it at home. How do you go to the other employees and tell them you can't use your Google Chrome account here in the office? How are you going to enforce it? How are you going to tell your husband or wife, Hey, that's dangerous? I don't want you installing any of these extensions on your computer. One of the really bad things that people do with their browsers is they put on these real fancy little extensions that give all kinds of extra wonderful information. It ends up as a toolbar and it lets you do searches on this site or that site. Maybe it keeps you up to date on the stocks that you have in your portfolio. You're telling hackers what stocks you own, really? It might be legitimate, right. But who knows? That's the problem. Something like that can really mess you up and send you to malicious sites. You know that your spouse is using that or your kids are using that. How do you talk to them? How do you solve those problems? It's a real problem.

There are some interesting tools that you can use, as professionals. There's a Slack channel I can send you to, if you're interested, actually, it'll be in the newsletter that comes out on Sunday. At least it should be under one of those articles. It is a problem.

Netflix, by the way, is really trying to help you out too. Not only did the Netflix security team provide some feedback for what's called the honest security guide, but it's also made some of its user tools, the tools that you might use at your home to find a movie, et cetera, it might help really to secure you.

Git Hub has this. It is called, this is a Netflix skunkworks, the stethoscope app. It's a desktop application created by Netflix that checks security-related settings and makes recommendations for improving the configuration of your computer. It doesn't require central device management or reporting. You can have a look at that. If you are interested, let me know. I can probably point you in the right direction to the stethoscope app. That's what we want to see in this honest security guide. You'll find it online. At honest security is a guide to your devices, security, which in the biz we call endpoint security and it is cool. You can run through all of this list is a big checklist and talking about why honest, and they're saying dishonesty stops you from doing the right thing.

That's why in my courses, I spend a lot of time, more time in fact, on the why than the how. I want you to understand honestly, why you should or should not do something.

There are so many people who are out there yelling and screaming, jumping up and down. Particularly your antivirus companies. You fake VPN companies who are trying to get you to buy their products that not only do not need in most cases but will actually make your computer less secure.

So we have to be careful about all of this stuff. We have to make sure we are talking. We've got to have a trust relationship set up with the owners of our business. Cause you guys, some of you, I know own businesses, some of you work for a business. We've got people listening to this all over the world and every continent I've even seen a listener down in Antarctica. I really can say every continent. It's important that we know how to work with our fellow employees, with our management, with our family members, to help them to know what they need to do. There is no time to wait. We have never seen as many attacks as we're seeing now. We've never seen the government using its resources to attack us more than we have now.

We've never seen more billions of dollars stolen per year by the bad guys. There are some basic tenants that you can follow that will make you way more secure. And that's why you're listening. That's why I go through some of these things to help everybody understand.

That's also why I go ahead and make sure that I answer your emails. If you have a question, make sure you go ahead and ask. You can just email me at [email protected]. If it's something urgent, I have a form on the bottom of my homepage @craigpeterson.com. You can give me a little bit more information. I tend to keep an eye on that a little bit better than my general email, although I do use some amazing email software that helps me to keep track of the real email and get rid of the spam and put things in boxes and stuff craigpeterson.com. It's that simple email me [email protected]. If you have questions.

I hope that Google is going to continue to improve itself. I love the fact that they found out that this one extension was malicious.

For those of you who might've just tuned in, we're talking about something called the Great Suspender something I've used for years, it became malicious, but they need to do more.

As people who are concerned about security, we just can't wait for the next incident. Just again, this client of mine, who we've been warning about this for months, he's stopped doing what we told him to do, and then decided well it's just too difficult. That's something we hear a lot from businesses. Oh, it just hampers the work. It hampers it because now we have to get permission from it in order to mount this particular drive or gain access to those files or materials. Yes you do, because we have to stop the internal spread of all of this malware and all of these hackers.

It is absolutely worth it.

All right, everybody. Thanks again for joining me today. I really hope you've been enjoying this. I have years' worth of podcasts out there and you'll find all of those at craigpeterson.com/podcast or on your favorite podcast platform.

If you subscribed under iTunes, you might've noticed, ah, yeah, I just released a whole batch there too.

I expressed concerns about owning an Apple watch. I held off for a long time. I want to talk about these devices now, the security concerns, but also the amazing health tools that are built right in.

Hey, welcome back. This Apple watch is really fascinating. It has been around now for six generations. There are a number of other watches that have had, or tried, I should say, to compete with Apple. They haven't been very successful. You might've noticed that. I have a friend that bought some watches for his family and to him that monitor all of the basic vitals and record them and send them up to his phone. It's a 20-ish dollar watch. He got it from South Korea probably are parts made in China, but it is an inexpensive watch and it does some of the basics at the other end of the scale.

Let's have a look right now. I'm going to go to apple.com online, and we're going to click on watch. Here we go, Oh, my they've got special watches so you can buy their watches. It looks like the new one, the Apple watch series six for starting at 400 bucks or they have two different sizes. . They have a more basic watch called the Apple Watch SE that starts at about $300. You can still get the Apple watch series three. Now, these all can monitor high and low heart rates. They can give you irregular heart rhythm notification, but it's only a-fib atrial fibrillation, I think is the only one they can monitor, but all three of those can monitor that.

As I said, my buddy's watches, he got for his family at 20 bucks apiece are able to do most of that as well.

These are water-resistant to 50 meters, which is really cool. The series six also has an ECG app. That is very cool. You open the app, you put your finger on the crown of the watch and it gives you an EKG right there on the watch and it feeds it to your phone.

On your phone, you can turn it into a PDF. You can share it with your doctor on and on. It's just amazing. It's a three-lead type, I was in emergency medicine, right? A med-tech EMT, EMT-PD can't remember. I had a whole bunch of different certifications back in the day. But it's fantastic for that.

It also has a blood oxygen app that monitors your blood oxygen levels. It ties all of this into their new exercise app, which is amazing. That ties into your phone or your iPad. I will go down in the basement onto the treadmill and I'll select your treadmill workout. It has dozens of them.

Have you seen this really fancy treadmill? A couple of years ago they got in all kinds of trouble because they advertised it around Christmas time and apparently this woman really wanted a treadmill and she got one and she was all excited. All of these people jumped out of the woodwork. All your you're saying she's fat, et cetera. No, she wanted a treadmill.

These are amazing treadmills because they have built into them. These streams and you can join classes, et cetera. With the Apple Watch, my iPad, and a subscription to this iHealth app, which you can get as part of this Apple plus thing you can buy for 30 bucks for the whole family, 30 bucks a month.

I don't know how many I have seen probably a hundred different workouts on there. It has different workouts, different types of weightlifting, running, jogging, treadmills, elliptical machines, everything. You can pick your pace. You can pick your instructor, you can pick everything.

Then your Apple watch is monitoring your body. As you're working out. So it's telling you how many calories you've burned. What's your heart rate is to help keep your heart rate in the best range for you, depending on what kind of a workout you're doing. It also lets you compete against other people.

Does this sound like an ad for the Apple watch?

You can compete with other people your age doing the same workout and see where you're at. I was really surprised because typically I am at the front of the pack when it comes to my treadmill workouts. That's really cool as well.

Those are some of the basics. There are other things too, that Apple is doing. We've found, right now, that Mount Sinai just came out with an announcement and they said that the Apple watch can predict COVID 19 diagnosis up to a week before testing can detect it. Yes. Isn't that something? Not only can the Apple watch help with certain heart arrhythmias, but it can predict that you have COVID-19 too a week before testing normal testing. Those swabs can find it out.

This is from the journal of medical internet research, which is a peered review journal. And they found that wearable hardware and specifically the Apple watch can effectively predict a positive COVID-19 diagnosis up to a week before the current PCR-based nasal swab tests.

They called this the warrior watch study. They had a dedicated Apple watch and the iPhone app, and they had some participants from the Mount Sinai staff and it required, of course, these staff members to use the app to turn on the health and data monitoring and collection, and also asked them to fill out a survey every day to provide some feedback about their potential COVID-19 symptoms. As well as other things like stress can obviously make your heart rate, go up your blood pressure, go up, et cetera. Oh. By the way, Apple, supposedly the rumors are, we'll have a BP sensor in the Apple seven that'll be out later this year, most likely.

So they had several hundred healthcare workers and the primary biometric signal. I know that the studies authors were watching was heart rate variability. This is fascinating to me because it's something that I learned about fairly recently. Then when I got my Apple watch, I read up more about this, but basically, heart rate variability is what it sounds like. It's your heart rate. Let's say your heart is beating at 60 beats per minute. It is not beating once every 10 seconds. It is not beating once a second. Your heart rate will vary over the course of that minute. If you're healthy. Obviously, a beat every 10 seconds isn't 60 a minute.

Let's use that as an example. Somebody who's almost dead and has six beats per minute. The first heartbeat might be at 10 seconds. The second heartbeat might be at 22 seconds because your heart is supposed to vary its rate of contractions based on immediate feedback. It's not just that you're going out in your running and now you've driven up your heart rate and you're doing your cardio and it or you just walked up a flight of stairs or you stood up, which is another test, by the way, what we're talking about here.

You might just be sitting there, but your cells have a different need for oxygen or for the blood. The heart slows down slightly or speeds up slightly. This heart rate variability is something built into the Apple watch and into the iPhone app that you attach to the Apple watch. Isn't that useful without an iPhone, frankly? Then you can look at your heart rate variability right there.

They said, combining that with the symptoms that people reported, these Mount Sinai staff, that the symptoms that they reported that were associated with COVID-19 including fever, aches, dry cough, gastrointestinal issues, loss of taste and smell corresponded with changes in the heart rate variability. I thought that was just absolutely phenomenal because heart rate variability is considered to be a key indicator of strain on your nervous system. COVID-19 obviously is going to put a strain on the nervous system. Just very neat. It says here that the study was not only able to predict infections up to a week before tests provided confirmed diagnosis but also revealed that participants' heart rate variability patterns normalized fairly quickly after their diagnosis or turning to normal run about one to two weeks following their positive tests. That's from a TechCrunch, that particular quote.

I am very excited about this, but I am also on the concerned side. I'm concerned because they are collecting vital data from us. All of the major companies, Google and Microsoft and Apple want to be the company that holds all of your personal medical records.

We're going to get back to that when we come back here. What is happening? How is your doctor managing your medical records? I was really shocked to find out how that industry is working.

Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson. Check it out online. Craig peterson.com.

Welcome back. What are you doing? Are you asking your doctor how they are handling your medical records? Because I think you probably should based on what I learned just this week.

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me. We were just talking about health. We're talking about the Apple watch and the fact that there's a lot of competitors out there, some of them, a fraction of the cost. If you buy the Apple watch on terms, you're going to pay less in one month's payment on terms to Apple than you would for some of these other watches out there, but Apple watches do have more features.

Mine even has a built-in cellular modem. Even if I don't have my phone with me, phone calls come through to my watch and text messages, and I can respond and answer. It's really nice. Medically I am very impressed. It has been good at motivating me to do some exercise, to get up, and about just to do a bunch of things I had never, ever done before. Consider that.

It is collecting our data. Apple now has potential access to all of my cardiac data. They've got EKGs that I have run on my watch. They know about my heart rate. They know how often I exercise, and how hard I exercise when I exercise. They know all of this stuff about me. I had a conversation with someone just saying why does that matter? Maybe it's Apple, maybe it's somebody else. Why does it matter?

It does matter. Think about an evil genius, right? The thing about somebody that might want to target Americans and might want medical information about Americans. They can gather it in a number of different ways. We're going to talk about medical records here in a little bit.

One of the things they could certainly do is grab all of our watch data. Some of these watches, including my Apple watch, have GPS built into them. When you're out running or jogging, you know where you went, you can plan your route and it'll remind you, Hey, turn here, turn there. That's one of the things I love about the Apple Watch when I'm using it with Apple maps out driving, it taps me on the wrist and reminds me, Hey, in 500 feet, you got to turn.

If I look at the watch, it'll even show me the turn I need to make coming up in 500 feet. It's really amazing. All of this information is being compiled and hopefully, it's being compiled by a company that we can trust. At this point, we can probably trust Apple. Hopefully, they're not going to be broken into. Now, their margins or profit is high enough that they certainly can afford a security team, one capable of defending them and defending our data. I hope they are. I suspect that they are for the most part.

How about some of these others? We know Google, for instance, is in the business of collecting and selling our information, is having all of our medical information. Not just the stuff from our watches, but the stuff from our doctors. Are they to be trusted with that kind of information?

Going back to that bad guy, that mad scientist we can, and probably do engineer viruses that are targeted at specific things. In fact, the Russians have been doing it. The Soviets' started it, they came up with a phage. That can attack certain viruses and it acts like a virus it gets in and does this little thing. We've got right now, these COVID-19 vaccines and they act like a virus they're messing with, well effectively, the DNA. In fact, it's the RNA, but it's pretending, Hey, I got a message from the DNA, here it is.

What if a bad guy knew that are a certain population in a certain area, and that area was right by this important military base or whatever they came up with something that would target them and they'd have all of the data to do it now. That's obviously an extreme example. A more common example would be that your medical data is there. It's being sold to advertisers and you're going to end up with something.

For instance, there's a company, very big company out there and they sell baby products. What they did was they tracked and they bought this information, but they tracked women who were purchasing certain things. Now, they weren't purchasing things that were directly related to having a baby, right? They weren't purchasing diapers or little jumpsuits or whatever it is. They were purchasing things that were not directly related maybe people wouldn't even think they were typically related to having a baby. Yet they were able to figure this out. They got that good with the data. So they thought, Oh, okay let's get wise here. Let's send out a postcard, congratulating them on their pregnancy and offering them a discount on something. Yeah. Not a bad idea, frankly.

However, in this case, some of these moms I hadn't told anybody that they were pregnant yet and didn't want to tell anybody that they were pregnant yet. It fell on its face. Didn't it?

How about these ambulance-chasing lawyers that are out there? Are they going to want to gain access to this, to your medical records?

How about your employer? Your employer wants to know I'm going to train this person. Hopefully, they'll stick with us for a while, but is he going to be a burden on our medical plan? Keyman insurance, health insurance, life insurance. Have access to everything about you. That's what really concerns me about these, all of these devices.

Right now, pretty confident that I can give Apple this information and they will keep it pretty safe. But, I said the same thing about the Great Suspender, right? I don't know about the future.

Then I found something out this week that was in my mind extremely disturbing. We have a new clinic that we've picked up as a client. They needed to have security. They had a couple of little security issues. They were worried. They knew they were not HIPAA compliant. They approached us because they know that's what we do is cybersecurity and audits and remediation. Fixing the problems. We pick them up. They're a client. We're in there. They had told us in advance that all of their medical record systems were on-line. It was on the web. All they needed was a web browser to run their business. Okay. That could be a problem. It might be okay. The medical records manufacturer might have good security on all of the records. So we may be safe, although in HIPAA unless you have a business process agreement in place with that vendor if that data is lost, it falls back on the doctor's shoulders.

Anyhow, what I found out was, first of all, it wasn't completely web-based, which just shocked me. I'm not talking about they have to scan records or they got the x-ray machine or whatever. It really wasn't web-based and secondarily the company they were using for the medical records was a free service.

The doctor, that clinic, was not paying for their medical records management software. The way it works is this medical records management company when the doctor prescribes something when the doctor performs a procedure and bills and insurance company, it's all done through this one company and that company takes a chunk of their money.

In some cases we found seems to have been inflating the bills that went off to the insurance companies and that, as it turns out is a common practice in the industry. According to the doctors at this clinic, I was shocked, amazed.

Something you might want to look at. Ask your doctors where are your records kept and are they secure?

Now we had HIPAA. We thought that would secure it, but it doesn't.

Stick around.

Hey, we got a name now for what happened to the Great Suspender and QR code scanner apps over on the Google stores. One at Google Play, the other one over on the Google Chrome store. It's become that popular.

Hey, everybody, I wanted to mention this whole new category of malware really, and they're calling it, right now, Buy to infect. What happens is a bad guy, a malware guy buys a legitimate app and then starts infecting it. We know, obviously, about the one that I've been talking about a lot the Google extension that I used to use all of the time, the Great Suspender. I mentioned this one a few weeks ago, it's called QR code scanner. It's been on the Google play store for a long time, had more than 10 million installs and then all of a sudden it became malicious.

This is a little bit of a different angle on it because, with the Great Suspender, the ownership of that software actually transferred to somebody. With QR code scanner, they were working on a deal with a company and this company wanted to verify the Google play account for QR code scanner. This is all according to the owner, the original owner of QR code scanner. They said that what had happened is part of this purchase deal. I let them have a look and gain access to the software's key and password prior to purchase so they could confirm the purchase, which doesn't sound too bad. Apparently, as soon as they got a hold of the software's key and password, forget about the purchase, we're going to start infecting it right away. It ended up getting that app, the QR code scanner app, pulled right from the Google play score store. Of course, now you don't need that quite as much because most of the phone apps when you go to take a picture, the camera apps have built into them, a QR code scanner.

I thought that was fascinating what they did. They totally cheated the company. They didn't even bother buying it. So a little word for the wise out there.

Got another Apple story cause this is showing how the computer industry is really shifting. We've talked about some of the shortages of chips and the shortages of computer chips are so bad that General Motors has had to shut down two-thirds of its manufacturing lines in at least one plant. Every major automobile manufacturer is having problems making cars because they can't get the chips.

Remember nowadays, a car, a truck is essentially just a computer on wheels. Not really actually computer on wheels. It's really dozens of computers all linked together with a network on wheels.

Apple has been worried about that, right? Supply chain. That's one of the things you're supposed to worry about as a public company. What are the risks going forward including to my supply chain? Obviously your supply chain matters. You gotta be able to make something you need parts, right? Apple has been upset with Intel for a while. You might remember Apple. When it first came out, was using a Motorola chipset, which was exceptional much better than the Intel chipsets. Of course, that's my opinion, a lot of people agree with me. You had the 68000, 68010, and 20, et cetera. Very good chips.

When Apple started getting into the laptop business, that's when the problems started to happen. These Motorola chips gave off a lot of heat and used up a lot of electricity. At the time Apple looked around and said our only real alternative right now is Intel. Intel has a whole line of chips, different speeds, and they have mobile chips. Those mobile chips use much less power than the Motorola chips for the main CPU. They also use less battery. Those two go hand in hand and generate less heat. That's it all goes hand in hand. So they said, we'll start working with Intel. They did. Intel really disappointed them more than once, which is a shame. They disappointed them with the 64-bit migration. AMD, advanced micro devices, beat Intel to the punch. Shockingly Intel started making AMD compatible CPUs right. The 64-bit extensions to the CPU were AMD extensions. They had problems with some of their other chips as well. Mobile chips getting the power usage under control, the heat dissipation problems under control, and they never really lived up to what Apple was hoping for. What everybody in the industry was hoping for. In many ways, Intel has been a huge disappointment, which is really a shame.

We'll look at what they did to the industry, with these predictive instructions, the hyper-threading, and stuff. Where bad guys were able to bring a computer to its knees. What does Intel say? Here's a firmware patch you can apply to our CPU, those little CPUs you pay upwards of $2,000 for a piece for one chip. Those CPU's and by the way, it's going to, cut its performance by a minimum of 20%, maybe 50%, that's okay.

What are you kidding me? A lot of people were upset with Intel and Apple and Microsoft and everybody released patches that use the new Intel microcode. You might've noticed when this happened a couple of years ago that your computer slowed down. I certainly noticed, actually, it was little more than a year, anyway, I noticed it because I own a data center. That has a lot of Intel chips in it where we're running mostly Unixes, Linux, and BSD, but we're also running Windows. So the only way to work around this bug was to apply the patch and slow everything way, way down.

Imagine how Apple and Google felt with their huge data centers. IBM too. IBM has Intel-based data centers, as well as its own chips, and boy talking about phenomenal chips, as far as processing power goes, IBM, man, they are still the leader with the power chips and their Z series. That just wow. Mind-blowing.

Most of us are stuck in the Intel world. Apple said we can no longer trust Intel. So what are we going to do? Apple said we've been developing this chip for a long time. Apple took the chip design, they licensed it from this open sourcee type of company that has a number of members. They took this arm architecture and were able to improve it, and keep adding to it, et cetera. They're still part of this Alliance. They started using these in their iPhones. The iPhones have been using these chips the whole time and they started improving them after they released the first iPhones. Intel didn't really get them upset until a little later on, too.

They came up with newer ones, faster ones, better ones, right to all of these A10 their bionic chips. They've got AI chips, machine learning chips, all Apple designed. Chips, of course, manufactured by third parties, but that's what Apple is using. Apple has now said we expect all of their Macintosh computers to be based on Apple's CPU within the next two years.

There's already some really good ones out there right now that people like a lot. We've been using them with some of our clients that use Apple. Not everybody has had great luck with them, but Apple is not only ditching Intel, that's not the big story here. Apple's got some job listings out there looking to hire engineers.

So when we get back, we'll tell you more about what Apple is doing and what frankly, I think the rest of the industry should look at. Guess what? They are.

It's been Intel versus the rest of the world. They've been winning for years in many categories, but now they're starting to lose, as major manufacturers are starting to leave Intel behind. But there's more to the story still.

Hi, everybody.. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for tuning in. We're glad you're here. In the last segment of the day, I want to point everybody to the website, of course. You can get my newsletter. It comes out every Sunday morning and it highlights one of the articles of the week. It gives you a pointer to my podcast. So you can listen right there. There's just a lot of great information. Plus I'm also doing little training. I'm sending out, hopefully, next week, two little training sessions for everybody to help you understand security a little better, and this applies to business. However, it's not. Strictly business, much of what I talk about is also for home users. So if you want to go along for the ride, come along, we'd be glad to have you. There's a lot to understand and to know that you won't get from anywhere else. It's just amazing. Many other of these radio shows where they are just nothing but fluff and commercials and paid promotions. I'm just shocked at it. It goes against my grain when that sort of thing happens. Absolutely.

We were just talking about Apple and how Apple got upset with Intel, but they're not the only ones upset. We also now have seen a lot of manufacturers who have started producing Chromebooks and surface tablets that are based on chip sets other than Intel's.

This is going to be a real problem for Intel. Intel has almost always relied, certainly in the later years has relied on Microsoft and people bought Intel because they wanted Windows. That's the way that goes. It's just like in the early days, people bought an Apple too, because they wanted a great little VisiCalc, the spreadsheet program.

Now, what we're seeing are operating systems that do not require a single line of Microsoft software. Google Chrome is a great example of it. Linux is another great example and people are loving their Google Chrome laptops, and you can buy these laptops for as little as 200 bucks. Now you get what you pay for and all the way up to a couple of grand and they don't have a line single line of Microsoft code. Yet you can still edit Word documents and Excel documents, et cetera. They do not contain any Intel hardware. What was called, well, they might have a chip here or there, but not the main CPU. What used to be called the Wintel monopoly. In other words, Windows-Intel monopoly is dying. It's dying very quickly.

Apple is not helping now. Apple, they've had somewhere between seven and 10% market share in the computer business for quite a while. Personally, I far prefer Apple Macintoshes over anything else out there by far. I use them every day. So that's me. I don't know about you. There's a little bit of a learning curve. Although people who aren't that computer literate find it easier to learn how to use a Mac than to learn how to use Windows, which makes sense. Apple has really done a great job. A bang-up job.

With these new chips, it's getting even faster. We are now finding out from a report from Bloomberg who first started these, that Apple has been posting job listings, looking for engineers to work on 6G technology. 6G, right now we're rolling out 5g, which hasn't been a huge win because of the fact that if you want really fast 5g, like the type Verizon provides, you have to have a lot of micro-cell sites everywhere. They have to be absolutely everywhere. Of course, it's just not financially reasonable to put them up in smaller communities. If the Biden administration continues the way they're going with the FCC and the open internet type thing of a-bits-a-bit, then there will be no incentive for any of these carriers to expand their networks because they can't charge more for better service. If you can imagine that. Ajit Pai fought against that for many years, Trump's appointee as chairman to the FCC, but things are changing. The wind has changed down in Washington, so we'll lose some of those jobs and we're not going to get all of the benefits of 5g. If he keeps us up. 6G is coming.

What that means is Qualcomm, who is the manufacturer of record for most of the modems that are in our cell phones. Qualcomm has also missed some deadlines. Apple is tired of dependencies on third parties because Qualcomm might have somebody else that buys way more chips. It might be able to sell the same chip to the military of whatever country for a much, much higher price. They can sell it to consumers. Maybe they just change the label on it and call it a mill spec, and often goes right, who knows? What they're doing out there, but Apple doesn't want to do that anymore. They are looking for engineers to define and perform the research for the next generation standards of wireless communications, such as 6G The ads say you will research and design next-generation 6G wireless communication systems for radio access networks with emphasis on the physical Mac L two and L three layers. Fascinating, eh? What do you think? I think a huge deal as Apple continues to ditch, many of its vendors that have not been living up to the standards Apple has set.

Apple has moved some of the manufacturing back to the United States. More of the assembly has been moved here. The manufacturing, it's starting to come back again. We'll see the Trump administration really wanted it here. We need it here, not just for jobs, we needed it here for our security.

We've talked about that before, too, right? I want to also point out speaking of Apple and manufacturing, China, of course, does most of it for Apple and Foxconn is the company in China that makes almost all of this stuff for Apple. It's huge. Foxconn owns cities. Huge cities. They have high rises where people basically don't see the light of day, these high rise factories. You live there, you eat there, you shop there, you work there.

Like the old company store who is it, Tennessee Ernie, right? Owe my soul to the company store. That's what's happening over there. And Foxconn has kept its costs low by bringing people in from the fields, if you will, out there being farmers and paying them extremely low wages. On top of all of that, in some cases they're using slave labor. I found this article very interesting, from Ars Technica's, Timothy B. Lee. He's talking about a potential partnership between Apple and Nissan. Let me remember. I mentioned Apple talking with Kia and Kia is denying it.

The financial times reported on Sunday that this potential deal between Apple and Nissan fell apart because Apple wanted Nissan to build Apple cars, they would have the Apple logo on them. They all be branded Apple. It wouldn't say Nissan unless you took something seriously apart you might find it inside.

Nissan wanted to keep the Nissan brand on its own vehicles. Bloomberg reported last week that the negotiations with Kia and of course its parent companies Huyndaiin South Korea had ended without a deal. The Financial Times said that Apple has also sounded out BMW as a potential partner because Apple doesn't make cars.

So how are they going to do this? Apparently the talks faltered with Apple and Nissan because Nissan had a fear and apparently this is true of Kia too, of becoming quote the Foxconn of the auto industry, unquote, which is a reference to this Chinese well it's Taiwanese technically, but a group that manufacturers are while actually assembles the iPhones. Fascinating. Isn't it fascinating.

When you start to dig into this self-driving technology and the numbers behind it, that's where you wonder, why is Apple even trying at this point, Apple's test vehicles only traveled 18,000 miles on California roads. Between 2019 and 2020, or over the course of about a year, late in both years. 18,000 miles in a year. Heck, I've done that before with my own car.

Waymo, which is Google's self-driving project put on more than well, about 630,000 miles in California. Likely a lot more in Arizona where they doa lot more testing. Cruise, which is this startup that was put together by GM and Honda logged even more miles than Google's Waymo, 77,000 miles on California roads.

So this is going to be interesting. Apple sitting on 77 billion dollars in cash and short-term investments. That's more than the market capitalization, the entire market gap of a number of major market car makers, including Nissan, Ford. Actually, you add those two together and you haven't reached the amount of cash Apple has on hand and Stellantis, the parent company of Chrysler Fiat. They have the money potentially they could buy out one of these companies. We'll see what happens, the automated cars market's going to be huge. I'm looking forward to it. We're going to have a lot of struggles between now and then.

Hey everybody, if you haven't done it go right now to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. You'll get my newsletter. You'll get these trainings. You'll get to listen to my appearances if you miss them. You can find my podcasts on almost any platform out there.

Just check it out. Craig peterson.com. If you have a minute, leave a hopefully five star review for me. I'd really appreciate it.

Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!  

It was also another busy week on the technology front and we are going to delve into what actually caused the energy problems in Texas.  There is a new type of malware that is affecting Macs and it is has a different MO.  Then we are going to discuss Apple and their ventures into automated electric cars and what we can expect. Why are states having issues making appointments for vaccines? In a word, it is bureaucratic incompetence. Then we have a new type of hack out there.  It is called Buy-to-Infect and there is more so be sure to Listen in.

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

---

Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read:

This Basic Math Shows How Wind Energy Failures Contributed To Texas’s Deadly Power Loss

An Insider Explains Why Texans Lost Their Power

New malware found on 30,000 Macs has security pros stumped

Report: Nissan shot down Apple deal to avoid becoming Foxconn of cars

N.Y.’s Vaccine Websites Weren’t Working

Apple is already working on developing 6G wireless technology

Owner of an app that hijacked millions of devices with one update exposes the buy-to-infect scam

Mount Sinai study finds Apple Watch can predict COVID-19 diagnosis up to a week before testing

Malware Exploits Security Teams' Greatest Weakness: Poor Relationships With Employees

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] You probably know I've been doing cybersecurity now for 30 years in the online world. Yeah, that long. I'm afraid I have some confessions to make about our relationships here, cybersecurity people, and employees.

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. I'm so glad to be here. I'm happy your here as well. There are so many ways to listen.

I got pulled into this whole business of cybersecurity quite literally, kicking and screaming. I had been already involved in the development of the internet and internet protocols for a decade before. In fact, one of the contracts that I had was with a major manufacturer of computer systems.

What I did there was design for Unix systems a way to check for malware, a way to manage them remotely. Yes indeed, I made one of the first RMM systems, as we call them nowadays. We also tied that RMM system, of course, into Windows and a few other operating systems. Unix was where I was working at the time.

 I am what they called an OG in the industry. My gosh, my first job with computer networks was back in 75. Believe it or not a long time ago. Back then, of course, it was mainframe to mainframe basically and some of the basic protocols, the RJE, and stuff. I know I've got a lot of older people who are listening who are saying, yeah, I remember that. It brings back memories. 

In fact, I got a note just this week from a listener who was saying his first computer was a Sinclair. Do you remember those things? Oh my gosh. It brought back so many memories for us older guys. But it was just such a cool little device with the keys and much different than I'd ever seen before. The XZ81. I just looked it up online so I can remember what the model number was. That was made by Timex. If you can believe that too. It's just. Wow. It had a Z 80 CPU, which of course was like an 8080, which was Intel's, big chip at the time, running at 3.25 megahertz. Yes, indeed. Very cool. I love that computer anyways. I digress. 

The whole industry at the time was non-existent, yeah. You had antivirus software. We started seeing that in the eighties and we had some terrible operating systems that many people were running like Windows, just absolutely horrific.

Remember windows three-point 11 and XP and the millennial edition just some of the most terrible software ever. That's what happens when you have interns? A lot of the code, it came out in one of the lawsuits, for one of these versions of Windows. 

It was a different world and I had to figure out what was going on because I had some servers that were Unix servers. This was the early nineties and I was hosting email for companies and websites and doing some filtering and things with some kind of precursor to SpamAssassin. It was really something. I had some DECservers, Digital Equipment Corporation. Remember those guys and all of a sudden customers started calling me because the email wasn't working.  It turned out it was working, but it was extremely slow and I had to figure out why. 

I telneted to my server. I got on, started poking around the servers.

 I had a computer room and the first floor of the building that I owned and I was up on the second floor. Off we go looking around trying to figure out what is going on. It was me actually. I said us, but it was really me. Cause I knew the most about this stuff. 

There were these processes that just continued to fork and I was trying to figure out why is it creating all these new processes. What's going on? What has happened here? Back then, The internet was a much different place. We trusted everybody. We had fun online. We would spam people who broke our almost unwritten rules of the internet about being kind to other people. What spam was, where the whole term comes from is you would send the script from Monty Python spam and eggs, spam and ham spam, spam, spam routine.

You just send it to somebody that was breaking these unwritten rules, like trying to sell something on the internet. Absolutely verboten. What a change to today. 

I saw some of this stuff going on. I was trying to figure out what it was, but, we trusted everybody. So my mail server was Sendmail, at the time. We still maintain some instances of Sendmail for customers that need that. 

Nowadays. It's usually more something like postfix in the backend. You might have Zimbra or something out front, but postfix in the backend. We allowed anybody on the internet to get on to our mail server and fix some configuration problems. They didn't have full access to everything. Firewalls weren't then what they are today.

In fact, one of our engineers just had to run out to a client who did something we told them not to do.  They were using the Sonic wall firewall on their network as well as they had our stuff. So we had a really good Cisco firepower firewall sitting there, and then they have this SonicWall so that they're people, remotely could connect to the Sonic wall firewall, because it's good enough. SonicWall says it's compliant. The SonicWall firewall was being used to scan the network and load stuff. Does that sound familiar? Much to our chagrin. 

So he had to run out and take care of that today. It sounds like we might have to do a rip and replace over there restore from backups. You have no idea what these bad guys might've done. We've seen Chinese into these networks before, Chinese malware. It's been really bad. 

Boy, am I wandering all over the place? 

Back to this, we would allow people to get onto our network to fix things.  If something was wrong, if we were misconfigured, they could help us and they could get on and do it because Sendmail configuration was not for the faint-hearted.

In the days before Google, right? Eventually, we had Archie and Veronica, and Jughead. They did basic searches across FTP servers. That's my kicking and screaming story. I was trying to run a business where we hosted email for businesses, which we still do to this day, and where we had some, back then we didn't have websites. The web didn't come in into play until a couple of years later, but we did host FTP sites for businesses so that they could share files back and forth. 

That's what I wanted to do. That was my business. 

Later on, I ended up helping 80% of my clients find the other web hosts after, these $8 Gator hosting things. We just got a call on that this week. Somebody who'd been a client of ours 20 years ago, went with a guy that charges $5 a month for web hosting. They have personally identifiable information on that site if you can believe it. He was complaining because it wasn't working he was getting a C-panel error anytime he went to the site. We said, Hey, listen, this problem is the guy that you're hosting from. We did a little research and we checked the IP address and how many sites we're at that IP address. This guy that was charging them $5 a month had 150 different websites at that one IP address. Now that's not bad. He was hosting all of these 150 at a site, the charges, the eight to $10 a month for web hosting.  He had all of these sites on top of a machine that was already split up hundreds of ways. It's just amazing what people do. 

Man alive.  We got rid of 80% of those customers, the ones that wanted cheap, that's fine, get cheap, and see what happens to you. Some of them, we still maintain a good relationship with and so we help them out from time to time, right? 

What am I going to do? So somebody calls me, I gotta help them. That's precisely what we do now with this malware problem. 

What's going on here? We talked already about the Great Suspender and how Google has said, Hey, this now has malware in it, so we're removing it from your web browsers. That to me makes a ton of sense. Why not do that? 

This is another example of what happened with SolarWinds. This is an example of a supply chain infection. What happened with that? Somebody bought Great Suspender from the developer and then added in this basically malware to the Great Suspender. Just it's a terrible thing. Very surprising, but one of the biggest exploits that are being used by the bad guys right now is the security team's poor relationship with other employees within the organization. 

I promise we'll get to this a little bit more and explain the bottom line here. What's going on and it goes back to this customer that we just had to run out to. 

Why did they do what we told them not to do? 

Stick around.

We're getting into the battle between cybersecurity senior officers in companies, owners, business owners, and the, even the employees. There has been such a battle going on.  I saw two examples this week.

Hi, everybody, it's a difficult world out there, but I find some comfort in listening to, of course, news radio. It keeps me up to date on what's going on. It helps me to really understand the world a lot better. 

I mentioned that one of my guys just had to run out to a client who did something we absolutely told them not to do. They had been using this company that was a break-fix shop, I guess is the way you would put it. They had a business that would respond to problems and they charge by the hour. I think right now their hourly rate is like 160 bucks or something. It is not cheap, but anyhow, That they would sell people equipment and then move on, right? Your problems aren't my problems. Just leave me alone, go away.  It's a beautiful model because their employees at this break-fix shop don't have to understand much. They just have to know more than you do as a customer. 

There's one level of understanding that you have, and for someone to appear to be an expert, all they have to do is have slightly more understanding. 

That has bothered me so many times listened to the radio and they talk about somebody that's just this great expert, in reality, of course, they are not. But you don't know. That person talking about the expert doesn't know either because they just don't have enough knowledge. Of course, the person that's labeled the expert isn't going to say anything about it. 

They were doing what most companies do, which is okay. We know we need a firewall, so let's get a firewall. They went out and they talked to this company and they did their Google research because of course, Dr. Google is an expert on everything.  Even with those differing opinions, you're going to go with the opinion that you like the best.  That's what they did. 

They bought a Sonic wall firewall from this vendor, which was a break-fix shop. Now that's all well, and good. The sonic wall is not terrible stuff. They've got some amazing stuff as well.

The problem is this device has been out of support for more than two years now. Even though they're not as advanced as some of the systems we can install, not that we always use the most advanced systems. It's not a bad, a little thing for a small business. We warned them that because they were using an out-of-date firewall that they could not get fixes for known vulnerabilities. Now that's a big deal too. Most people are not aware of the vulnerabilities that are on their machines.

Do you go out every month and check the firmware versions on your firewall? You should be, even if you're a home user. Are you checking to make sure the firewall that the cable company provided you with is up to date, configured correctly? You've changed the password and the admin username, right? No? 

Most people haven't. He hadn't, right. He didn't know. We told them we did a little research and said here's your problem. 

That's part of his cyber health assessment. We told them what kind of firewall do you have? What's the version of software on it and we do that. We have a bunch of people that have asked for cyber health assessments. We've got them on a list because we're busy. So we have to schedule these and make them happen. 

So we said, do not plug that machine in. Of course, what do they do? They plugged it back in again. So now all of a sudden this morning, we get a wake-up call from our monitors that are running they're on their  Cisco firepower firewall, where we have their extensive suite of additional software. This isn't just an off-shelf, Cisco firewall. 

It's telling us that the SonicWall or something through our, via the SonicWall. Is going through all this customer's network. It's actually attacking the Cisco firewall from inside the network. Absolutely amazing.

Why does that happen? In this case, the business owner, and it is a  very small business. It has about 5 million in revenue per year, I would guess.  It's a small business by every stretch. The owner just doesn't want to spend the money he doesn't absolutely have to spend. He's not looking at this saying I could lose all my intellectual property. I could get sued by these people. I could lose my clients who find out that their data was released. Their orders were released. Everything was stolen. 

He looks at it and says, Oh wow. It's 200 bucks a month. Wait a minute guy, you have how many employees? You're worried about 200 bucks a month. I personally, I don't understand that. Why would you do that? 

Now, you're in a poor country. Okay. I get it right. That's a lot of money to spend, but not here in the United States. Doesn't make sense. 

A lot of this is really the reason I brought it up. It's showing how there is a disconnect between business owners, C-level people, and cybersecurity people. Basically, if you have less than 200 employees, you cannot afford to have your own cybersecurity team. It's impossible. It's way too expensive. 

Then the numbers start to change outsourced cybersecurity, which is what we do.  We do this for this customer and. The in-house cybersecurity people, but we all have the same basic problem. The owner has a problem too, right? He has to weigh the costs of cybersecurity against the risks involved, which is what Equifax did. 

What so many of these big companies do, right? There's this, the norm Equifax said it's going to be way cheaper to just pay out $10 million in fines. When we get fined by the federal government for losing everyone in the country's personal financial information then it is to do this or we're not going to bother. 

Man, I'd love to see the smoking gun email on that, where they made that final decision, probably doesn't exist. They're smart enough to know that they would get sued and they have been sued because of this. 

We've got another problem right now because of people working from home. I mentioned, in fact, this week, you should have gotten an email from me on Thursday. That was a little audio thing that I put together. We call these things, audiograms, and it's a kind of a video that'll play. 

This particular one is about part of this problem. We've talked extensively about that water plant in Florida, that was hacked for lack of a better term. It might've been an insider thing. It might've been someone external, et cetera, et cetera. The reason it happened is that business, the water plant for a town of 15,000 people, which would be in a normal world, a small business. That small government operation was all of a sudden faced with lockdowns. What do we do? They didn't have a plan. They didn't have a business continuity plan, which is so important. I talked about it extensively last week as well. They had no way to manage this. So what did they do? They went out and bought team viewer licenses for everybody in the business. That put, well not the business, in this case, the agency, that put the agency at risk.

That is putting our businesses at risk too, in such a big way. That's what the audiogram I emailed out on Thursday explaining this a bit. 

So stick around. We're going to continue this conversation. 

 Of course,  you're listening to Craig Peterson [email protected].

We have people working from home. We didn't really plan for this. We're doing it because of the lockdown. Maybe, you found that it's actually better for your business, from whatever angle. What are the risks here of people taking computers home?

Hello. Everybody Craig, Peterson here. So glad to be with you today. Glad you're taking a few minutes out of your day as well to listen in. 

Now I am very concerned about people using computers that they're taking home. I want to make a definition. Maybe there's a better way of saying this, computers that are used at home, home computers should never be used for work. 

I'm going to explain why. Computers that are at work probably should not be taken home. We saw the example of this, just this last couple of weeks. 

I was talking about this wonderful plugin that I've been using and recommending people use here for a very long time, called the Great Suspender. We've talked at length really about what happened there with the company being bought and then becoming evil, right? Just buying their way into 2 million people's computers. 

Sometimes these Chrome extensions that are installed on personal computers get automatically installed and synchronized to your work devices. In fact, that's the default. If you log into Chrome and you're using Google Chrome as your browser and you log into it on your home computer, and when you log into your same account over on your business computer. All of a sudden, now it's syncing. It's syncing things like passwords, which you should not be having Google store for you. You should definitely be using a good password manager and there are a few out there. 

If you're not familiar with them or don't know which one to use or how to use them. I have a great little special report on passwords and using password managers. I'd be glad to send it to you. Just email [email protected] and I'll send that on-off, right? I'm not making a dime off of that. I want to make you safer. 

I don't want to have happened to you what's happened to millions of Americans, including my best buddy who had his information stolen. I've been after him to use password managers. He never did it. I don't know why.

Until his paycheck got stolen. Then he came over and I explained it and set it up with them and really helped him out.

Maybe we should do a whole webinar showing you how to use these password managers, how to get them set up because it is a little bit tricky. It's certainly different than you're used to. Many people are using their browser Chrome in this example, to save passwords. When you go to a website, you'll automatically have the password there. Maybe you've got it set up so that it'll automatically log you in with all kinds of cool stuff. But there is a very big problem and that is that there is a huge risk with running these extensions, like the Great Suspender. The Great Suspender was approved by Google. It was in the Google store. You could download it from their app store. Absolutely free. 

 In January of this year in 2021, we had someone out on Twitter, tweet that there was a problem with the security on the Great Suspender. It had been changed. It was being used now to send ads out and other things. That's pretty, pretty bad. The extension wasn't banned until about a month later and you as an end-user had no official notification that this extension was potentially malicious. 

Apparently, they could, with this malicious software they embedded, not just show you ad, not just insert their own ads to generate revenue onto the webpage as you were visiting, they could also grab files from your machine. That's a very bad thing. 

Now, presumably, if you're at work, you have a team that's helping you outright.  The IT security team, there may be different teams and maybe the same person who also is the office manager, who knows. It does vary. Businesses cannot know what you're doing when you're starting to install those extensions and they are pushing their way onto your office computer because you're using the same Google account in both places.

Now, despite the risks, of course, I installed this Great Suspender used it for years and I was pretty happy using it. I know many other people who were in the same boat. Security teams have some great tools. I mentioned my son who's one of our team members got called out to a client. During the break, I was just chatting with him briefly. What had happened is they plugged in this firewall we told them not to plugin. It was apparently hacked from the outside. It had known security vulnerabilities. He had not, this small business owner had not yet paid for maintenance on his little firewall, so he was not getting security updates.

In fact, my team member looked at this and found that it had been three years since the firmware on his firewall had been updated. The bad guys got into his network through this secondary firewall, which we told them not to have not to plugin. Our firewall only noticed it because this malware started scanning everything on the network. Of course, it scanned two of our machines, one being the firewall. 

Remember this isn't a regular firewall that we put in there. This is a firepower firewall with a whole bunch of extra software on top of it.  In our data center, we have some huge machines that are sitting there watching what's going on remotely. On our client's networks via that firepower firewall. 

We started getting all these notices as to what was going on, but this is a great example. We're not updating some of that software. He had a security team and he ignored the security team. We were the security team. We're outsourced cybersecurity that's what we do, but that happens many times. 

Many business owners and others look at the cybersecurity situation as having many different shades of gray. What should you do? What shouldn't you do? The teams that are working in these businesses, including us. We have to tell them, Hey, don't use that firewall. Do not plug it in. You don't need it. If you plug it in, it's going to make it way easier for some of your people to work from home.  This is not set up correctly and you're going to have problems. That's a difficult conversation to have with a business owner. We had it and he ignored it much to his peril.

In this case, this one is hard to tell how much data was stolen from his business. The impact from this could last for months, and there could be investigations who knows what's going to end up happening here. That business owner and I, because I spoke to him as well about this whole situation before this particular event happened just about two weeks ago. In fact, that was a reminder cause they had plugged it in again. Six months before that we had told the business owner, you can't plug this thing in, you cannot be using it. 

How do you do that? How do you let an impacted employee, somebody who's working from home, maybe using their own computer to do work for the business? How can you approach them and tell them, Hey, you cannot use Google Chrome?  You cannot save your passwords on your browser. You cannot install extensions. Even if you had a list of extensions today that were bad, that list is going to be out of date tomorrow, which is going to be a very big problem.

Individual users do not have the ability to check this. Frankly, most businesses don't either. Again, that's why a business under 200 employees cannot afford to do this yourself. You just can't. This is a specialty. 

We were talking yesterday with a prospect who had been brought to us by a break-fix shop and trying to get this concept through. We're going to talk a little bit more about that. What should you be doing? How can you pay attention? How can you even be safe in this day and age? 

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. We've been talking about supply chain problems. That's a technical term for it, but the software that we rely on becoming evil, and what can we really do about it?

Hello, everybody. You're listening to Craig Peterson. 

How do you talk to a business owner and help them understand? That's a problem. Isn't it? Look at what happened a few years back with TJX stores. Them as maybe TJ max, that's one of their stores. They have a number of others.

Their cybersecurity guys did something I have seen done before. That is, they went to the management of this massive public company and said, Hey, TJX, we need to get this hardware. We need to get this staffing. The hardware course pretty expensive and it sits there and it does much the same stuff. Even back then. Nowhere as good as today. It's exponential, as to how much better it gets every year, but it was good hardware.  It really could have stopped the hack that happened and it did. 

Here's what it did. It noticed the hack was going on. The problem was they were able to say yes to the hardware, the senior management said yes. They got the hardware, but senior management would not get the security technicians that were needed to monitor and run that hardware. They were short-staffed. 

That's another problem we're seeing. That's why the companies you're dealing with, whether it's Equifax, with who you do not have a direct business relationship with, and yet have all this information about you and sell that. Or maybe it's just some other website. That's why they lose your data. It's a real bad idea. The bad guys are just waiting out there just siphon all of your data. In many cases, when you're talking about a business and a business website, or even your home computer, they're looking to redirect you to malicious websites.

What they'll do is for instance, again, the Great Suspenders' an example, that they claim it's been fixed now. With something like an extension or a plugin that you put in your browser, they could rather easily code it up so that you are going to a website that's malicious.

It could look like Bank of America's website and you go there and you enter in your information. You put in your username, you put in your password, it asks you a security question. Maybe maybe not, but your username and password. Then it says incorrect. Then your screen refreshes while your screen just refreshed because you were not at the Bank of America, originally. You were at a malicious website and you entered in your username and password. Now the bad guys have your username and password to your banking system, to your login, to your bank accounts. They got that. That's all they needed. They didn't want you to know that this was going on so they just went ahead and redirected you over to the real bank website. Hence, the supposed reload. 

It's a very big weakness here in how IT and security teams operate because too few security teams really can relate with the CEO and vice versa.  I've seen that all of the time with people working for me in cybersecurity, you've got a really good idea of what needs to be done, how it needs to be done when it needs to be done. To you, it's the most important thing in the world, right? You don't want the business to go under, you're going to lose your job, maybe your pension retirement plan is tied to that business. You don't want it to happen, but have you got the trust built up with the senior management? 

Then how about the other side of this relationship? How about if you're a cybersecurity person? Even if, again, you're not a professional, you're just the person tasked with it in the office or you're the person tasked with it at home. How do you go to the other employees and tell them you can't use your Google Chrome account here in the office? How are you going to enforce it? How are you going to tell your husband or wife, Hey, that's dangerous? I don't want you installing any of these extensions on your computer. One of the really bad things that people do with their browsers is they put on these real fancy little extensions that give all kinds of extra wonderful information. It ends up as a toolbar and it lets you do searches on this site or that site. Maybe it keeps you up to date on the stocks that you have in your portfolio. You're telling hackers what stocks you own, really? It might be legitimate, right. But who knows? That's the problem. Something like that can really mess you up and send you to malicious sites. You know that your spouse is using that or your kids are using that. How do you talk to them? How do you solve those problems? It's a real problem. 

There are some interesting tools that you can use, as professionals. There's a Slack channel I can send you to, if you're interested, actually, it'll be in the newsletter that comes out on Sunday. At least it should be under one of those articles. It is a problem. 

Netflix, by the way, is really trying to help you out too. Not only did the Netflix security team provide some feedback for what's called the honest security guide, but it's also made some of its user tools, the tools that you might use at your home to find a movie, et cetera, it might help really to secure you. 

Git Hub has this. It is called, this is a Netflix skunkworks, the stethoscope app. It's a desktop application created by Netflix that checks security-related settings and makes recommendations for improving the configuration of your computer. It doesn't require central device management or reporting. You can have a look at that. If you are interested, let me know. I can probably point you in the right direction to the stethoscope app. That's what we want to see in this honest security guide. You'll find it online. At honest security is a guide to your devices, security, which in the biz we call endpoint security and it is cool. You can run through all of this list is a big checklist and talking about why honest, and they're saying dishonesty stops you from doing the right thing. 

That's why in my courses, I spend a lot of time, more time in fact, on the why than the how.  I want you to understand honestly, why you should or should not do something.

There are so many people who are out there yelling and screaming, jumping up and down. Particularly your antivirus companies. You fake VPN companies who are trying to get you to buy their products that not only do not need in most cases but will actually make your computer less secure. 

So we have to be careful about all of this stuff. We have to make sure we are talking. We've got to have a trust relationship set up with the owners of our business. Cause you guys, some of you, I know own businesses, some of you work for a business. We've got people listening to this all over the world and every continent I've even seen a listener down in Antarctica.  I really can say every continent. It's important that we know how to work with our fellow employees, with our management, with our family members, to help them to know what they need to do.  There is no time to wait. We have never seen as many attacks as we're seeing now. We've never seen the government using its resources to attack us more than we have now.

We've never seen more billions of dollars stolen per year by the bad guys. There are some basic tenants that you can follow that will make you way more secure. And that's why you're listening. That's why I go through some of these things to help everybody understand. 

That's also why I go ahead and make sure that I answer your emails. If you have a question, make sure you go ahead and ask. You can just email me at [email protected]. If it's something urgent, I have a form on the bottom of my homepage  @craigpeterson.com. You can give me a little bit more information. I tend to keep an eye on that a little bit better than my general email, although I do use some amazing email software that helps me to keep track of the real email and get rid of the spam and put things in boxes and stuff  craigpeterson.com. It's that simple email me [email protected]. If you have questions. 

I hope that Google is going to continue to improve itself. I love the fact that they found out that this one extension was malicious.

For those of you who might've just tuned in, we're talking about something called the Great Suspender something I've used for years, it became malicious, but they need to do more. 

As people who are concerned about security, we just can't wait for the next incident. Just again, this client of mine, who we've been warning about this for months, he's stopped doing what we told him to do, and then decided well it's just too difficult. That's something we hear a lot from businesses. Oh, it just hampers the work. It hampers it because now we have to get permission from it in order to mount this particular drive or gain access to those files or materials. Yes you do, because we have to stop the internal spread of all of this malware and all of these hackers.

 It is absolutely worth it. 

All right, everybody. Thanks again for joining me today. I really hope you've been enjoying this. I have years' worth of podcasts out there and you'll find all of those at craigpeterson.com/podcast or on your favorite podcast platform. 

If you subscribed under iTunes, you might've noticed, ah, yeah, I just released a whole batch there too.

I expressed concerns about owning an Apple watch. I held off for a long time. I want to talk about these devices now, the security concerns, but also the amazing health tools that are built right in.

Hey, welcome back. This Apple watch is really fascinating. It has been around now for six generations. There are a number of other watches that have had, or tried, I should say, to compete with Apple. They haven't been very successful. You might've noticed that. I have a friend that bought some watches for his family and to him that monitor all of the basic vitals and record them and send them up to his phone. It's a 20-ish dollar watch. He got it from South Korea probably are parts made in China, but it is an inexpensive watch and it does some of the basics at the other end of the scale.

Let's have a look right now. I'm going to go to apple.com online, and we're going to click on watch. Here we go, Oh, my they've got special watches so you can buy their watches. It looks like the new one, the Apple watch series six for starting at 400 bucks or they have two different sizes. . They have a more basic watch called the Apple Watch SE that starts at about $300. You can still get the Apple watch series three. Now, these all can monitor high and low heart rates. They can give you irregular heart rhythm notification, but it's only a-fib atrial fibrillation, I think is the only one they can monitor, but all three of those can monitor that.

As I said, my buddy's watches, he got for his family at 20 bucks apiece are able to do most of that as well. 

These are water-resistant to 50 meters, which is really cool. The series six also has an ECG app. That is very cool. You open the app, you put your finger on the crown of the watch and it gives you an EKG right there on the watch and it feeds it to your phone.

On your phone, you can turn it into a PDF. You can share it with your doctor on and on. It's just amazing. It's a three-lead type, I was in emergency medicine, right? A med-tech EMT, EMT-PD can't remember. I had a whole bunch of different certifications back in the day. But it's fantastic for that.

It also has a blood oxygen app that monitors your blood oxygen levels. It ties all of this into their new exercise app, which is amazing. That ties into your phone or your iPad.  I will go down in the basement onto the treadmill and I'll select your treadmill workout.  It has dozens of them.

Have you seen this really fancy treadmill? A couple of years ago they got in all kinds of trouble because they advertised it around Christmas time and apparently this woman really wanted a treadmill and she got one and she was all excited. All of these people jumped out of the woodwork. All your you're saying she's fat, et cetera. No, she wanted a treadmill.

These are amazing treadmills because they have built into them. These streams and you can join classes, et cetera. With the Apple Watch, my iPad, and a subscription to this iHealth app, which you can get as part of this Apple plus thing you can buy for 30 bucks for the whole family, 30 bucks a month.

 I don't know how many I have seen probably a hundred different workouts on there.  It has different workouts, different types of weightlifting, running, jogging, treadmills, elliptical machines, everything.  You can pick your pace. You can pick your instructor, you can pick everything.

Then your Apple watch is monitoring your body. As you're working out. So it's telling you how many calories you've burned. What's your heart rate is to help keep your heart rate in the best range for you, depending on what kind of a workout you're doing. It also lets you compete against other people.

Does this sound like an ad for the Apple watch? 

You can compete with other people your age doing the same workout and see where you're at. I was really surprised because typically I am at the front of the pack when it comes to my treadmill workouts. That's really cool as well.

Those are some of the basics. There are other things too, that Apple is doing. We've found, right now, that Mount Sinai just came out with an announcement and they said that the Apple watch can predict COVID 19 diagnosis up to a week before testing can detect it. Yes. Isn't that something? Not only can the Apple watch help with certain heart arrhythmias, but it can predict that you have COVID-19 too a week before testing normal testing. Those swabs can find it out. 

This is from the journal of medical internet research, which is a peered review journal. And they found that wearable hardware and specifically the Apple watch can effectively predict a positive COVID-19 diagnosis up to a week before the current PCR-based nasal swab tests.

They called this the warrior watch study. They had a dedicated Apple watch and the iPhone app, and they had some participants from the Mount Sinai staff and it required, of course, these staff members to use the app to turn on the health and data monitoring and collection, and also asked them to fill out a survey every day to provide some feedback about their potential COVID-19 symptoms. As well as other things like stress can obviously make your heart rate, go up your blood pressure, go up, et cetera. Oh. By the way, Apple, supposedly the rumors are, we'll have a BP sensor in the Apple seven that'll be out later this year, most likely. 

So they had several hundred healthcare workers and the primary biometric signal. I know that the studies authors were watching was heart rate variability. This is fascinating to me because it's something that I learned about fairly recently. Then when I got my Apple watch, I read up more about this, but basically, heart rate variability is what it sounds like. It's your heart rate. Let's say your heart is beating at 60 beats per minute. It is not beating once every 10 seconds.  It is not beating once a second. Your heart rate will vary over the course of that minute. If you're healthy.  Obviously, a beat every 10 seconds isn't 60 a minute.

Let's use that as an example. Somebody who's almost dead and has six beats per minute. The first heartbeat might be at 10 seconds. The second heartbeat might be at 22 seconds because your heart is supposed to vary its rate of contractions based on immediate feedback. It's not just that you're going out in your running and now you've driven up your heart rate and you're doing your cardio and it or you just walked up a flight of stairs or you stood up, which is another test, by the way, what we're talking about here.

You might just be sitting there, but your cells have a different need for oxygen or for the blood. The heart slows down slightly or speeds up slightly.  This heart rate variability is something built into the Apple watch and into the iPhone app that you attach to the Apple watch. Isn't that useful without an iPhone, frankly? Then you can look at your heart rate variability right there. 

They said, combining that with the symptoms that people reported, these Mount Sinai staff, that the symptoms that they reported that were associated with COVID-19 including fever, aches, dry cough, gastrointestinal issues, loss of taste and smell corresponded with changes in the heart rate variability. I thought that was just absolutely phenomenal because heart rate variability is considered to be a key indicator of strain on your nervous system. COVID-19 obviously is going to put a strain on the nervous system. Just very neat.  It says here that the study was not only able to predict infections up to a week before tests provided confirmed diagnosis but also revealed that participants' heart rate variability patterns normalized fairly quickly after their diagnosis or turning to normal run about one to two weeks following their positive tests. That's from a TechCrunch, that particular quote. 

 I am very excited about this, but I am also on the concerned side. I'm concerned because they are collecting vital data from us. All of the major companies, Google and Microsoft and Apple want to be the company that holds all of your personal medical records.

We're going to get back to that when we come back here. What is happening? How is your doctor managing your medical records? I was really shocked to find out how that industry is working.

 Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson. Check it out online. Craig peterson.com.

Welcome back. What are you doing? Are you asking your doctor how they are handling your medical records? Because I think you probably should based on what I learned just this week.

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me.  We were just talking about health. We're talking about the Apple watch and the fact that there's a lot of competitors out there, some of them, a fraction of the cost. If you buy the Apple watch on terms, you're going to pay less in one month's payment on terms to Apple than you would for some of these other watches out there, but Apple watches do have more features. 

Mine even has a built-in cellular modem. Even if I don't have my phone with me, phone calls come through to my watch and text messages, and I can respond and answer. It's really nice. Medically I am very impressed. It has been good at motivating me to do some exercise, to get up, and about just to do a bunch of things I had never, ever done before. Consider that. 

It is collecting our data. Apple now has potential access to all of my cardiac data. They've got EKGs that I have run on my watch. They know about my heart rate. They know how often I exercise, and how hard I exercise when I exercise. They know all of this stuff about me. I had a conversation with someone just saying why does that matter? Maybe it's Apple, maybe it's somebody else. Why does it matter? 

It does matter. Think about an evil genius, right? The thing about somebody that might want to target Americans and might want medical information about Americans. They can gather it in a number of different ways. We're going to talk about medical records here in a little bit.

One of the things they could certainly do is grab all of our watch data. Some of these watches, including my Apple watch, have GPS built into them. When you're out running or jogging, you know where you went, you can plan your route and it'll remind you, Hey, turn here, turn there. That's one of the things I love about the Apple Watch when I'm using it with Apple maps out driving, it taps me on the wrist and reminds me, Hey, in 500 feet, you got to turn.

 If I look at the watch, it'll even show me the turn I need to make coming up in 500 feet. It's really amazing. All of this information is being compiled and hopefully, it's being compiled by a company that we can trust. At this point, we can probably trust Apple. Hopefully, they're not going to be broken into. Now, their margins or profit is high enough that they certainly can afford a security team, one capable of defending them and defending our data. I hope they are. I suspect that they are for the most part.

How about some of these others? We know Google, for instance, is in the business of collecting and selling our information, is having all of our medical information. Not just the stuff from our watches, but the stuff from our doctors. Are they to be trusted with that kind of information?

Going back to that bad guy, that mad scientist we can, and probably do engineer viruses that are targeted at specific things. In fact, the Russians have been doing it. The Soviets' started it, they came up with a phage. That can attack certain viruses and it acts like a virus it gets in and does this little thing. We've got right now, these COVID-19 vaccines and they act like a virus they're messing with, well effectively, the DNA. In fact, it's the RNA, but it's pretending, Hey, I got a message from the DNA, here it is. 

What if a bad guy knew that are a certain population in a certain area, and that area was right by this important military base or whatever they came up with something that would target them and they'd have all of the data to do it now. That's obviously an extreme example. A more common example would be that your medical data is there. It's being sold to advertisers and you're going to end up with something. 

For instance, there's a company, very big company out there and they sell baby products. What they did was they tracked and they bought this information, but they tracked women who were purchasing certain things. Now, they weren't purchasing things that were directly related to having a baby, right? They weren't purchasing diapers or little jumpsuits or whatever it is. They were purchasing things that were not directly related maybe people wouldn't even think they were typically related to having a baby. Yet they were able to figure this out. They got that good with the data.  So they thought, Oh, okay let's get wise here. Let's send out a postcard, congratulating them on their pregnancy and offering them a discount on something. Yeah. Not a bad idea, frankly. 

However, in this case, some of these moms I hadn't told anybody that they were pregnant yet and didn't want to tell anybody that they were pregnant yet. It fell on its face. Didn't it? 

How about these ambulance-chasing lawyers that are out there? Are they going to want to gain access to this, to your medical records? 

How about your employer? Your employer wants to know I'm going to train this person. Hopefully, they'll stick with us for a while, but is he going to be a burden on our medical plan? Keyman insurance, health insurance, life insurance. Have access to everything about you. That's what really concerns me about these, all of these devices. 

Right now, pretty confident that I can give Apple this information and they will keep it pretty safe. But, I said the same thing about the Great Suspender, right? I don't know about the future. 

Then I found something out this week that was in my mind extremely disturbing. We have a new clinic that we've picked up as a client. They needed to have security. They had a couple of little security issues. They were worried. They knew they were not HIPAA compliant. They approached us because they know that's what we do is cybersecurity and audits and remediation. Fixing the problems. We pick them up. They're a client. We're in there. They had told us in advance that all of their medical record systems were on-line. It was on the web. All they needed was a web browser to run their business. Okay. That could be a problem. It might be okay. The medical records manufacturer might have good security on all of the records. So we may be safe, although in HIPAA unless you have a business process agreement in place with that vendor if that data is lost, it falls back on the doctor's shoulders.

Anyhow, what I found out was, first of all, it wasn't completely web-based, which just shocked me. I'm not talking about they have to scan records or they got the x-ray machine or whatever. It really wasn't web-based and secondarily the company they were using for the medical records was a free service. 

The doctor, that clinic, was not paying for their medical records management software.  The way it works is this medical records management company when the doctor prescribes something when the doctor performs a procedure and bills and insurance company, it's all done through this one company and that company takes a chunk of their money.

In some cases we found seems to have been inflating the bills that went off to the insurance companies and that, as it turns out is a common practice in the industry. According to the doctors at this clinic, I was shocked, amazed. 

Something you might want to look at. Ask your doctors where are your records kept and are they secure?

Now we had HIPAA. We thought that would secure it, but it doesn't.

 Stick around.

Hey, we got a name now for what happened to the Great Suspender and QR code scanner apps over on the Google stores. One at Google Play, the other one over on the Google Chrome store. It's become that popular.

Hey, everybody, I wanted to mention this whole new category of malware really, and they're calling it, right now, Buy to infect. What happens is a bad guy, a malware guy buys a legitimate app and then starts infecting it.  We know, obviously, about the one that I've been talking about a lot the Google extension that I used to use all of the time, the Great Suspender. I mentioned this one a few weeks ago, it's called QR code scanner. It's been on the Google play store for a long time, had more than 10 million installs and then all of a sudden it became malicious. 

This is a little bit of a different angle on it because, with the Great Suspender, the ownership of that software actually transferred to somebody. With QR code scanner, they were working on a deal with a company and this company wanted to verify the Google play account for QR code scanner. This is all according to the owner, the original owner of QR code scanner.  They said that what had happened is part of this purchase deal. I let them have a look and gain access to the software's key and password prior to purchase so they could confirm the purchase, which doesn't sound too bad. Apparently, as soon as they got a hold of the software's key and password, forget about the purchase, we're going to start infecting it right away.  It ended up getting that app, the QR code scanner app, pulled right from the Google play score store. Of course, now you don't need that quite as much because most of the phone apps when you go to take a picture, the camera apps have built into them, a QR code scanner.

 I thought that was fascinating what they did. They totally cheated the company. They didn't even bother buying it. So a little word for the wise out there.

 Got another Apple story cause this is showing how the computer industry is really shifting. We've talked about some of the shortages of chips and the shortages of computer chips are so bad that General Motors has had to shut down two-thirds of its manufacturing lines in at least one plant.  Every major automobile manufacturer is having problems making cars because they can't get the chips. 

Remember nowadays, a car, a truck is essentially just a computer on wheels. Not really actually computer on wheels. It's really dozens of computers all linked together with a network on wheels. 

Apple has been worried about that, right? Supply chain. That's one of the things you're supposed to worry about as a public company. What are the risks going forward including to my supply chain? Obviously your supply chain matters. You gotta be able to make something you need parts, right?  Apple has been upset with Intel for a while. You might remember Apple. When it first came out, was using a Motorola chipset, which was exceptional much better than the Intel chipsets.  Of course, that's my opinion, a lot of people agree with me. You had the 68000, 68010, and 20, et cetera. Very good chips. 

When Apple started getting into the laptop business, that's when the problems started to happen.  These Motorola chips gave off a lot of heat and used up a lot of electricity.  At the time Apple looked around and said our only real alternative right now is Intel. Intel has a whole line of chips, different speeds, and they have mobile chips.  Those mobile chips use much less power than the Motorola chips for the main CPU.  They also use less battery. Those two go hand in hand and generate less heat. That's it all goes hand in hand. So they said, we'll start working with Intel. They did. Intel really disappointed them more than once, which is a shame. They disappointed them with the 64-bit migration. AMD, advanced micro devices, beat Intel to the punch. Shockingly Intel started making AMD compatible CPUs right. The 64-bit extensions to the CPU were AMD extensions. They had problems with some of their other chips as well. Mobile chips getting the power usage under control, the heat dissipation problems under control, and they never really lived up to what Apple was hoping for. What everybody in the industry was hoping for. In many ways, Intel has been a huge disappointment, which is really a shame. 

We'll look at what they did to the industry, with these predictive instructions, the hyper-threading, and stuff. Where bad guys were able to bring a computer to its knees.  What does Intel say? Here's a firmware patch you can apply to our CPU, those little CPUs you pay upwards of $2,000 for a piece for one chip.  Those CPU's and by the way, it's going to, cut its performance by a minimum of 20%, maybe 50%, that's okay.

What are you kidding me?  A lot of people were upset with Intel and Apple and Microsoft and everybody released patches that use the new Intel microcode. You might've noticed when this happened a couple of years ago that your computer slowed down. I certainly noticed, actually, it was little more than a year, anyway, I noticed it because I own a data center. That has a lot of Intel chips in it where we're running mostly Unixes, Linux, and BSD, but we're also running Windows. So the only way to work around this bug was to apply the patch and slow everything way, way down. 

Imagine how Apple and Google felt with their huge data centers. IBM too. IBM has Intel-based data centers, as well as its own chips, and boy talking about phenomenal chips, as far as processing power goes, IBM, man, they are still the leader with the power chips and their Z series. That just wow. Mind-blowing. 

Most of us are stuck in the Intel world. Apple said we can no longer trust Intel. So what are we going to do? Apple said we've been developing this chip for a long time. Apple took the chip design, they licensed it from this open sourcee type of company that has a number of members. They took this arm architecture and were able to improve it, and keep adding to it, et cetera.  They're still part of this Alliance. They started using these in their iPhones. The iPhones have been using these chips the whole time and they started improving them after they released the first iPhones.  Intel didn't really get them upset until a little later on, too.

They came up with newer ones, faster ones, better ones, right to all of these A10 their bionic chips. They've got AI chips, machine learning chips, all Apple designed. Chips, of course, manufactured by third parties, but that's what Apple is using.  Apple has now said we expect all of their Macintosh computers to be based on Apple's CPU within the next two years. 

There's already some really good ones out there right now that people like a lot. We've been using them with some of our clients that use Apple. Not everybody has had great luck with them, but Apple is not only ditching Intel, that's not the big story here. Apple's got some job listings out there looking to hire engineers. 

So when we get back, we'll tell you more about what Apple is doing and what frankly, I think the rest of the industry should look at. Guess what? They are.

It's been Intel versus the rest of the world. They've been winning for years in many categories, but now they're starting to lose, as major manufacturers are starting to leave Intel behind. But there's more to the story still.

Hi, everybody.. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for tuning in. We're glad you're here.  In the last segment of the day, I want to point everybody to the website, of course. You can get my newsletter. It comes out every Sunday morning and it highlights one of the articles of the week. It gives you a pointer to my podcast. So you can listen right there. There's just a lot of great information. Plus I'm also doing little training. I'm sending out, hopefully, next week, two little training sessions for everybody to help you understand security a little better, and this applies to business. However, it's not. Strictly business, much of what I talk about is also for home users. So if you want to go along for the ride, come along, we'd be glad to have you. There's a lot to understand and to know that you won't get from anywhere else. It's just amazing. Many other of these radio shows where they are just nothing but fluff and commercials and paid promotions. I'm just shocked at it. It goes against my grain when that sort of thing happens. Absolutely. 

We were just talking about Apple and how Apple got upset with Intel, but they're not the only ones upset. We also now have seen a lot of manufacturers who have started producing Chromebooks and surface tablets that are based on chip sets other than Intel's.

This is going to be a real problem for Intel. Intel has almost always relied, certainly in the later years has relied on Microsoft and people bought Intel because they wanted Windows. That's the way that goes. It's just like in the early days, people bought an Apple too, because they wanted a great little VisiCalc, the spreadsheet program. 

Now, what we're seeing are operating systems that do not require a single line of Microsoft software. Google Chrome is a great example of it. Linux is another great example and people are loving their Google Chrome laptops, and you can buy these laptops for as little as 200 bucks. Now you get what you pay for and all the way up to a couple of grand and they don't have a line single line of Microsoft code. Yet you can still edit Word documents and Excel documents, et cetera. They do not contain any Intel hardware. What was called, well, they might have a chip here or there, but not the main CPU. What used to be called the Wintel monopoly. In other words, Windows-Intel monopoly is dying. It's dying very quickly.

 Apple is not helping now. Apple, they've had somewhere between seven and 10% market share in the computer business for quite a while. Personally, I far prefer Apple Macintoshes over anything else out there by far.  I use them every day. So that's me.  I don't know about you. There's a little bit of a learning curve. Although people who aren't that computer literate find it easier to learn how to use a Mac than to learn how to use Windows, which makes sense.  Apple has really done a great job. A bang-up job.

With these new chips, it's getting even faster. We are now finding out from a report from Bloomberg who first started these, that Apple has been posting job listings, looking for engineers to work on 6G technology. 6G, right now we're rolling out 5g, which hasn't been a huge win because of the fact that if you want really fast 5g, like the type Verizon provides, you have to have a lot of micro-cell sites everywhere. They have to be absolutely everywhere.  Of course, it's just not financially reasonable to put them up in smaller communities. If the Biden administration continues the way they're going with the FCC and the open internet type thing of a-bits-a-bit, then there will be no incentive for any of these carriers to expand their networks because they can't charge more for better service. If you can imagine that. Ajit Pai fought against that for many years, Trump's appointee as chairman to the FCC, but things are changing. The wind has changed down in Washington, so we'll lose some of those jobs and we're not going to get all of the benefits of 5g. If he keeps us up. 6G is coming. 

 What that means is Qualcomm, who is the manufacturer of record for most of the modems that are in our cell phones. Qualcomm has also missed some deadlines. Apple is tired of dependencies on third parties because Qualcomm might have somebody else that buys way more chips. It might be able to sell the same chip to the military of whatever country for a much, much higher price. They can sell it to consumers. Maybe they just change the label on it and call it a mill spec, and often goes right, who knows? What they're doing out there, but Apple doesn't want to do that anymore. They are looking for engineers to define and perform the research for the next generation standards of wireless communications, such as 6G The ads say you will research and design next-generation 6G wireless communication systems for radio access networks with emphasis on the physical Mac L two and L three layers. Fascinating, eh? What do you think?  I think a huge deal as Apple continues to ditch, many of its vendors that have not been living up to the standards Apple has set. 

Apple has moved some of the manufacturing back to the United States. More of the assembly has been moved here. The manufacturing, it's starting to come back again. We'll see the Trump administration really wanted it here.  We need it here, not just for jobs, we needed it here for our security.

We've talked about that before, too, right? I want to also point out speaking of Apple and manufacturing, China, of course, does most of it for Apple and Foxconn is the company in China that makes almost all of this stuff for Apple. It's huge. Foxconn owns cities. Huge cities. They have high rises where people basically don't see the light of day, these high rise factories. You live there, you eat there, you shop there, you work there. 

Like the old company store who is it, Tennessee Ernie, right? Owe my soul to the company store. That's what's happening over there. And Foxconn has kept its costs low by bringing people in from the fields, if you will, out there being farmers and paying them extremely low wages. On top of all of that, in some cases they're using slave labor. I found this article very interesting, from Ars Technica's, Timothy B. Lee. He's talking about a potential partnership between Apple and Nissan. Let me remember. I mentioned Apple talking with Kia and Kia is denying it.

The financial times reported on Sunday that this potential deal between Apple and Nissan fell apart because Apple wanted Nissan to build Apple cars, they would have the Apple logo on them. They all be branded Apple. It wouldn't say Nissan unless you took something seriously apart you might find it inside.

 Nissan wanted to keep the Nissan brand on its own vehicles. Bloomberg reported last week that the negotiations with Kia and of course its parent companies Huyndaiin South Korea had ended without a deal. The Financial Times said that Apple has also sounded out BMW as a potential partner because Apple doesn't make cars.

So how are they going to do this? Apparently the talks faltered with Apple and Nissan because Nissan had a fear and apparently this is true of Kia too, of becoming quote the Foxconn of the auto industry, unquote, which is a reference to this Chinese well it's Taiwanese technically, but a group that manufacturers are while actually assembles the iPhones. Fascinating. Isn't it fascinating. 

When you start to dig into this self-driving technology and the numbers behind it, that's where you wonder, why is Apple even trying at this point, Apple's test vehicles only traveled 18,000 miles on California roads. Between 2019 and 2020, or over the course of about a year, late in both years. 18,000 miles in a year. Heck, I've done that before with my own car.

 Waymo, which is Google's self-driving project put on more than well, about 630,000 miles in California. Likely a lot more in Arizona where they doa lot more testing. Cruise, which is this startup that was put together by GM and Honda logged even more miles than Google's Waymo, 77,000 miles on California roads.

So this is going to be interesting. Apple sitting on 77 billion dollars in cash and short-term investments. That's more than the market capitalization, the entire market gap of a number of major market car makers, including Nissan, Ford. Actually, you add those two together and you haven't reached the amount of cash Apple has on hand and Stellantis, the parent company of Chrysler Fiat. They have the money potentially they could buy out one of these companies. We'll see what happens, the automated cars market's going to be huge. I'm looking forward to it. We're going to have a lot of struggles between now and then.

Hey everybody, if you haven't done it go right now to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. You'll get my newsletter. You'll get these trainings. You'll get to listen to my appearances if you miss them. You can find my podcasts on almost any platform out there.

Just check it out. Craig peterson.com.  If you have a minute, leave a hopefully five star review for me. I'd really appreciate it. 

Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody!

I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon. We really got into the power distribution issues in TX and it appears that the Energy department was really "asleep at the switch." Then we talked about the nightmare that these bureaucratic states are having with their vaccine scheduling websites. We discussed why they are having a problem and what they could have done, but didn't. Here we go with Matt.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. I'm laughing because I just had to run over to another computer, shut off the speaker because here it was on the air with Mr. Matt Gagnon, and all of a sudden my computer, which was rebooting came up and decided it was going to play Johnny Cash Ring of fire. See if you can hear it in the background, it shouldn't be too loud. Cause I've got a decent microphone here, but man, did it distract me?

Anyhow, we got into New York's vaccine website. What's going on there?

This math that talks about wind energy shows what really happened down in the great state of Texas.

A little bit about what's going on in Maine and of course, a little bit of ring of fire. So here we go with Mr. Matt Gagnon.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:46] It's WGAN morning news on a Wednesday, which means it's a good time to talk to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. You can hear him on this very station on Saturdays at one for his own show where he talks about a lot of these same topics, but why wait, he's here with us now, Craig, how are you this morning?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:01] Hey, good morning back. Doing really well.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:03] Lots of stuff to get to with you here. One of the most topical topics, if you will, that we could deal with here, which is interesting to talk to you about. But something that we've talked about on the show quite often here in the last week, or so is about what's going on in Texas, right?

With the energy failure. What's been going on with power outages and how cold has affected it and what I would consider a brewing controversy about, what's really. The ultimate culprit here, initially a lot of people were blaming sort of wind farms that had frozen and were unable to be producing any sort of electricity.

Others have pointed the blame at natural gas facilities, also not being able to transfer a lot of electricity, et cetera, but you gave me an article that to read, which I thought was very interesting about the basic math behind all this showing how frankly wind energy actually is a pretty big culprit in this whole story.

So just tell us a little bit more about what we've learned here.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:54] Yeah, It's interesting when you get beyond kind of the emotions and the political arguments and get down to the real facts behind it all. Texas, of course, this is just a terrible thing. We had people die. Every year, in fact, of course, people end up dying from the cold and heat as well.

Having the ability to heat our homes, our businesses, and cool them in the summer, particularly in Texas is really important. Texas focused on the summer where of course everything gets hot, they need a lot of electricity. They're four main ways of generating electricity. Natural gas, of course, they have a lot of that thanks to fracking, coal, wind, and nuclear.

When we look at the numbers, the actual hard numbers of megawatt-hours produced in Texas. We see about a 20% drop across the board in the amount of electricity that they are generating by each of those four categories. That's not a good thing, right? Because you need more energy. In every case, the amount of energy produced dropped, because those systems were not set up to handle the cold.

What's really interesting is you look at natural gas. For instance, it was about 44,000 megawatt-hours before this whole thing happened.

That 44,000 number dropped down to 30,000 when we had, of course, the coldest part of the winter. Some of that was because control valves in some cases were not winterized. They weren't ready for the cold. There are other reasons as well. It dropped because, of course, now we have people demanding it to heat their homes. So there was less natural gas available for these power plants.

Coal even dropped. It went from 10,000 megawatt-hours down to 8,000, but you pointed out something that's really dramatic and that is the wind power.

We have all kinds of jets, but let's just use a small one as an example, a little Bombardier jet, they fly in and out of these smaller Maine airports all the time.

How do they fly? Well, they fly because of the lift, right? The aerodynamic lift. If you get ice on those wings, all of a sudden you lose that lift, and the plane crashes.

How are we not having planes crash all the time? It's that bladder on the leading edge of the wing. In the smaller planes, you use a bladder and that bladder expands, which now breaks up all of the ice it's on that wing and then contracts back down so that you maintain that aerodynamic shape.

The same type of principle is in play when it comes to windmills, you basically have the wing of an aircraft in each one of those blades on the windmill. When that windmill gets coated with ice, it all of a sudden the blade does not grab the air anymore.

So wind power generation in Texas dropped from about 8,000 megawatt-hours of production down to 650. Just dramatic.

Even nuclear power dropped from about 5,000 megawatt-hours down to about 3,800. A lot of these were caused really by Texas, not paying attention to what would happen when it gets really cold.

What most news outlets are not reporting, in fact, I haven't heard this on any news outlet, so you're hearing it first, probably right here.

Is that Texas was minutes away from potentially being months away from recovering from this whole thing and back to the old normal.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:36] Yeah, I would say it to interrupt you there. I saw that same report and, it looks to me like a salacious headline but reading through the actual story, that's not an exaggeration. It was really a disaster waiting to happen.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:47] It really was because again, natural gas doesn't like, oxygen. What happens when you're using a lot of the natural gas up? Well, the pressure drops. What happens for the pressure drops to a certain point where the pressure in the pipeline is about equal to that in the air? All of a sudden you get oxygen back into the lines and you get explosions. It's incredible, all the way across the board.

Now, in Maine, we're not really heating all that much by electricity or natural gas. Nearly two-thirds of the households here in Maine use fuel oil as their primary energy source. Of course, most of that comes down from the great white North, say from Canada.

That's the largest share of any state in the union, frankly. In 2019 80% of Maine's electrical need here was fulfilled from renewable energy sources, which includes, hydroelectric power, which provided the largest shared of about 31%.

We've got some interesting things going on, including wind power generation, because Maine leads New England in wind power and ranks sixth in the nation. We built it to be able to handle these cold snaps.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:57] Speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology.

Craig, also, another thing I've been talking an awful lot about on the show here is about the various problems in the state of New York and exactly what they've been doing wrong for quite a while, as it relates to COVID-19 stuff. Specifically Andrew Cuomo and all of his friends. You know, another story to talk about here, the vaccine website's not working in New York, again.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:23] Yeah. It's incredible. The amount of difficulty, there's something called over-engineering. You've heard of that before. I'm sure, Matt. That's where you need to move a Boulder, so you get an engineer. The engineer comes out and designs a bulldozer when all you need was a fulcrum and level. Which would make life a whole lot easier for you.

There's a lot of things to consider when you get right down to it. The bottom line is it is a major problem in New York. People are not able to get onto the website. Same problem in Massachusetts. They got the same thing going on. You could do all of this from these websites, just by hiring their commercial service like Cvent, or in this case, one guy for about 50 bucks built a website that would handle New York city's registration for COVID vaccines.

Matt Gagnon: [00:08:11] It's incredible. Yeah. That kind of stuff that continues to be an issue and that New York always seems to lead the way and incompetence here.

Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us on Wednesdays to go over the world of technology. You can also hear him on Saturdays as well at one o'clock.

Craig, appreciate it as always. And we'll talk to you again next week.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:27] Hey, take care, Matt.

Hey, everybody, take care. Have a great day. We'll be back this weekend. Of course.

I'm having a little trouble with some of the software we're trying to use here to help. With you guys going through this Improve Windows Security course. I had set up an appointment with the vendor and they just bailed on me because the lady that I was going to be working with at her family just came down with the COVID-19. So she can't help.

Lockdown affects us again, as well as apparently the virus. Anyhow, the course is all done. It's in the can. But we got to set it up in a way that you guys can get to it and can use it because we're covering 22 major topics here. I want you to be able to progress through it and understand it, use it, have all of the notes there, and everything. The only real way to do that, frankly, is with kind of a membership site.

We're getting there, although we're not there yet. Man. What a year?

I don't know about you. I was talking, actually, I was on the air. I was talking with somebody on the air, Oh, it was a television interview I did this week.

I should post that up on the podcast.

Anyhow, I was talking about the last year I said, my brain was saying this was last year. It was 2019 that was what I was talking about. Something that occurred in 2019. Here it is 2021. It was as though 2020 never happened.

Maybe, I wiped it out of my brain. Which is a good thing.

One of those years that you wish hadn't happened and apparently did end up happening.

All right, everybody, take care. Thanks for being here.

Love you. Appreciate you.

Man, I love getting those notes from everybody. Me at craigpeterson.com.

Take care. Bye-bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody! 

I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon. We really got into the power distribution issues in TX and it appears that the Energy department was really "asleep at the switch." Then we talked about the nightmare that these bureaucratic states are having with their vaccine scheduling websites.  We discussed why they are having a problem and what they could have done, but didn't. Here we go with Matt.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. I'm laughing because I just had to run over to another computer, shut off the speaker because here it was on the air with Mr. Matt Gagnon, and all of a sudden my computer, which was rebooting came up and decided it was going to play Johnny Cash Ring of fire. See if you can hear it in the background, it shouldn't be too loud. Cause I've got a decent microphone here, but man, did it distract me?

Anyhow, we got into New York's vaccine website. What's going on there?

This math that talks about wind energy shows what really happened down in the great state of Texas.

A little bit about what's going on in Maine and of course, a little bit of ring of fire. So here we go with Mr. Matt Gagnon.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:46] It's WGAN morning news on a Wednesday, which means it's a good time to talk to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. You can hear him on this very station on Saturdays at one for his own show where he talks about a lot of these same topics, but why wait, he's here with us now, Craig, how are you this morning?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:01] Hey, good morning back. Doing really well.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:03] Lots of stuff to get to with you here. One of the most topical topics, if you will, that we could deal with here, which is interesting to talk to you about. But something that we've talked about on the show quite often here in the last week, or so is about what's going on in Texas, right?

With the energy failure. What's been going on with power outages and how cold has affected it and what I would consider a brewing controversy about, what's really. The ultimate culprit here, initially a lot of people were blaming sort of wind farms that had frozen and were unable to be producing any sort of electricity.

Others have pointed the blame at natural gas facilities, also not being able to transfer a lot of electricity, et cetera, but you gave me an article that to read, which I thought was very interesting about the basic math behind all this showing how frankly wind energy actually is a pretty big culprit in this whole story.

So just tell us a little bit more about what we've learned here.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:54] Yeah, It's interesting when you get beyond kind of the emotions and the political arguments and get down to the real facts behind it all. Texas, of course, this is just a terrible thing. We had people die. Every year, in fact, of course, people end up dying from the cold and heat as well.

Having the ability to heat our homes, our businesses, and cool them in the summer, particularly in Texas is really important. Texas focused on the summer where of course everything gets hot, they need a lot of electricity. They're four main ways of generating electricity. Natural gas, of course, they have a lot of that thanks to fracking, coal, wind, and nuclear.

When we look at the numbers, the actual hard numbers of megawatt-hours produced in Texas. We see about a 20% drop across the board in the amount of electricity that they are generating by each of those four categories. That's not a good thing, right? Because you need more energy. In every case, the amount of energy produced dropped, because those systems were not set up to handle the cold.

What's really interesting is you look at natural gas. For instance, it was about 44,000 megawatt-hours before this whole thing happened.

That 44,000 number dropped down to 30,000 when we had, of course, the coldest part of the winter. Some of that was because control valves in some cases were not winterized. They weren't ready for the cold. There are other reasons as well. It dropped because, of course, now we have people demanding it to heat their homes. So there was less natural gas available for these power plants.

Coal even dropped. It went from 10,000 megawatt-hours down to 8,000, but you pointed out something that's really dramatic and that is the wind power.

We have all kinds of jets, but let's just use a small one as an example, a little Bombardier jet, they fly in and out of these smaller Maine airports all the time.

How do they fly? Well, they fly because of the lift, right? The aerodynamic lift.  If you get ice on those wings, all of a sudden you lose that lift, and the plane crashes.

How are we not having planes crash all the time? It's that bladder on the leading edge of the wing. In the smaller planes, you use a bladder and that bladder expands, which now breaks up all of the ice it's on that wing and then contracts back down so that you maintain that aerodynamic shape.

The same type of principle is in play when it comes to windmills, you basically have the wing of an aircraft in each one of those blades on the windmill. When that windmill gets coated with ice, it all of a sudden the blade does not grab the air anymore.

So wind power generation in Texas dropped from about 8,000 megawatt-hours of production down to 650. Just dramatic.

Even nuclear power dropped from about 5,000 megawatt-hours down to about 3,800. A lot of these were caused really by Texas, not paying attention to what would happen when it gets really cold.

What most news outlets are not reporting, in fact, I haven't heard this on any news outlet, so you're hearing it first, probably right here.

Is that Texas was minutes away from potentially being months away from recovering from this whole thing and back to the old normal.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:36] Yeah, I would say it to interrupt you there. I saw that same report and, it looks to me like a salacious headline but reading through the actual story, that's not an exaggeration. It was really a disaster waiting to happen.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:47] It really was because again, natural gas doesn't like, oxygen. What happens when you're using a lot of the natural gas up? Well, the pressure drops. What happens for the pressure drops to a certain point where the pressure in the pipeline is about equal to that in the air? All of a sudden you get oxygen back into the lines and you get explosions. It's incredible, all the way across the board.

Now, in Maine, we're not really heating all that much by electricity or natural gas. Nearly two-thirds of the households here in Maine use fuel oil as their primary energy source. Of course, most of that comes down from the great white North, say from Canada.

That's the largest share of any state in the union, frankly. In 2019 80% of Maine's electrical need here was fulfilled from renewable energy sources, which includes, hydroelectric power, which provided the largest shared of about 31%.

We've got some interesting things going on, including wind power generation, because Maine leads New England in wind power and ranks sixth in the nation. We built it to be able to handle these cold snaps.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:57] Speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology.

Craig, also, another thing I've been talking an awful lot about on the show here is about the various problems in the state of New York and exactly what they've been doing wrong for quite a while, as it relates to COVID-19 stuff. Specifically Andrew Cuomo and all of his friends. You know, another story to talk about here, the vaccine website's not working in New York, again.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:23] Yeah. It's incredible. The amount of difficulty, there's something called over-engineering. You've heard of that before. I'm sure, Matt.  That's where you need to move a Boulder, so you get an engineer. The engineer comes out and designs a bulldozer when all you need was a fulcrum and level. Which would make life a whole lot easier for you.

There's a lot of things to consider when you get right down to it. The bottom line is it is a major problem in New York. People are not able to get onto the website. Same problem in Massachusetts. They got the same thing going on. You could do all of this from these websites, just by hiring their commercial service like Cvent, or in this case, one guy for about 50 bucks built a website that would handle New York city's registration for COVID vaccines.

Matt Gagnon: [00:08:11] It's incredible. Yeah. That kind of stuff that continues to be an issue and that  New York always seems to lead the way and incompetence here.

Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us on Wednesdays to go over the world of technology. You can also hear him on Saturdays as well at one o'clock.

Craig, appreciate it as always. And we'll talk to you again next week.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:27] Hey, take care, Matt.

Hey, everybody, take care. Have a great day. We'll be back this weekend. Of course.

I'm having a little trouble with some of the software we're trying to use here to help. With you guys going through this Improve  Windows Security course. I had set up an appointment with the vendor and they just bailed on me because the lady that I was going to be working with at her family just came down with the COVID-19. So she can't help.

Lockdown affects us again, as well as apparently the virus. Anyhow,  the course is all done. It's in the can. But we got to set it up in a way that you guys can get to it and can use it because we're covering 22 major topics here. I want you to be able to progress through it and understand it, use it, have all of the notes there, and everything.  The only real way to do that, frankly, is with kind of a membership site.

We're getting there, although we're not there yet. Man. What a year?

I don't know about you. I was talking, actually, I was on the air. I was talking with somebody on the air, Oh, it was a television interview I did this week.

I should post that up on the podcast.

Anyhow, I was talking about the last year I said, my brain was saying this was last year. It was 2019 that was what I was talking about. Something that occurred in 2019. Here it is 2021.  It was as though 2020 never happened.

Maybe, I wiped it out of my brain. Which is a good thing.

One of those years that you wish hadn't happened and apparently did end up happening.

All right, everybody, take care. Thanks for being here.

Love you. Appreciate you.

Man, I love getting those notes from everybody. Me at craigpeterson.com.

Take care. Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning, everybody.

I was on this morning on WTAG with Jim Polito. We discussed the power situation in Texas and then brought it home to Mass and talked about whether we could be in for anything similar. We also discussed Green Energy and Nuclear Energy. Then we got into 6G -- yes that is not a typo, Apple is developing their own chips and ditching Intel and Qualcomm to run on 6G. Here we go with Jim.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Good morning, Craig Peterson here.

I've had a great day today. So far, anyway, and I was on with Mr. Polito this morning. We covered of course Texas stuff but from a Massachusetts angle. The electrical generation in Mass and what the numbers look like. It's actually quite a bit different in all of the new England States. It's amazing when I did the research on this.

Apple. They're working on 6G. I explain how Apple is trying to divest itself of some of these vendors it had for years, that just aren't cutting it anymore. So here we go with Mr. Polito.

Jim Polito: [00:00:36] It's time to bring in our good friend, the man who has the answers to all the questions. We may have our tech talk guru. Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig.

Craig Peterson: [00:00:48] Hey, good morning, sir. How are you doing?

Jim Polito: [00:00:51] I'm good. Thank you. Actually, it's getting much nicer outside now. So, I'm feeling good. My friend Bob in Texas tells me it's going to be in the seventies today. We still need to talk about Texas. It was great last week having a conversation with you about them. Just about the failures and well the good old-fashioned green energy.

Then I want to talk about 6G.

Let's start with this, basically, energy failures contributed to the deadly situation in Texas, isn't that true?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:31] Yeah, absolutely is. When we look at Texas and the Department of Energy and how much generation they have, they rely pretty heavily on wind power.

In fact, Texas was generating, let's put it this way about 8,000 megawatts of electricity before the storm hit from wind power.

Then the next day at the height of the storm, it went from 8,000-megawatt hours down to 650. It just completely wiped it out.

What this is really indicative of is a general problem, that Texas seems to have, just like Massachusetts we're looking at our electrical generation and where does most of our power come from? Number one by far here is using the natural gas resources and burning that to make electricity. Well, that is also number one down in Texas.

They had about 44-megawatt hours before the storm that dropdown to 30,000. So natural gas, coal, wind, and nuclear in Texas all dropped about 20% because of the storm. Man, did that cascade, but wind, it got wiped out.

Jim Polito: [00:02:50] There you go when you need it the most, it's not there. I mean, we really need, we need Scotty from Star Trek to get the dilithium crystals to make us some, a power. I mean that's what we need. Then if Texas has another crisis, he can say I'm giving it all I got Captain. Not to make light of the fact that people actually died, but these types of things Chuck Schumer is saying, well, this is what happens when you don't pay attention to climate change. That's a nice thing to say to people who, you know, a state where people died. You get what you deserve. This is what happens or you don't want to join the feds. Unbelievable.

Craig Peterson: [00:03:32] Well here in Mass, about one-fourth of Mass's total generation of electricity, comes from what are called renewable resources. The largest chunk of that in Mass is small-scale solar panels, less than a megawatt of generating capacity.

So here, what we're talking about when we're talking about the renewable stuff, obviously wind is something they call renewable. Solar is something they call renewable, but you have to have sun. You have to have no snow on the solar panels.

If you're going to do wind, you have to make sure that just like the leading edge of a wing on an airplane, you either have a bladder that expands and contracts to break the ice off or you have these things heated. There's a video going around from, I think it was 2017 of a helicopter in Texas with a spray unit hanging underneath it. Like we use here on our jets and it was hovering around these wonderful windmills spraying them trying to melt the ice off of them.

If we're going to try and do this, you got to try and do it right. Again, let's talk green. The manufacturing of solar panels is anything, but green, the manufacturing of these lithium-ion batteries, even the nickel, the metal of batteries is anything but green.

We talked before about how a Hummer, an H1 running diesel, and burning diesel for its entire lifetime is greener than a Toyota Prius because of all of the pollution that's caused by the Toyota Prius.

The fact that your car, if you've got one of these electric cars, you know, God bless you, that those things are so cool. I would love to have one. But don't let it get stuck in your head that somehow it's green because it is not. It doesn't just have to do with the production of electricity.

In Mass, we've totally gotten rid of these coal power plants. Our biggest nuclear plant down on the Cape has been shut down in May 2019. I was going to say last year because I'm not sure 2020 actually happened.

Jim Polito: [00:05:48] Yeah. we skipped it. It's like the 13th floor in a hotel. Yeah. No, go ahead. Yeah, we've got to think about nuclear and we've got to think about all these other things.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:57] Yes. Yes. You know what the biggest problem, if you ask me, with nuclear is that we are using standards at the nuclear regulatory commission that were established in the early fifties. They don't take into account these six-generation nuclear plants.

Right now, extremely safe nuclear plants are on the drawing board and are being tested. That you could stick one right in your hometown. You have your own nuclear plant. The things buried underground. There's basically no moving parts other than, a couple. If it was to have a massive failure there'd be no leak of any nuclear material. That little plant, you can get them that'll produce one megawatt all the way on up from there.

We can have them all over the place. We don't have the nuclear waste problem. It's using very low radioactive materials. In fact, it can take some of these radioactive materials from these old plants that we have from Pilgrim, et cetera and reuse them.

The result would be something that even lower nuclear problems. So, uh, it's crazy. We're not thinking.

Jim Polito: [00:07:07] Yeah, no that's because Bruce Springsteen in the no nukes concert back in the late seventies, you know, kind of solidified it all. You got to hate nuclear power yet when Kathy and I flew from Milan to Paris over the Alps. I looked down and saw two separate nuclear power plants, and France gets the majority of its electricity from nuclear power. By the way, they're not doing it really with the sixth generation nuclear power plants. Um, they still have older power plants and it works.

We're talking with Craig Peterson our tech talk guru. Great guy.

Craig, I think you made the point, I think they have a lot of thinking to do in a lot of these places.

I want to talk about Apple already working on 6g. Now, first of all, I got a 5g phone over the holidays and 5g availability it's not as available as one would think and we're already talking about 6G.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:05] Yeah. Yeah. 5G unless you're carriers T-Mobile, 5g is unavailable throughout most of the United States.

Now we won't have time to get all the technical issues and I'll probably get into it a little bit this weekend as well on my show.

Apple has decided they've had it with these third-party vendors. They've had it. I'm talking about the chip manufacturer. So for instance, when Apple came out with its iPhone and its iPad, it was using chips, and today chips completely designed by Apple. There's some licensed technology in there. No doubt.

Apple is ditching Intel for all of its computers. It's already selling computers, if you buy a new Mac book air, or a Mac mini, or some of these others, very shortly including a small Mac book pro, it no longer has that Intel chip in it.

Well, they want to get rid of Qualcomm chips that are in the phones because they don't meet their specs. If you're using 5g on your new iPhone 12. You'll notice your battery looks like it has a leak. It uses so much electricity just to do this 5g because of the way 5g works, but more particularly because of the way Qualcomm makes that little modem chip that's inside the phone.

So Apple has said, okay, we're already making the main CPUs for the computers let's get busy let's make our own ship sets for cellular data. I'll let you in on a secret. Apple is really moving towards having these chips in every device they sell. So if you get an iPad, you get a laptop, et cetera, you're going to be connecting to the 6G probably some 5G's as well, initially to this new 6G network.

Apple wants to be an absolute leader there. Let me tell you, they will be. They've done some amazing things and they're not stuck with the silicone they designed 10 years ago like Qualcomm is. They're starting from scratch and they can do it.

Jim Polito: [00:10:09] Yeah. Well, that's interesting. Cause I'd like to see that and if Apple does it fine. I am on the Verizon network and I've just found that there's no big deal here with me other than it not being all that available. I don't notice any difference between the 5g and the 4g LTE, I just, I don't.

Craig Peterson: [00:10:31] Well, many carriers are kind of spoofing it a little bit. They're calling a more advanced version of 4g, 5g. Ajit Pai who was the Trump administration guy over there at the FCC was starting to come down on these guys.

The whole Biden switch up here has made it so that they're just letting it run wild right now. So, 5g isn't 5g isn't 5g and it's just not generally available, particularly not available on the Verizon network.

Jim Polito: [00:11:01] Craig, this is great as usual. How do people get in touch with you?

Well, if you go to Craig peterson.com, you're going to find all kinds of stuff right there. We have courses that we have started sending out little training every week.

We got bigger pieces of training coming up to keep you up-to-date on security. Step-by-step what you should do. Right? I've got 50 different special reports that we're going to be sending out. You can only get it, if you go to Craig peterson.com. Slash subscribe, sign up there. I'll send you a few of them, right out of the shoot to get you started.

Craig Peterson: [00:11:38] Then every week I'm going to be sending you more and we have deeper courses and deeper dives and webinars. I really want everybody to understand what you have to do to stay safe. Particularly our small businesses, our elderly, everybody out there.

Jim Polito: [00:11:53] Again, Craig peterson.com. That's great, Craig. Thank you so much. As usual and thank you for the extra time last week you gave us. We look forward to talking with you again soon.

Craig Peterson: [00:12:05] Take care, Jim. Thanks.

For those that have been following here on what is happening with my Improving Windows Security course, you'll be happy to know it is finished and we're putting it all up. We're making a little membership site for y'all where I'm going to be putting all of these different things, make it easy for you to digest it. That's the whole idea, right?

Little reminders and bookmarks, you can put into the video, text and screenshots, and everything.

So it is almost there. Keep an eye out on your emails, take care of everybody.

We'll be back on the Morrow.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553