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

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.

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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.

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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. We talked about what is going on in Texas and Why? What did they do? What assumptions did they make? Where do they go from here? Here we go with Chris.

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

- CraigPeterson.com

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Justin McIssac: [00:00:00] Texas had a problem with this in 2011, just as the power company decided, it's going to cost too much to fix. With virtually no regulation, isn't that the issue, more than wind power itself,

Craig Peterson: [00:00:10] Almost a total grid collapsed down in Texas. I get into that. All of the statistics, the real numbers. Let's prove what's right here when we're talking about some of these renewable energy resources. I get into it all with Mr. Chris, Ryan, here we go.

Chris Ryan: [00:00:28] To be our new newscaster here on New Hampshire today. As we move to a little bit more serious topic, certainly for individuals involved down in Texas. I think this, obviously, when you see things happen in other States, you start to think about what could happen in my state. What could happen here in New Hampshire? The energy failure in regards to the grid in Texas is deeply concerning. What have you seen in regards to that and what do you attribute it to?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:53] Chris, we talked a few weeks ago here about what could happen with even something like a massive solar flare. That it really could knock out our electric grid. This would be a major problem, because even as we're burning oil You still need electricity in order to get that heat flowing through your house, whether it's via water or by air.

Obviously, what's happened in Texas is not terribly unique and it's a little different than the rest of the country.

First of all, Texas has its own power grid. Texas has been very independent over the years. They are not connected to anyone out in the country. So they're making their own, they're using natural gas, coal, wind, and nuclear power. In fact, they've had a very, strong move towards wind power because normally speaking wind is a very big deal.

I'm looking at the production numbers, for electricity here in megawatt-hours in Texas. Number one is natural gas, then coal, and then wind. The wind production went down from over 8,000 megawatt-hours down to 649. But so did everything else, Chris?

Justin McIssac: [00:02:07] So, Craig, isn't this more of an issue of Texas, the Texas power company, didn't get its turbines ready for winterization. Rather than wind power is an issue of wind. Turbines running the North sea. They're running in Antarctica, Canada, other places. Texas had a problem with this in 2011. The power company decided that it's going to cost too much to fix. So with virtually no regulation, isn't that the issue more than wind power itself.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:30] Yeah, it is. Everything went down. Natural gas went down from 43,000-megawatt hours down to 30. That's a pretty dramatic cut looking at it, lost almost a quarter of the natural gas. Nothing in Texas, including the wind power was ready for this type of cold weather.

They had valves that were exposed to the elements out there. They just had an almost perfect storm and it's worse than I think many people realize.

If the grid had gone offline and they were minutes away from losing the entire grid, it would have been months before everything could have been fixed.

Let me explain all of that. Bottom line is you need to reboot your electric grid in much the same way you might reboot your network at the office. You need to have extremely large generators of some type that can provide that frequency, that clock in order to get all of the other parts of the grid online.

Now there's other problems, too. You look at natural gas, which is again, number one in Texas for feeding homes and electrical generation with natural gas. If the supply starts to run out and dwindle, which it did because of frozen valves. Much the same problem that wind had. But because of frozen valves, the pressure continues to drop. Natural gas mixed with oxygen is very, very bad. The pressure drops to a certain point where all of a sudden there is more atmospheric pressure or almost an equal amount than there is in those pipelines. You're mixing air with gas. Now all of a sudden you have gas lines blowing up all over the place. In addition to having pipes freezing.

Yeah, Justin, you're right. This is a failure of wind, but it's also a failure of everything else. Even the nuclear power went from over 5,000 megawatt-hours down to 3,800. They just were not prepared for this at all.

By the skin of their teeth, they're going to manage to survive something where people could have been without power for months in a worst-case scenario.

Chris Ryan: [00:04:50] This has been a big discussion in regards to renewable energy versus fossil fuels and which works. A lot of folks have pointed to the wind issue, here where you're right they all lost considerable amounts down, 20 to 25% in natural gas, coal, and nuclear. But winds lost obviously the most during the height of the storm. So, in your view, is it more about renewable versus traditional fossil fuel type of an argument, or is it an infrastructure piece where they were not prepared for wind to be able to be functional in this environment. Where wind has proven to be functional in other cold-weather areas?

Craig Peterson: [00:05:31] Well, there's a, quite a few problems, frankly, with wind and the technology we're using. These windmills did not totally freeze up. The big problem was the same problem you have with icing on the wing of an airplane. These windmills are a lot like airplane wings. They rely on the surface sizes and shapes in order to be able to get the most effective bite, if you will, into that wind. So those surfaces got covered with ice.

Was that a problem that could be solved? Oh, you bet. Look at our airplanes. Even the small ones they have on the leading edge of the wings, little bladders, and those bladders in icing conditions swell up. They blow up and they go down, up and down, up and down so that they keep all of the ice off.

So, no question at all, this problem could have been solved before it even happened.

Wind, I kind of like. I'm not a big wind fan. There is so many problems long-term. They're expensive to maintain. There are people who've had to move out of the areas with windmills, because of the low-frequency vibration. It was driving them crazy. Then there's the bird kill.

There is a problem with everything, frankly, when you get right down to it from the natural gas on out.

They could have done something about it. They are probably going to doing something about it. Right now, here in New Hampshire, we have a, I think, a better system, but we're thinking about what is our problem?

The largest nuclear power reactor in New England provides us with 61% of our electrical grid generation power. Again, it is winterized. We have a lot of biomass for generating electricity here in New Hampshire. That's about 17% of New Hampshire's from renewable resources and we still have two of our three coal-fired plants operating here in New Hampshire.

So, add all of that up we are a little better off. We're also set up for winter. We do have, by the way, electricity from wind here. In fact, 2016 was the first time that we had more electricity in New Hampshire from the wind than from coal. It's something that can be managed. They just didn't bother managing it. Now they're talking about connecting to the rest of the grid in the United States for a couple of different reasons. It's probably a smart thing to do. Just like here in New Hampshire, we don't have our own grid. We have a grid that covers new England, so we can feed electricity back and forth.

Chris Ryan: [00:08:15] As always, I appreciate you joining us for the show.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:17] Thank you.

Chris Ryan: [00:08:18] All right. That is Craig Peterson. Joining us here on Hampshire today. I am Chris Ryan. You can hear tech talk with Craig on Saturdays and Sundays,

Craig Peterson: [00:08:25] by the way. We're almost finished up with those cyber health assessment worksheets for everybody. I'm going to record a little bit of audio to kind of explain them. Anybody that asked for the cyber health assessment stuff of that will be coming your way in a couple of weeks.

And as I've mentioned before, I think I'm expecting next week-ish, to be able to have out that Improving Windows Security course.

All right. Everybody, take care.

We'll be back tomorrow.

---

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. We talked about what is going on in Texas and Why?  What did they do?  What assumptions did they make? Where do they go from here? Here we go with Chris. 

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

- CraigPeterson.com

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Justin McIssac: [00:00:00] Texas had a problem with this in 2011, just as the power company decided, it's going to cost too much to fix. With virtually no regulation, isn't that the issue, more than wind power itself,

Craig Peterson: [00:00:10] Almost a total grid collapsed down in Texas. I get into that. All of the statistics, the real numbers. Let's prove what's right here when we're talking about some of these renewable energy resources. I get into it all with Mr. Chris, Ryan, here we go.

Chris Ryan: [00:00:28] To be our new newscaster here on New Hampshire today. As we move to a little bit more serious topic, certainly for individuals involved down in Texas. I think this, obviously, when you see things happen in other States, you start to think about what could happen in my state. What could happen here in New Hampshire? The energy failure in regards to the grid in Texas is deeply concerning. What have you seen in regards to that and what do you attribute it to?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:53] Chris, we talked a few weeks ago here about what could happen with even something like a massive solar flare. That it really could knock out our electric grid. This would be a major problem, because even as we're burning oil You still need electricity in order to get that heat flowing through your house, whether it's via water or by air.

Obviously, what's happened in Texas is not terribly unique and it's a little different than the rest of the country.

First of all, Texas has its own power grid. Texas has been very independent over the years. They are not connected to anyone out in the country. So they're making their own, they're using natural gas, coal, wind, and nuclear power. In fact, they've had a very, strong move towards wind power because normally speaking wind is a very big deal.

I'm looking at the production numbers, for electricity here in megawatt-hours in Texas. Number one is natural gas, then coal, and then wind. The wind production went down from over 8,000 megawatt-hours down to 649. But so did everything else, Chris?

Justin McIssac: [00:02:07] So, Craig, isn't this more of an issue of Texas, the Texas power company, didn't get its turbines ready for winterization. Rather than wind power is an issue of wind. Turbines running the North sea. They're running in Antarctica, Canada, other places. Texas had a problem with this in 2011. The power company decided that it's going to cost too much to fix. So with virtually no regulation, isn't that the issue more than wind power itself.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:30] Yeah, it is. Everything went down. Natural gas went down from 43,000-megawatt hours down to 30. That's a pretty dramatic cut looking at it,  lost almost a quarter of the natural gas. Nothing in Texas, including the wind power was ready for this type of cold weather.

They had valves that were exposed to the elements out there. They just had an almost perfect storm and it's worse than I think many people realize.

If the grid had gone offline and they were minutes away from losing the entire grid, it would have been months before everything could have been fixed.

Let me explain all of that. Bottom line is you need to reboot your electric grid in much the same way you might reboot your network at the office. You need to have extremely large generators of some type that can provide that frequency, that clock in order to get all of the other parts of the grid online.

Now there's other problems, too. You look at natural gas, which is again, number one in Texas for feeding homes and electrical generation with natural gas. If the supply starts to run out and dwindle, which it did because of frozen valves. Much the same problem that wind had. But because of frozen valves, the pressure continues to drop.  Natural gas mixed with oxygen is very, very bad. The pressure drops to a certain point where all of a sudden there is more atmospheric pressure or almost an equal amount than there is in those pipelines. You're mixing air with gas.  Now all of a sudden you have gas lines blowing up all over the place. In addition to having pipes freezing.

Yeah, Justin, you're right. This is a failure of wind, but it's also a failure of everything else. Even the nuclear power went from over 5,000 megawatt-hours down to 3,800. They just were not prepared for this at all.

By the skin of their teeth, they're going to manage to survive something where people could have been without power for months in a worst-case scenario.

Chris Ryan: [00:04:50] This has been a big discussion in regards to renewable energy versus fossil fuels and which works. A lot of folks have pointed to the wind issue, here where you're right they all lost considerable amounts down,  20 to 25% in natural gas, coal, and nuclear. But winds lost obviously the most during the height of the storm. So, in your view, is it more about renewable versus traditional fossil fuel type of an argument, or is it an infrastructure piece where they were not prepared for wind to be able to be functional in this environment. Where wind has proven to be functional in other cold-weather areas?

Craig Peterson: [00:05:31] Well, there's a, quite a few problems, frankly, with wind and the technology we're using. These windmills did not totally freeze up. The big problem was the same problem you have with icing on the wing of an airplane. These windmills are a lot like airplane wings. They rely on the surface sizes and shapes in order to be able to get the most effective bite, if you will, into that wind. So those surfaces got covered with ice.

Was that a problem that could be solved? Oh, you bet. Look at our airplanes. Even the small ones they have on the leading edge of the wings, little bladders, and those bladders in icing conditions swell up. They blow up and they go down, up and down, up and down so that they keep all of the ice off.

So, no question at all, this problem could have been solved before it even happened.

Wind, I kind of like. I'm not a big wind fan. There is so many problems long-term. They're expensive to maintain. There are people who've had to move out of the areas with windmills, because of the low-frequency vibration. It was driving them crazy. Then there's the bird kill.

There is a problem with everything, frankly, when you get right down to it from the natural gas on out.

They could have done something about it. They are probably going to doing something about it. Right now, here in New Hampshire, we have a, I think, a better system, but we're thinking about what is our problem?

The largest nuclear power reactor in New England provides us with 61% of our electrical grid generation power. Again, it is winterized. We have a lot of biomass for generating electricity here in New Hampshire. That's about 17% of New Hampshire's from renewable resources and we still have two of our three coal-fired plants operating here in New Hampshire.

So, add all of that up we are a little better off. We're also set up for winter. We do have, by the way, electricity from wind here. In fact, 2016 was the first time that we had more electricity in New Hampshire from the wind than from coal. It's something that can be managed. They just didn't bother managing it. Now they're talking about connecting to the rest of the grid in the United States for a couple of different reasons. It's probably a smart thing to do. Just like here in New Hampshire, we don't have our own grid. We have a grid that covers new England, so we can feed electricity back and forth.

Chris Ryan: [00:08:15] As always, I appreciate you joining us for the show.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:17] Thank you.

Chris Ryan: [00:08:18] All right. That is Craig Peterson. Joining us here on Hampshire today. I am Chris Ryan. You can hear tech talk with Craig on Saturdays and Sundays,

Craig Peterson: [00:08:25] by the way. We're almost finished up with those cyber health assessment worksheets for everybody.  I'm going to record a little bit of audio to kind of explain them. Anybody that asked for the cyber health assessment stuff of that will be coming your way in a couple of weeks.

And as I've mentioned before, I think I'm expecting next week-ish, to be able to have out that Improving Windows Security course.

All right. Everybody, take care.

We'll be back tomorrow.

---

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!

We lost a Radio Icon this week and he had a big impact on me, I have a short tribute to him but it was also another busy week on the technology front. We are going to get into the differences between Backups, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity, often these get tossed around in discussions as one in the same - they are not. Then we will discuss Bitcoin and it metoric rise and why that happened. Next we'll discuss Apple and Google and why Google is trying to play hardball but may end up getting burned. Then we are headed to Space and NASA space travel and a discussion on Rocket Fuel for future missions to Mars and there is even more, so be sure to Listen in.

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

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Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read:

Breached water plant employees used the same TeamViewer password and no firewall

As Prices Surge, Bitcoin Now Reportedly Consumes More Electricity Than Argentina, Netherlands, And UAE

Google flags its iOS apps as "out of date" after two months of neglect

White House hastens to address global chip shortage

Report: NASA's only realistic path for humans on Mars is nuclear propulsion

A Windows Defender vulnerability lurked undetected for 12 years

Hackers try to contaminate Florida town's water supply through computer breach

Barcode Scanner app on Google Play infects 10 million users with one update

SolarWinds Attack Reinforces Importance of Principle of Least Privilege

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] I've got to say the big story of the week is this breached water plant and how it really affects all of us. Not just because our water could be poisoned by a hacker, but it gives us a bit of a lesson on what we should be doing and what we did.

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here.

There are many things that we did over this lockdown. Things we did. In fact, the lockdown itself to try and help stop not just the spread of the virus, but remember it was a two week lockdown just so that we did not overwhelm our hospitals. Who could disagree with that, right?

We all stayed home for two weeks that makes sure that we're flattening the curve, that we're not going to have a lot of. People in hospitals. Unfortunately other people who couldn't make it into the hospitals that needed it. That two week locked down to flatten the curve has turned into what? Now, almost a year later we are still seeing these lockdowns. These lockdowns have caused havoc.

We've talked about many of them. Of course, you hear them all the time on radio. Everything from suicides of our children. Through our parents dying in these homes and without the comfort of their family and without human touch for almost a year. It's just so, so, so sad to see.

Now I'm not going to get into the political sides of this and what should we have done? What shouldn't have we'd had done. I've got my opinions on some of this. What I want to talk about is what we did with our jobs? What we did with our businesses? I think we did some terrible things there, too.

What I'm talking about is we need to stay home, but we have certain businesses that need to stay open. Now, frankly, every business needs to stay open. It's a business because it's fulfilling a need, right? It is so basic. It's hard to think that people don't understand this, but obviously they don't.

We shut down businesses. Businesses that will never, ever come back. People's lives destroyed. People whose entire savings, their entire retirement plan, everything was based on the business. That's where their money was. The people working there were counting on having that money to pay the rent, to pay the electric bills and other utilities. To pay for all of the things in life that we need to pay.

It's one thing to have credit card bills that you can't pay, because they're not a whole lot they can do about unsecured debt. They can certainly harass you. When it comes to things like your home or whatever it is, you're renting, whether you own it or not, how can you make those payments if you don't have money coming in. The money that the government is issued has just been a mere pittance. I get it.

In some cases, people had just incredible amounts of money compared to what they were normally making with unemployment, with the federal subsidies, et cetera. That didn't last. PPP money, this payroll protection money, lasted for about six weeks for those businesses that could get it. Those that qualified.

My business didn't qualify for PPP money. Not because it's too big, but because it's too small. Most of what happens in my business is done by my family members. I've got myself, I've got my wife, of course, you've probably seen Karen mentioned in some of my emails that go out.

I've got my eldest son involved. He loves security. He's great at it. He's been working with me now for more than 10- 15 years on this. I've got one of my daughters working with this on me. So it's primarily a family business. We've got contractors who will do different things for us. We have a lot of suppliers and we have to pay those bills, but no payroll per se. You know what? That's a lot of businesses. The number of businesses that were in the same boat as me is huge. That's how things get started in this country.

All of these companies that could have started. The companies that had started that had entered into lease agreements. That had started to provide services for their customers. Whether it be B2B like mine, business to business or business to consumer they were all stifled.

What have we done to ourselves? Really? What have we done? The virus itself is obviously pretty nasty and can be lethal in a lot of cases. It has been. Now we found out that people like governor Cuomo apparently just cooked the books. Cooked the books, something awful.

We went home, we started working from home. Our businesses said, what can we do? We had people getting very, very busy trying to figure it out. There are a lot of little remote programs that you can use in one of those is Team Viewer.

Now there's nothing particularly wrong with Team Viewer. I'm not fond of the idea of things like Team Viewer, remote desktop, and others, but sometimes it is the best solution for a particular problem. Team viewer in this case was used by a small government agency. Think about what would have happened. You had to shut down, you still had to do work. What did you do as a business?

You probably got something like Team Viewer, one of these login, remote login programs. Maybe you set up remote desktop so people could get in remotely. Maybe you set up a VPN because that's going to solve all of your problems. Which of course it causes almost as many as it solves, but most people don't realize this.

That's the case here. We're talking about a small town, 15,000 people, called Oldsmar. I don't think it's because they're a small town. I think this problem happened because they did what most of us did. We were not ready for a shutdown.

As businesses, we wern't ready for shutdown. In fact, the year before they did the shutdown, they had this massive pandemic planning session about eight months before. They all agreed that a shut down was the wrong thing to do in the case of a worldwide pandemic. They also redefined pandemic. I think maybe getting the angle I'm coming from here. Right.

They decided no, we're not going to do that. They did not plan for pandemic. In fact, they didn't plan for a lockdown.

Obviously, you don't. Well, I don't know, maybe you do plan for a pandemic. If you're coming up with a virus you're going to release, but they were not planning for a pandemic. They were not planning for the lockdown and neither were businesses. Most businesses, government agencies and NGOs, had no plans in place, even for disaster recovery or business continuity. You may or may not be aware of this, but there's different levels.

You've got basic backups and you should be doing backups because hard disks fail. One of my customers CEO thought that hard desks never fail. She was really upset when a disc crashed that we'd been warning her about, because we keep an eye on things called smart stats on the disks. We said you've got this disc it's going to fail. You probably need to fix things because you're not in a raid array. You've fallen out of that already. Things didn't just get worse.

You have a backup. You hope that Mac going to work. If you get ransomware and I got to tell you, nowadays, the answer's no. There's two sides to ransomware, but we've talked about that before. I'm not going to get into it right now.

You've got the backup mainly in case the disk fails, or you accidentally delete a whole bunch of files and you want to get them back.

The next step that you have is disaster recovery. You have a disaster, like there's massive snow storm that caused a water main to break in the roof. All of your computer equipment is covered with water and none of it will work anymore. In a disaster recovery situation, you now take your backups and you get new machines and you load it all on and hopefully your backups are remote. They weren't damaged by the water. Unfortunately, most businesses, again, not thinking this through just hoping, crossing their fingers, that they're not going to be one of those 50% of businesses that is out of business because of a disaster. Actually is closer to 75%.

It depends on whose numbers you're looking at. So they're hoping. No, no, I'm going to be part of your disaster. Disaster recovery. Is just think of that, of a snow storm and the roof collapses of a fire and the computers have burn. Can you get your business back in business?

Then there is business continuity. That's a whole other level of planning and business continuity is where you say, Hey, I need to make sure my business continues to conduct business. If you have a hundred, 200, 300 employees, You're much better off being able to let's say the computer room burns down as an example that or that roof caves in because of the snow and you've lost those computers. You're much better to be back in business in four hours or less. We've had business continuity solutions where we had equipment on site in a different part of the building. If there was a problem in one part of the building, we could fail over to the other part. Now this is an awfully big building and we had fiber links between them, but they could be back in business in less than 10 minutes. It's just that quick. That is business continuity, right?

If you are a public company or you are a division of a public company by law, you cannot be out of business for more than four hours. Now, that's just public companies. By the way, those same rules are in place for doctor's offices, for hospitals, any medical personnel you have to be able to get at the patient's records within four hours.

How many of us are ready for that? Then along comes a shutdown, remote workers. We're going to get into this a little more detail. We're going to talk about these SCADA systems, supervisory control and data acquisition. What does that mean? And why is this a problem for all of our infrastructure. How did this guy poison or at least try to a town of 15,000.

You're listening to Craig Peterson.

What happened to that town, a Florida city of about 15,000, Northwest of Tampa when hackers got into their water supply and hacked up the amount of lye by a factor of 100.

Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here.

This whole concept of having a backup versus some sort of a disaster recovery plan versus business continuity is something most businesses really don't pay enough attention to. Now, we've got another problem which is really a business continuity problem. What do you do when your employees can't get into the business?

When we've set up business continuity for businesses, in the past, what we've done is I mentioned earlier this data center where we duplicated part of it in another part of this massive building. If there was a problem with something, could just be some of the core switches go down or something, we could automatically fail over and continue running within 10 minutes. That's one way to do it.

But how about if the rest of the building went away? How about if your main servers okay, but the roof collapses or there's some sort of a fire? What happens if your employees can't come into work because there's a lockdown? There are so many reasons you need to have business continuity in place.

We didn't have it right. Not we, as in me, but so many people, so many companies didn't have that. That's what happened in Oldsmar, Florida. They have a water plant. Of course, they have all of the normal things any city of 15,000 people would have. They had in their water treatment plant these devices that are called SCADA devices that are used to control valves. These valves are exactly what you think in a water plant. They're used to control the mixture of various chemicals to divert water around the plant. The source of the water, the type of filter switched over to a new filter so that older filter can be replaced. In many cases, the main filtration is just done through sand and it has to backwash every once in a while. This is all controlled by computer, nowadays.

They were running a Windows seven machine. No I know you're saying, well, I've got Windows seven I'm okay. The problem is Windows seven is no longer supported by Microsoft, unless you're paying them ungodly amounts of money. I'm talking about $50,000 a year per machine sort of money. It's just crazy amounts of money. Most companies don't have that, right? I don't know anybody outside the federal government that actually has that. There's probably some, but they will not release it to the general public.

Sometimes they'll release a few little security patches because something was just so apparent that they had overlooked. But most of the time, no. Most of the time these security patches just aren't available for older versions of Windows. So they had a Windows machine that was controlling this network with all of these valves on it.

They had that machine hooked up to something called Team Viewer. The idea behind Team Viewer is, Oh, this is really handy. I can put Team Viewer on our control machine. Then I can have my employees be at home and then use that control machine remotely over Team Viewer .

That's what Team Viewer is designed for, isn't it? Well, as it turns out, they were using Team Viewer throughout the water district. That became a bit of a problem because they did not have proper firewalls to protect it. And they were all sharing the same password.

Interesting advisory that came out about this particular problem from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, if you can believe it. This cybersecurity advisory for public water suppliers is talking about how water suppliers can guard against cyber attacks on water supplies. It goes through a lot of these basic things that I've talked about. They should listen to my show every once in a while, right? Or attended the briefings that I had put on for the FBI's InfraGuard program. It would be pretty simple for them. The state of Florida came out with some guidelines, et cetera, after the fact. As did Massachusetts.

They were running Windows seven. They were remotely accessing plant controls. The computer had no firewall installed. Well, that's what they're saying. In reality, Windows ships with a firewall installed, but that doesn't mean it's going to do any good. I talk a lot about that in some of my courses, but the computer was visible to the internet apparently. Okay.

They all shared the same password. What do you want to bet it was a bad password and employees could remotely log into city systems using this Team Viewer application. It was really that simple.

Now this actor's here apparently is more than one and they are unidentified. So we don't have a whole lot of information on it, but I did get a notice. It's called a pin, which is a notice from the FBI it's labeled green, which means I can share it with everybody. It's saying that they obtained unauthorized access to it.

Now, here's the most important part. These cyber actors likely access the system by exploiting cybersecurity weaknesses, including poor password security and outdated Windows seven operating system to compromise the software used to remotely manage water treatment.

The actor also likely use the desktop sharing software Team Viewer to gain on authorized access to the system. We've seen this, not only with Team Viewer, we have seen this with remote desktop and many other systems that people have been using to allow their workers to get in remotely. All of this because of the lockdown, people working at home. All of this should have been handled properly by having a business continuity plan in place. It's really that simple.

Now the putting the plan together, isn't that simple, frankly, but we've got to think about what happens here.

No. I also think about this particular hack and who did it. Well, it could have been the Russians, right? It could have been the Chinese or the North Koreans. We know Vietnam has gotten into the game lately. It could have been any of those guys.

But do you know who the most likely people are to do this sort of thing? It's somebody who works for the company or in this case, very likely that it's a disgruntled employee. They all shared the same password. They use Team Viewer. I said, I'm not blaming Team Viewer here, but this is not good. This is really bad. This is not just something that could happen at a water plant where they're moving the amount of lye from a hundred parts per million to 11,000 parts per million. They're using it in drinking water to change the Alkalinity, the acidity of the water.

I don't know, I don't know. We've got to do something about this. I'm going to have some training on this, what you should be doing for remote workers.

If you're interested, let me know I'm going to plan some, but I'm not going to do it until I hear from you to know it's worth my time to put it all together. Email me M E at Craig Peterson. Let me know that you'd like to know about remote workers or maybe this whole business continuity idea. Again, email me [email protected]. Let me know.

Hey, you'll find a whole lot of stuff. If you go to Craig peterson.com and it's all good information that you need. Make sure you sign up for my newsletter right there. Craig peterson.com

Hey, we can't go without talking about Bitcoin. It has surged surged surged. It may go up, it may go down. I'm not somebody who advises on investments, but we're going to talk about what it is and why people are mining it.

Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here.

Well, we have a real big thing to talk about when it comes to Bitcoin, but first I have to take a minute and honor a man who has inspired me in broadcasting for decades. A man who has changed the whole face of radio. AM radio was pretty much dead. Then he started his national show. Of course, I'm talking about Rush Limbaugh.

Whether you agree with him politically, and I think most of you guys probably do. We all have our differences, or not, he is a man that deserves great respect. He changed the face of American politics. He literally single handedly saved AM radio. He created this whole concept of a national syndicated talk radio show, and it has helped to educate millions of people.

I started listening to him back in the late eighties, quite a while ago. I was just amazed with him and the way he did it. One of the things that inspired me about it is he took callers, but they weren't the guest, he was the guest. They were asking him questions. That is so topsy turvy from how, even today, most radio shows are.

People would call him up and they would ask him questions and he'd be able to answer them. He also asked them some questions, obviously, in order to figure things out, he also was not afraid to take opposing calls. He would look for those and he would put those to the top of the queue. He would take those callers that disagreed with him before he took callers that agreed with him, his ditto heads, as they like to call themselves.

When I heard this week that he had passed, I knew it was coming, but it hit me hard. It hit me really hard. He's not that much older than me. Although I remain in really good health, knock on wood here I am just flabbergasted. I don't have words for his passing. So it would not be right for me not to have mentioned a man who inspired me, who educated me and played a role in my life, such that when he passed, I was just gobsmacked.

It's absolutely a sad, sad time. I really wish my best, obviously to his wife. I guess Catherine is his fourth wife, so I'm guessing he didn't have the best home life out there. Things obviously didn't do well on that front. I think he's a little bold and brash and maybe that's part of it.

But my memories of him being down in Cambridge, Mass. I was working as a contractor for about a year and a half at the Open Software Foundation. I was working on the operating system and that was rewriting the TCPIP stack. If you know what that is, it's the basis of the internet today and the Open Software Foundation provided its code to pretty much everybody out there. That's how I can say with high degree of confidence, the code I wrote is still in use today to help run the internet. I was working down there as a contractor for about 18 months. I also put in the i18n, the internationalization code into many of the Unix libraries and at lunchtime. I had a small radio with me and I would go out and walk around for lunchtime and listen to Rush Limbaugh while I was out walking around. He had been quite the companion for me, gave me a lot of things to think about, disagree with him on, and agree with him on. Conversations were spurred with other people.I've come to realize, I mentioned this to my wife, as well, this week after he passed that as someone who's on radio, call us personalities or whatever you might want to call us. But as someone on radio, this is a very personal medium. I've come to realize that Rush taught me something. I realized it when he passed, I've never met the man. I have a photograph of him signed by him around here, somewhere. He taught me something else and that is, I never met the guy, yet I felt attachment to him that I had never felt really to anybody else.

Certainly I've never felt that way about a movie actor that died. I've never felt that way about an author whose books I loved. I've missed some of them, some of these books where there a series of books and the author died. You could tell mid book that the voice changed and it was being written at that point by someone else. I was just disappointed by that. I didn't feel that sense of loss that I felt this week. It helps me to realize. How important it is for me with you guys. Without you guys listening, we wouldn't have a radio station. Without you guys buying from the advertisers it couldn't afford to, to pay for the electricity, and all of the people that are involved. It's the listeners. Right.

I have an obligation to you to present the information that you need in a way that you can understand and hopefully in a way that you can use it, right?

What good is a show like this? If I'm giving you stuff that there's nothing you can do about it? You notice, I always try and do that, but that's the way Rush was too. Rush wouldn't just sit there and complain. Rush would talk about the facts, what's happening, where he thinks it should go, and what we should be doing. What we should be doing as a nation and what we should be doing as individuals. To me, that was very inspirational. Frankly, that's how I've patterned this show. I've had this radio show for over 20 years and I've patterned it that way, where I try and help. If you've ever sent me an email you get a personal reply from me because I am here to help. And I felt that way about Rush.

I've sent him emails. I'd never gotten responses, right? But you, I feel this attachment to these people. That's part of the beauty of these smaller radio stations, where there are people, we are local, we do care about you. These advertisers tend to be local as well. Certainly local businesses advertise locally, and we really have an obligation to you, to every one of you. So I appreciate you. I really do. I really to want to help. I am beginning to understand some of the responsibility that I have it isn't just to help you understand technology a little better to keep your machines clean, to stop your businesses from being stolen from, by hackers or by Snowfall that might bring your building down.

It is to help you as best I can, as often as I can. So that's why I do it. That's why I do these courses, the newsletters, everything else. Rest in peace, Rush. We're going to miss you.

Visit online as well, craig peterson.com and sign up for my newsletter so I can help you a little more.

Well, we really, are going to talk about Bitcoin in this segment. So stick around. I had to talk about Rush this last time around. Bitcoin, the prices are surging. People are mining. What does that mean? And why are they using more electricity than the country of Argentina?

Craig Peterson here.

Bitcoin has been around for a while. I don't think anybody out there has not heard about Bitcoin. It is a power in and of itself. We don't know who actually came up with this whole concept. There's a concept behind Bitcoin called blockchain technology. Blockchain technology is based on the concept of ledgers. Where you have ledgers, just like a bank ledger that keeps track of every transaction. There are hundreds of thousands. Just so many ledgers in the world. In order to verify transactions, half of those ledger entries have to agree. So it's pretty basic on that level.

What is the Bitcoin itself, which sits on top of this blockchain technology? Well, if you want to look at it, simply take a look at prime numbers.

Hopefully you can name the first five prime numbers, right? What do we got? One, three, five, seven, 11. There you go those are the first five prime numbers and a prime numbers a number that is only divisible by itself and one, which is why one is a prime number.

We use prime numbers a lot nowadays. Most of the encryption that you're using is based on prime numbers. If you go to a secure website, you're using something called SSL, which is the secure socket layer and that's what shows up in your browser, in that URL line as a little lock, if you see that lock that you have effectively a VPN, a virtual private network between your browser and that remote site.

Guess what? You already have a VPN, right? Why use one of these VPNs that spies on you?

That is encrypted data and it's very difficult to encrypt in between. How does it do that? It's using something known as public key technology, the RSA algorithm. We're not going to go any further down that, but basically it's allows someone to have a public key and use that public key to encrypt a message. then you, the person who's receiving the message whose private key was used to do the encryption can decrypt it using their private key. So the public key side, the private keys side, it allows the encryption from end to end. That's what the SSL is all about.

Well, when we're talking about Bitcoin, we are talking about something that goes and uses some of the similar technology. What it's doing is using these prime numbers. That's what the RSA algorithm is using this encryption algorithm, using these very large, very complicated prime numbers because you get past 11 and lets see 12. That's not a prime, right? Uh, because it's divisible by. Two and six and three and four, and then let's see 13. Okay. That's a prime 14, no 15, no 16. No. It gets more difficult.

I remember way back when, writing a little program that just found prime numbers and it looked for prime numbers and the easiest way to do it was I would start, first of all, you take a number, divide it into. There's no reason to go any higher than that when you're trying to figure out if it's prime or not. Then I would start looking at some of the base numbers to try and figure it out. Of course, real mathematicians were able to figure out better ways to find primes.

Well, when we're talking about Bitcoin and some of these other cryptocurrencies, they are also using these very large prime numbers, just like you're being used for this public key encryption. They also have some other parameters around some of these prime numbers.

To have a Bitcoin is to have this digital number that represents a unique prime number. If you want to mine, what you're doing is you are trying to find a prime number that no one has ever found before, just to oversimplify things a little bit. You find that prime number and Tada now you have a Bitcoin. Sounds easy enough, sounds quick enough. It is not easy and it is not quick.

It's not just the based on the prime number algorithm, but we're keeping this simple here. We have found millions now of these Bitcoins. I should look that up and find out exactly how many, but there are many Bitcoins. The whole algorithm, the whole system is set up to do some restrictions here, there's only a certain number of these Bitcoins that will ever be mined.

It's estimated that something like 20% of the Bitcoins that were found have been lost because the encryption was used to keep the keys. People forgot it.

You probably heard about this guy that has a quarter of a billion dollars in Bitcoin in this wallet. He only gets eight tries before it auto destructs. He hasn't found them yet. There's a quarter of a billion dollars that's unreachable, but that's what we're talking about here.

Bitcoin mining. In this day and age, Bitcoin mining is so hard and it takes so much computing power that it is using a couple of things. First of all, the thing that bothers me the most is it's using up these GPU's these graphical processing units, because GPU, which we typically use for graphics processing are set up so that we have are hundreds, thousands of processes that can be happening on that card simultaneously, various small little tiny processes that can be set up to somewhat be optimized for Bitcoin mining or mining, any of these other cryptocurrencies.

Then the people who really want to make money on mining these cryptocurrencies have machines that are special machines. They are designed specifically to mine, one type of coin, one of these crypto coins. We're talking about Bitcoin. There are machines that are designed to mine bitcoins, go to E-bay and look for Bitcoin miner. They used to have themon Amazon. I haven't checked in a while, but you'll find them in both places. At least you used to be able to, you can certainly still find the money bank. You'll find some that are old, that are used and some brand new ones.

Well, it is expensive to mine them. One of my sons and I, we decided years ago to try and do a little mining. We probably should have tried harder but we gave up. It was a, who knows what's going to happen with Bitcoin.

There are so many cryptocurrencies and today there are people introducing new cryptocurrencies all of the time. I avoid those like the plague because you never know what's going to happen.

Bitcoin is definitely the 800 pound gorilla out there. We were able to mine I guess my son said he mind a couple of other little currencies they're worth a penny or two, not a very big deal.

We have now so many people in China that were doing Bitcoin mining China could not produce enough electricity to mine the Bitcoins. China went around and shut down anybody that was mining Bitcoin. We have something called the Cambridge Bitcoin electricity consumption index. This is an index designed to figure out how much electricity is being used in order to mine Bitcoin.

This is, of course, over in England, the university of Cambridge the judge business school. I'm looking at a graphic right now that they have, and this is showing the electricity and Bitcoin mining. They actually have all of the data for downloading, if you ever wanted to do some serious analysis. It's showing there was hardly anything, if anything, back in 2016. The summer 2017, when it started to jump up and that's, of course, when the price of Bitcoin started to go up.

Why? Well, mainly because of ransomware. People having to pay ransomware and buy Bitcoin in order to pay that ransom.

In terawatts. Now we are showing at about, okay, this is Wednesday, February 10, 2021 288 terawatts of electricity on that one day. Isn't that something. The amount of electricity that's being used has been surging because, of course, the price of Bitcoin has been going up. Just been going up in crazy, crazy rates. The amount of mining going on has doubled, almost doubled since October last year. We're talking about using more electricity than the entire country of Argentina, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates. It is absolutely amazing, amazing how much we're using. People are alarmed by this. Countries are having major problems in trying to figure this out.

What else is funny about it? They talk about Bitcoin being one of these so-called green technologies. Well, it turns out that Bitcoin because of the electricity that it's using for people to mine now has a carbon footprint comparable to the entire country of New Zealand. It's producing about 37 mega tons of carbon dioxide per year. I think that's funny, frankly, because they call it green. Right?

It's like green cars that are electric. Well, guess what? They, aren't green in so many ways. They're cool as heck don't get me wrong, but don't think they're green because they're not. A lot of reasons for that. I've talked about it many times in the past, on my radio show.

If you go to my website, you can just look that up and you can find out why, and I've got hard numbers there, anything else?

All right, everybody make sure you visit me online. We have started some new stuff. If you are a frequent reader of my, now Sunday newsletter, which has my show notes. You are getting also one or two other newsletters during the week just short trainings.

I'm trying to help you out, but if you're not opening that newsletter, if you don't download the images. That's how I tell that you opened it, then you're not going to get all of the supplemental material, including some audio programming that you can't get anywhere else. So make sure you go to Craig peterson.com and sign up for the newsletter. Open the silly thing.

So you get all of this free training and more. Craig peterson.com.

Apple has been really busy trying to make sure we know who's using our data and what they're using it for turns out Google's not too happy about that. You'll be surprised what they did this week.

Hi everybody. Thanks for joining me.

I've talked here about how Apple is really taking some major steps up in trying to defend our privacy. Apple does not make money off of our data. They don't sell it. They don't compile it and then sell it, Google however, is trying to be the repository of all of our information. So much for the don't be evil thing. Right?

Well, Apple's got these almost like nutritional labels. You remember when the CDC or it wasn't the CDC, it was some federal agency, I can't even remember forced food companies to put labels on the packaging, telling us about calories, fat, various other types of things. You could make a bit of an informed decision by looking at that.

Obviously there's other stuff that I don't know what this word means. I don't know what that is. What's red dye, number two, all of those types of things, but at least it brings it to your mind. You can also see how many servings there are. It'll say this muffin is a 500 servings and only a calorie a piece, right.

The reality is that box is really meant to be two or three or four servings, including that Coke that you might be drinking. I am more of a Pepsi man, but I haven't drank either in years now, frankly.

Well, Apple is trying to do kind of the same thing. They've got millions of apps up on their app store. In the app store, of course you can not only find the apps, but you can download them. You can buy them depending on what the app is. Most of these apps that are free, are really not free right? We've talked about that before. I don't know that we need to get into in a lot of detail, but it goes back to that saying of if it's free, then your, probably the product.

That's been very true. Apple and Google both have caught a lot of companies. Who've been trying to steal our information successfully in some cases. Obviously, that's a bad thing particularly when you don't know about it.

So these labels that Apple is having app developers put on their apps have got a whole bunch of people upset, Google ran full page ads in newspapers, complaining about it and how it's going to hurt small business.

Reality is, it is going to hurt some small businesses that do advertising. That's very, very narrow. It's going to hurt me if I'm doing that type of advertising no question about it. I don't do that. But one of these days, I hope to be able to do it.

What it is doing now, is stopping companies like Facebook. Facebook has always been doing tracking, not just when you're running their app. Facebook has been getting information from other websites from web pages like mine, for instance, I've got a Facebook pixel on my website so I know if you came from Facebook, what you're interested in and in what you're doing so that I can present information to you based on your interest.

I'm doing now for the very first time, this week, a similar thing. With my newsletter. If you have, for instance said that you're interested in my improving windows security course, the newsletter, isn't going to bother you about that anymore because I have this little signature at the bottom with, here's a few things that I could do for you. If you want a little extra help. Some of it's paid, some of it's free, obviously, but. I think it's annoying personally to keep getting the same message every week. I've put into my email program, some conditional stuff so that if you've asked for the improving windows security course, I'm not going to bother you about that anymore. By the way, no, the course hasn't started yet. It's a labor of love. What can I say?

There are a lot of different types of tracking that are done and not all of them are bad. For instance, I just gave you an example of something that I've started doing, and I am doing some tracking in order to do that because I don't want to annoy you. I want to give you the information you need when you need it, right? Bottom line. It's like, I've always said, if I'm interested in buying a Ford F150, then I don't mind seeing ads for it, but if I'm not interested in buying a pickup truck or a Silverado, why would I want to see a GM ad when I'm going to get a Ford, right? It's really that simple.

Google, as I mentioned, has been complaining. They've done the full-page ads. They've complained to Congress critters they've spent so much money. Lobbying, it's a real problem and a difficult solution to it. If you want to get rid of lobbyists, obviously the bottom line is you have to get rid of the money going to, and coming from Washington DC. If they don't have control over our money. If they don't have control over our lives. Then the lobbyists aren't going to be going there.

I don't care which side of the aisle you are on, or if you're a right in that middle of the aisle. Lobbyists do not represent our interests as a nation. That's the bottom line.

Google's down there spending money saying, Oh, you're going to hurt the small businesses. When in reality, the biggest target that's going to be hurt by Apple cracking down on people taking our information without letting us know is Google.

It's going to be a problem for Google, so how to get around it. One of the things that Apple has for its apps that are on your iPhone and on also your tablets is a tracker. When was the last time that app was updated. Of course, when the app gets updated, Apple has a look at it and tries to see if there's anything malicious going on.

Now it's impossible to catch everything. Some of the stuff is very well, obfuscated. I can't blame Apple or Google for letting some of this malware through. But the bottom line is they want to know. When did you update it? What's going on?

Google apparently flagged its own Apple apps. The apps designed for iOS.

Think about the Google apps, obviously. There's the Google app itself. There are Google maps. Apps can be very useful, including Waze. I was so upset when they bought Waze, but that goes into the anti-trust stuff that is going on right now in Congress.

But I was looking at the phone and looking at the app and they were flagged as out of date. It had been two months since Google updated iOS apps. It has been updating its apps in the Android space, but not the iOS apps. The theory is that Google has not been doing updates on its Apple apps because of this new privacy labeling that Apple's come up with.

You see back in early January, Google could have said, we haven't been updating our apps because of the lockdown. The engineers are busy trying to handle this and that. We just had the holidays and I would have accepted that you would have accepted that. Well, that was what now six weeks ago. Google has, every year around the holidays a code freeze, which means no one can make any changes, that is done with right now. The company Google should have released two new versions, particularly since they come out with the new versions for the Android operating system, Gmail, Google maps, Google search, Chrome, drive, photos, keep and duo have all been frozen since Apple launched these privacy requirements.

What do we think is going on? Well, it looks like frankly, Google just doesn't want us to know what data they're trying to get at. What they're doing? What they're selling? What they're tracking, the inter app tracking.

The Google's been doing as well as Facebook and many of these others. What's the easiest way to not have to worry about that don't have a new release so that you don't have to abide by the new terms from Apple, which include, Hey, what information are you gathering? How are you gathering? What are you doing with my personal information?

It looks like Google took the easy way out again. It's a phenomenal. I'm looking right now, Gmail and it has not been updated on iOS since December 1st. The Android version of Gmail has had four updates since then. That's a pretty big deal, frankly.

Apple's definitely got people's attention. The app developers attention. I am glad they're doing it as a user. I'm not so sure. I'm glad if I decide to try and do targeted marketing through some of these online pay-per-click and some of these other ways of reaching people. But you guys, already how I feel about you and I'm going to be giving you lots of good information.

I some of you guys become my clients cause your businesses and you need that little extra help for your poor overworked IT people internally.

Lots of what's going on with Google. We'll see when they do come up with the next update, but it's a real problem.

Hey, if you want to get my weekly email where I have my show notes.

Now these show notes are what I use here on the show. They're also what I send to people like Matt Gagnon who I am on with every Wednesday morning. That's what he picks from. That's what all of these stations pick from, my show notes. The only way you can get them and get information about what's going on in the world and things you have to do right now, is by signing up for my email.

Craig peterson.com.

Boy, I love space stuff. I have for years. I was so excited to play an extremely minor role, but to get involved with the NASA space shuttle program. Let's talk a little bit about what's next up for it.

I remember that day. I can't remember what day of the week it was, but that day when we landed on the moon watching it live. It was just mind blowing. Of course the newspaper, first time I had ever seen a color cover on a newspaper and it was a picture of our astronauts there on the moon. It was just so incredible.

Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson.

NASA has been trying to get back to the moon for a long time. We haven't been funding them. Priorities have changed. A lot of people say why don't we spend the money domestically rather than on the space program?

The space program has provided us all kinds of benefits over the years. It's benefited mankind, not just by giving us things like Tang, for instance. It's given us all kinds of technology and science that we would never have had any other way. I'm looking right now at a report that was put together by AIESEC, which is the international space exploration coordination group. It just a top level executive summary. Numerous cases of societal benefits, new knowledge and technology from space exploration, things like solar panels came from the space program, implantable heart monitors. Cancer therapy, lightweight materials, water purification systems, improved computing systems, a global search and rescue systems, course rockets as well. There's so much more, things we just weren't expecting. Thin materials, power generation, energy storage, recycling and waste management, advanced robotics, health and medicine, transportation, engineering, computing, and software. Not just the $800 hammers. Okay.

Culture and inspiration. As you can tell I find this very, very inspiring. We've got all kinds of things that we are using just day-to-day that we don't even think about it. As the space scientists, engineers overcome obstacles, in some cases, we never even realized were there and I think that's another phenomenal thing.

Well, right now, what we're doing is having private organizations competing to send our missions up. For many years now, since the space shuttle program was ended and it lasted far longer than they expected it to. But now that the space shuttle program has been over.

We've mostly been using Russian rockets to get our astronauts into space and also to get things to things like the international space station. What are we going to end up doing in the future?

We already know who was it, Bob and somebody, right? A couple of astronauts. The went up on the Elon Musk rocket, and docked with the space station.

It was again, one of the most amazing things ever. I sat there glued watching it on the computer. It was just, wow. To see that.

We're looking at going to Mars. Now, we're looking at exploring some of Mars is moons more than we have in the past, doing all kinds of things that are just going to make a huge, huge difference to humanity.

It's been quite a while since that Apollo program of 50 years ago took humans to the moon and they were using chemical propulsion. What that means that you had rocket engines burn liquid oxygen and hydrogen in a combustion chamber. Nowadays we're playing around with hydrogen peroxide in order to get that oxygen.

They use have their advantages and that gives NASA the ability to start and stop an engine really quickly. Back in the sixties, this was the most mature technology for space travel. We'd been using rockets. They were really piloted in world war two. It made a lot of sense back then.

However, now we've got some other problems we've gone to prepare for. We're going to be sending four or more astronauts to Mars. We want to colonize Mars, but relying on chemical propulsion to get beyond the moon, bottom line, it just won't cut it. The main reason is the amount of rocket fuel. Most of that rocket fuel is going to be consumed getting out of the atmosphere.

It's crazy how much we're talking about $2 billion for a flight of one of these huge rockets. These block one B configurations, NASA's SLS or space launch system rocket, is going to be able to carry 105 tons to lower earth orbit. That's a lot of money. They're not going to be able to get that many of them up there. That only takes it to lower earth orbit.

Now, of course, the idea is to do what in fact, the Apollo mission had looked at, which is get the fuel up to orbit and then have a rocket up there that maybe is assembled an orbit and is refueled in orbit. Then it goes to the moon. That was actually the plan NASA was originally going to pursue.

We're looking at that now, when we're talking about going to Mars while we're talking about going even further out there. What can we do? Just for the fuel, by the way $20 billion just to get the fuel up. That's just absolutely crazy.

There were some tests that were done, some studies that were done on behalf of NASA for a mission to Mars in 2039. So this one's quite a ways out. Of course, Elon Musk wants to do it even sooner. He is relying on these chemical rockets. By the way, to get back home from Mars, he's relying on being able to make rocket fuel right there on the surface of Mars and then charge up the rocket engines in the launch vehicle and then launch back up to get back to earth.

It's going to be really, really interesting to see what we end up doing. They are looking at a nuclear propulsion system. It's going to be interesting. NASA has had budget for this. They got $110 million for nuclear, thermal propulsion development. We know a lot about nuclear fuel nuclear propulsion. We'll see what happens.

This star ship concept that space X is building to send humans to Mars using chemical propellant. They're countering the costs involved with the chemical propellant by having this low cost reusable launch system. We just saw one blow up here a few weeks ago, but that's okay there was no intent of having astronauts sitting on that candle. That was just a test system. We've seen him repeatedly now land successfully.

All of those boosters and it's amazing what's been happening now. They're not the only ones. We've got a number of other companies that are working on these types of systems. Space X ultimately we're talking about pushing the boundaries of reuse and heavy lift rockets to extreme limits which is exactly what space X is trying to do. They're looking for some other answers.

Hey, make sure you sign up Craig peterson.com. I want you to make sure you have all of the latest materials.

Craig peterson.com.

We're going to talk about how some of our technology we're bringing into our homes to keep us safe is actually ending up in killing people. Yeah. Yeah. Death by police officer. Here we go.

If you want to see my show notes, all you have to do is subscribe. Craig peterson.com. And once you're there, you'll see all of the information that I have available my podcasts and a little articles that we've written, and you'll also have the opportunity to subscribe to my newsletter.

I just want to get the message out is my bottom line.

We have these home cameras that we have welcomed into our homes. And one of the ones has been getting a lot of heat lately is the ring camera. I don't know if you've seen these things. They've been advertised on television and it's basically like a little doorbell. You put it out there by your front door, side door, whatever, and it has a doorbell button.

And it also has a camera and a speaker that's built into it. Then the microphone, obviously. So someone comes to the door or rings to the doorbell. There's an app that you can have on your phone. So you could be at the beach. You could be at the DMV. Someone comes to your home and hits that button. You can now converse with them and tell them to leave the package or go away or whatever it is you want to do.

There have been some problems. One of them that has been rather controversial is that there are a number of police departments that are part of a program with ring that gives them alive. Real-time access to all of the ring doorbells in neighborhoods. And the idea there is the police can patrol the neighborhoods without having to spend money on cameras that might be up on telephone poles, et cetera.

And they get their feeds alive from people's doorbell cams, these ring doorbell cams. So that could be considered good. It could be considered bad, just like about almost anything. Now we're seeing that they have been hacked. Yes, indeed. There is a hack that's out there that has been used and hijackers have been live streaming peoples ring, doorbell cameras.

Now where this gets really dangerous and where it hasn't been really dangerous is something called swatting. You probably know about SWAT teams, the police have, and unfortunately, most federal agencies have their own SWAT teams, which just constantly blows my mind because why. Does this little department or that little department need of full SWAT team, it should really be a police department of some sort, but at any rate the whole idea behind a SWAT team is they have special weapons and tactics that they can use in a situation where there might be a hostage or maybe there's a report of a bomb or something else that they have to take care of.

And thank God these teams exist in, they do drills. They'll do drills in schools. I know my police department does that fairly frequently and I was involved with some of those when I was a volunteer on the ambulance squad here in town. All make sense, but what has happened in a number of occasions and far more than we like to talk about is that there are.

The bad guys or people who don't like their neighbor and call in hoaxes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So there here's an example in Wichita, Kansas, this happened a couple of years back where a man had been arrested after allegedly swatting prank led police to shoot dead 28 year old man. So this guy, 28 years old, Wichita, Kansas, please surrounded his home.

After they received a hoax emergency call from a man claiming to have shot dead his father and taken his family hostage. And this call apparently stemmed from a kind of a battle between two online gamers playing call of duty online. The way these games work is you can talk back and forth. You can have.

Teams and you or your team members can be from almost anywhere around the world. And you sitting there with headphones on and talking back and forth. You've got these teams and in some cases, this is just one person against another. And apparently they believe the report was an act of swatting where.

Somebody makes a false report to a police department that causes the police to respond with a SWAT team. Now the audio of this emergency calls been made public, a man can be heard telling the authorities. This is according to the BBC that he had shot his father in the head and claimed to have taken his mother and siblings hostage.

The color also said he had a handgun at had poured fuel over the house and wanted to set the property on fire. Sounds like the perfect thing for. A SWAT team to come to. Please say they surrounded the address. They called her given and we're preparing to make contact with the suspect reportedly inside.

When Mr. Finch came to the door, they said one round was released by the officers after the 28 year old failed to comply with verbal orders to keep his hands up. Why would he, what did he done wrong? Obviously. The police ordered you to put your hands up. You probably should put your hands up.

And they said he appeared to move his hands towards his waist multiple times when she probably did. Please say Mr. Finch was late found to be unarmed and was pronounced dead at a local hospital. A search found four of his family members inside. None of them dead. Injured North taken hostage. His family told local media, he was not involved in online.

Gaming. Gaming is a little different than the call of duty and stuff. Gaming typically is gambling. Now we're finding that the, that hackers are out there who do this swatting maneuver on somebody. And then they have the hacked ring camera at that house and they watch the SWAT team respond. Can you believe that?

And the FBI is saying that this is the latest twist on the swatting prank, some prank, right? Because victims had reused passwords from other services when setting up their smart devices. How many times do I have to warn about this? My buddy, I was just telling you guys about a couple of weeks ago, he's done that his.

His revenue, his pay from the work he was doing, delivering food to people's homes was stolen by a hacker because he was using the same email address. Yes. To log in and the same password as had been stolen before. Absolutely incredible. There's also been reports of security flaws in some products, including the smart doorbells have allowed hackers to steal pet network passwords, et cetera.

In one case in Virginia. Police reported hearing the hacker shout helped me after arriving at the home of a person they had fought might be about to kill himself. That's swatting that using technology you've brought into your home, it causes death, many examples of that, and we're still reusing passwords. Give me a break.

We were busy trying to defend the election this year and had the, what did they call it? The most secure election in history, which baffles me.

But anyway our businesses and government got broken thats what we're going to talk about right now.

Let's get into our big problem here this week. And this has been continuing for what now about two or three weeks we've known about it? This is a hack of a company called SolarWinds. This hack apparently allowed intruders into our networks for maybe a year and a half. But certainly since March of 2019, this is. A huge deal. We're going to explain a little bit about that here.

Who got hacked? What does it mean to you there? And I'm going to get into it just a little bit of something simple. It could be, haven't been done, right? That I have been advising you guys to do for a long time. Does this, like earlier I mentioned, Hey, change your passwords, use different passwords.

And in fact, That's a big problem still, but we'll talk about this right now. SolarWinds is a company that makes tools to manage networks of computers and the network devices themselves. And my company mainstream was a client of SolarWinds. Sorry. I want to put that on the table. However, about a year and a half to two years ago, it's probably been about two years.

We dropped SolarWinds as a vendor, and the reason we dropped them and we made it very clear to them was we had found security. Vulnerabilities in their architecture, the way they were doing things. We reported these security vulnerabilities to SolarWinds a couple of years ago, and they wouldn't do anything about it.

So we said goodbye, and we dropped them as a vendor. Yeah, we were customer SolarWinds. We were using their stuff, but then we abandoned them when they wouldn't follow what we considered to be basic security guidelines. It turns out they weren't and we got it as a country. This has been called the Pearl Harbor of American information technology.

Because the data within these hack networks, which included things like user IDs, passwords, financial records, source code can presumed now to being the hand of Russian intelligence agent. This is from. The United States of America's main security guide general Paul NACA sewn. It's just incredible what he's admitting here.

He said SolarWinds, that company that the hackers used as a conduit for their attacks had a history of lackluster security for its products. What did I tell you, making it an easy target interviews with current and former employees suggest it was slow to make security a priority even as its software was adopted by federal agencies expert note that our experts noted that it took days after the Russian attack was discovered before SolarWinds websites stopped offering client the compromised programs.

Microsoft by the way said that it had not been breached and initially here, but now this week it discovered it had been breached and resellers of Microsoft software had been breached to, and we've got intelligence officials now very upset about Microsoft not detecting it. It's just absolutely incredible here.

This wasn't something like we had with Pearl Harbor, but this attack may prove to be even more damaging to our national security and our business prosperity. This is really fast. I love the fact. I'm not going to say I told you because I, I didn't tell you guys this, but I do love the fact that I was right again.

How unfortunately I'm right too often when it comes to security and it is very frustrating to me to work with some clients that just don't seem to care about security. And I want to jump to an opinion piece here from our friends over at CNN. This is an opinion piece by Bruce.

Schneider. You've probably seen him before. He is also, I think he writes for the Washington post. But remember when this came out the word about the SolarWinds hack, president Joe Biden said we're going to retaliate which I don't know that makes a whole lot of sense in this particular case for a number of reasons.

Not the least of which we're not a hundred percent sure it's the Russians, but how are we going to retaliate? Cyber espionage is frankly business as usual for every country, not just the North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, and Vietnam. It's business as usual by us as well. And that it States is very aggressive offensively.

In other words, going out after other countries in the cyber security realm. And we benefit from the lack of norms that are in cybersecurity, but here's what I really liked. The Bruce said. And I agree with entirely. I'm glad he must listen to the show. The fundamental problem is one of economic incentives.

The market rewards, quick development of products. It rewards new features. It rewards spine on customers, end users collecting and selling individual data. Think of Facebook when we're saying this, our Instagram or any of these services that we're using all the time. So back to the quote here, the market does not reward security, safety, or transparency.

It doesn't reward reliability past a bare minimum, and it does not reward resilient at all. And this is what happened with SolarWinds. SolarWinds ended up contracting software development to Eastern Europe where Russia has a lot more influence and Russia could easily subvert programmers over there.

It's cheaper for Russia, not just for SolarWinds short-term profit. That's what they were after here was totally prioritized over product security, and yet their product is used to help secure. It just drives me crazy out there. Just absolutely crazy what some people are doing. I read a little quote down.

I'm looking here to see if I've got it handy on my desk and I just don't see it. But they are prioritizing everything except. Security. And that is, I think, frankly, completely in excusable, right. Inexcusable. So this is happening with SolarWinds right now, but it's going to be happening with other places out there.

We have probably 250 federal government agencies that were nailed by this. Can you imagine that? The man who owned SolarWinds is a Puerto Rican born billionaire named Orlando Bravo. His business model is to buy niche software companies, combine them with competitors, offshore work, cut any cost he can and raise prices.

The same swapping corrupt practices that allowed this massive cybersecurity hack made Bravo a billionaire. Another quote here. This is from tech beacon. Hey, this is just crazy. Okay. So we know. Okay. I've established it. Craig, stop the stop. The monotonous. Okay. But I got to mention, we've got the US treasury department was hacked the US department of Commerce's national telecommunication infrastructure administration, department of health, national institutes of health, cyber security, and infrastructure.

Agency. SISA the department of Homeland security, the US department of state, the department of justice, the national nuclear security administration, the US department of energy, three US state governments, the city of Austin, many hundreds more including Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, VMware, and others. I use two of those.

We use Cisco and VMware. We use Intel, but only peripherally and we actually prefer other processors. So this is a real problem. How are we going to change it? I don't know that we can, you and I, but I can tell you what you can do. Just like I keep reminding everybody use a password manager and I will have a course on that this year.

Absolutely guaranteed using a password manager, use a password manager and generate different passwords for every website using the password manager, use the manager to log in. Okay. So that's step number one. That's the best thing you can do right now for your cybersecurity next to keeping all of your soccer up to date.

The second thing that we can do. Is block this malware from getting out of your network. If you are a business, and if you consider yourself an it security person, you need to block all outbound connections. All of them. Only allow connections where they are absolutely mandatory. For instance, your accounting department may need access to some form of cloud services out there.

Heaven forbid. Okay. Maybe you're using an Oracle product, et cetera. Only those people that need access to that cloud service should have access to the cloud service. Does that make sense? Email? You should bring it in through a single server. So you only have 1.4 email coming in and going out SMTP Imam.

They should be controlled and controlled pretty tightly. According to the department of justice, apparently their email accounts were compromised about 4,000 dish. People's accounts were compromised through this hack. So from a professional standpoint, there's a lot of things you could do, but it costs money.

It takes time. How about the rest of us? What can we do to protect ourselves? Use open DNS or Cisco's umbrella service. Umbrella, we sell the professional version that's used by businesses. That's what you need because it allows you to tune it to the people and what they need access to? Umbrella and open DNS will stop most malware from getting out. Most of it, not everything. That is huge defense.

Hey, if you want more information, if you want to go to my initial here, Microsoft security course, that's coming up in a couple of weeks. Just email [email protected] and let me know, be glad to send you stuff.

ME@Craig peterson.com.

Take care guys.

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Welcome!  

We lost a Radio Icon this week and he had a big impact on me, I have a short tribute to him but it was also another busy week on the technology front.  We are going to get into the differences between Backups, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity, often these get tossed around in discussions as one in the same - they are not. Then we will discuss Bitcoin and it metoric rise and why that happened.  Next we'll discuss Apple and Google and why Google is trying to play hardball but may end up getting burned.  Then we are headed to Space and NASA space travel and a discussion on Rocket Fuel for future missions to Mars and there is even more, so be sure to Listen in.

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

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Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read:

Breached water plant employees used the same TeamViewer password and no firewall

As Prices Surge, Bitcoin Now Reportedly Consumes More Electricity Than Argentina, Netherlands, And UAE

Google flags its iOS apps as “out of date” after two months of neglect

White House hastens to address global chip shortage

Report: NASA’s only realistic path for humans on Mars is nuclear propulsion

A Windows Defender vulnerability lurked undetected for 12 years

Hackers try to contaminate Florida town's water supply through computer breach

Barcode Scanner app on Google Play infects 10 million users with one update

SolarWinds Attack Reinforces Importance of Principle of Least Privilege

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] I've got to say the big story of the week is this breached water plant and how it really affects all of us. Not just because our water could be poisoned by a hacker, but it gives us a bit of a lesson on what we should be doing and what we did.

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here.

There are many things that we did over this lockdown. Things we did. In fact, the lockdown itself to try and help stop not just the spread of the virus, but remember it was a two week lockdown just so that we did not overwhelm our hospitals. Who could disagree with that, right?

We all stayed home for two weeks that makes sure that we're flattening the curve, that we're not going to have a lot of. People in hospitals. Unfortunately other people who couldn't make it into the hospitals that needed it. That two week locked down to flatten the curve has turned into what? Now, almost a year later we are still seeing these lockdowns.  These lockdowns have caused havoc.

We've talked about many of them. Of course, you hear them all the time on radio. Everything from suicides of our children. Through our parents dying in these homes and without the comfort of their family and without human touch for almost a year. It's just so, so, so sad to see.

Now I'm not going to get into the political sides of this and what should we have done? What shouldn't have we'd had done. I've got my opinions on some of this. What I want to talk about is what we did with our jobs? What we did with our businesses? I think we did some terrible things there, too.

What I'm talking about is we need to stay home, but we have certain businesses that need to stay open. Now, frankly, every business needs to stay open. It's a business because it's fulfilling a need, right? It is so basic. It's hard to think that people don't understand this, but obviously they don't.

We shut down businesses. Businesses that will never, ever come back. People's lives destroyed. People whose entire savings, their entire retirement plan, everything was based on the business. That's where their money was. The people working there were counting on having that money to pay the rent, to pay the electric bills and other utilities. To pay for all of the things in life that we need to pay.

It's one thing to have credit card bills that you can't pay, because they're not a whole lot they can do about unsecured debt. They can certainly harass you.  When it comes to things like your home or whatever it is, you're renting, whether you own it or not, how can you make those payments if you don't have money coming in.  The money that the government is issued has just been a mere pittance. I get it.

In some cases, people had just incredible amounts of money compared to what they were normally making with unemployment, with the federal subsidies, et cetera. That didn't last. PPP money, this payroll protection money, lasted for about six weeks for those businesses that could get it. Those that qualified.

My business didn't qualify for PPP money.  Not because it's too big, but because it's too small. Most of what happens in my business is done by my family members. I've got myself, I've got my wife, of course, you've probably seen Karen mentioned in some of my emails that go out.

I've got my eldest son involved. He loves security. He's great at it. He's been working with me now for more than 10- 15 years on this. I've got one of my daughters working with this on me. So it's primarily a family business. We've got contractors who will do different things for us. We have a lot of suppliers and we have to pay those bills, but no payroll per se. You know what? That's a lot of businesses. The number of businesses that were in the same boat as me is huge. That's how things get started in this country. 

All of these companies that could have started. The companies that had started that had entered into lease agreements. That had started to provide services for their customers. Whether it be B2B like mine, business to business or business to consumer they were all stifled.

What have we done to ourselves? Really? What have we done? The virus itself is obviously pretty nasty and can be lethal in a lot of cases. It has been.  Now we found out that people like governor Cuomo apparently just cooked the books. Cooked the books, something awful.

We went home, we started working from home. Our businesses said, what can we do?  We had  people getting very, very busy trying to figure it out. There are a lot of little remote programs that you can use in one of those is Team Viewer.

Now there's nothing particularly wrong with Team Viewer. I'm not fond of the idea of things like Team Viewer, remote desktop, and others, but sometimes it is the best solution for a particular problem.  Team viewer in this case was used by a small government agency. Think about what would have happened. You had to shut down, you still had to do work. What did you do as a business?

You probably got something like Team Viewer, one of these login, remote login programs. Maybe you set up remote desktop so people could get in remotely. Maybe you set up a VPN because that's going to solve all of your problems. Which of course it causes almost as many as it solves, but most people don't realize this.

That's the case here. We're talking about a small town, 15,000 people, called Oldsmar. I don't think it's because they're a small town. I think this problem happened because they did what most of us did. We were not ready for a shutdown.

As businesses, we wern't ready for shutdown. In fact, the year before they did the shutdown, they had this massive pandemic planning session about eight months before. They all agreed that a shut down was the wrong thing to do in the case of a worldwide pandemic. They also redefined pandemic. I think maybe getting the angle I'm coming from here. Right.

They decided no, we're not going to do that. They did not plan for pandemic. In fact, they didn't plan for a lockdown.

Obviously, you don't. Well, I don't know, maybe you do plan for a pandemic. If you're coming up with a virus you're going to release, but they were not planning for a pandemic. They were not planning for the lockdown and neither were businesses.  Most businesses, government agencies and NGOs, had no plans in place, even for disaster recovery or business continuity. You may or may not be aware of this, but there's different levels.

You've got basic backups and you should be doing backups because hard disks fail. One of my customers CEO thought that hard desks never fail. She was really upset when a disc crashed that we'd been warning her about, because we keep an eye on things called smart stats on the disks.  We said you've got this disc it's going to fail. You probably need to fix things because you're not in a raid array. You've fallen out of that already. Things didn't just get worse.

You have a backup. You hope that Mac going to work. If you get ransomware and I got to tell you, nowadays, the answer's no. There's two sides to ransomware, but we've talked about that before. I'm not going to get into it right now.

You've got the backup mainly in case the disk fails, or you accidentally delete a whole bunch of files and you want to get them back.

The next step that you have is disaster recovery. You have  a disaster, like there's massive snow storm that caused a water main to break in the roof. All of your computer equipment is covered with water and none of it will work anymore.  In a disaster recovery situation, you now take your backups and you get new machines and you load it all on and hopefully your backups are remote. They weren't damaged by the water. Unfortunately, most businesses, again, not thinking this through just hoping, crossing their fingers, that they're not going to be one of those 50% of businesses that is out of business because of a disaster. Actually is closer to 75%.

It depends on whose numbers you're looking at. So they're hoping. No, no, I'm going to be part of your disaster. Disaster recovery. Is just think of that, of a snow storm and the roof collapses of a fire and the computers have burn. Can you get your business back in business?

Then there is business continuity. That's a whole other level of planning and business continuity is where you say, Hey, I need to make sure my business continues to conduct business. If you have a hundred, 200, 300 employees, You're much better off being able to  let's say the computer room burns down as an example that or that roof caves in because of the snow and you've lost those computers. You're much better to be back in business in four hours or less. We've had business continuity solutions where we had equipment on site in a different part of the building.  If there was a problem in one part of the building, we could fail over to the other part. Now this is an awfully big building and we had fiber links between them, but they could be back in business in less than 10 minutes. It's just that quick. That is business continuity, right?

If you are a public company or you are a division of a public company by law, you cannot be out of business for more than four hours. Now, that's just public companies. By the way, those same rules are in place for doctor's offices, for hospitals, any medical personnel you have to be able to get at the patient's records within four hours.

How many of us are ready for that?  Then along comes a shutdown, remote workers. We're going to get into this a little more detail. We're going to talk about these SCADA systems, supervisory control and data acquisition. What does that mean? And why is this a problem for all of our infrastructure. How did this guy poison or at least try to a town of 15,000.

You're listening to Craig Peterson.

What happened to that town, a Florida city of about 15,000, Northwest of Tampa when hackers got into their water supply and hacked up the amount of lye by a factor of 100.

Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here.

This whole concept of having a backup versus some sort of a disaster recovery plan versus business continuity is something most businesses really don't pay enough attention to. Now, we've got another problem which is really a business continuity problem. What do you do when your employees can't get into the business?

When we've set up business continuity for businesses, in the past, what we've done is I mentioned earlier this data center where we duplicated part of it in another part of this massive building. If there was a problem with something, could just be some of the core switches go down or something, we could automatically fail over and continue running within 10 minutes. That's one way to do it.

But how about if the rest of the building went away? How about if your main servers okay, but the roof collapses or there's some sort of a fire? What happens if your employees can't come into work because there's a lockdown? There are so many reasons you need to have business continuity in place.

We didn't have it right. Not we, as in me, but so many people, so many companies didn't have that. That's what happened in Oldsmar, Florida. They have a water plant. Of course, they have all of the normal things any city of 15,000 people would have. They had in their water treatment plant these devices that are called SCADA devices that are used to control valves. These valves are exactly what you think in a water plant. They're used to control the mixture of various chemicals to divert water around the plant.  The source of the water, the type of filter switched over to a new filter so that older filter can be replaced. In many cases, the main filtration is just done through sand and it has to backwash every once in a while. This is all controlled by computer, nowadays.

They were running a Windows seven machine. No I know you're saying, well, I've got Windows seven I'm okay.  The problem is Windows seven is no longer supported by Microsoft, unless you're paying them ungodly amounts of money. I'm talking about $50,000 a year per machine sort of money. It's just crazy amounts of money. Most companies don't have that, right? I don't know anybody outside the federal government that actually has that. There's probably some, but they will not release it to the general public.

Sometimes they'll release a few little security patches because something was just so apparent that they had overlooked. But most of the time, no. Most of the time these security patches just aren't available for older versions of Windows. So they had a Windows  machine that was controlling this network with all of these valves on it.

They had that machine hooked up to something called Team Viewer. The idea behind Team Viewer is, Oh, this is really handy. I can put Team Viewer on our control machine. Then I can have my employees be at home and then use that control machine remotely over Team Viewer .

That's what Team Viewer is designed for, isn't it? Well, as it turns out, they were using Team Viewer throughout the water district. That became a bit of a problem because they did not have proper firewalls to protect it. And they were all sharing the same password.

Interesting advisory that came out about this particular problem from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, if you can believe it. This cybersecurity advisory for public water suppliers is talking about how water suppliers can guard against cyber attacks on water supplies. It goes through a lot of these basic things that I've talked about. They should listen to my show every once in a while, right? Or attended the briefings that I had put on for the FBI's InfraGuard program. It would be pretty simple for them. The state of Florida came out with some guidelines, et cetera, after the fact. As did Massachusetts.

They were running Windows seven. They were remotely accessing plant controls. The computer had no firewall installed. Well, that's what they're saying. In reality, Windows ships with a firewall installed, but that doesn't mean it's going to do any good. I talk a lot about that in some of my courses, but the computer was visible to the internet apparently. Okay.

They all shared the same password. What do you want to bet it was a bad password and employees could remotely log into city systems using this Team Viewer application. It was really that simple.

Now this actor's here apparently is more than one and they are unidentified. So we don't have a whole lot of information on it, but I did get a notice. It's called a pin, which is a notice from the FBI it's labeled green, which means I can share it with everybody. It's saying that they obtained unauthorized access to it.

Now, here's the most important part. These cyber actors likely access the system by exploiting cybersecurity weaknesses, including poor password security and outdated Windows seven operating system to compromise the software used to remotely manage water treatment.

The actor also likely use the desktop sharing software Team Viewer to gain on authorized access to the system. We've seen this, not only with Team Viewer, we have seen this with remote desktop and many other systems that people have been using to allow their workers to get in remotely. All of this because of the lockdown, people working at home. All of this should have been handled properly by having a business continuity plan in place. It's really that simple.

Now the putting the plan together, isn't that simple, frankly, but we've got to think about what happens here.

No. I also think about this particular hack and who did it. Well, it could have been the Russians, right? It could have been the Chinese or the North Koreans. We know Vietnam has gotten into the game lately. It could have been any of those guys.

But do you know who the most likely people are to do this sort of thing? It's somebody who works for the company or in this case, very likely that it's a disgruntled employee. They all shared the same password. They use Team Viewer. I said, I'm not blaming Team Viewer here, but this is not good. This is really bad. This is not just something that could happen at a water plant where they're moving the amount of lye from a hundred parts per million to 11,000 parts per million. They're using it in drinking water to change the Alkalinity, the acidity of the water.

I don't know, I don't know. We've got to do something about this.  I'm going to have some training on this, what you should be doing for remote workers.

If you're interested, let me know I'm going to plan some, but I'm not going to do it until I hear from you to know it's worth my time to put it all together. Email me M E at Craig Peterson. Let me know that you'd like to know about remote workers or maybe this whole business continuity idea. Again, email me [email protected]. Let me know.

Hey, you'll find a whole lot of stuff. If you go to Craig peterson.com and it's all good information that you need. Make sure you sign up for my newsletter right there. Craig peterson.com

Hey, we can't go without talking about Bitcoin. It has surged surged surged. It may go up, it may go down. I'm not somebody who advises on investments, but we're going to talk about what it is and why people are mining it.

Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here.

Well, we have a real big thing to talk about when it comes to Bitcoin, but first I have to take a minute and honor a man who has inspired me in broadcasting for decades. A man who has changed the whole face of radio. AM radio was pretty much dead. Then he started his national show. Of course, I'm talking about Rush Limbaugh.

Whether you agree with him politically, and I think most of you guys probably do. We all have our differences, or not, he is a man that deserves great respect. He changed the face of American politics. He literally single handedly saved AM radio. He created this whole concept of a national syndicated talk radio show, and it has helped to educate millions of people.

I started listening to him back in the late eighties, quite a while ago. I was just amazed with him and the way he did it. One of the things that inspired me about it is he took callers, but they weren't the guest, he was the guest. They were asking him questions. That is so topsy turvy from how, even today, most radio shows are.

People would call him up and they would ask him questions and he'd be able to answer them. He also asked them some questions, obviously, in order to figure things out, he also was not afraid to take opposing calls. He would look for those and he would put those to the top of the queue. He would take those callers that disagreed with him before he took callers that agreed with him, his ditto heads, as they like to call themselves.

When I heard this week that he had passed, I knew it was coming, but it hit me hard. It hit me really hard. He's not that much older than me. Although I remain in really good health,  knock on wood here I am just flabbergasted. I don't have words for his passing. So it would not be right for me not to have mentioned a man who inspired me, who educated me and played a role in my life, such that when he passed, I was just gobsmacked.

It's absolutely a sad, sad time. I really wish my best, obviously to his wife. I guess Catherine is his fourth wife, so I'm guessing he didn't have the best home life out there. Things obviously didn't do well on that front. I think he's a little bold and brash and maybe that's part of it.

But my memories of him being down in Cambridge, Mass. I was working as a contractor for about a year and a half at the Open Software Foundation.  I was working on the operating system and that was rewriting the TCPIP stack. If you know what that is, it's the basis of the internet today and the Open Software Foundation  provided its code to pretty much everybody out there. That's how I can say with high degree of confidence, the code I wrote is still in use today to help run the internet.  I was working down there as a contractor for about 18 months. I also put in the  i18n, the internationalization code into many of the Unix libraries and at lunchtime. I had a small radio with me and I would go out and walk around for lunchtime and listen to Rush Limbaugh while I was out walking around.  He had been quite the companion for me, gave me a lot of things to think about, disagree with him on, and agree with him on. Conversations were spurred with other people.I've come to realize, I mentioned this to my wife, as well, this week after he passed that as someone who's on radio, call us personalities or whatever you might want to call us. But as someone on radio, this is a very personal medium. I've come to realize that  Rush taught me something. I realized it when he passed, I've never met the man. I have a photograph of him signed by him around here, somewhere. He taught me something else and that is, I never met the guy, yet I felt attachment to him that I had never felt really to  anybody else.

Certainly I've never felt that way about a movie actor that died. I've never felt that way about an author whose books I loved. I've missed some of them, some of these books where there a series of books and the author died. You could tell mid book that the voice changed and it was being written at that point by someone else. I was just disappointed by that.  I didn't feel that sense of loss that I felt this week.  It helps me to realize. How important it is for me with you guys. Without you guys listening, we wouldn't have a radio station. Without you guys buying from the advertisers it couldn't afford to, to pay for the electricity, and all of the people that are involved. It's the listeners. Right.

I have an obligation to you to present the information that you need in a way that you can understand and hopefully in a way that you can use it, right?

What good is  a show like this? If I'm giving you stuff that there's nothing you can do about it? You notice, I always try and do that, but that's the way Rush was too. Rush wouldn't just sit there and complain. Rush would talk about the facts, what's happening, where he thinks it should go, and what we should be doing. What we should be doing as a nation and what we should be doing as individuals.  To me, that was very inspirational.  Frankly, that's how I've patterned this show. I've had this radio show for over 20 years and I've patterned it that way, where I try and help.  If you've ever sent me an email you get a personal reply from me because I am here to help. And I felt that way about Rush.

I've sent him emails. I'd never gotten responses, right? But you, I feel this attachment to these people. That's part of the beauty of these smaller radio stations, where there are people, we are local, we do care about you. These advertisers tend to be local as well. Certainly local businesses advertise locally, and we really have an obligation to you, to every one of you. So I appreciate you. I really do.  I really to want to help.  I am beginning to understand some of the responsibility that I have it isn't just to help you understand technology a little better to keep your machines clean, to stop your businesses from being stolen from, by hackers or by Snowfall that might bring your building down.

It is to help you as best I can, as often as I can. So that's why I do it. That's why I do these courses, the newsletters, everything else. Rest in peace, Rush. We're going to miss you.

Visit online as well, craig peterson.com and sign up for my newsletter so I can help you a little more.

Well, we really, are going to talk about Bitcoin in this segment. So stick around. I had to talk about Rush this last time around.  Bitcoin, the prices are surging. People are mining. What does that mean? And why are they using more electricity than the country of Argentina?

Craig Peterson here.

Bitcoin has been around for a while. I don't think anybody out there has not heard about Bitcoin. It is a power in and of itself. We don't know who actually came up with this whole concept. There's a concept behind Bitcoin called blockchain technology.  Blockchain technology is based on the concept of ledgers. Where you have ledgers, just like a bank ledger that keeps track of every transaction. There are hundreds of thousands. Just so many ledgers in the world.  In order to verify transactions, half of those ledger entries have to agree. So it's pretty basic on that level.

What is the Bitcoin itself, which sits on top of this blockchain technology? Well, if you want to look at it, simply take a look at prime numbers.

Hopefully you can name the first five prime numbers, right? What do we got? One, three, five, seven, 11. There you go those are the first five prime numbers and a prime numbers a number that is only divisible by itself and one, which is why one is a prime number.

We use prime numbers a lot nowadays. Most of the encryption that you're using is based on prime numbers. If you go to a secure website, you're using something called SSL, which is the secure socket layer and that's what shows up in your browser, in that URL line as a little lock, if you see that lock that you have effectively a VPN, a virtual private network between your browser and that remote site.

Guess what? You already have a VPN, right? Why use one of these VPNs that spies on you?

That is encrypted data and it's very difficult to encrypt in between. How does it do that? It's using something known as public key technology, the RSA algorithm. We're not going to go any further down that, but basically it's allows someone to have a public key and use that public key to encrypt a message. then you, the person who's receiving the message whose private key was used to do the encryption can decrypt it using their private key. So the public key side, the private keys side, it allows the encryption from end to end. That's what the SSL is all about.

Well, when we're talking about Bitcoin, we are talking about something that goes and uses some of the similar technology. What it's doing is using these prime numbers. That's what the RSA algorithm is using this encryption algorithm, using these very large, very complicated prime numbers because you get past 11 and lets see 12. That's not a prime, right? Uh, because it's divisible by. Two and six and three and four, and then let's see 13. Okay. That's a prime 14, no 15, no 16. No.  It gets more difficult.

I remember way back when, writing a little program that just found prime numbers and it looked for prime numbers and the easiest way to do it was I would start, first of all, you take a number, divide it into. There's no reason to go any higher than that when you're trying to figure out if it's prime or not.  Then I would start looking at some of the base numbers to try and figure it out. Of course, real mathematicians were able to figure out better ways to find primes.

Well, when we're talking about Bitcoin and some of these other cryptocurrencies, they are also using these very large prime numbers, just like you're being used for this public key encryption. They also have some other parameters around some of these prime numbers.

To have a Bitcoin is to have this digital number that represents a unique prime number. If you want to mine, what you're doing is you are trying to find a prime number that no one has ever found before, just to oversimplify things a little bit. You find that prime number and Tada now you have a Bitcoin. Sounds easy enough, sounds quick enough. It is not easy and it is not quick.

It's not just the based on the prime number algorithm, but we're keeping this simple here. We have found millions now of these Bitcoins. I should look that up and find out exactly how many, but there are many Bitcoins. The whole algorithm, the whole system is set up to do some restrictions here, there's only a certain number of these Bitcoins that will ever be mined.

It's estimated that something like 20% of the Bitcoins that were found have been lost because the encryption was used to keep the keys. People forgot it.

You probably heard about this guy that has a quarter of a billion dollars in Bitcoin in this wallet.  He only gets eight tries before it auto destructs. He hasn't found them yet.  There's a quarter of a billion dollars that's unreachable, but that's what we're talking about here.

Bitcoin mining. In this day and age, Bitcoin mining is so hard and it takes so much computing power that it is using a couple of things. First of all, the thing that bothers me the most is it's using up these GPU's these graphical processing units, because GPU, which we typically use for graphics processing are set up so that we have are hundreds, thousands of processes that can be happening on that card simultaneously, various small little tiny processes that can be set up to somewhat be optimized for Bitcoin mining or mining, any of these other cryptocurrencies.

Then the people who really want to make money on mining these cryptocurrencies have machines that are special machines. They are designed specifically to mine, one type of coin, one of these crypto coins. We're talking about Bitcoin. There are machines that are designed to mine bitcoins, go to E-bay and look for Bitcoin miner. They used to have themon Amazon. I haven't checked in a while, but you'll find them in both places. At least you used to be able to, you can certainly still find the money bank.  You'll find some that are old, that are used and some brand new ones.

Well, it is expensive to mine them. One of my sons and I, we decided years ago to try and do a little mining. We probably should have tried harder but we gave up.  It was a, who knows what's going to happen with Bitcoin.

There are so many cryptocurrencies and today there are people introducing new cryptocurrencies all of the time. I avoid those like the plague because you never know what's going to happen.

Bitcoin is definitely the 800 pound gorilla out there. We were able to mine I guess my son said he mind a couple of other little currencies they're worth a penny or two, not a very big deal.

We have now so many people in China that were doing Bitcoin mining China could not produce enough electricity to mine the Bitcoins. China went around and shut down anybody that was mining Bitcoin. We have something called the Cambridge Bitcoin electricity consumption index. This is an index designed to figure out how much electricity is being used in order to mine Bitcoin.

This is, of course, over in England, the university of Cambridge the judge business school. I'm looking at a graphic right now that they have, and this is showing the electricity and Bitcoin mining. They actually have all of the data for downloading, if you ever wanted to do some serious analysis.  It's showing there was hardly anything, if anything, back in 2016. The summer 2017, when it started to jump up and that's, of course, when the price of Bitcoin started to go up.

Why? Well, mainly because of ransomware. People having to pay ransomware and buy Bitcoin in order to pay that ransom.

In terawatts. Now we are showing at about, okay, this is Wednesday, February 10, 2021 288 terawatts of electricity on that one day. Isn't that something. The amount of electricity that's being used has been surging because, of course, the price of Bitcoin has been going up. Just been going up in crazy, crazy rates. The amount of mining going on has doubled, almost doubled since October last year. We're talking about using more electricity than the entire country of Argentina, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates. It is absolutely amazing, amazing how much we're using. People are alarmed by this. Countries are having major problems in trying to figure this out.

What else is funny about it? They talk about Bitcoin being one of these so-called green technologies. Well, it turns out that Bitcoin because of the electricity that it's using for people to mine now has a carbon footprint comparable to the entire country of New Zealand. It's producing about 37 mega tons of carbon dioxide per year. I think that's  funny, frankly, because they call it green. Right?

It's like green cars that are electric. Well, guess what? They, aren't green in so many ways. They're cool as heck don't get me wrong, but don't think they're green because they're not. A lot of reasons for that.  I've talked about it many times in the past, on my radio show.

If you go to my website, you can just look that up and you can find out why, and I've got hard numbers there, anything else?

All right, everybody make sure you visit me online. We have started some new stuff. If you are a frequent reader of my, now Sunday newsletter, which has my show notes. You are getting also one or two other newsletters during the week just short trainings.

I'm trying to help you out, but if you're not opening that newsletter, if you don't download the images. That's how I tell that you opened it, then you're not going to get all of the supplemental material, including some audio programming that you can't get anywhere else. So make sure you go to Craig peterson.com and sign up for the newsletter.  Open the silly thing.

So you get all of this free training and more. Craig peterson.com.

Apple has been really busy trying to make sure we know who's using our data and what they're using it for turns out Google's not too happy about that. You'll be surprised what they did this week.

Hi everybody. Thanks for joining me.

I've talked here about how Apple is really taking some major steps up in trying to defend our privacy. Apple does not make money off of our data. They don't sell it. They don't compile it and then sell it, Google however, is trying to be the repository of all of our information. So much for the don't be evil thing. Right?

Well, Apple's got these almost like nutritional labels. You remember when the CDC or it wasn't the CDC, it was some federal agency, I can't even remember forced food companies to put labels on the packaging, telling us about calories, fat, various other types of things. You could make a bit of an informed decision by looking at that.

Obviously there's other stuff that I don't know what this word means. I don't know what that is. What's red dye, number two, all of those types of things, but at least it brings it to your mind. You can also see how many servings there are. It'll say this muffin is a 500 servings and only a calorie a piece, right.

The reality is that box is really meant to be two or three or four servings, including that Coke that you might be drinking. I am more of a Pepsi man, but I haven't drank either in years now, frankly.

Well, Apple is trying to do kind of the same thing. They've got millions of apps up on their app store. In the app store, of course you can not only find the apps, but you can download them. You can buy them depending on what the app is. Most of these apps that are free, are really not free right? We've talked about that before. I don't know that we need to get into in a lot of detail, but it goes back to that saying of if it's free, then your, probably the product.

That's been very true.  Apple and Google both have caught a lot of companies. Who've been trying to steal our information successfully in some cases. Obviously, that's a bad thing particularly when you don't know about it.

So these labels that Apple is having app developers put on their apps have got a whole bunch of people upset, Google ran full page ads in newspapers, complaining about it and how it's going to hurt small business.

Reality is, it is going to hurt some small businesses that do advertising. That's very, very narrow. It's going to hurt me if I'm doing that type of advertising no question about it. I don't do that. But one of these days, I hope to be able to do it.

What it is doing now, is stopping companies like Facebook. Facebook has always been doing tracking, not just when you're running their app. Facebook has been getting information from other websites from web pages like mine, for instance, I've got a Facebook pixel on my website so I know if you came from Facebook, what you're interested in and in what you're doing so that I can present information to you based on your interest.

I'm doing now for the very first time, this week, a similar thing. With my newsletter. If you have, for instance said that you're interested in my improving windows security course, the newsletter, isn't going to bother you about that anymore because I have this little signature at the bottom with, here's a few things that I could do for you. If you want a little extra help.  Some of it's paid, some of it's free, obviously, but. I think it's annoying personally to keep getting the same message every week.  I've put into my email program, some conditional stuff so that if you've asked for the improving windows security course, I'm not going to bother you about that anymore. By the way, no, the course hasn't started yet. It's a labor of love. What can I say?

There are a lot of different types of tracking that are done and not all of them are bad. For instance, I just gave you an example of something that I've started doing, and I am doing some tracking in order to do that because I don't want to annoy you. I want to give you the information you need when you need it, right? Bottom line. It's like, I've always said, if I'm interested in buying a Ford F150, then I don't mind seeing ads for it, but if I'm not interested in buying a pickup truck or a Silverado, why would I want to see a GM ad when I'm going to get a Ford, right? It's really that simple.

Google, as I mentioned, has been complaining. They've done the full-page ads. They've complained to Congress critters they've spent so much money. Lobbying, it's a real problem and a difficult solution to it. If you want to get rid of lobbyists, obviously the bottom line is you have to get rid of the money going to, and coming from Washington DC.  If they don't have control over our money. If they don't have control over our lives. Then the lobbyists aren't going to be going there.

I don't care which side of the aisle you are on, or if you're a right in that middle of the aisle. Lobbyists do not represent our interests as a nation. That's the bottom line.

Google's down there spending money saying, Oh, you're going to hurt the small businesses. When in reality, the biggest target that's going to be hurt by Apple cracking down on people taking our information without letting us know is Google.

It's going to be a problem for Google, so how to get around it. One of the things that Apple has for its apps that are on your iPhone and on also your tablets is a tracker. When was the last time that app was updated. Of course, when the app gets updated, Apple has a look at it and tries to see if there's anything malicious going on.

Now it's impossible to catch everything. Some of the stuff is very well, obfuscated.  I can't blame Apple or Google for letting some of this malware through. But the bottom line is they want to know. When did you update it? What's going on?

Google apparently flagged its own Apple apps. The apps designed for iOS.

Think about the Google apps, obviously. There's the Google app itself. There are Google maps. Apps can be very useful, including Waze. I was so upset when they bought Waze, but that goes into the anti-trust stuff that is going on right now in Congress.

But I was looking at the phone and looking at the app and they were flagged as out of date. It had been two months since Google updated iOS apps. It has been updating its apps in the Android space, but not the iOS apps. The theory is that Google has not been doing updates on its Apple apps because of this new privacy labeling that Apple's come up with.

You see back in early January, Google could have said, we haven't been updating our apps because of the lockdown. The engineers are busy trying to handle this and that. We just had the holidays and I would have accepted that you would have accepted that. Well, that was what now six weeks ago. Google has, every year around the holidays a code freeze, which means no one can make any changes, that is done with right now. The company Google should have released two new versions, particularly since they come out with the new versions for the Android operating system, Gmail, Google maps, Google search, Chrome, drive, photos, keep and duo have all been frozen since Apple launched these privacy requirements.

What do we think is going on? Well, it looks like frankly, Google just doesn't want us to know what data they're trying to get at. What they're doing? What they're selling? What they're tracking, the inter app tracking.

The Google's been doing as well as Facebook and many of these others.  What's the easiest way to not have to worry about that don't have a new release so that you don't have to abide by the new terms from Apple, which include, Hey, what information are you gathering? How are you gathering? What are you doing with my personal information?

It looks like Google took the easy way out again. It's a phenomenal.  I'm looking right now, Gmail and it has not been updated on iOS since December 1st. The Android version of Gmail has had four updates since then. That's a pretty big deal, frankly.

Apple's definitely got people's attention. The app developers attention. I am glad they're doing it as a user. I'm not so sure. I'm glad if I decide to try and do targeted marketing through some of these online pay-per-click and some of these other ways of reaching people. But you guys, already how I feel about you and I'm going to be giving you lots of good information.

I some of you guys become my clients cause your businesses and you need that little extra help for your poor overworked IT people internally.

Lots of what's going on with Google. We'll see when they do come up with the next update, but it's a real problem.

Hey, if you want to get my weekly email where I have my show notes.

Now these show notes are what I use here on the show. They're also what I send to people like Matt Gagnon who I am on with every Wednesday morning. That's what he picks from. That's what all of these stations pick from, my show notes.  The only way you can get them and get information about what's going on in the world and things you have to do right now, is by signing up for my email.

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Boy, I love space stuff. I have for years. I was so excited to play an extremely minor role, but to get involved with the NASA space shuttle program. Let's talk a little bit about what's next up for it.

I remember that day. I can't remember what day of the week it was, but that day when we landed on the moon watching it live. It was just mind blowing.  Of course the newspaper, first time I had ever seen a color cover on a newspaper and it was a picture of our astronauts there on the moon. It was just so incredible.

Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson.

NASA has been trying to get back to the moon for a long time.  We haven't been funding them. Priorities have changed. A lot of people say why don't we spend the money domestically rather than on the space program?

The space program has provided us all kinds of benefits over the years. It's benefited mankind, not just by giving us things like Tang, for instance. It's given us all kinds of technology and science that we would never have had any other way. I'm looking right now at a report that was put together by AIESEC, which is the international space exploration coordination group. It just a top level executive summary. Numerous cases of societal benefits, new knowledge and technology from space exploration, things like solar panels came from the space program, implantable heart monitors. Cancer therapy, lightweight materials, water purification systems, improved computing systems, a global search and rescue systems, course rockets as well. There's so much more, things we just weren't expecting. Thin materials, power generation, energy storage, recycling and waste management, advanced robotics, health and medicine, transportation, engineering, computing, and software. Not just the $800 hammers. Okay.

Culture and inspiration. As you can tell I find this very, very inspiring. We've got all kinds of things that we are using just day-to-day that we don't even think about it. As the space scientists, engineers overcome obstacles, in some cases, we never even realized were there and I think that's another phenomenal thing.

Well, right now, what we're doing is having private organizations competing to send our missions up. For many years now, since the space shuttle program was ended and it lasted far longer than they expected it to. But now that the space shuttle program has been over.

We've mostly been using Russian rockets to get our astronauts into space and also to get things to things like the international space station. What are we going to end up doing in the future?

We already know who was it, Bob and somebody, right? A couple of astronauts. The went up on the Elon Musk rocket, and docked with the space station.

It was again, one of the most amazing things ever. I sat there glued watching it on the computer. It was just, wow. To see that.

We're looking at going to Mars. Now, we're looking at exploring some of Mars is moons more than we have in the past, doing all kinds of things that are just going to make a huge, huge difference to humanity.

It's been quite a while since that Apollo program of 50 years ago took humans to the moon and they were using chemical propulsion. What that means that you had rocket engines burn liquid oxygen and hydrogen in a combustion chamber. Nowadays we're playing around with hydrogen peroxide in order to get that oxygen.

They use have their advantages and that gives NASA the ability to start and stop an engine really quickly. Back in the sixties, this was the most mature technology for space travel. We'd been using rockets. They were really piloted in world war two. It made a lot of sense back then.

However, now we've got some other problems we've gone to prepare for. We're going to be sending four or more astronauts to Mars. We want to colonize Mars, but relying on chemical propulsion to get beyond the moon, bottom line, it just won't cut it. The main reason is the amount of rocket fuel.  Most of that rocket fuel is going to be consumed getting out of the atmosphere.

It's crazy how much we're talking about $2 billion for a flight of one of these huge rockets. These block one B configurations, NASA's SLS or space launch system rocket, is going to be able to carry 105 tons to lower earth orbit. That's a lot of money. They're not going to be able to get that many of them up there. That only takes it to lower earth orbit.

Now, of course, the idea is to do what in fact, the Apollo mission had looked at, which is  get the fuel up to orbit and then have a rocket up there that maybe is assembled an orbit and is refueled in orbit. Then it goes to the moon. That was actually the plan NASA was originally going to pursue.

We're looking at that now, when we're talking about going to Mars while we're talking about going even further out there. What can we do?  Just for the fuel, by the way $20 billion just to get the fuel up. That's just absolutely crazy.

There were some tests that were done, some studies that were done on behalf of NASA for a mission to Mars in 2039. So this one's quite a ways out. Of course, Elon Musk wants to do it even sooner. He is relying on these chemical rockets.  By the way, to get back home from Mars, he's relying on being able to make rocket fuel right there on the surface of Mars and then charge up the rocket engines in the launch vehicle and then launch back up to get back to earth.

It's going to be really, really interesting to see what we end up doing. They are looking at a nuclear propulsion system. It's going to be interesting. NASA has had budget for this. They got $110 million for nuclear, thermal propulsion development. We know a lot about nuclear fuel nuclear propulsion. We'll see what happens. 

This star ship concept that space X is building to send humans to Mars using chemical propellant. They're countering the costs involved with the chemical propellant by having this low cost reusable launch system. We just saw one blow up here a few weeks ago, but that's okay there was no intent of having astronauts sitting on that candle. That was just a test system. We've seen him repeatedly now land successfully.

All of those boosters and it's amazing what's been happening now. They're not the only ones. We've got a number of other companies that are working on these types of systems. Space X ultimately we're talking about pushing the boundaries of reuse and heavy lift rockets to extreme limits which is exactly what space X is trying to do. They're looking for some other answers.

Hey, make sure you sign up Craig peterson.com. I want you to make sure you have all of the latest materials.

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We're going to talk about how some of our technology we're bringing into our homes to keep us safe is actually ending up in killing people. Yeah. Yeah. Death by police officer. Here we go.

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I just want to get the message out is my bottom line.

We have these home cameras that we have welcomed into our homes. And one of the ones has been getting a lot of heat lately is the ring camera. I don't know if you've seen these things. They've been advertised on television and it's basically like a little doorbell. You put it out there by your front door, side door, whatever, and it has a doorbell button.

And it also has a camera and a speaker that's built into it. Then the microphone, obviously. So someone comes to the door or rings to the doorbell. There's an app that you can have on your phone. So you could be at the beach. You could be at the DMV. Someone comes to your home and hits that button. You can now converse with them and tell them to leave the package or go away or whatever it is you want to do.

There have been some problems. One of them that has been rather controversial is that there are a number of police departments that are part of a program with ring that gives them alive. Real-time access to all of the ring doorbells in neighborhoods. And the idea there is the police can patrol the neighborhoods without having to spend money on cameras that might be up on telephone poles, et cetera.

And they get their feeds alive from people's doorbell cams, these ring doorbell cams. So that could be considered good. It could be considered bad, just like about almost anything. Now we're seeing that they have been hacked. Yes, indeed. There is a hack that's out there that has been used and hijackers have been live streaming peoples ring, doorbell cameras.

Now where this gets really dangerous and where it hasn't been really dangerous is something called swatting. You probably know about SWAT teams, the police have, and unfortunately, most federal agencies have their own SWAT teams, which just constantly blows my mind because why. Does this little department or that little department need of full SWAT team, it should really be a police department of some sort, but at any rate the whole idea behind a SWAT team is they have special weapons and tactics that they can use in a situation where there might be a hostage or maybe there's a report of a bomb or something else that they have to take care of.

And thank God these teams exist in, they do drills. They'll do drills in schools. I know my police department does that fairly frequently and I was involved with some of those when I was a volunteer on the ambulance squad here in town. All make sense, but what has happened in a number of occasions and far more than we like to talk about is that there are.

The bad guys or people who don't like their neighbor and call in hoaxes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So there here's an example in Wichita, Kansas, this happened a couple of years back where a man had been arrested after allegedly swatting prank led police to shoot dead 28 year old man. So this guy, 28 years old, Wichita, Kansas, please surrounded his home.

After they received a hoax emergency call from a man claiming to have shot dead his father and taken his family hostage. And this call apparently stemmed from a kind of a battle between two online gamers playing call of duty online. The way these games work is you can talk back and forth. You can have.

Teams and you or your team members can be from almost anywhere around the world. And you sitting there with headphones on and talking back and forth. You've got these teams and in some cases, this is just one person against another. And apparently they believe the report was an act of swatting where.

Somebody makes a false report to a police department that causes the police to respond with a SWAT team. Now the audio of this emergency calls been made public, a man can be heard telling the authorities. This is according to the BBC that he had shot his father in the head and claimed to have taken his mother and siblings hostage.

The color also said he had a handgun at had poured fuel over the house and wanted to set the property on fire. Sounds like the perfect thing for. A SWAT team to come to. Please say they surrounded the address. They called her given and we're preparing to make contact with the suspect reportedly inside.

When Mr. Finch came to the door, they said one round was released by the officers after the 28 year old failed to comply with verbal orders to keep his hands up. Why would he, what did he done wrong? Obviously. The police ordered you to put your hands up. You probably should put your hands up.

And they said he appeared to move his hands towards his waist multiple times when she probably did. Please say Mr. Finch was late found to be unarmed and was pronounced dead at a local hospital. A search found four of his family members inside. None of them dead. Injured North taken hostage. His family told local media, he was not involved in online.

Gaming. Gaming is a little different than the call of duty and stuff. Gaming typically is gambling. Now we're finding that the, that hackers are out there who do this swatting maneuver on somebody. And then they have the hacked ring camera at that house and they watch the SWAT team respond. Can you believe that?

And the FBI is saying that this is the latest twist on the swatting prank, some prank, right? Because victims had reused passwords from other services when setting up their smart devices. How many times do I have to warn about this? My buddy, I was just telling you guys about a couple of weeks ago, he's done that his.

His revenue, his pay from the work he was doing, delivering food to people's homes was stolen by a hacker because he was using the same email address. Yes. To log in and the same password as had been stolen before. Absolutely incredible. There's also been reports of security flaws in some products, including the smart doorbells have allowed hackers to steal pet network passwords, et cetera.

In one case in Virginia. Police reported hearing the hacker shout helped me after arriving at the home of a person they had fought might be about to kill himself. That's swatting that using technology you've brought into your home, it causes death, many examples of that, and we're still reusing passwords. Give me a break.

We were busy trying to defend the election this year and had the, what did they call it? The most secure election in history, which baffles me.

But anyway our businesses and government got broken thats what we're going to talk about right now.

Let's get into our big problem here this week. And this has been continuing for what now about two or three weeks we've known about it? This is a hack of a company called SolarWinds. This hack apparently allowed intruders into our networks for maybe a year and a half. But certainly since March of 2019, this is. A huge deal. We're going to explain a little bit about that here.

Who got hacked? What does it mean to you there? And I'm going to get into it just a little bit of something simple. It could be, haven't been done, right? That I have been advising you guys to do for a long time. Does this, like earlier I mentioned, Hey, change your passwords, use different passwords.

And in fact, That's a big problem still, but we'll talk about this right now. SolarWinds is a company that makes tools to manage networks of computers and the network devices themselves. And my company mainstream was a client of SolarWinds. Sorry. I want to put that on the table. However, about a year and a half to two years ago, it's probably been about two years.

We dropped SolarWinds as a vendor, and the reason we dropped them and we made it very clear to them was we had found security. Vulnerabilities in their architecture, the way they were doing things. We reported these security vulnerabilities to SolarWinds a couple of years ago, and they wouldn't do anything about it.

So we said goodbye, and we dropped them as a vendor. Yeah, we were customer SolarWinds. We were using their stuff, but then we abandoned them when they wouldn't follow what we considered to be basic security guidelines. It turns out they weren't and we got it as a country. This has been called the Pearl Harbor of American information technology.

Because the data within these hack networks, which included things like user IDs, passwords, financial records, source code can presumed now to being the hand of Russian intelligence agent. This is from. The United States of America's main security guide general Paul NACA sewn. It's just incredible what he's admitting here.

He said SolarWinds, that company that the hackers used as a conduit for their attacks had a history of lackluster security for its products. What did I tell you, making it an easy target interviews with current and former employees suggest it was slow to make security a priority even as its software was adopted by federal agencies expert note that our experts noted that it took days after the Russian attack was discovered before SolarWinds websites stopped offering client the compromised programs.

Microsoft by the way said that it had not been breached and initially here, but now this week it discovered it had been breached and resellers of Microsoft software had been breached to, and we've got intelligence officials now very upset about Microsoft not detecting it. It's just absolutely incredible here.

This wasn't something like we had with Pearl Harbor, but this attack may prove to be even more damaging to our national security and our business prosperity. This is really fast. I love the fact. I'm not going to say I told you because I, I didn't tell you guys this, but I do love the fact that I was right again.

How unfortunately I'm right too often when it comes to security and it is very frustrating to me to work with some clients that just don't seem to care about security. And I want to jump to an opinion piece here from our friends over at CNN. This is an opinion piece by Bruce.

Schneider. You've probably seen him before. He is also, I think he writes for the Washington post. But remember when this came out the word about the SolarWinds hack, president Joe Biden said we're going to retaliate which I don't know that makes a whole lot of sense in this particular case for a number of reasons.

Not the least of which we're not a hundred percent sure it's the Russians, but how are we going to retaliate? Cyber espionage is frankly business as usual for every country, not just the North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, and Vietnam. It's business as usual by us as well. And that it States is very aggressive offensively.

In other words, going out after other countries in the cyber security realm. And we benefit from the lack of norms that are in cybersecurity, but here's what I really liked. The Bruce said. And I agree with entirely. I'm glad he must listen to the show. The fundamental problem is one of economic incentives.

The market rewards, quick development of products. It rewards new features. It rewards spine on customers, end users collecting and selling individual data. Think of Facebook when we're saying this, our Instagram or any of these services that we're using all the time. So back to the quote here, the market does not reward security, safety, or transparency.

It doesn't reward reliability past a bare minimum, and it does not reward resilient at all. And this is what happened with SolarWinds. SolarWinds ended up contracting software development to Eastern Europe where Russia has a lot more influence and Russia could easily subvert programmers over there.

It's cheaper for Russia, not just for SolarWinds short-term profit. That's what they were after here was totally prioritized over product security, and yet their product is used to help secure. It just drives me crazy out there. Just absolutely crazy what some people are doing. I read a little quote down.

I'm looking here to see if I've got it handy on my desk and I just don't see it. But they are prioritizing everything except. Security. And that is, I think, frankly, completely in excusable, right. Inexcusable. So this is happening with SolarWinds right now, but it's going to be happening with other places out there.

We have probably 250 federal government agencies that were nailed by this. Can you imagine that? The man who owned SolarWinds is a Puerto Rican born billionaire named Orlando Bravo. His business model is to buy niche software companies, combine them with competitors, offshore work, cut any cost he can and raise prices.

The same swapping corrupt practices that allowed this massive cybersecurity hack made Bravo a billionaire. Another quote here. This is from tech beacon. Hey, this is just crazy. Okay. So we know. Okay. I've established it. Craig, stop the stop. The monotonous. Okay. But I got to mention, we've got the US treasury department was hacked the US department of Commerce's national telecommunication infrastructure administration, department of health, national institutes of health, cyber security, and infrastructure.

Agency. SISA the department of Homeland security, the US department of state, the department of justice, the national nuclear security administration, the US department of energy, three US state governments, the city of Austin, many hundreds more including Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, VMware, and others. I use two of those.

We use Cisco and VMware. We use Intel, but only peripherally and we actually prefer other processors. So this is a real problem. How are we going to change it? I don't know that we can, you and I, but I can tell you what you can do. Just like I keep reminding everybody use a password manager and I will have a course on that this year.

Absolutely guaranteed using a password manager, use a password manager and generate different passwords for every website using the password manager, use the manager to log in. Okay. So that's step number one. That's the best thing you can do right now for your cybersecurity next to keeping all of your soccer up to date.

The second thing that we can do. Is block this malware from getting out of your network. If you are a business, and if you consider yourself an it security person, you need to block all outbound connections. All of them. Only allow connections where they are absolutely mandatory. For instance, your accounting department may need access to some form of cloud services out there.

Heaven forbid. Okay. Maybe you're using an Oracle product, et cetera. Only those people that need access to that cloud service should have access to the cloud service. Does that make sense? Email? You should bring it in through a single server. So you only have 1.4 email coming in and going out SMTP Imam.

They should be controlled and controlled pretty tightly. According to the department of justice, apparently their email accounts were compromised about 4,000 dish. People's accounts were compromised through this hack. So from a professional standpoint, there's a lot of things you could do, but it costs money.

It takes time. How about the rest of us? What can we do to protect ourselves? Use open DNS or Cisco's umbrella service. Umbrella, we sell the professional version that's used by businesses. That's what you need because it allows you to tune it to the people and what  they need access to?  Umbrella and open DNS will stop most malware from getting out. Most of it, not everything. That is huge defense.

Hey, if you want more information, if you want to go to my initial here, Microsoft security course, that's coming up in a couple of weeks. Just email [email protected] and let me know, be glad to send you stuff.

ME@Craig peterson.com.

Take care guys.

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Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on WTAG this morning with Jim Polito. He wanted me on to discuss the problems that Massachusetts was having with the rollout of their Vaccine Scheduling website. Here we go with Jim.

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

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. He had a special command appearance this morning to answer a major question that's been bothering people in Massachusetts. Their state just yesterday came out with a COVID vaccine registration site and a million people ages 65 and up became eligible that had not been eligible before.

Of course, it did not work. They were getting errors like bad gateway error or this application crashed. It's just incredible. Incredible. Talk a little bit about what should have happened and the ways to really think about putting together something for your business. Should you, should the state be developing these systems from scratch?

I give some alternatives here. You might know. I built one of the first large-scale websites in the world. The whole thing, including the data center for the silly thing, way back when. It was for Big yellow. I don't know if you remember that or not, which was the predecessor to Superpages. We were able to get it up and running in a matter of weeks from scratch, which was a database of every business in the entire region, multiple, multiple States. In fact, we ended up covering the entire United States before we even launched. We managed to get it finished at 2:00 AM. 9:00 AM they had a press conference down a New York City, and the site was released to the world and everything worked. It never crashed, which is absolutely amazing.

In fact, we ended up after 18 months deciding maybe we should start rebooting some of these servers because they've been online yeah. For a year and a half. Of course, I was not running windows. Right.

I have some credit here. I know what I'm talking about, kind of the bottom line. I think you might find this a little interesting if you're wondering about these government projects. Cause I also bring up Obamacare and what ended up happening with this $600 check that people were getting for being laid off over the whole lockdown thing.

So here we go with Mr. Jim Pollito.

Jim Polito: [00:02:27] Charlie. Baker's not having a great day. Didn't have a great day yesterday. The governor of Massachusetts because his computer system to register people to get the COVID vaccination crashed. It's been opened up to people 65 and older, and apparently, 1 million people to log on to set up appointments for the COVID-19 vaccine.

It just crashed. It crashed.

Joining us now to sort this all out is our good friend. Who's usually you're on Tuesday, but this is why he's such a great asset to the show tech talk guru Craig Peter song. Good morning, sir.

Craig Peterson: [00:03:06] Hey, good morning, Jim. Hey, not only was the site unavailable but if you called2-1-1, the vaccine hotline, it also failed, they couldn't transfer through. So, the frustration level was just out of this world.

Jim Polito: [00:03:22] It reminds me of the old days when you were calling and trying to get tickets to see the Rolling Stones when they went on sale and the systems would just crash to try to get through. I have advertisers who really attempt to crash their systems because I want to send them so many people for their system. That's a good thing. Like they say, Oh my God, all these callers from the Jim Pollito show were all of these people trying to log onto our website. What happens? Why does that happen?

Craig Peterson: [00:03:53] In one-word incompetence. We remember the rollout of course, of the Obamacare website. I said, Hey, listen, this is going to take about three years for them to get right, after what is already online. It took about three years for them to get right.

I have done some amazing things and seen some amazing things done when it comes to websites over the years. You just can't find competent people in some of these organizations, particularly some of the larger ones.

It is easy enough in this day and age. In fact, it's very easy in less than a week you could put together a website that is effectively crash-proof that will automatically scale itself up. The question about why does it crash, has to do with the components that they're using and the way they're spreading the load.

It's not as though all of a sudden yesterday a million more people were eligible for getting shots and they should've been concerned about this. There just weren't enough computing resources behind all of this is kind of the bottom line.

Jim Polito: [00:05:01] It's like you got a bag that's rated for 10 pounds and you're trying to put 20 pounds in it.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:07] Think about having a Toyota Prius and all of a sudden you want to get a hundred people into it. You should have known that since there were a hundred people that were going to line up, a Prius just wouldn't have done it. You needed a couple of buses. That's why it goes back to incompetence.

Let's not even look all the way back through the Obamacare website. Let's look at what happened with unemployment, where people were getting these $600 checks, right? We have the exact same problem.

All 50 States had it, but there's an even simpler solution besides designing this properly using sites like Amazon web services or Microsoft Azure, which both have systems to make sure that you can handle the load. It's something called queuing.

They had something that many States adopted for their unemployment site. Very easy to add. I mean very easy to add. I looked into it because of problems I saw States having thought, well, maybe I could put a product together for them. I found Florida was using something and it took them all of about half an hour to put it in place.

What this queuing system does is you go to the website and the queuing system says all the backend systems are pretty busy right now. So I'm just going to give you basically a line in number and when the backend systems are ready for you, then little it'll all be well and good.

Now, I've got to give them a little bit of leeway here, Jim, because I'm not sure what's actually behind all of this. Are they actually trying to tie into all of these pharmacy's computer systems from that front-end website, ultimately, because there are so many pieces?

Jim Polito: [00:06:59] No.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:00] Okay.

Jim Polito: [00:07:01] No, I don't think so.

It's the super sites that they've set up, but I'm fairly sure that's how it is. Frankly, I have been suggesting, why don't we just put this in the hands of the people who've been doing it all along, and then it's their problem. Say to CVS, Walgreens, Stop and Shop, Wegmans, Price Chopper, all these places where you can get vaccines. Send them to them, pay them and say here.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:32] Yeah, exactly. Why do you build a website in the first place to take appointments? There are dozens of calendaring and scheduling websites out there.

You talk about these events, getting rolling stone tickets. Well, there's a website called that is designed to do exactly what the state is trying to do right now. The cost of this is like next to nothing to use it. I've used it before for events. We use it for the FBI InfraGard events. It's so simple. Yet, no, we've got a bureaucracy. We have people who are here on phony-baloney jobs, as Mel Brooks would say. They need to design it.

No. All we're talking about is some basic calendaring functions. To your point, why set up these sites? Walmart has pharmacies, and so do most grocery stores, as you've just mentioned. Let them do it. Maybe have one of these things like the event or one of the other scheduling pieces of software or websites do the scheduling. Just let them do it.

We don't need a whole new bureaucracy. They can't get it done.

Jim Polito: [00:08:45] Yeah. See, here's the thing though that's different with Charlie Baker versus when Deval Patrick was governor in Massachusetts. As you alluded to the Obamacare exchanges and that site kept crashing, but not just from demand, it just wasn't designed well. It was a mess but different Deval Patrick just made excuses about it.

Charlie Baker went out. I think Wednesday and said, yep, it's all ready to go. Which knowing what I know about Charlie Baker when he ran Harvard Pilgrim health care, he went to the person said, is this ready to go? Are you sure? Okay. He went out there.

That's why, yesterday, he actually used the word I'm pissed, which I think is better for him to say and he will say I own it. I'm pissed. It's gotta be fixed. I would not, Charlie Bakers' a really nice guy. Some people say too nice. I wouldn't want to be the person who told him, it's ready to go. It's all set.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:45] The other side of this is the testing involved because again, you can put these systems under load test and you should, and in the regular non-governmental space, we do put them under load tests and make sure they're going to work.

Obviously, none of this happened. I can see why you're saying his hair is on fire and he's really upset, but so were all these other people.

The design of the site was you went to the site, you filled out a PDF form online, and this form went on for pages and like you, so you're filling it all out, which I don't get either, right? Government paperwork and all of a sudden the site crashes. It does not keep any of the information that you just spent all your time filling out. Pages and pages form so that the design of it, even from that standpoint was ludicrous. What there is going to be a problem. The person's internet could go down, their computer could crash. Your website might not be able to handle the load. Then what are you going to do? Because now everybody has to start from scratch again.

Jim Polito: [00:10:58] My goodness this is why you're the great resource. Hopefully, the state was listening and Rhode Island is listening to, and they'll call in and they'll say we got to get this Craig Peterson guy.

Craig, by the way, while you're here, how would people get you through a system that would not crash?

Craig Peterson: [00:11:16] Well, you can always just email me [email protected] and I have all of my podcasts and everything up at my website, which of course is also. craigpeterson.com. If you have any questions or anything [email protected] and I'm always happy to answer pretty much anything that comes my way.

Jim Polito: [00:11:36] There you go.

Craig. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on WTAG this morning with Jim Polito.  He wanted me on to discuss the problems that Massachusetts was having with the rollout of their Vaccine Scheduling website. Here we go with Jim.

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

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. He had a special command appearance this morning to answer a major question that's been bothering people in Massachusetts. Their state just yesterday came out with a COVID vaccine registration site and a million people ages 65 and up became eligible that had not been eligible before.

Of course, it did not work. They were getting errors like bad gateway error or this application crashed. It's just incredible. Incredible. Talk a little bit about what should have happened and the ways to really think about putting together something for your business. Should you, should the state be developing these systems from scratch?

I give some alternatives here. You might know. I built one of the first large-scale websites in the world. The whole thing, including the data center for the silly thing, way back when. It was for Big yellow. I don't know if you remember that or not, which was the predecessor to Superpages. We were able to get it up and running in a matter of weeks from scratch, which was a database of every business in the entire region, multiple, multiple States.  In fact, we ended up covering the entire United States before we even launched.  We managed to get it finished at  2:00 AM. 9:00 AM they had a press conference down a New York City, and the site was released to the world and everything worked. It never crashed, which is absolutely amazing.

In fact, we ended up after 18 months deciding maybe we should start rebooting some of these servers because they've been online yeah. For a year and a half. Of course, I was not running windows. Right.

I have some credit here. I know what I'm talking about, kind of the bottom line.  I think you might find this a little interesting if you're wondering about these government projects. Cause I also bring up Obamacare and what ended up happening with this $600 check that people were getting for being laid off over the whole lockdown thing.

So here we go with Mr. Jim Pollito.

Jim Polito: [00:02:27] Charlie. Baker's not having a great day. Didn't have a great day yesterday. The governor of Massachusetts because his computer system to register people to get the COVID vaccination crashed. It's been opened up to people 65 and older, and apparently, 1 million people to log on to set up appointments for the COVID-19 vaccine.

It just crashed. It crashed.

Joining us now to sort this all out is our good friend. Who's usually you're on Tuesday, but this is why he's such a great asset to the show tech talk guru Craig Peter song. Good morning, sir.

Craig Peterson: [00:03:06] Hey, good morning, Jim. Hey, not only was the site unavailable but if you called2-1-1, the vaccine hotline, it also failed, they couldn't transfer through. So, the frustration level was just out of this world.

Jim Polito: [00:03:22] It reminds me of the old days when you were calling and trying to get tickets to see the Rolling Stones when they went on sale and the systems would just crash to try to get through. I have advertisers who really attempt to crash their systems because I want to send them so many people for their system. That's a good thing. Like they say, Oh my God, all these callers from the Jim Pollito show were all of these people trying to log onto our website. What happens? Why does that happen?

Craig Peterson: [00:03:53] In one-word incompetence. We remember the rollout of course, of the Obamacare website.  I said, Hey, listen, this is going to take about three years for them to get right, after what is already online.  It took about three years for them to get right.

I have done some amazing things and seen some amazing things done when it comes to websites over the years. You just can't find competent people in some of these organizations, particularly some of the larger ones.

It is easy enough in this day and age. In fact, it's very easy in less than a week you could put together a website that is effectively crash-proof that will automatically scale itself up.  The question about why does it crash, has to do with the components that they're using and the way they're spreading the load.

It's not as though all of a sudden yesterday a million more people were eligible for getting shots and they should've been concerned about this. There just weren't enough computing resources behind all of this is kind of the bottom line.

Jim Polito: [00:05:01] It's like you got a bag that's rated for 10 pounds and you're trying to put 20 pounds in it.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:07] Think about having a Toyota Prius and all of a sudden you want to get a hundred people into it. You should have known that since there were a hundred people that were going to line up, a Prius just wouldn't have done it. You needed a couple of buses. That's why it goes back to incompetence.

Let's not even look all the way back through the Obamacare website. Let's look at what happened with unemployment, where people were getting these $600 checks, right? We have the exact same problem.

All 50 States had it, but there's an even simpler solution besides designing this properly using sites like Amazon web services or Microsoft Azure, which both have systems to make sure that you can handle the load. It's something called queuing.

They had something that many States adopted for their unemployment site. Very easy to add. I mean very easy to add. I looked into it because of problems I saw States having thought, well, maybe I could put a product together for them. I found Florida was using something and it took them all of about half an hour to put it in place.

What this queuing system does is you go to the website and the queuing system says all the backend systems are pretty busy right now. So I'm just going to give you basically a line in number and when the backend systems are ready for you, then little it'll all be well and good.

Now, I've got to give them a little bit of leeway here, Jim, because I'm not sure what's actually behind all of this. Are they actually trying to tie into all of these pharmacy's computer systems from that front-end website, ultimately, because there are so many pieces?

Jim Polito: [00:06:59] No.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:00] Okay.

Jim Polito: [00:07:01] No, I don't think so.

It's the super sites that they've set up, but I'm fairly sure that's how it is. Frankly, I have been suggesting, why don't we just put this in the hands of the people who've been doing it all along, and then it's their problem.  Say to CVS, Walgreens, Stop and Shop, Wegmans, Price Chopper, all these places where you can get vaccines. Send them to them, pay them and say here.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:32] Yeah, exactly. Why do you build a website in the first place to take appointments? There are dozens of calendaring and scheduling websites out there.

You talk about these events, getting rolling stone tickets. Well, there's a website called that is designed to do exactly what the state is trying to do right now. The cost of this is like next to nothing to use it. I've used it before for events. We use it for the FBI InfraGard events. It's so simple. Yet, no, we've got a bureaucracy. We have people who are here on phony-baloney jobs, as Mel Brooks would say. They need to design it.

No. All we're talking about is some basic calendaring functions. To your point, why set up these sites? Walmart has pharmacies, and so do most grocery stores, as you've just mentioned. Let them do it. Maybe have one of these things like the event or one of the other scheduling pieces of software or websites do the scheduling. Just let them do it.

We don't need a whole new bureaucracy. They can't get it done.

Jim Polito: [00:08:45] Yeah. See, here's the thing though that's different with Charlie Baker versus when Deval Patrick was governor in Massachusetts. As you alluded to the Obamacare exchanges and that site kept crashing, but not just from demand, it just wasn't designed well. It was a mess but different Deval Patrick just made excuses about it.

Charlie Baker went out. I think Wednesday and said, yep, it's all ready to go. Which knowing what I know about Charlie Baker when he ran Harvard Pilgrim health care, he went to the person said, is this ready to go? Are you sure? Okay. He went out there.

That's why, yesterday, he actually used the word I'm pissed, which I think is better for him to say and he will say I own it. I'm pissed.  It's gotta be fixed. I would not, Charlie Bakers' a really nice guy. Some people say too nice. I wouldn't want to be the person who told him, it's ready to go. It's all set. 

Craig Peterson: [00:09:45] The other side of this is the testing involved because again, you can put these systems under load test and you should, and in the regular non-governmental space, we do put them under load tests and make sure they're going to work.

Obviously, none of this happened.  I can see why you're saying his hair is on fire and he's really upset, but so were all these other people.

The design of the site was you went to the site, you filled out a PDF form online, and this form went on for pages and like you, so you're filling it all out, which I don't get either, right? Government paperwork and all of a sudden the site crashes. It does not keep any of the information that you just spent all your time filling out. Pages and pages form so that the design of it, even from that standpoint was ludicrous. What there is going to be a problem. The person's internet could go down, their computer could crash. Your website might not be able to handle the load. Then what are you going to do? Because now everybody has to start from scratch again.

Jim Polito: [00:10:58] My goodness this is why you're the great resource. Hopefully, the state was listening and Rhode Island is listening to, and they'll call in and they'll say we got to get this Craig Peterson guy.

Craig, by the way, while you're here, how would people get you through a system that would not crash?

Craig Peterson: [00:11:16] Well, you can always just email me [email protected] and I have all of my podcasts and everything up at my website, which of course is also. craigpeterson.com. If you have any questions or anything [email protected] and I'm always happy to answer pretty much anything that comes my way.

Jim Polito: [00:11:36] There you go.

Craig. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

--- 

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 began talking about the shortages of Semiconductor Chips, what caused it, what is being done about it and why did it happen. Then we got into Space and fueling rockets for trips to Mars. Of course, we had to get into the hack of the water plant in FL and what happened. Here we go with Matt.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:00] From what I understand about this story, they were using an unsupported version of windows with no firewall and everybody had the same password. Am I right about that?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:10] Good morning, Craig Peterson here had a great little chat with Mr. Matt Gagnon, as we discuss some of our favorite things, including NASA. We talked a little bit about their new rocket propulsion using nuclear fuel.

We also talked about our breached water plant, which is a bit of an issue, and why our car manufacturers are cutting back on manufacturing by a factor of two-thirds. So here we go with Mr. Gagnon.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:41] We're talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to talk about the world of technology, Craig, how are you, sir?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:48] Hey, good morning doing well. I actually saw the sun this morning.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:52] You saw the sun. Amazing. Yes, it does exist. It is out there. Although I heard it's going to be a pretty cold night tonight, so we shall see. Craig, I was reading something this morning. It was in the press Herald and it was talking about how everybody is in fact able to buy toilet paper.

Today and all those global shortages of the commodities that we saw early in the pandemic are mostly solved. There is still a pretty huge need in some areas. Some places where you need to get some stuff that you can't really quite get. One of those is interestingly enough, computer chips.

This is something that we're seeing, in a lot of different industries. I think I remember you saying to me a few weeks ago that this might be one of the ultimate culprits for why the PS5's aren't coming out like gangbusters, and some other things as well. Tell me a little bit about the shortage itself and what the white house wants to do about it.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:39] This is really interesting, especially that last part, what the White House wants to do about it. Because of the lockdown, we had companies trying to guess what are we going to need inventory-wise? The manufacturers of these various types of chips based it on the orders that were coming in. They ordered these things months in advance. That is part of the problem we're having with the Sony PlayStations and others.

We've got our major manufacturers of cars, like Ford, for example, that has cut back from running three shifts to one shift because they cannot get the chips that they need inside of our cars.

Our cars today are not just computers on wheels. They are dozens of computers on wheels, each car. It's been a real problem. That inventory is catching up. It will catch up pretty quickly. We can manufacture these things. It's not like the problem we had with hard drives being manufactured in Indonesia, where they had massive flooding and it took all of these hard drive facilities offline.

This was just because people didn't order at the right time and the supply chain got messed up. Now, what the White House is going to do about it? They're going to talk about it. They are going to identify potential choke points in the supply chain, according to the White House press secretary.

Bottom line there's nothing for them to do. There's nothing that they're going to do. This problem will fix itself. This is going to lead to shortages in cars and basically anything with a chip in it.

Matt Gagnon: [00:03:16] Talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us now as he always does on Wednesdays, of course, can hear him on Saturdays in some more depth and detail on these various stations for his show which you can hear at 1:00 PM.

Now Craig, my favorite topic to chat about with you is always something space-related and there's. Always some news and tidbits to sink your teeth into, as it relates to, to, to those types of stories. Elon Musk wants to go to Mars and developments and engines, all kinds of stuff.

I did, however, read with great interest this tidbit that you had from ARS Technica about NASA thinking that the only realistic plan for humans actually on Mars is with nuclear propulsion. Talk to me about this a little bit.

Craig Peterson: [00:03:54] Yeah, isn't this kind of neat. I just love to think about this, because it's the future.

Elon Musk and NASA both are using chemically fueled rockets, these are the rockets that we've had in use now for a very long time.

Matt Gagnon: [00:04:09] Rocket fuel, right? Yeah.

Craig Peterson: [00:04:11] Yeah, exactly good old chemical rocket fuel. The problem that we have is the cost involved. You have to use tons, thousands of tons of rocket fuel in order to just get pounds of payload up into space. The biggest problem is of course from the ground until orbit. So NASA originally planned our first moon launch to have a base that was circling the globe. This was back in the sixties and it was basically going to be a refueling stop. The astronauts would go up there the fuel would already be ready. It would be loaded into the rocket. That's going to take them to the moon.

There's still a whole lot of work on that concept when it comes to these Mars flights. When you get right down to it, carrying a hundred tons to low earth orbit. In other words, just to go around the earth, not to go to the moon or Mars, a hundred tons, which is a lot of payload. That's going to cost about two billion dollars using these chemical rockets.

So NASA back in the sixties was also looking at nuclear propulsion. They've been getting a budget for nuclear propulsion now for a long time. It looks like we're talking about a dramatically different way of doing it instead of having to have 4,000 tons of propellant to get up there. We're just talking about a few hundred when we're talking about nuclear.

This is very fascinating. We've been using nuclear in space. The Russians have as well to run some of their satellites. In many cases, it's really worried us. The biggest reason NASA has not been a big proponent of this is the risk involved. If you've got all of that nuclear propellant on those rockets, you could have an accident, just like we've seen with some of Elon Musk's rockets, as he's trying to figure this whole thing out, and that could spread nuclear waste. There's concerns involved. Right now it looks like the only long-term solution we have for getting lots of colonists and supplies to Mars and beyond.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:26] Craig Peterson our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. Final question for you, Craig, there's some utility stuff in the news, obviously with all the power outages going on down South. There was also this story of the Florida water treatment facility that had a disastrous computer system failure. Apparently, from what I understand about this story, they were using an unsupported version of Windows with no firewall and everybody had the same password. Am I right about this? What could possibly go wrong?

Craig Peterson: [00:06:57] This is what we're seeing as a result of the lockdown again. People working from home. That happened in this small Florida community, about 15,000 people, right outside of Tampa. They, of course, had the lockdown, but people still want water coming out of their taps.

So what do you do?

We're going to put Team viewer on all of our computers so that people can get in from home. What happened was, as you said, they were running Windows seven and you can't get patches for it. They didn't have it configured properly. This is by the way, why I'm doing this Improving Windows Security course in a couple of weeks.

They moved quickly to get people to the point where they're able to work from home, sounds familiar. Because of that, they didn't lock things down. They didn't do it properly.

The sharing of the password thing is just absolutely unreal. Are you kidding me?

Inside many of manufacturing plants, and pretty much all of our critical infrastructure are what are called SCADA systems. These are systems that open and close valves and control the physical properties of the plant.

Somebody got on to this computer that was used to control the lye mix and increase the amount of lye being added to the water by 100 fold. Just incredible. It could have caused very severe sickness to anyone that used the water. Maybe even death.

Now the good news is some people who work from home are actually working. The guy that was monitoring this computer. Saw wait, somebody else is on this computer and changed screens and increased the lye by a factor of a hundred. He immediately turned it down. Nobody was injured by this, but it does bring up again this problem.

We moved very quickly to work from home. We didn't think it through. We didn't put proper safeguards in place. If they listened to WGAN, Matt, they would know what to do. The simple stuff here. Sometimes that's the stuff we overlook the most.

Matt Gagnon: [00:09:10] Indeed. Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us this time every Wednesday. Thanks a lot, Craig. Appreciate it. We will talk to you again next week, sir.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:16] All right. I'll be back Saturday, of course, at 1:00 PM.

Matt Gagnon: [00:09:19] Indeed. All right.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:21] Hey everybody. I figured out what had been going on. I just noticed maybe a week or so ago, the feed at Apple podcasts was not working. I was trying to figure out why hasn't it updated since November?

It was like November 2nd or something. I couldn't figure out why. I ran my podcast feed through a bunch of these online feed aggregator checkers, cause it was working everywhere else.

I had to do the process of elimination and figured out the problem was Apple didn't like the dimensions of my artwork. They apparently are very picky. They want your artwork to be square somewhere between 1500 by 1500 pixels and 3000 by 3000 pixels.

I made a little piece of artwork. I'm not terribly happy with it, but whatever that was 2000 by 2000 pixels and lo and behold, the next day. It shows up. So I think that's pretty darn cool.

My podcast download numbers went way up. So welcome back all you guys. Sorry about that. I didn't even notice that it wasn't working. I'm sure some of you guys complained. I might've missed that email,

Take care, everybody. I'll be back this weekend.

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 began talking about the shortages of Semiconductor Chips, what caused it, what is being done about it and why did it happen.  Then we got into Space and fueling rockets for trips to Mars.  Of course, we had to get into the hack of the water plant in FL and what happened.  Here we go with Matt.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:00] From what I understand about this story, they were using an unsupported version of windows with no firewall and everybody had the same password. Am I right about that?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:10] Good morning, Craig Peterson here had a great little chat with Mr. Matt Gagnon, as we discuss some of our favorite things, including NASA. We talked a little bit about their new rocket propulsion using nuclear fuel.

We also talked about our breached water plant, which is a bit of an issue, and why our car manufacturers are cutting back on manufacturing by a factor of two-thirds. So here we go with Mr. Gagnon.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:41] We're talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to talk about the world of technology, Craig, how are you, sir?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:48] Hey, good morning doing well. I actually saw the sun this morning.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:52] You saw the sun. Amazing. Yes, it does exist. It is out there. Although I heard it's going to be a pretty cold night tonight, so we shall see. Craig, I was reading something this morning. It was in the press Herald and it was talking about how everybody is in fact able to buy toilet paper.

Today and all those global shortages of the commodities that we saw early in the pandemic are mostly solved. There is still a pretty huge need in some areas. Some places where you need to get some stuff that you can't really quite get. One of those is interestingly enough, computer chips.

This is something that we're seeing, in a lot of different industries. I think I remember you saying to me a few weeks ago that this might be one of the ultimate culprits for why the PS5's aren't coming out like gangbusters, and some other things as well.  Tell me a little bit about the shortage itself and what the white house wants to do about it.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:39] This is really interesting, especially that last part, what the White House wants to do about it. Because of the lockdown, we had companies trying to guess what are we going to need inventory-wise?  The manufacturers of these various types of chips based it on the orders that were coming in. They ordered these things months in advance. That is part of the problem we're having with the Sony PlayStations and others.

We've got our major manufacturers of cars, like Ford, for example, that has cut back from running three shifts to one shift because they cannot get the chips that they need inside of our cars.

Our cars today are not just computers on wheels. They are dozens of computers on wheels, each car.  It's been a real problem. That inventory is catching up. It will catch up pretty quickly. We can manufacture these things. It's not like the problem we had with hard drives being manufactured in Indonesia, where they had massive flooding and it took all of these hard drive facilities offline.

This was just because people didn't order at the right time and the supply chain got messed up. Now, what the White House is going to do about it? They're going to talk about it. They are going to identify potential choke points in the supply chain, according to the White House press secretary.

Bottom line there's nothing for them to do. There's nothing that they're going to do. This problem will fix itself. This is going to lead to shortages in cars and basically anything with a chip in it.

Matt Gagnon: [00:03:16] Talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us now as he always does on Wednesdays, of course, can hear him on Saturdays in some more depth and detail on these various stations for his show which you can hear at 1:00 PM.

Now Craig, my favorite topic to chat about with you is always something space-related and there's. Always some news and tidbits to sink your teeth into, as it relates to, to, to those types of stories. Elon Musk wants to go to Mars and developments and engines, all kinds of stuff.

I did, however, read with great interest this tidbit that you had from ARS Technica about NASA thinking that the only realistic plan for humans actually on Mars is with nuclear propulsion. Talk to me about this a little bit.

Craig Peterson: [00:03:54] Yeah, isn't this kind of neat. I just love to think about this, because it's the future.

Elon Musk and NASA both are using chemically fueled rockets, these are the rockets that we've had in use now for a very long time.

Matt Gagnon: [00:04:09] Rocket fuel, right? Yeah.

Craig Peterson: [00:04:11] Yeah, exactly good old chemical rocket fuel. The problem that we have is the cost involved. You have to use tons, thousands of tons of rocket fuel in order to just get pounds of payload up into space. The biggest problem is of course from the ground until orbit. So NASA originally planned our first moon launch to have a base that was circling the globe. This was back in the sixties and it was basically going to be a refueling stop. The astronauts would go up there the fuel would already be ready. It would be loaded into the rocket. That's going to take them to the moon.

There's still a whole lot of work on that concept when it comes to these Mars flights. When you get right down to it, carrying a hundred tons to low earth orbit. In other words, just to go around the earth, not to go to the moon or Mars, a hundred tons, which is a lot of payload. That's going to cost about two billion dollars using these chemical rockets.

So NASA back in the sixties was also looking at nuclear propulsion. They've been getting a budget for nuclear propulsion now for a long time. It looks like we're talking about a dramatically different way of doing it instead of having to have 4,000 tons of propellant to get up there. We're just talking about a few hundred when we're talking about nuclear.

This is very fascinating. We've been using nuclear in space. The Russians have as well to run some of their satellites.  In many cases, it's really worried us. The biggest reason NASA has not been a big proponent of this is the risk involved. If you've got all of that nuclear propellant on those rockets, you could have an accident, just like we've seen with some of Elon Musk's rockets, as he's trying to figure this whole thing out, and that could spread nuclear waste. There's concerns involved. Right now it looks like the only long-term solution we have for getting lots of colonists and supplies to Mars and beyond.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:26] Craig Peterson our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. Final question for you, Craig, there's some utility stuff in the news, obviously with all the power outages going on down South. There was also this story of the Florida water treatment facility that had a disastrous computer system failure. Apparently, from what I understand about this story, they were using an unsupported version of Windows with no firewall and everybody had the same password. Am I right about this? What could possibly go wrong?

Craig Peterson: [00:06:57] This is what we're seeing as a result of the lockdown again. People working from home. That happened in this small Florida community, about 15,000 people, right outside of Tampa. They, of course, had the lockdown, but people still want water coming out of their taps.

So what do you do?

We're going to put Team viewer on all of our computers so that people can get in from home. What happened was, as you said, they were running Windows seven and you can't get patches for it. They didn't have it configured properly. This is by the way, why I'm doing this Improving Windows Security course in a couple of weeks.

They moved quickly to get people to the point where they're able to work from home, sounds familiar. Because of that, they didn't lock things down. They didn't do it properly.

The sharing of the password thing is just absolutely unreal. Are you kidding me?

Inside many of manufacturing plants, and pretty much all of our critical infrastructure are what are called SCADA systems. These are systems that open and close valves and control the physical properties of the plant.

Somebody got on to this computer that was used to control the lye mix and increase the amount of lye being added to the water by 100 fold. Just incredible. It could have caused very severe sickness to anyone that used the water. Maybe even death.

Now the good news is some people who work from home are actually working. The guy that was monitoring this computer. Saw wait, somebody else is on this computer and changed screens and increased the lye by a factor of a hundred. He immediately turned it down.  Nobody was injured by this, but it does bring up again this problem.

We moved very quickly to work from home. We didn't think it through. We didn't put proper safeguards in place.  If they listened to WGAN, Matt, they would know what to do. The simple stuff here. Sometimes that's the stuff we overlook the most.

Matt Gagnon: [00:09:10] Indeed.  Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us this time every Wednesday. Thanks a lot, Craig. Appreciate it.  We will talk to you again next week, sir.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:16] All right. I'll be back Saturday, of course, at 1:00 PM.

Matt Gagnon: [00:09:19] Indeed. All right.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:21] Hey everybody. I figured out what had been going on. I just noticed maybe a week or so ago, the feed at Apple podcasts was not working. I was trying to figure out why hasn't it updated since November?

It was like November 2nd or something.  I couldn't figure out why.  I ran my podcast feed through a bunch of these online feed aggregator checkers, cause it was working everywhere else.

I had to do the process of elimination and figured out the problem was Apple didn't like the dimensions of my artwork. They apparently are very picky. They want your artwork to be square somewhere between 1500 by 1500 pixels and 3000 by 3000 pixels.

I made a little piece of artwork. I'm not terribly happy with it, but whatever that was 2000 by 2000 pixels and lo and behold, the next day. It shows up. So I think that's pretty darn cool.

My podcast download numbers went way up. So welcome back all you guys. Sorry about that. I didn't even notice that it wasn't working. I'm sure some of you guys complained. I might've missed that email,

Take care, everybody.  I'll be back this weekend.

Bye-bye.

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Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on WTAG this morning with Jim Polito. We got into a couple of interesting topics. First was the hack of the FL water plant and how that happened and why. Then we got into NASA and how it plans on propelling the spacecraft to Mars. Here we go with Jim.

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

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] The Russians have been using them for years in space. We've been concerned about it because of what happens when that Russian bird comes down. There's issues right with all of that. These nuclear propulsion plants really tend to make a whole lot of sense.

Hi, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on this morning with Mr. Jim Pollito. We talked about the NASA space program and I love this thing. You probably know listening for a while that I actually helped just a teeny tiny bit with NASAs program called the space shuttle. That was really cool. I did some engineering way back when. Also, we talked about this breached water plant, what happened there? Who did it? Why and how can we avoid this sort of thing happening in our lives? So here we go with Jim.

Jim Polito: [00:00:52] Hey, what's team viewer. Apparently, I guess it's something like Zoom. Guess what? Hackers busted in through it. Almost polluted water in Florida. This is the stuff we were worried about. Joining us now to discuss all of this, our good friend and a very popular guest tech talk guru. Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:20] Hey, good morning. Yeah, this is a bad thing, Jim. You're right about that.

Jim Polito: [00:01:25] Apparently in Florida hackers broke into the computer system and just a smaller system. A smaller water system in Florida provides water to about 15,000 people, but they were able to, I think, turn up the chlorine in it so that the water coming out of your tap would basically be Clorox. Contaminating the water with the very agent we use to purify it. It seems that as usual, they're not listening to Craig Peterson down there, the people running this water system.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:00] Absolutely. You know that I set up the FBI InfraGard webinar program and I ran it. I conducted the webinars for a couple of years and the whole idea behind InfraGuard is that it's infrastructure protection, right? It's everything from heaven forbid lawyers get hacked, all the way to these types of systems.

In this particular case, we're talking about a technology called SCADA. These are devices that are everywhere. These are devices that control valves, they'll open and close valves.

On the electric grid, for instance, right now in Texas, right? They were foolish enough to go to wind power and so all of a sudden now all of the windmills are frozen solid.

I saw, by the way, a video of this drone that applies D-ICER to these windmills. Anyhow, they're frozen just like an airplane. If it's flying through the sky and it gets ice up and they don't have anything to stop that ice. Of course, in commercial planes the wings will no longer have lift. The same sort of problems happening with those windmills down there, Florida.

What happened, now is they have to shut down parts of the grid. Throughout Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, they are now shutting down parts of the grid doing rolling blackouts. That's all controlled by these SCADA systems.

Now you mentioned something called team viewer.

Jim Polito: [00:03:29] Yeah.

Craig Peterson: [00:03:30] Team viewer is something that people have been using as part of this lockdown thing. We're not going in to work. So how do I get to the computers at work? Well pulling all of this together, this water plant, as well as every other water plant in the country uses these computer-controlled mixing valves and on-off valves. They are controlled by computers there in the plant.

In this case, the computer they figured man, we still got to have people monitor this right. We don't want our water to go offline. We don't want the quality to go down. So some guys sitting there at home and are connected to the computer in the plant using team viewer.

Now there's a few problems here, obviously. Team viewer isn't necessarily the best thing in the world. There are much more secure ways of even setting up Team Viewer than what they did.

They were running windows seven cause that's the controller for all of these mixing valves there in the plant. Windows seven, of course, was an unsupported operating system. No firewall.

They shared the same team viewer password amongst everybody there in the plant.

They released something called sodium hydroxide. That's lye. That's the stuff that'll burn your hands off. Whoever got on to it, increased the amount of lye in the water by a factor of 100. It could have caused sickness or death. At least the guy who's working from home, who's using team viewer saw, wait a minute, somebody just changed the lye setting to death. I'm going to turn it back down again.

Jim Polito: [00:05:17] Okay. We're talking with our tech talk guru, Craig Peterson, just about the things that we do worry about which is, World War Three will not be fought with conventional weapons. It'll be fought over the internet. We see this in a hack into a water plant in Florida. Craig, do we have any idea where this hack came from? Is it as they say the usual suspects?

Almost certainly Russians. No, we don't know yet, but I thought I'd throw that in there.

In fact, there's an advisory out right now from the state of Massachusetts about this. They're talking about what the problem was. We know how they got in. We aren't sure who it was yet.

The old-style hack. This is not using what we call a zero-day vulnerability or anything else. The people who set it up were, I would say stupid, but I'm not going to say that. I would have said stupid if I had said something. They should know better if they had attended any of the briefings that I conducted for the FBI InfraGard program, they would have known that. We don't know it could be anyone, anywhere. It could be another employee at the water plant that just wanted to prove his point that the system's insecure.

Yeah, not good. Not good. This is not good. Just fix it, so we won't worry anymore.

Craig, to go to Mars help me out with this, cause you are a smart person. We need nuclear power. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. So you're saying that it's going to be like the starship enterprise. You're going to have, dilithium crystals in there. Scotty's got, "I can't give it no more, Captain". Are we really talking about a nuclear-powered spaceship to go to Mars?

Craig Peterson: [00:07:09] Obviously we've got Elon Musk. He's the guy out front and he has the standard chemical rockets. If you've ever watched the movie Snowpiercer or the TV show, Snowpiercer, which causes global catastrophe. Okay.

Jim Polito: [00:07:24] Yes, I saw the movie. I don't watch the series. The movie was just not all that great. I love SciFi, but I don't watch the series, even though one of my favorites, Jennifer Conley is in it. No, I don't watch it.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:37] Of course, completely fiction the way they've done it.

Elon Musk is looking at using chemical rockets. NASA is looking at, in fact they're planning on using chemical rockets. In both cases, NASA is can use them to go to the moon. It gets very expensive.

Our first moonshot, you and I both remember it in the sixties, I can remember watching it live on TV. It was just mind-blowing. The very first time I had ever seen a color newspaper was the day after. They had a color picture of our men there on the moon. It was just such a great time.

We were planning on something different. We were planning on having boosters to get the main rocket supplies up into orbit around the earth. Then filling those up with fuel, having fuel there, and then using the rocket that we assemble in orbit around the earth to then go to the moon.

There are plans to potentially do that for Mars missions and other deep space-type missions. The biggest problem we have is getting out of earth's gravity. When you get right down to it, NASA is expecting its big space launch system to cost around $2 billion for a flight to go on up, to get the fuel up, and other things. It's just very expensive.

Some technology that we looked at in the sixties was nuclear technology where we have a small nuclear power plant. We know how to make these things. The Russians have been using them for years in space. We've been concerned about it because of what happens when that Russian bird comes down. There's issues right with all of that.

These nuclear propulsion plants really tend to make a whole lot of sense. We'll cut way back on the cost because the amount of nuclear material we have to haul in space is a tiny fraction of the chemical propellant we'd have to haul in space. NASA is looking at it again. Congress has been funding, nuclear, propulsion experiments, and stuff now for many years.

We'll see where it all goes. It's a different way to do it. We've got a lot of proposals on the table still. I think the first missions to Mars are going to be chemical rockets because Musk is doing a pretty darn good job with that. Our missions to the moon in the near future will be chemical.

We're going to end up with a space station in earth orbit that is going to essentially be a fueling station for our continued missions to Mars, even to the moon. Mars's moons and maybe some deeper space.

Jim Polito: [00:10:23] That's amazing. We've got to make sure that the death star. We don't have an exhaust portal on the vessel two meters wide that you could get, some type of a weapon into, and then the whole thing is gone.

We just gotta make sure we

Craig Peterson: [00:10:39] we found out about that though. Do you remember? What we found out is the guy that designed it, built that flaw into it, on purpose

Jim Polito: [00:10:46] He did that was great.

Craig Peterson: [00:10:48] Rebels could. Yeah. Was that a little backstory explanation?

Jim Polito: [00:10:53] I love that. That was Rogue One. I love that. Love it. Our good friend who knows everything.

Craig Peterson, tech talk guru. Craig, how do folks get in touch with you?

Craig Peterson: [00:11:03] I am starting up here this next week, in fact, this week, this morning, you'll get an email from you, a little bit of training a whole bunch of training programs just to help you guys understand this, but you've got to be on my email list and that means go to Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. You can subscribe right there. You can listen to my podcasts.

Of course, they're my articles. You can even get the weekly email, similar to what I sent to Jim, my show notes every week, as well on Sunday mornings, I've actually pulled it together. Jim, just Craig peterson.com.

Jim Polito: [00:11:37] Nice, nice. That's right. Get everybody informed, Craig. Thank you very much. We'll talk with you next week.

Craig Peterson: [00:11:44] Take care. Bye-bye.

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More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553