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

Welcome,

Craig Peterson here. I was on with Chris Ryan on NH Today. We talked about how you can stay secure and private while being online and how Facebook works. We also discussed Gen Z's propensity for sharing everything on social media and why that is not the best idea.   Here we go with Chris. 

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

- CraigPeterson.com

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey, good morning. I was on with Chris Ryan this morning, the new host over at WGIR. And my gosh, I think I'm on like six different stations simulcast all over the place. Anyway, we chatted this morning about your security. How to keep your info safe, a little bit safe, from at least prying advertisers this morning.

So here we go.

Chris Ryan: [00:00:23] I've often said here on the show that we use our phones to spy on ourselves. That could be in many different circumstances, whether you are, writing things that shouldn't be written on social media. Whether it's your searches. Whether it's, you don't realize, how your searches are being detected. My phone has done way too much spying on myself, I've determined.

Welcome to the program right now. Craig Peterson, who hosts a tech talk here on news radio, 610 and 96.7.

Craig, how are you?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:50] I am doing well. Yeah. They've cut all kinds of new sensors in them, including these back hair centers. It's amazing.

Chris Ryan: [00:00:57] How does my phone know that I have back hair?

Justin McIssac: [00:00:59] How much did Chris have talk about his back hair, in order for the ad to pop up?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:03] Okay. This will never end.

Chris Ryan: [00:01:07] It's crazy. But in all honesty, we have these ads which are targeted towards us or this ad is clearly just mistargeted, obviously. We are constantly putting in information. I think a lot of times individuals don't realize how much they're putting in.

I remember back when the internet first came in back in 1995 and you had the AOL thing and you hit the button down for three seconds, and then you went finally connected to the internet. Parents always said We're not going to put anything of any significance on the internet, our credit card numbers, and social security. You're never going to do anything like that because it could have bad things to happen.

Now we're constantly putting in information. We're buying things on Amazon. Our credit cards would appear to be available on online, as well. So what are we giving away in this trade-off for more information? For more access. What fail-safes are there?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:59] This has become really something very old, I think everyone's heard by now. We are the product, right? If you're using a free app, it is not free. If you're using a free site, like Facebook, it is not free. The only thing that really is free out there, are some of these open source products. What are we giving away? Things like our credit cards, you mentioned we're putting online. 

Look at what GoDaddy did with some employees last fall. They wanted to have employees stop[clicking on these phishing emails that are sent out to get you to do something that you really shouldn't be doing. So they sent a thing out to about 500 employees in emails saying, Hey guys, it's time for the annual bonus. If you click through here, you'll get the $560 bonus, you just got to fill it out.

So these people working there for GoDaddy clicked on that email and they filled it out. They gave all of this personal information, Chris, and then all of a sudden they were in trouble. Now that's evil. That is frankly evil. That was the company doing it. To them, this is a big problem.

If you look at a generation Z, they have security in mind, just so much, that they've done some studies and found the generation Z will give away personal information, like their email address and their name in exchange, for a donut.

That's all it takes, Chris.

Chris Ryan: [00:03:27] So let's take a look at, say Facebook as an example, or what is the business model for Facebook? Obviously, they have some ads that run. This is a multi-billion dollar company and, you don't see when you're going through Facebook, the mechanism by which they would be able to generate the type of revenue that they do.

So take us through what the business model is for Facebook, and how they go about having success with that model.

Craig Peterson: [00:03:57] For everyone's information, I have worked with clients who advertise on Facebook and I have set up the Facebook pixels all the way through, just the whole thing. Okay. So I do understand this.

The advertising mechanism inside Facebook tracks you, what you're saying within Facebook, and all of Facebook's properties, which by the way is why people are concerned about WhatsApp, which is a secure messaging platform that Facebook is messing with. They not only track you on their own properties, they also track you when you are on other parts of the internet.

They know where you're going. They know what you're doing on websites that aren't owned by Facebook or affiliated with Facebook.

The reason that happens is these third- party websites also want to know what your interests are. So that the marketers can now put it all into a big pot and stir it up and say, Oh he was over at this website. He was looking at this and he was looking at that and he went here, he went there.

So Facebook now gives these advertisers the ability to retarget these people that are visiting other websites.

So if you went to a website and you look to purchase something, an advertiser on Facebook can say, Oh, he was at my website earlier today. So now when you go to the website or any of the advertising properties and Facebook is helping to provide advertising on it will now show you an ad specifically for you and it's gotten so good, Chris, that people think that their phones are listening in on their conversations.

They think that somehow they've been listening on a phone call or just on the other side of the room. No, it, most of the time these ads are popping up for us because of the tracking, the mechanisms, the artificial intelligence behind it, being able to know basically everything you're doing online, putting into a pot can predict before you even want it.

Amazon is using similar mechanisms right now where they pre-ship things. They think that you, Chris Ryan, are going to buy. They shipped them to a distribution center near you. So their business model is to know everything about everyone. Be able to predict what they want to buy and then sell that information to interested advertisers.

That's how they're making billions of dollars. They really have a corner on that market.

Chris Ryan: [00:06:32] They really do. It's incredibly smart and intelligent. The algorithms are good. From an advertising standpoint. You look at just where digital advertising is at this point, what they're able to do? What they're able to focus on? It's flat out remarkable.

So let's say that I wanted to avoid being tracked, but I still want to use the same products, but I don't want back hair ads popping up in my feed. How do I go about doing that? Can I do that? Can you Google things? Cause Google is another big one, as well. Can you go and do your searches and not be inundated with ads that kind of freak you out.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:10] There are some ways to do some of this right now. Our friends over at Mozilla who make a browser called Firefox, have a special mode in their browser that kicks in automatically when it comes to Facebook. For example, So if you're using Firefox Mozilla, and there's a couple of issues with that, but generally speaking, it's a good internet browser.

It actually builds a wall around Facebook. So that Facebook can start poking around saying, what else is he doing? Okay. Where else is he going? So that's your first trick out there is to put that in place.

Apple has gone a long way now they have a special advertiser ID. Facebook and Google are really upset with Apple right now because of this release of Apple's operating system iOS, which blocks them from doing most of the tracking and tells you exactly what they're doing and will ask you if it's okay.

If Facebook is tracking you while you're looking at your favorite Zappos site shoes and whatever you might be looking at online. Firefox combined with something like Signal.

If you are trying to communicate with someone, Signal and iMessage are great ways to go. I Message is very simple its Apple-centric. Obviously, they don't track you. Apple does not make money off of you by selling your information, which is a big deal.

There's a few other things that you can do.

I do some training on some plugins that you can put into your browsers to block what is called cross-site keys. That's a big one as well.

Justin McIssac: [00:08:51] I've got some friends convinced that they've got to throw a couple of weird searches in there now, and then just to disrupt the algorithms. So they'll look up like a Scandinavian candy shop. They'll Google that now just to try and throw Bezos off, but I don't think that works.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:05] No it does actually to some extent.

Yeah, Justin, you, there is a plugin that will automatically put random searches out there into Google to do exactly what you're talking about. It does it automatically. Don't use Google use duck go, which is hard to say, that's Duck Duck Go something search engine. Yeah, and it doesn't track you. It doesn't tie into the Facebook trackers and particularly when you're using Firefox. We're being tracked everybody.

Chris Ryan: [00:09:37] Craig has always, appreciate you joining us for the show.

We shall chat again next Monday.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:41] All right. Take care. And I'll be back of course, Saturdays at 1130,

Chris Ryan: [00:09:45] 1130 tech talk here on news radio, 610 and 96.7

I am Chris Ryan.

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Welcome!

This has been quite the week for Tech news with Big Tech lowering their Iron Fist on any opinions with which they don't agree. Social Media censorship is here and it has taught us that if you want to communicate freely you cannot and must not use their platforms or services. I will introduce you to a new service that is out of their control and completely decentralized -- like the original internet. Plus we will talk about Elon Musk, What'sApp and 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:

WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using the app

Insurrectionists' social media presence gives feds an easy way to ID them

Elon Musk is the world's richest person

What to expect from the first-ever virtual CES

Google, Apple, and Amazon bans Parler

Mastodon is the Only Open Social Network Remaining

Malware Developers Refresh Their Attack Tools

How the Shady Zero-Day Sales Game Is Evolving

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hi. Hey everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me. We're going to talk about that. WhatsApp. What are the alternatives to WhatsApp that you might want to use to have private communications? We're going to talk about zero day attacks. This is a very big deal, particularly for us regular users and businesses and what.

Does that mean to you? What does that mean to me? The whole thing about in these insurrectionists on social media, what happened down at the white house? Not the white house, but excuse me. The Capitol building. And what are the federal and local police doing to track down the people they are using tech, which should not come as a surprise to anybody.

Ilan Musk is the world's richest person. Now we'll go into a little bit about him and what's going on. We are in the middle of the virtual CES. This is the first time that consumer electronic show has been virtual because of the lock. Down. They couldn't have all of these people out in Vegas. I can't imagine what the finances are like in Vegas right now.

That place has to be destroyed. Oh my gosh. What's been going on. People just aren't going out there. I was listening this morning to an interview with the head of the Manchester, Boston Regional Airport. And he was saying that, they had a peak, during the holidays, people were traveling no matter what the advice was, and they had a decent time of it.

They were able to handle the volume. But now that those travel days are over with we're just basically Thanksgiving and then around Christmas, they're now seeing just a glut. Because nobody's going to Vegas. Right now they'd be pretty busy. Today they probably wouldn't because most people will be in Vegas for the consumer electronic show, but they built up Vegas, Las Vegas in order to handle this show.

It's the second biggest show in the world and the largest consumer show in the world. And it's not even happening this year. At least not the way it's happened in years past. I'm so glad I'm not out there. I used, I loved going to Vegas. I really did, because you could do people watching. I'd usually bring a roll of nickels and it's hard to find the nickel slot machines, I'd blow every nickel I had that was running joke of mine for a few decades.

Yeah. Boring guy.

But the rest of the time I was watching people enjoying the restaurant. I loved walking around Vegas. Absolutely loved it. It was so much fun because it's just an exciting place to be. But now, Oh my gosh.

We have some clients out in Vegas, a medical client actually. We will have to comply with the HIPAA regulations and all of these, obviously that's part of what we do, is hip hop because we help businesses with their regulatory burdens. And I saw a mountain Vegas and we were taking care of this client and we just hop over to this trip. And in talking with them, some of these different clients out there, none of them go to the strip. If you're a resident, you just don't go.

Unless you're going to meet a friend from out of town and you go to a great restaurant. And I remember this last time I was out there, we went to Like it was Gordon Ramsey's new restaurant at the time, and it was a kind of an English pub theme. And I had, smashed peas and bangers and potatoes.

I forget what they called the potatoes. But that's for those of us who speak American English, it's sausages and peas and potatoes. It was actually very good. What's happening now because so many of these restaurants are shut down the casinos?

We just had a major casino owner just passed away this week as well. What's going to happen there?

So CES. It was what kept that whole economy really in the black frankly, and it's not even happening. So we'll, anyways, we'll talk a little bit about what's happening out there at the first ever Virtual Consumer Electronic show.

And if you don't hear it, make sure you go check it out. Online. Craig peterson.com got lots of great stuff there. For you a Google banning parlor from the Android app store. We're going to talk a little bit about that. What does it mean? Not just Google. Of course now we have Apple has banned them from their app store.

We've got Amazon who's kicked them off of their platform. We actually know a fair amount about this right now, but where are things going? How the biggest decentralized social network is dealing with its Nazi problem. We'll talk a little bit if we can get to it today, but about something called Mastodon. And I'm going to probably try and bring a Mastodon server up online, and it's designed for your own social network and these servers can tie together and each server can have its own standards in a way people can say and do and whatever online.

And Gab, which is where a lot of the people have gone that have been disaffected from Twitter and other places, and Gab had kicked them off. And so they went over to Mastodon and of course, Gab's has been having problems now, too. I guess a president just opened a gab account, just Gab, gab.com this week for people to follow him.

We'll see how that works out. It's just incredible. I mentioned this week on the air. I'm want, I consider myself anyways to be a, I'm the regionalist particularly here when we're talking about the internet and internet originalists. I firmly believe that the internet was intended to be just a free and open place, not just for exchanging ideas, which is.

Ultimately incredibly important. And it's so important that I think the only real way to solve problems isn't to find a new energy source or whatever it might be. I think that ultimately. It's the human mind, the human intellect, that is the most valuable resource on earth because we've been able to solve every problem that has come along.

So having this ability to communicate was what we saw the internet capable of back in the early 1980s, and then in the nineties. And when Berners Lee came out with the concept with NCSA, Mosaic of the web browser was just, Oh my gosh, that's just brilliant. Again, it was a simple step, but a brilliant idea that he was able to implement and he gave us the web.

And I was just so excited then, because what I thought was, what would happen is we would all be able to communicate and we'd see each other's ideas. And at the time the internet was probably about 90, 95% conservative, because remember where it came from, it was all of us working on government funded projects, many in universities.

But we were libertarian, we were conservative and this is going to be wonderful. We're going to get our libertarian message out about government control. In fact, I had a signature back in the day that I wrote a little bit of code in order to generate a new signature. Every time an email went out and it had all of these NSA buzzwords in it.

I was going to solve this problem all by myself by just making the NSA monitor my email. Now the stupid things we do is kids. But that's what we were seeing. We were originalist. This was just so exciting. So you had the free speech part of it, but you also have the freedom of development of you taking your ideas.

Finally, now you could connect with anyone in the world, anything in the world. Ultimately, of course we couldn't when it first started, right? How many of us were on the internet? My node is listed on some of those early maps of the internet. It's fun. Look at it. Oh, there I am. That's me. That was my machine. That was my company. That's what I was doing at the time.

Looking at it today. That excitement that we had of being able to develop software and new protocols and new technologies. And we weren't even thinking about competition because there was no competition. It was just a wonderful time to what we have today.

We've got our friends primarily at Facebook and Twitter, but also at Google, but maybe Facebook and Twitter are some of the worst offenders I'm going to lump Google into. Okay. But where we had all of these people, having free conversations and disagreeing with each other about political things and technological things and ways to move forward and how much security do we need, and should we be sending these commands in-line as just text real texts that you could read?

Just like the protocol that runs our email today. It says, hello, literally. Hello. When it connects. Nowadays the more advanced version say E H L O, but anyways you send real text commands to the machine so people could watch what was going on and debug it and figure things out. And talking about email, our email servers, the earlier versions of sendmail that we had were set up so that a remote person could get onto your server without your knowledge or permission even, and fix a configuration problem and debug a problem.

Think of that world, what that world was like. It was so exciting. We were in on something that just had never, ever happened before. And what Facebook and Twitter have done is completely turned the tables on this whole thing.

And I'm going to tell you what they did to turn the tables and we'll get into also what is going on with social networking? Where is it ultimately going to end up at? So we've got a lot to talk about today and I hope that you can stick around and pick up on all of this stuff.

How did we get there from here? Really don't know. I'm my head's still spinning, but here's, what's happened. You had Facebook start and Facebook's whole business model is to have you be the product.

You've heard this a million times before. And so Google. Oh, and Facebook and Twitter all want you to use their services. And they're going to, you pay the highest bidder for you, right? For your eyeballs. Okay. That's all fine. I understand that. But in order for them to make more money, what do you have to do?

As a business person, you know what you have to do, either get more customers, you have to increase the volume of purchases by the customers you have, or perhaps you need to increase your prices or cut your costs. There's only so many metrics that are available to a business. Two that you can manipulate in order to really come out.

I had to have the game so that you can create more jobs and more opportunity for people by hiring them. If Facebook is going to be able to sell your information to more people, they need you on the platform for longer periods of time. That basically gives them more product to offer. Again, remember you are the product.

So if they're going to try and keep you on Facebook, what are they going to do? They have on staff, all kinds of psychiatrists, psychologists, and sociologists who try and figure out how to really pull your strings. That's what they want. They want you on there. They're going to have colors that are designed to keep you on the website.

Again, going back to the Vegas thing from the prior segment, you go into Las Vegas and do a casino and you are going to be completely oblivious as to what time of day it is. You have no idea. There aren't any windows. The light is always the same. The flooring the weird patterns they have in the carpets on the floors are designed to slightly disorient.

You. So you're just sitting there playing the slots, getting free booze, because that's going to keep you playing because you don't make the best decisions when you are on the tipsy side. You are not going to be an effective gambler. Get, you might stay there all night and you have no idea.

Use your Apple watch in order to remind you when you should be leaving right, or whatever, watch out. The same types of things have gone into all of these social media sites. And now one of the things that they have found out is if you get pissed off, if you're very angry at something, you are going to leave.

Now you may just go and do something else because you're so upset, right? You're steaming over. You're boiling. You might leave the site permanently, just so many Twitter users have done thousands of them here after president Trump. Had decided he wasn't going to post because he couldn't on Twitter anymore.

And moved over to Gab.com, as I mentioned. So what should they do? They want more product. They need more eyeballs that they can sell. So they're going to show you things that you want to see that are going to keep you on their site. So they're going to upset you. Yeah they want to upset you because if you are a little upset, you're going to pay more attention, right?

Your eyeballs are going to be drawn in as it were. So they're going to show you things that effectively you want to see, but it's really more than that. It's really, they've got to get your hormones flowing to such a degree at such a level that you are going to stay on this site. And you're going to share content with your friends and.

You're going to comment on a tweet and they're going to show it to the people that it's really going to upset in, but not so much that they're going to get off of the site for the day, but enough that they're going to want to jump in because their opinion matters. And in reality on these social media sites your opinion really doesn't matter that much, right?

None of us are as important as we think, like to think we are. So they have sucked you in. And how many times have we seen people who are stuck in these sites all day long? They have a spare moment. They are just flipping through headlines and those headlines are designed to get you. To stick on the site to share stuff.

That's what it's designed for. I didn't see that common. I really didn't and a really good friend of mine. He pointed out something the other day, cause he was asking about, what's the ultimate outcome going to be of what we've seen with president Trump and. Social media and banning conservatives, et cetera, et cetera.

And so we had a great little chat about that and he pointed out Craig, normally you don't think this way. I don't think like the people that are trying to shut us up. I don't think like the people that are trying to take control, I'm I am not a socialist. I'm not a national socialist.

Also called Nazi the German word for national socialists. I'm not a communist, which is again, an international socialist. You notice they're all socialists. And I just think everybody should have reasonable freedoms. Obviously we need laws and the right for me to swing my fist, stops somewhere before your nose.

And I understand all of that and I believe firmly in all of that. And I was raised remember in a socialist country that there has discussions about some of this stuff.

But I really am very libertine I think is maybe the way to put it because you have the Libertarian party, the uppercase L. I am a lowercase L I think that people have the right to privacy, for instance, which used to be something that the Democrat party talked about.

And that used to be something the Democrat party cared about. But now with these massive businesses, That want your eyeballs that are keeping your eyeballs, it's all changed. And part of the reason it's all changed. And this is what I explained to my friend is if you're a big company, you don't want competition, right?

So you get Facebook buying Instagram, you get Facebook buying WhatsApp because they were competition to them. What's another great way to get rid of competition if you don't have any morals? And we know from all of the stories we've seen about Zuckerberg and how he stole photos from Harvard university of all of the co-eds that were there and put them up and had people rating their them based on their looks. That story would tell us the Zuckerberg doesn't have those morals, but if you don't have any morals and you have enough money to get the attention of Congress or State legislatures, then what can you do? And I think that's where our problem has come in. Frankly, these guys want legislation.

So when we get back, I'll tell you why I think they want this legislation. Why they want the types of enforcement they have, because many times you might be scratching your head.

I know I used to do saying why would this company be lobbying for legislation to regulate themselves? I think there's a pretty simple answer here.

I mentioned how I am an intranet originalist because I was around in the days of the founding of the internet. Absolutely. So I was looking forward to all of this freedom, to all of this open space, to the ability to communicate back and forth with anybody, to be able to develop applications, whatever I needed to do, whatever I might want to do.

It was just an incredible day. Incredible time to where we're at today. So you have these big businesses, Facebook and others who are doing the nasty, frankly, where they are controlling us. They really are because they're controlling the content we see, and we are no longer able to distinguish between something that is being fed to us.

Because they think it'll keep us on the site longer. They think it'll make us talk about an article or something. And the difference between that and something maybe we need to see, which is most likely an opposing opinion now, just because there's an opposing opinion doesn't mean that it's a worthwhile opinion, right?

There are some seriously crazy people out there, but we're not making that decision anymore. That decision is being made by the tech tyrant and the tech tyrant's love to have government intervene. If the tech titans, the Facebooks and Googles and Twitters of the world can get the government to put various controls in place because "in this industry, we have not done a great job of controlling ourselves. So we need the government to control us."

When the government starts "controlling," it's quote unquote, right? These big tech giants and puts rules and regulations in place saying thou shall do this thou shalt not do that. We all chair many of us anyways, chair. And we cheer because the problem solved.

And of course, as we know, anytime government quote "solves" unquote, a problem they've created three, four, five, six other problems. So government loves it because there's more problems to solve, but the original problem was never solved, but here's the trick. These tech tyrants or tyrants of other kinds, we'll talk about some others in just a minute, are now under new regulations. But they can afford those regulations. Who cannot afford to comply with those regulations? It's a little guy, isn't it? The small companies is small startups. That, that I was so excited were coming our way because we had this new internet technology.

This wonderful tech that was going to change our lives. Those companies are squashed. They're stepped on. They are little gnats that are flying about their heads that are now starved because they can't comply. Now, let me give you an example.

I deal with regulatory compliance. My business is all about cyber security right now. We're not a law firm. I don't give legal advice, but I help them comply. And how do I help them comply? We'll go in and we'll do audits on their networks. Figure out what it is that needs to be done on their network. How can that work? What problems might we have? What problems might they have and then move forward right to the next step.

And that is solve the problems. Just this week we delivered a case of paper to one of our clients. Now this is a moderately small client there. They're not huge. They are considered a small business by the Small Business Administration. So they're not a particularly big customer or business, but here's, what's happened in their industry.

There are rules called CMMC, which are based on some National Institutes of Standards and Technology requirements or guidelines that were put in place. And anyone that manufacturers anything or provides anything to the federal government has to comply with these rules. And compliance is very expensive.

We're talking a half, a million dollars upfront for a small business. And then if you really are complying probably about 300,000 a year, if you're trying to do it all yourself, okay. Very expensive.

Now I look at these cybersecurity rules and say you know to me anyways, being a cybersecurity guy, these are legitimate, they're reasonable. But most of these small companies are looking at it and say it's easy enough for one of these major contractors that you probably heard, their names is places like Boeing or BAE. And those types of places it's easy enough for them to comply because they've got great profit margins and they have thousands of people working for them.

Tens of thousands. It's easy for them. It's hard for us. So we delivered. A case of printed paper, where we had gone through and written up all of the documentation necessary for them to comply with the CMMC rules. Now this documentation set that we wrote up for them is, as you can guess, Thousands and thousands of pages long, and it's all stuff that they're supposed to comply with. And it goes into every level. What should happen from the physical security, which the fed call ITAR all the way through the computer security and password changes. When should they happen, et cetera, et cetera. And this is a $50,000 project. How is a small company going to be shelling out this kind of money?

Now we try and make it easy for them because we will rent them the equipment as opposed to sell them equipment. And we'll, we will do the documentation for them at this cost because the 50,000 frankly, is cheap. If they had done it themselves it would have been closer to 200,000. But because we do it for so many businesses and so much of it, the same.

we're able to give it to them at a savings, but how can a small business comply with all these regulations? A startup business comply. It's very difficult. If not impossible to be able to comply with this stuff. And there are some market opportunities for us that we're pursuing where they, these customers are actually using our systems in order to help stay safe.

And I think that might be a good way for them to get around that initial quarter million, half a million dollar investment in upgrades that they have to do. But it makes it difficult to enter the market, right? Investors they're always looking at what's the barrier to entry here for potential competitors?

If you can get the federal government's ear, if you are a big contractor, you can get regulations put in place that you could comply with. No problem. I'll just add it onto my bill, which they were able to do by the way. If the regulations were written so they could bill it back to the federal government, but for various reasons, very small businesses and startups just cannot bill it back. How's that for our scary situation?

We don't like the fact that frankly, Google Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, you name any of these big companies. We don't like the fact that they are able to control the market that they're in. Now we had this whole antitrust system set up, you might remember the robber barons and what they were doing, which was just totally immoral and really hurt a lot of people a hundred years ago.

This is the modern version of the robber barons. If you can't beat them, join them. And as I mentioned in the last segment . They love the regulations and the regulations love them.

Now, the reason I say the regulations love them is because the regulators love them.

Mel Brooks. You remember with the the movie, it was just absolutely fantastic. And they're all sitting around the table with the Governor and they're talking about their phony baloney jobs. That's really what so many of these regulations are. Do we really need them, do we really need all of these laws?

And the answer is obviously no. We just cut back on tons of regulations, tens of thousands of regulations that were just absolutely not needed, but the regulators love it.

If you are a regulator and you are sitting behind a desk and you'd like to earn more money. And of course, who wouldn't like to make a few extra bucks, and maybe take a vacation for once. But you're sitting behind a desk as a regulator. How are you going to justify a higher salary? Obviously more work would help justify that. And you're probably looking, as part of that raise to maybe move up the ladder. In order to move up the ladder and manage people, you have to have more people.

So the more work you can make for yourself and for your department, so that the department has to grow, the better, the chance of you being able to move up the ladder and get that extra salary bump. You see how that works. I know you guys. You're the best and brightest and you're like me. We don't think that way, but many regulators do think that way.

And I know there's some great, honest people out there that are trying to do the right thing. We work with a number of State organizations from school districts to counties. We've done it for years to State governments, in fact, and we always try and do the right thing, but the tendency. The gravity is towards these regulatory agencies growing and just grabbing more and more power and authority so that they can justify more and more.

And the big companies don't actually really complain about it much because that helps them keep the small guys out. That's what I've been talking about. They don't want those small guys. They don't want the startups. They don't want what the internet had so much hope and opportunity held out for.

They want to stay in their phony baloney positions as well at the head of some of these things. So they've made it very difficult for us to get in. Then on the state and local level, look at what's happened. Again, government likes to control government likes to regulate, which is controlled. That's what it's all about.

Remember, regulator was the brand name for a clock because it helped to regulate the time. Ball was the first watch. That was good enough for the railroad to keep track of time. And we have our time zones today because of the railroad, nothing to do with what the real time of day is. If we were at noon, when the sun was high overhead, when it was directly overhead, we'd have an even amount of time in the afternoon as we do in the morning.

In other words, the sun would rise at 8:00 AM and set at 8:00 PM. But that doesn't happen. Does it? And that's all because of regulation or just because of the railroad who was huge at the time. So State and local think about the licenses that are required in so many places. Do we really need to have a business license?

Did you know, Singapore does not require business licenses. They hardly have any licenses. In fact, in Singapore, and they have one of the best economies in the world and have had for a very long time, because a simple idea might be a great idea, but it might not work in the real world. Look at the numbers coming out of the small business administration.

Most businesses fail.

And the best way to fail is to fail fast before you spend all of your money, your savings. Hopefully you have something after this whole lockdown, but that's the best way to figure out if an business idea is a good one. Failed. You got to try it, but if you have to have a license from the town for the business, you have to have an occupancy permit for the office space.

You have to have an, a license to run it out of your house nowadays, right? Because we're working from home and then consider things like a license for a hairdresser for a barber really. Really you need a license for that? It is great because it keeps people out of the business. It keeps the number of barbers down, the number of hairdressers down there aren't as many because you need a license, but do we really need a license for that?

So I wanted to use that as a lower end example because barbershops and hair salons tend to be much, much smaller than trillion dollar companies. So we have to be very careful about our tendencies growing up, my father and my mother, they would continually say, ah, there ought to be a law about that.

Really do we need a law? How long has murder being illegal? Go back to British common law where a lot of our laws started from anyways. It was illegal. Then it was illegal to cheat somebody out of something. It was illegal to do these various things, but the lawyers, the whole law community has built it up.

Along with the politicians, so that everything's become incredibly complicated, which benefits who again, does it really benefit you? If someone cheats you? Those laws had been on the books since the Magna Carta. Okay? So do we really need to have a specific law about cheating on the internet using this type of achieved against this type of a person that applies to this type of a company?

Really? Do we really need that? Isn't that what the whole courts were about is to interpret the law. We have come so far from our founding. And I'm referring to the internet here, not just the country, but it applies to both. So we are now faced with this problem of the internet and these mega-monopolies effectively, when you control 60% of the online servers and data processing storage that's pretty much a monopoly and that's the position Amazon is in right now.

How do you get rid of those monopolies while we've tried legislatively before? But those laws don't work. They've worked a way around those laws. They've said, okay, we're going to actually use the laws to protect our monopoly. And they go to the government and they say, Hey we want to buy Instagram or we want to buy WhatsApp.

And we're not gaining any sort of a monopoly position by doing this because we do have laws in place that require these big companies to go before a federal bureaucracy who by the way, is going to regulate them and has that additional incentive hidden away in their back pocket.

If we have this bigger company here, we can regulate it easier than all of these little companies. So they go and they get permission to buy these competitors. And they were competitors because Instagram was taking those ever valuable eyeballs that are needed by Facebook, away from Facebook.

WhatsApp was taking people away from messenger and WhatsApp was great at the time because it was end to end encrypted used MarlinSpike's algorithms. It just was a nice little product. But Facebook already had a competing product called Messenger, and yet they were able to buy it anyways and become bigger and get more regulations in place, which keeps the small guys out.

It keeps the best ideas, ideas we never saw because frankly they never saw the light of day. So how could we see them? Are you willing to put all of this money into something and find out there's all these regulations in your way where you have to hire a company like mine and hire me because you need to do an audit.

You need to comply with the HIPAA regulations. You need to comply with these CMMC regulations. And in some cases it makes sense. And I got to say, I think in most cases I've seen these regulations do nothing but preserve and create monopolies. So not that I have an opinion on the matter, but I thought it was while in these turbulent times to explain what I think is going on.

And these calls for further regulations I think are going to ultimately have the exact opposite effect. That these new regulations that people are calling for more regulations from the FTC, from the FCC Pitt and PI I should say and company did not do enough regulations. They got rid of regulations.

And we don't have free speech that gamer, he can't get internet cheap because he's using a lot of internet compared to what that granny next door who wants to send a nice picture of her cat or get pictures of the grandkids. She has to pay the same as him. That's what they want. That's what they want.

And I think it's going to be destructive

Let's talk about secure communications right now. And I'm talking about talking to your kids at school or grandkids, or, any type of communication you might want to have, including of course, business communication that you want to be.

Relatively / reasonably secure. You can't expect to using just regular hardware to have military grade security. It's just not reasonable. Apple went to all of the trouble and they got their iPhone certified for certain types of data. And I think it's great that they did because it's helping all of us.

But in, in, unless you are a spy working for a foreign government or something, Really these things are going to work for you. So when the number one out there is an app called WhatsApp and it is an app that was designed using a very good base. There's a guy out there by the name of MarlinSpike.

Probably not the name he was born with. And he designed a end-to-end state-of-the-art encryption mechanism. And it was used, it still is used in an app called Signal. And another app called WhatsApp. I got about a week ago, a notification on WhatsApp because we use WhatsApp for a mastermind group on men.

And the idea is we don't want people spying in maybe competitors who knows who. And so we wanted something that was secure end to end and remember that's what zoom was telling us. Yeah. It's secure end to end. And of course we find out later on that it wasn't, they were absolutely lying. Big surprise there.

But when we're talking about secure communications, it has to be end to end. And what that means is you type into your phone for instance, and it's in the clearer right there on your phone and then the app, whatever it might be will encrypt it. Send it to the remote site. Now we obviously, it's going to go through a bunch of routers on the internet.

It may end up in a server or two, depending on the app and how it's written, and then it'll end up on the other person's smartphone or desktop, whatever it might be end to end means that anyone in the middle who is capturing the data only sees it as random letters and numbers. That's the idea behind this.

So it won't prevent someone from listening in on your conversation because they can certainly listen in, but it will prevent them from listening intelligibly to your conversation. In other words, they've got all of the data. It's encrypted data, it looks like trash and they have it now. Is that any good for people?

Again, it depends on how spy worlds you want to get here? Is it something where knowing that there's a communication going on means something right there. There's a lot of stuff you can read into it. How active is it? You might remember in world war II, we were listening to German communications and you could tell something's ramping up here because we've got more units, transmitting unit codes, and we use that as did our enemies in the war to fool them as well. We had pretended we had a whole tank divisions that didn't actually exist as well as various other things. So secure communications means a lot of things, but when we're talking end to end, all it means is when you send it is basically garbage one is being transmitted. And then it's in the clear when it arrives at the far side. So that's end to end communications what app has had and then communications encrypted, which is why people have been using it. If you listen to the first hour, you heard me complaining about Facebook and how they've been buying their competition, and then the competition that they can't buy that doesn't even exist yet.

Before it gets started, they've been using government regulations to suppress them and make sure they just don't become competitors. One of the apps that was bought by Facebook, because it was taken away a lot of eyeballs, is called WhatsApp. It's a messaging app. It has, or at least used to have privacy coded into the way it was designed.

Now, Facebook owning it means who knows if it still does. We don't have the source code that Facebook is using, who knows what they've gotten into it, but we're talking about 2 billion users. Worldwide. And I got this message from WhatsApp saying that if I don't concede to these new terms of service, I'm not going to be able to use WhatsApp anymore.

While these terms of service include. And I had to look at this and now I have it up on my screen right now. They are changing WhatsApp service and the way they process your data, how businesses can use Facebook hosted services to store and manage. There are WhatsApp client chats, how they partner with Facebook to offer integrations across the Facebook company products.

So guess what that all means. And they said, if you don't agree to this by February 8th, you will no longer be able to use WhatsApp. Now remember they paid $19 billion for WhatsApp in 2014, and it's really going to make you wonder what they were thinking. All right. They have not been making money off of WhatsApp.

They haven't been able to track you what you're doing, insert ads, et cetera. And there have been a lot of people over the years who have said to guests, what's going to happen here. Our friends at Facebook are going to start monetizing WhatsApp. If I paid $19 billion for an app, I'd want a mob monetize it as well.

This is getting scary in 2016. WhatsApp gave users the ability to pull out of having your account data transferred over to Facebook. So it took them about. Two years after the acquisition to say, okay, now we're going to grab all of your count data. And now this updated privacy policy is changing.

Everything you will no longer have that choice. Like you had four years ago. So some of the data that WhatsApp collects is going to be available and open to Facebook. So that includes user phone numbers, other people's phone numbers that are stored in your address. Book, profile names, profile pictures, status messages, indicating when you were last online diagnostic data collected from app blogs.

Now. The diagnostic data can tell them a lot. And it isn't just used to fix broken programs. This diagnostic data oftentimes contains things like passwords or user account names, other websites that you visit. It's got. Just a ton of stuff. So under these new terms, Facebook is saying they have the right to share all of this data with its family of companies.

So think about what that means. They've got the Facebook payments. Family member. And part of the reason that they're probably doing this is Facebook really wants to get in the money business. You might remember. We talked last year about how Facebook wants to have their own cryptocurrency and manage it.

So be careful here they have the right to collect purchase information, your financial information, location, contacts, user content. So what should you use? I'm not going to delve into more about what this problem is. I think it should be pretty obvious. If you want something that's quick and easy to use.

If you're following in my advice so far, you're using an iPhone because that is your best bet, generally speaking out there right now. And when it comes to security and even for some of these regulated industries that we serve with these services, like doing the documentation. Fixing up networks doing audits, all of that sort of stuff.

It's good for them too. It works for them. And on your iPhone and also your Macs. There's something called I message. And I message is end to end encrypted. And Apple is not using it for advertising. It is not using it for your financial transactions and spying on you. Okay. You had another reason to use your iPhone.

If you're on an Android, we've got something for you here in a minute as well. So iPhone problem with iPhone and iMessage is, the recipient has to have an iPhone or a Mac in order for it to be encrypted. So what do I recommend overall? I use I message when I want something easy, maybe talking to family members and I use Signal it's called Signal messenger.

It's fantastic. It is end to end. It is what. The pros you, so check it out.

you are not hearing the truth. The algorithms at Facebook and Twitter and every other place was social media.

Those programs are not designed to show you the truth. They're just designed to manipulate you. And I explained what that was all about, how it works and why. So if you missed that, make sure you check out the podcast, CraigPeterson.com/podcast, and you'll see them all there. Or just in your favorite podcast app, just search for Craig Peterson.

You should be able to find it that way. We have had a lot of turmoil lately and I chalk a lot of it, much much of it to the social media sites that are out there because these social media sites are doing a disservice. By dividing us up even further. They are just letting us know things they think we want to know and you know what, they're not wrong.

We do want to know those things and it gets to be a problem certainly. But how do you deal with that problem? Yeah. I was just thinking of the sound of music. When I said that you can deal with this problem in a number of different ways, but social media is not helping the matter at all. These people that broke into the Capitol building on Wednesday, we're not very subtle about what they were doing.

There were filming themselves, actively tweeting, actively posting things on Instagram, on and on. And they were uploading them to websites. It was pretty obvious where they were and many people, of course, they don't know how to, I don't maybe, maybe you don't know, but the photos you take, the videos you take, they have information embedded into them that tells you where and when the photo was taken.

That frankly is a huge problem for these people. So law enforcement agencies are now trying to track down these people. They're calling insurrectionists who have done things that I guess you could call a bit of an insurrection. The Washington DC attacks seem to have been mostly conservative people that may have gotten caught up.

There could be people who were embedded into the crowd just to rile them up and get them in and get them going. Many of these BLM and Antifa protests, of course they are actively burning and looting and mugging and shooting. It there's a huge difference here, but in both cases, local police and the FBI are trying to find out who these people were.

I got an email from the FBI earlier in the week where the FBI was asking, Hey here are some posters that we put together and we're trying to identify these people in it. It had what they had identified as kind of leaders of what was going on. They had pictures of them.

And of course, people have been reporting them and saying who it is because they were allegedly actively instigating violence. There were thousands of photos also in videos taken by some of the media who were on site. But several police departments here recently, like my Miami, Philadelphia, and New York city of Portland, Seattle they've turned to facial recognition platforms.

Now, in some cases, these cities have said it's illegal, but the police have been using it. And one of them is something we talked about last week and that's this clear view. A I. We've got to keep an eye on that one clear view, AI, for those who don't remember, maybe you haven't heard of it before is a company that went online and against the policies of these websites scraped all of the pictures.

It could find. And scraping in this case means downloading the photographs. So they downloaded them. They put them into a database. There were billions, as I recall of these photos, and then they had some facial recognition software they were using to try and figure out who's who there. Now they use this for these demonstrations by the BLM and the Antifa people.

And they were able to find a lot of the people and arrest them and charge them. So they used in Philadelphia , Again protest footage against Instagram photos to identify and arrest restaurant protestor there in November. The Washington post reported that investigators from 14 local and federal agencies in the DC area used it more than 12,000 times since 2019. So over a two year period, and they haven't disclosed who it was, et cetera. And in many cases they odd few skate where they got the photo from the, this is a technique that the police department have been using more recently, like over the last decade or two, where. They don't want to disclose the way they found out about something.

And a good example of that are these stingray devices, which are fake mobile towers that the police will put in place. Now they're not a tower, it's a mobile, it's a a cellular site. And so any phone that comes within that cell sites area is going to link up to the stingray device.

And then the stingray device is going to monitor everything going through it, which means, by the way, remember your text messages, your SMS messages can all be grabbed by a stingray device, which is really a huge problem. So they were trying to hide the source of the stingray as being the source, because they didn't want to reveal that these stingray, these fake cell sites they were using were actually in use that they even existed.

They were denying even the existence for a long time. And eventually we found out, yeah, that's what. They were doing until that's over with. But anyways, what they do oftentimes when they don't want to reveal the source is they'll lie about it. So they'll use that source, like a stingray device to identify someone, and then they'll go the next step and investigate that person a little bit and try and find something else and say yeah.

Someone at this diner reported this person, or we were at this diner having lunch, and we saw this person walk in knowing full well that the only reason they're there they're at that diner, which is 20 miles off of their beat, if you will, was because the stingray device had grabbed that person's phone number and they knew that they had been communicating and in fact, maybe planning some operation. Or another. Okay. So they'll lie about the source and we've seen that again and again many times. So the law enforcement now is using also something called geo-fence warrants. And they take them to companies like Google who is collecting data on us and where we are.

If you have an Android phone, it's guaranteed, the Google is tracking you. So one of these geo-fence warrant is issued saying, I want to know. Everyone that was within this area. That's geo fences and they will look in their database and check and see, okay. Who was in that area at that time. And then they'll give it.

This list of all mobile devices that were within that geographic carrier during the given time, they'll give it to law enforcement, then we've seen how people have been arrested and even charged for no good reason other than they got caught up in one of these geo-fence warrants.

Now, I don't want you guys to get the wrong idea here. The reason I'm telling you this is these tools for identifying people are not just in the hands of law enforcement. They are in the hands of bad guys. They're in the hands of advertisers. They're in everybody's hands. Remember Google, their whole business model, is making money off of you by you being the product. So if you are using Google maps, even if it's on an iPhone, Google knows where you are.

They may not know exactly what you're doing, but they probably have a pretty good idea. And they're willing to sell this to absolutely anyone, the data aggregators, the same sort of a thing that free app that you play. Isn't it fun? Yeah. Yeah. Well, Apple shut down the ability of many of these apps now to track you because that's how they were paying for themselves.

It wasn't that, you know, Hey, I made this free app out of the goodness of my heart. Isn't this wonderful look at this. No, no, no. It's because they were tracking you. Some of these were even malicious, particularly in the early days of Android screensavers that were downloading everything. It was just, it was crazy what was going on back in the days.

But our social media, the pictures that we're posted are available, not just to law enforcement, but to bad guys, nation States like China, uh, Russia, North Korea. Now we've got Iran and Vietnam involved in some of these things. And when we're posting the pictures, some of these sites will remove the geo information from the pictures and the videos. Others do not.

So be very careful with them, you might want to double check it. And it's handy sometimes, right? Like you can look at that beautiful trip to Disney world that you talk just by the geo codes on those pictures. Putting it all together. That's how some of these services, like if you have Amazon and you're uploading your photos to Amazon, they will put together a little photo book for you because they know, okay, from this day to this day, you were in Disney world and off it goes, and you can make your nice little photo book.

So be very, very careful about this because you, the identities that we have are not so secret and letting all of this stuff go, letting it become effectively public knowledge, I think is potentially a big problem. It isn't that I have anything to hide. It's that I have nothing to share. It's a great concept.

Remember, on, on all of that stuff, people were reporting what they were doing in DC and at these other riots around the country. Including, putting them up on Parler, which is offline, going to be online, probably would be offline. Gab is another big one, Telegram's, another one. But we gotta be very, very careful.

Okay. Be careful. Uh, there's home, honey. So many things we could talk about here. It's it's just absolutely crazy. Uh, but I want to get into Elon Musk here for a quick minute. He has been absolutely amazing. This man has taken some huge, huge risks. He said moving to the United States was the best move he ever made.

And I can see that. And he says, it's because of the freedoms we have here. Again, my cautionary tales here about regulation. You got to be very careful. He's now, Elon Musk, worth more than $180 billion looking at his shares. Isn't that crazy? And that of course is mostly because of Tesla. He has a lot of great ideas, including he's got this whole thing about going to Mars and he also has the, uh, the boring company, few other things, including a little thing called Space X, uh, stuff you might've heard about before too.

He's got some amazing rockets, but that is just, just amazing this week, at least on one point, Tesla was valued at almost $800 billion, which is several times more than any other car company. Which means that investors are thinking that Tesla is going to be worth more than any other car company and you know what? I think they're probably right.

I think Tesla is going to pretty much own the automobile industry and just a few years from now. Oh. And speaking of that, I don't know if you saw this, but apparently Apple is in talks right now. The very preliminary stage with Hyundai, who is a huge manufacturer, not just of cars, like the Hyundai and Kia brands, but of ships.

And that's how I've known them too, in the shipping industry. Having some kids in that industry. But think about this just over a year ago, 2020 Musk was only worth 27 billion. It's just, just absolutely amazing. So Tesla is really winning the game. They have the most miles they have the most cars. Uh, we'll see, and we'll see how this goes.

And by the way, mosque is making a lot of his money. From stock options that he gets based on the valuation of the company, which is not a bad way to incentivize these people. I mentioned earlier Parler. It was banned and is banned from the Android store, from the Apple's store. And also from Amazon, which was a major platform they were using.

We have seen over the last week, a ton of conservatives just being de-platformed and Parler was this free speech app. No, it wasn't the wild, wild West. They had restrictions on speech and it was clearly spelled out and Parler had committees that would look at things that were questionable. That had been reported. And were we moving things and because of that and the wording in what was said by these trillion dollar tech companies has got Parler now suing them.

So we'll see how that ends up going.

But this is just absolutely amazing to me. There is. Or at least there was no true free speech outlet online until Parler came up. Well, recently, right? Until Parley came along, we used to be a lot of free speech online, but you know, it gets, gets a little troublesome sometimes.

Google, it's just, it's incredible what they did here. And what Amazon did. Amazon pulled all of their servers. All of the services Parler was using and knocked it offline. So there are some lawsuits underway, expect more lawsuits over time. We'll see what happens.

A lot of libertarian as well as conservative people have had their platforms yanked. Ron Paul, who has never been one out there saying anything about an insurrection. Ron Paul's account was also yanked. So it's, I don't know. It's just crazy. What's going on. Guess we'll see, keep up, keep watching, keep listening.

Many people have gone over to some other sites like Gab right now is a Twitter replacement and good for them too. Pretty decent Twitter replacement, frankly, but there's another one out there called Mastodon.

This is really an interesting one. I like it. It's open source. Everybody can view the source. Anyone can run their own Mastodon server, which I think is just absolutely amazing here. And the idea behind Mastodon is all of these Mastodon servers can talk to each other, can share things so you can have the large conversations, but each server can have its own set of rules.

That's the part that makes it really interesting. And that's why I want to try and bring a Mastodon server up on the line

And I am looking for someone right now who loves to correspond to people and do some follow-up because I get a lot of inquiries and I want to make sure that I am getting back to people and getting back to them in a timely manner, because frankly, I get distracted as well .

So if you are someone that has a question, or if you think you might be able to help, wanna little bit of work and you know, every day to, do some follow-up and some tracking, make sure you just email me [email protected]. I'd absolutely love to hear from you.

Before the break we were talking about some of these social media sites and how conservative voices have been shut down. What's interesting is that Gab has picked up a lot of people, including president Trump, but Gab's had a problem too.

Gab has been kind of taken over by some of these. People might call them far right. Wingers, but that's not true. The United States has a different political scale than any other country, really in the world. In the United States, if you are on the right of the political scale. The far right is complete libertarian small "L" Libertine that's on the far right.

And then you start moving left to get into the conservatives, and then you keep moving a lot further left. You ended up in the Democrats and then further left from them you have the communist and further left from them you have the Nazis, right? All different forms of socialism. On the left. So left is socialism, right is freedom is kind of how you boil it down. That's the way it works in the United States.

In Europe, it is a different scale. In Europe. The scale is entirely socialist. The assumption has in Europe has gotten to the point where everyone wants to be socialist. It's just what kind of socialist. So on the right hand side of the European political scale, you have the national socialists, IE, the Nazis.

So the national socialists are on the right side of the scale. And on the left side of the European political scale, you have the communists, which are the international socialists. And then in the middle, you have these socialists that are, you know, kind of pro their country , maybe a little bit more international.

So think of a communist as it's my, my union brother, uh, in Minsk. And I am here in Detroit. That's what a communist would be. It's international. It's kind of what the United Nations is doing. It's an international socialist organization. And then you have over on the far right of the European scale these people who are Nazis, which is, I am in Detroit. I am a union member. I am making automobiles. And that's all that matters, you know, forget about Minsk. You know, I don't forget about it. Right. So that's the big difference nationalist versus internationalist.

Well, when we're talking about Gab.com, which is one of these social media sites out there, there have been many people who are national socialists who have been prominent on gab.

Of course, the people that make the most noise, the people that are the least appealing, the people that are the most offensive are the squeaky wheel by definition. And they're the ones who are going to be talking about right. So I think that's a, that's a good thing. And so a lot of these people migrated, these people on the socialist scales, the national socialists and the international socialists, both of whom want to control your life.

They started going over onto Gab and the. Only real free and open social network right now is something called Mastodon, M A S T O D O N. And it is based on originalist internet views of the internet. And I explained that last hour as well. I'm an internet originalist. I believe the internet should be open. It should be freedom to speak and speak our mind. And obviously there's a line there and that is where it's legal to speak our minds. Right. You can't be, be plotting. Things are going to result in imminent death or destruction, et cetera. Um, But that's where I sit. And I also think that anyone should be able to make anything and have it go on the internet for anyone to use and compete freely.

Well that complete freely is not a big part of the internet nowadays. Unfortunately. So with Mastodon, you can put your own server up and there is a map out there right now that's showing this is unofficial, but showing about 2,500 mastodon servers that are out there. That's pretty huge. That's a very, very big deal.

And it is kind of a friendlier social network, but some people have moved there that have these extremist ideas like BLM and Antifa, uh, who are, you know, obviously facist organizations in both cases. In other words, national socialists. And Mastodon's admins have been forced to deal with this problem, but the beauty of Mastodon.

Is it as completely decentralized kind of like the internet was designed going right back to what I was saying about being an internet originalist. You don't want any single point of failure, so I'll, I'll let you know how it goes here. I'm going to put a Mastodon server up. And maybe we can try it. Maybe I'll invite you guys to it once I kind of got at work and we can see how it does and how it all works, but you can find it out there right now.

There's lots of apps that speak this protocol that is used by these Mastodon servers, which have apparently been also integrated into other websites and network, but it's essentially a way to host a social media website. Users can post 500 character messages called "toots." Uh, and you can repost or boost messages on your own timeline, follow, or privately message other users.

But instead of it being a single site run by a company it is software built on open source freely available and using this Activity Pub protocol. So we'll see how this all goes. I will let you guys know.

Consumer electronics show. I am just disappointed . It was canceled due to the lockdown.

And that means that we aren't out in Vegas. And the beautiful thing about it was you could wander around the floors for days, seeing new gadgets, seeing new technology improvements, dramatically new ones. There's so many things. And it's just not happening this year. Now they have this virtual version that I signed up for, and I've got a lot of emails from people who are promoting the different products and, you know, the all well and good.

But when you get back down to it, um, It's just not, it's not the same. Right? How can you get excited? How can you have buzz? It just doesn't make sense, but some of the things that people have pointed out, like CNET has a lot of coverage this year, they have been the official coverage platform for the consumer electronics show for quite a while. But it is not like it used to be because they got caught with some bribes and other things.

So here's a few things just for you to keep an eye out for remember oftentimes stuff shown at CES doesn't show up for six months or a year, but foldable phones are one thing, but LG has shown off.

A rollable smartphone. Yeah, really the expecting to release it later on this year and you roll it up and you stick it in your pocket. I'm looking at a picture right now of a company called TCLs new phone. This is a Chinese company and it has a 6.7 inch phone that can expand into a 7.8 inch tablet.

And actually. Pretty big tablet looking at this picture here. They also have a 17 inch. That's what I'm looking at. 17 inch printed, OLED scrolling display that can be unfurled and has a 100% color gamut. So I'm looking at this thing. It's basically a rollout think of your blinds in your windows, where you pull it out.

That's what it is. And it rolls out to a 17 inch wide screen. Absolutely amazing. Now we are giving some of our clients, um, we actually haven't handed them out yet. This was an end of year gift and it took us until now to get it together. But these little devices that you can put your phone in, and it has an inductive charger, it creates ozone. And also has ultraviolet light. So in other words, it kills germs.

There's a company that introduced an ultraviolet light treatment system for your car to kill pathogens. This man, this frame TV from Samsung is amazing. This thing is only 25 millimeters thick, which is crazy. It's the smallest ever. And 75 inches, seven, five inch display. Is that something or what?

A bunch of a wireless phone chargers that came out. There is a kind of a neat little, um, Bluetooth shower speaker from AMP that is powered by the water that flows through it. Right? So it's stealing some of the water energy.

This Cold Snap you might've seen. They won an innovation award this year. It kind of was like a career machine you'd use for making coffee, but it makes single serve. Pod dispensed ice cream. It's just amazing.

An infinity table game. This kind of reminds me of Ms. Pac-Man and the table version that you can use for running games.

Samsung has new robots for the home. They have three of them. They've got one that's for helping to clean the house. One's a personal assistant and also acts as a security camera.

OWC I love these guys, Other World Computing. I've had them on the show a lot of times. They got a new charging port again, uh, it's amazing what these guys were able to do, but there's, there's lots of cool stuff that's coming out this year.

I think it's going to be a bit of a slower year than usual for some of these innovations. But, I expect next year we'll be back in full swing.

Thanks for listening today. Make sure you are on my email list. I've been sending out trainings about what to do with VPNs, how to lock down your Windows computer, and much more.

And you only get that if you're on my email list and I send out that email once a week, Craigeterson.com. And you'll find my podcast there. The articles I talk about my appearances on radio ,TV, everything. CraigPeterson.com and have a great week.

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Welcome!  

This has been quite the week for Tech news with Big Tech lowering their Iron Fist on any opinions with which they don't agree.  Social Media censorship is here and it has taught us that if you want to communicate freely you cannot and must not use their platforms or services.  I will introduce you to a new service that is out of their control and completely decentralized -- like the original internet. Plus we will talk about Elon Musk, What'sApp and 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:

WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using the app

Insurrectionists’ social media presence gives feds an easy way to ID them

Elon Musk is the world’s richest person

What to expect from the first-ever virtual CES

Google, Apple, and Amazon bans Parler

Mastodon is the Only Open Social Network Remaining

Malware Developers Refresh Their Attack Tools

How the Shady Zero-Day Sales Game Is Evolving

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hi. Hey everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me. We're going to talk about that. WhatsApp. What are the alternatives to WhatsApp that you might want to use to have private communications? We're going to talk about zero day attacks. This is a very big deal, particularly for us regular users and businesses and what.

Does that mean to you? What does that mean to me? The whole thing about in these insurrectionists on social media, what happened down at the white house? Not the white house, but excuse me. The Capitol building. And what are the federal and local police doing to track down the people they are using tech, which should not come as a surprise to anybody.

Ilan Musk is the world's richest person. Now we'll go into a little bit about him and what's going on. We are in the middle of the virtual CES. This is the first time that consumer electronic show has been virtual because of the lock. Down. They couldn't have all of these people out in Vegas. I can't imagine what the finances are like in Vegas right now.

 That place has to be destroyed. Oh my gosh. What's been going on. People just aren't going out there. I was listening this morning to an interview with the head of the Manchester, Boston Regional Airport. And he was saying that, they had a peak, during the holidays, people were traveling no matter what the advice was, and they had a decent time of it.

They were able to handle the volume. But now that those travel days are over with we're just basically Thanksgiving and then around Christmas, they're now seeing just a glut. Because nobody's going to Vegas. Right now they'd be pretty busy. Today they probably wouldn't because most people will be in Vegas for the consumer electronic show, but they built up Vegas, Las Vegas in order to handle this show.

It's the second biggest show in the world and the largest consumer show in the world. And it's not even happening this year. At least not the way it's happened in years past. I'm so glad I'm not out there. I used, I loved going to Vegas. I really did, because you could do people watching. I'd usually bring a roll of nickels and it's hard to find the nickel slot machines, I'd blow every nickel I had that was running joke of mine for a few decades.

Yeah. Boring guy. 

But the rest of the time I was watching people enjoying the restaurant. I loved walking around Vegas. Absolutely loved it. It was so much fun because it's just an exciting place to be. But now, Oh my gosh.

We have some clients out in Vegas, a medical client actually. We will have to comply with the HIPAA regulations and all of these, obviously that's part of what we do, is hip hop because we help businesses with their regulatory burdens. And I saw a mountain Vegas and we were taking care of this client and we just hop over to this trip. And in talking with them, some of these different clients out there, none of them go to the strip. If you're a resident, you just don't go.

Unless you're going to meet a friend from out of town and you go to a great restaurant. And I remember this last time I was out there, we went to Like it was Gordon Ramsey's new restaurant at the time, and it was a kind of an English pub theme. And I had, smashed peas and bangers and potatoes.

I forget what they called the potatoes. But that's for those of us who speak American English, it's sausages and peas and potatoes. It was actually very good. What's happening now because so many of these restaurants are shut down the casinos?

We just had a major casino owner just passed away this week as well. What's going to happen there? 

So CES. It was what kept that whole economy really in the black frankly, and it's not even happening. So we'll, anyways, we'll talk a little bit about what's happening out there at the first ever Virtual Consumer Electronic show.

And if you don't hear it, make sure you go check it out. Online. Craig peterson.com got lots of great stuff there. For you a Google banning parlor from the Android app store. We're going to talk a little bit about that. What does it mean? Not just Google. Of course now we have Apple has banned them from their app store.

We've got Amazon who's kicked them off of their platform. We actually know a fair amount about this right now, but where are things going? How the biggest decentralized social network is dealing with its Nazi problem. We'll talk a little bit if we can get to it today, but about something called Mastodon. And I'm going to probably try and bring a Mastodon server up online, and it's designed for your own social network and these servers can tie together and each server can have its own standards in a way people can say and do and whatever online. 

And Gab, which is where a lot of the people have gone that have been disaffected from Twitter and other places, and Gab had kicked them off. And so they went over to Mastodon and of course, Gab's has been having problems now, too. I guess a president just opened a gab account, just Gab, gab.com this week for people to follow him.

We'll see how that works out. It's just incredible. I mentioned this week on the air. I'm want, I consider myself anyways to be a, I'm the regionalist particularly here when we're talking about the internet and internet originalists. I firmly believe that the internet was intended to be just a free and open place, not just for exchanging ideas, which is.

Ultimately incredibly important. And it's so important that I think the only real way to solve problems isn't to find a new energy source or whatever it might be. I think that ultimately. It's the human mind, the human intellect, that is the most valuable resource on earth because we've been able to solve every problem that has come along.

So having this ability to communicate was what we saw the internet capable of back in the early 1980s, and then in the nineties. And when Berners Lee came out with the concept with NCSA, Mosaic of the web browser was just, Oh my gosh, that's just brilliant. Again, it was a simple step, but a brilliant idea that he was able to implement and he gave us the web.

And I was just so excited then, because what I thought was, what would happen is we would all be able to communicate and we'd see each other's ideas. And at the time the internet was probably about 90, 95% conservative, because remember where it came from, it was all of us working on government funded projects, many in universities.

But we were libertarian, we were conservative and this is going to be wonderful. We're going to get our libertarian message out about government control. In fact, I had a signature back in the day that I wrote a little bit of code in order to generate a new signature. Every time an email went out and it had all of these NSA buzzwords in it.

I was going to solve this problem all by myself by just making the NSA monitor my email. Now the stupid things we do is kids. But that's what we were seeing. We were originalist. This was just so exciting. So you had the free speech part of it, but you also have the freedom of development of you taking your ideas.

Finally, now you could connect with anyone in the world, anything in the world. Ultimately, of course we couldn't when it first started, right? How many of us were on the internet? My node is listed on some of those early maps of the internet. It's fun. Look at it. Oh, there I am. That's me. That was my machine. That was my company. That's what I was doing at the time. 

Looking at it today. That excitement that we had of being able to develop software and new protocols and new technologies. And we weren't even thinking about competition because there was no competition. It was just a wonderful time to what we have today.

We've got our friends primarily at Facebook and Twitter, but also at Google, but maybe Facebook and Twitter are some of the worst offenders I'm going to lump Google into. Okay. But where we had all of these people, having free conversations and disagreeing with each other about political things and technological things and ways to move forward and how much security do we need, and should we be sending these commands in-line as just text real texts that you could read?

Just like the protocol that runs our email today. It says, hello, literally. Hello. When it connects. Nowadays the more advanced version say E H L O, but anyways you send real text commands to the machine so people could watch what was going on and debug it and figure things out. And talking about email, our email servers, the earlier versions of sendmail that we had were set up so that a remote person could get onto your server without your knowledge or permission even, and fix a configuration problem and debug a problem. 

Think of that world, what that world was like. It was so exciting. We were in on something that just had never, ever happened before. And what Facebook and Twitter have done is completely turned the tables on this whole thing.

And I'm going to tell you what they did to turn the tables and we'll get into also what is going on with social networking? Where is it ultimately going to end up at? So we've got a lot to talk about today and I hope that you can stick around and pick up on all of this stuff.

How did we get there from here? Really don't know. I'm my head's still spinning, but here's, what's happened. You had Facebook start and Facebook's whole business model is to have you be the product.

You've heard this a million times before. And so Google. Oh, and Facebook and Twitter all want you to use their services. And they're going to, you pay the highest bidder for you, right? For your eyeballs. Okay. That's all fine. I understand that. But in order for them to make more money, what do you have to do?

As a business person, you know what you have to do, either get more customers, you have to increase the volume of purchases by the customers you have, or perhaps you need to increase your prices or cut your costs. There's only so many metrics that are available to a business. Two that you can manipulate in order to really come out.

I had to have the game so that you can create more jobs and more opportunity for people by hiring them. If Facebook is going to be able to sell your information to more people, they need you on the platform for longer periods of time. That basically gives them more product to offer. Again, remember you are the product.

So if they're going to try and keep you on Facebook, what are they going to do? They have on staff, all kinds of psychiatrists, psychologists, and sociologists who try and figure out how to really pull your strings. That's what they want. They want you on there. They're going to have colors that are designed to keep you on the website.

Again, going back to the Vegas thing from the prior segment, you go into Las Vegas and do a casino and you are going to be completely oblivious as to what time of day it is. You have no idea. There aren't any windows. The light is always the same. The flooring the weird patterns they have in the carpets on the floors are designed to slightly disorient.

You. So you're just sitting there playing the slots, getting free booze, because that's going to keep you playing because you don't make the best decisions when you are on the tipsy side. You are not going to be an effective gambler. Get, you might stay there all night and you have no idea.

Use your Apple watch in order to remind you when you should be leaving right, or whatever, watch out. The same types of things have gone into all of these social media sites. And now one of the things that they have found out is if you get pissed off, if you're very angry at something, you are going to leave.

Now you may just go and do something else because you're so upset, right? You're steaming over. You're boiling. You might leave the site permanently, just so many Twitter users have done thousands of them here after president Trump. Had decided he wasn't going to post because he couldn't on Twitter anymore.

And moved over to Gab.com, as I mentioned. So what should they do? They want more product. They need more eyeballs that they can sell. So they're going to show you things that you want to see that are going to keep you on their site. So they're going to upset you. Yeah they want to upset you because if you are a little upset, you're going to pay more attention, right?

Your eyeballs are going to be drawn in as it were. So they're going to show you things that effectively you want to see, but it's really more than that. It's really, they've got to get your hormones flowing to such a degree at such a level that you are going to stay on this site. And you're going to share content with your friends and.

You're going to comment on a tweet and they're going to show it to the people that it's really going to upset in, but not so much that they're going to get off of the site for the day, but enough that they're going to want to jump in because their opinion matters. And in reality on these social media sites your opinion really doesn't matter that much, right?

None of us are as important as we think, like to think we are. So they have sucked you in. And how many times have we seen people who are stuck in these sites all day long? They have a spare moment. They are just flipping through headlines and those headlines are designed to get you. To stick on the site to share stuff.

That's what it's designed for. I didn't see that common. I really didn't and a really good friend of mine. He pointed out something the other day, cause he was asking about, what's the ultimate outcome going to be of what we've seen with president Trump and. Social media and banning conservatives, et cetera, et cetera.

And so we had a great little chat about that and he pointed out Craig, normally you don't think this way. I don't think like the people that are trying to shut us up. I don't think like the people that are trying to take control, I'm I am not a socialist. I'm not a national socialist.

Also called Nazi the German word for national socialists. I'm not a communist, which is again, an international socialist. You notice they're all socialists. And I just think everybody should have reasonable freedoms. Obviously we need laws and the right for me to swing my fist, stops somewhere before your nose.

 And I understand all of that and I believe firmly in all of that. And I was raised remember in a socialist country that there has discussions about some of this stuff. 

But I really am very libertine I think is maybe the way to put it because you have the Libertarian party, the uppercase L. I am a lowercase L I think that people have the right to privacy, for instance, which used to be something that the Democrat party talked about.

And that used to be something the Democrat party cared about. But now with these massive businesses, That want your eyeballs that are keeping your eyeballs, it's all changed. And part of the reason it's all changed. And this is what I explained to my friend is if you're a big company, you don't want competition, right?

So you get Facebook buying Instagram, you get Facebook buying WhatsApp because they were competition to them. What's another great way to get rid of competition if you don't have any morals? And we know from all of the stories we've seen about Zuckerberg and how he stole photos from Harvard university of all of the co-eds that were there and put them up and had people rating their them based on their looks. That story would tell us the Zuckerberg doesn't have those morals, but if you don't have any morals and you have enough money to get the attention of Congress or State legislatures, then what can you do? And I think that's where our problem has come in. Frankly, these guys want legislation. 

So when we get back, I'll tell you why I think they want this legislation. Why they want the types of enforcement they have, because many times you might be scratching your head.

I know I used to do saying why would this company be lobbying for legislation to regulate themselves? I think there's a pretty simple answer here.

I mentioned how I am an intranet originalist because I was around in the days of the founding of the internet. Absolutely. So I was looking forward to all of this freedom, to all of this open space, to the ability to communicate back and forth with anybody, to be able to develop applications, whatever I needed to do, whatever I might want to do.

It was just an incredible day. Incredible time to where we're at today. So you have these big businesses, Facebook and others who are doing the nasty, frankly, where they are controlling us. They really are because they're controlling the content we see, and we are no longer able to distinguish between something that is being fed to us.

Because they think it'll keep us on the site longer. They think it'll make us talk about an article or something. And the difference between that and something maybe we need to see, which is most likely an opposing opinion now, just because there's an opposing opinion doesn't mean that it's a worthwhile opinion, right?

There are some seriously crazy people out there, but we're not making that decision anymore. That decision is being made by the tech tyrant and the tech tyrant's love to have government intervene. If the tech titans, the Facebooks and Googles and Twitters of the world can get the government to put various controls in place because "in  this industry, we have not done a great job of controlling ourselves. So we need the government to control us."

 When the government starts "controlling," it's quote unquote, right? These big tech giants and puts rules and regulations in place saying thou shall do this thou shalt not do that. We all chair many of us anyways, chair. And we cheer because the problem solved.

And of course, as we know, anytime government quote "solves" unquote, a problem they've created three, four, five, six other problems. So government loves it because there's more problems to solve, but the original problem was never solved, but here's the trick. These tech tyrants or tyrants of other kinds, we'll talk about some others in just a minute, are now under new regulations. But they can afford those regulations. Who cannot afford to comply with those regulations? It's a little guy, isn't it? The small companies is small startups. That, that I was so excited were coming our way because we had this new internet technology.

This wonderful tech that was going to change our lives. Those companies are squashed. They're stepped on. They are little gnats that are flying about their heads that are now starved because they can't comply. Now, let me give you an example. 

I deal with regulatory compliance. My business is all about cyber security right now. We're not a law firm. I don't give legal advice, but I help them comply. And how do I help them comply? We'll go in and we'll do audits on their networks. Figure out what it is that needs to be done on their network. How can that work? What problems might we have? What problems might they have and then move forward right to the next step.

And that is solve the problems. Just this week we delivered a case of paper to one of our clients. Now this is a moderately small client there. They're not huge. They are considered a small business by the Small Business Administration. So they're not a particularly big customer or business, but here's, what's happened in their industry.

There are rules called CMMC, which are based on some National Institutes of Standards and Technology requirements or guidelines that were put in place. And anyone that manufacturers anything or provides anything to the federal government has to comply with these rules. And compliance is very expensive.

We're talking a half, a million dollars upfront for a small business. And then if you really are complying probably about 300,000 a year, if you're trying to do it all yourself, okay. Very expensive. 

Now I look at these cybersecurity rules and say you know to me anyways, being a cybersecurity guy, these are legitimate, they're reasonable. But most of these small companies are looking at it and say it's easy enough for one of these major contractors that you probably heard, their names is places like Boeing or BAE. And those types of places it's easy enough for them to comply because they've got great profit margins and they have thousands of people working for them.

Tens of thousands. It's easy for them. It's hard for us. So we delivered. A case of printed paper, where we had gone through and written up all of the documentation necessary for them to comply with the CMMC rules. Now this documentation set that we wrote up for them is, as you can guess, Thousands and thousands of pages long, and it's all stuff that they're supposed to comply with. And it goes into every level. What should happen from the physical security, which the fed call ITAR all the way through the computer security and password changes. When should they happen, et cetera, et cetera. And this is a $50,000 project. How is a small company going to be shelling out this kind of money?

Now we try and make it easy for them because we will rent them the equipment as opposed to sell them equipment. And we'll, we will do the documentation for them at this cost because the 50,000 frankly, is cheap. If they had done it themselves it would have been closer to 200,000. But because we do it for so many businesses and so much of it, the same.

 we're able to give it to them at a savings, but how can a small business comply with all these regulations? A startup business comply. It's very difficult. If not impossible to be able to comply with this stuff. And there are some market opportunities for us that we're pursuing where they, these customers are actually using our systems in order to help stay safe.

And I think that might be a good way for them to get around that initial quarter million, half a million dollar investment in upgrades that they have to do. But it makes it difficult to enter the market, right? Investors they're always looking at what's the barrier to entry here for potential competitors?

If you can get the federal government's ear, if you are a big contractor, you can get regulations put in place that you could comply with. No problem. I'll just add it onto my bill, which they were able to do by the way. If the regulations were written so they could bill it back to the federal government, but for various reasons, very small businesses and startups just cannot bill it back. How's that for our scary situation? 

We don't like the fact that frankly, Google Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, you name any of these big companies. We don't like the fact that they are able to control the market that they're in. Now we had this whole antitrust system set up, you might remember the robber barons and what they were doing, which was just totally immoral and really hurt a lot of people a hundred years ago.

This is the modern version of the robber barons. If you can't beat them, join them. And as I mentioned in the last segment .   They love the regulations and the regulations love them. 

Now, the reason I say the regulations love them is because the regulators love them.

Mel Brooks. You remember with the the movie, it was just absolutely fantastic. And they're all sitting around the table with the Governor and they're talking about their phony baloney jobs. That's really what so many of these regulations are. Do we really need them, do we really need all of these laws?

And the answer is obviously no. We just cut back on tons of regulations, tens of thousands of regulations that were just absolutely not needed, but the regulators love it. 

If you are a regulator and you are sitting behind a desk and you'd like to earn more money. And of course, who wouldn't like to make a few extra bucks, and maybe take a vacation for once. But you're sitting behind a desk as a regulator. How are you going to justify a higher salary? Obviously more work would help justify that. And you're probably looking, as part of that raise to maybe move up the ladder. In order to move up the ladder and manage people, you have to have more people.

So the more work you can make for yourself and for your department, so that the department has to grow, the better, the chance of you being able to move up the ladder and get that extra salary bump. You see how that works. I know you guys. You're the best and brightest and you're like me. We don't think that way, but many regulators do think that way.

And I know there's some great, honest people out there that are trying to do the right thing. We work with a number of State organizations from school districts to counties. We've done it for years to State governments, in fact, and we always try and do the right thing, but the tendency. The gravity is towards these regulatory agencies growing and just grabbing more and more power and authority so that they can justify more and more.

And the big companies don't actually really complain about it much because that helps them keep the small guys out. That's what I've been talking about. They don't want those small guys. They don't want the startups. They don't want what the internet had so much hope and opportunity held out for.

They want to stay in their phony baloney positions as well at the head of some of these things. So they've made it very difficult for us to get in. Then on the state and local level, look at what's happened. Again, government likes to control government likes to regulate, which is controlled. That's what it's all about.

Remember, regulator was the brand name for a clock because it helped to regulate the time. Ball was the first watch. That was good enough for the railroad to keep track of time. And we have our time zones today because of the railroad, nothing to do with what the real time of day is. If we were at noon, when the sun was high overhead, when it was directly overhead, we'd have an even amount of time in the afternoon as we do in the morning.

In other words, the sun would rise at 8:00 AM and set at 8:00 PM. But that doesn't happen. Does it? And that's all because of regulation or just because of the railroad who was huge at the time. So State and local think about the licenses that are required in so many places. Do we really need to have a business license?

Did you know, Singapore does not require business licenses. They hardly have any licenses. In fact, in Singapore, and they have one of the best economies in the world and have had for a very long time, because a simple idea might be a great idea, but it might not work in the real world. Look at the numbers coming out of the small business administration.

Most businesses fail. 

And the best way to fail is to fail fast before you spend all of your money, your savings. Hopefully you have something after this whole lockdown, but that's the best way to figure out if an business idea is a good one. Failed. You got to try it, but if you have to have a license from the town for the business, you have to have an occupancy permit for the office space.

You have to have an, a license to run it out of your house nowadays, right? Because we're working from home and then consider things like a license for a hairdresser for a barber really. Really you need a license for that? It is great because it keeps people out of the business. It keeps the number of barbers down, the number of hairdressers down there aren't as many because you need a license, but do we really need a license for that?

So I wanted to use that as a lower end example because barbershops and hair salons tend to be much, much smaller than trillion dollar companies. So we have to be very careful about our tendencies growing up, my father and my mother, they would continually say, ah, there ought to be a law about that.

Really do we need a law? How long has murder being illegal? Go back to British common law where a lot of our laws started from anyways. It was illegal. Then it was illegal to cheat somebody out of something. It was illegal to do these various things, but the lawyers, the whole law community has built it up.

Along with the politicians, so that everything's become incredibly complicated, which benefits who again, does it really benefit you? If someone cheats you? Those laws had been on the books since the Magna Carta. Okay? So do we really need to have a specific law about cheating on the internet using this type of achieved against this type of a person that applies to this type of a company?

Really? Do we really need that? Isn't that what the whole courts were about is to interpret the law. We have come so far from our founding. And I'm referring to the internet here, not just the country, but it applies to both. So we are now faced with this problem of the internet and these mega-monopolies effectively, when you control 60% of the online servers and data processing storage that's pretty much a monopoly and that's the position Amazon is in right now.

How do you get rid of those monopolies while we've tried legislatively before? But those laws don't work. They've worked a way around those laws. They've said, okay, we're going to actually use the laws to protect our monopoly. And they go to the government and they say, Hey we want to buy Instagram or we want to buy WhatsApp.

And we're not gaining any sort of a monopoly position by doing this because we do have laws in place that require these big companies to go before a federal bureaucracy who by the way, is going to regulate them and has that additional incentive hidden away in their back pocket.

If we have this bigger company here, we can regulate it easier than all of these little companies. So they go and they get permission to buy these competitors. And they were competitors because Instagram was taking those ever valuable eyeballs that are needed by Facebook, away from Facebook.

WhatsApp was taking people away from messenger and WhatsApp was great at the time because it was end to end encrypted used MarlinSpike's algorithms. It just was a nice little product. But Facebook already had a competing product called Messenger, and yet they were able to buy it anyways and become bigger and get more regulations in place, which keeps the small guys out.

It keeps the best ideas, ideas we never saw because frankly they never saw the light of day. So how could we see them? Are you willing to put all of this money into something and find out there's all these regulations in your way where you have to hire a company like mine and hire me because you need to do an audit.

You need to comply with the HIPAA regulations. You need to comply with these CMMC regulations. And in some cases it makes sense. And I got to say, I think in most cases I've seen these regulations do nothing but preserve and create monopolies. So not that I have an opinion on the matter, but I thought it was while in these turbulent times to explain what I think is going on.

And these calls for further regulations I think are going to ultimately have the exact opposite effect. That these new regulations that people are calling for more regulations from the FTC, from the FCC  Pitt and PI I should say and company did not do enough regulations. They got rid of regulations.

And we don't have free speech that gamer, he can't get internet cheap because he's using a lot of internet compared to what that granny next door who wants to send a nice picture of her cat or get pictures of the grandkids. She has to pay the same as him. That's what they want. That's what they want.

And I think it's going to be destructive 

Let's talk about secure communications right now. And I'm talking about talking to your kids at school or grandkids, or, any type of communication you might want to have, including of course, business communication that you want to be.

Relatively / reasonably secure. You can't expect to using just regular hardware to have military grade security. It's just not reasonable. Apple went to all of the trouble and they got their iPhone certified for certain types of data. And I think it's great that they did because it's helping all of us.

But in, in, unless you are a spy working for a foreign government or something, Really these things are going to work for you. So when the number one out there is an app called WhatsApp and it is an app that was designed using a very good base. There's a guy out there by the name of MarlinSpike.

Probably not the name he was born with. And he designed a end-to-end state-of-the-art encryption mechanism. And it was used, it still is used in an app called Signal. And another app called WhatsApp. I got about a week ago, a notification on WhatsApp because we use WhatsApp for a mastermind group on men.

And the idea is we don't want people spying in maybe competitors who knows who. And so we wanted something that was secure end to end and remember that's what zoom was telling us. Yeah. It's secure end to end. And of course we find out later on that it wasn't, they were absolutely lying. Big surprise there.

But when we're talking about secure communications, it has to be end to end. And what that means is you type into your phone for instance, and it's in the clearer right there on your phone and then the app, whatever it might be will encrypt it. Send it to the remote site. Now we obviously, it's going to go through a bunch of routers on the internet.

It may end up in a server or two, depending on the app and how it's written, and then it'll end up on the other person's smartphone or desktop, whatever it might be end to end means that anyone in the middle who is capturing the data only sees it as random letters and numbers. That's the idea behind this.

So it won't prevent someone from listening in on your conversation because they can certainly listen in, but it will prevent them from listening intelligibly to your conversation. In other words, they've got all of the data. It's encrypted data, it looks like trash and they have it now. Is that any good for people?

Again, it depends on how spy worlds you want to get here? Is it something where knowing that there's a communication going on means something right there. There's a lot of stuff you can read into it. How active is it? You might remember in world war II, we were listening to German communications and you could tell something's ramping up here because we've got more units, transmitting unit codes, and we use that as did our enemies in the war to fool them as well. We had pretended we had a whole tank divisions that didn't actually exist as well as various other things. So secure communications means a lot of things, but when we're talking end to end, all it means is  when you send it is basically garbage one is being transmitted. And then it's in the clear when it arrives at the far side. So that's end to end communications what app has had and then communications encrypted, which is why people have been using it. If you listen to the first hour, you heard me complaining about Facebook and how they've been buying their competition, and then the competition that they can't buy that doesn't even exist yet.

Before it gets started, they've been using government regulations to suppress them and make sure they just don't become competitors. One of the apps that was bought by Facebook, because it was taken away a lot of eyeballs, is called WhatsApp. It's a messaging app. It has, or at least used to have privacy coded into the way it was designed.

Now, Facebook owning it means who knows if it still does. We don't have the source code that Facebook is using, who knows what they've gotten into it, but we're talking about 2 billion users. Worldwide. And I got this message from WhatsApp saying that if I don't concede to these new terms of service, I'm not going to be able to use WhatsApp anymore.

While these terms of service include. And I had to look at this and now I have it up on my screen right now. They are changing WhatsApp service and the way they process your data, how businesses can use Facebook hosted services to store and manage. There are WhatsApp client chats, how they partner with Facebook to offer integrations across the Facebook company products.

So guess what that all means. And they said, if you don't agree to this by February 8th, you will no longer be able to use WhatsApp. Now remember they paid $19 billion for WhatsApp in 2014, and it's really going to make you wonder what they were thinking. All right. They have not been making money off of WhatsApp.

They haven't been able to track you what you're doing, insert ads, et cetera. And there have been a lot of people over the years who have said to guests, what's going to happen here. Our friends at Facebook are going to start monetizing WhatsApp. If I paid $19 billion for an app, I'd want a mob monetize it as well.

 This is getting scary in 2016. WhatsApp gave users the ability to pull out of having your account data transferred over to Facebook. So it took them about. Two years after the acquisition to say, okay, now we're going to grab all of your count data. And now this updated privacy policy is changing.

Everything you will no longer have that choice. Like you had four years ago. So some of the data that WhatsApp collects is going to be available and open to Facebook. So that includes user phone numbers, other people's phone numbers that are stored in your address. Book, profile names, profile pictures, status messages, indicating when you were last online diagnostic data collected from app blogs.

Now. The diagnostic data can tell them a lot. And it isn't just used to fix broken programs. This diagnostic data oftentimes contains things like passwords or user account names, other websites that you visit. It's got. Just a ton of stuff. So under these new terms, Facebook is saying they have the right to share all of this data with its family of companies.

So think about what that means. They've got the Facebook payments. Family member. And part of the reason that they're probably doing this is Facebook really wants to get in the money business. You might remember. We talked last year about how Facebook wants to have their own cryptocurrency and manage it.

So be careful here they have the right to collect purchase information, your financial information, location, contacts, user content. So what should you use? I'm not going to delve into more about what this problem is. I think it should be pretty obvious. If you want something that's quick and easy to use.

If you're following in my advice so far, you're using an iPhone because that is your best bet, generally speaking out there right now. And when it comes to security and even for some of these regulated industries that we serve with these services, like doing the documentation. Fixing up networks doing audits, all of that sort of stuff.

It's good for them too. It works for them. And on your iPhone and also your Macs. There's something called I message. And I message is end to end encrypted. And Apple is not using it for advertising. It is not using it for your financial transactions and spying on you. Okay.  You had another reason to use your iPhone.

If you're on an Android, we've got something for you here in a minute as well. So iPhone problem with iPhone and iMessage is, the recipient has to have an iPhone or a Mac in order for it to be encrypted. So what do I recommend overall? I use I message when I want something easy, maybe talking to family members and I use Signal it's called Signal messenger.

It's fantastic. It is end to end. It is what. The pros you, so check it out.

you are not hearing the truth. The algorithms at Facebook and Twitter and every other place was social media.

Those programs are not designed to show you the truth. They're just designed to manipulate you. And I explained what that was all about, how it works and why. So if you missed that, make sure you check out the podcast, CraigPeterson.com/podcast, and you'll see them all there. Or just in your favorite podcast app, just search for Craig Peterson.

You should be able to find it that way. We have had a lot of turmoil lately and I chalk a lot of it, much much of it to the social media sites that are out there because these social media sites are doing a disservice. By dividing us up even further. They are just letting us know things they think we want to know and you know what, they're not wrong.

We do want to know those things and it gets to be a problem certainly. But how do you deal with that problem? Yeah. I was just thinking of the sound of music. When I said that you can deal with this problem in a number of different ways, but social media is not helping the matter at all. These people that broke into the Capitol building on Wednesday, we're not very subtle about what they were doing.

There were filming themselves, actively tweeting, actively posting things on Instagram, on and on. And they were uploading them to websites. It was pretty obvious where they were and many people, of course, they don't know how to, I don't maybe, maybe you don't know, but the photos you take, the videos you take, they have information embedded into them that tells you where and when the photo was taken.

That frankly is a huge problem for these people. So law enforcement agencies are now trying to track down these people. They're calling insurrectionists who have  done things that I guess you could call a bit of an insurrection. The Washington DC attacks seem to have been mostly conservative people that may have gotten caught up.

There could be people who were embedded into the crowd just to rile them up and get them in and get them going. Many of these BLM and Antifa protests, of course they are actively burning and looting and mugging and shooting. It there's a huge difference here, but in both cases, local police and the FBI are trying to find out who these people were. 

I got an email from the FBI earlier in the week where the FBI was asking, Hey here are some posters that we put together and we're trying to identify these people in it. It had what they had identified as kind of leaders of what was going on. They had pictures of them.

And of course, people have been reporting them and saying who it is because they were allegedly actively instigating violence. There were thousands of photos also in videos taken by some of the media who were on site. But several police departments here recently, like my Miami, Philadelphia, and New York city of Portland, Seattle they've turned to facial recognition platforms.

Now, in some cases, these cities have said it's illegal, but the police have been using it. And one of them is something we talked about last week and that's this clear view. A I. We've got to keep an eye on that one clear view, AI, for those who don't remember, maybe you haven't heard of it before is a company that went online and against the policies of these websites scraped all of the pictures.

It could find. And scraping in this case means downloading the photographs. So they downloaded them. They put them into a database. There were billions, as I recall of these photos, and then they had some facial recognition software they were using to try and figure out who's who there. Now they use this for these demonstrations by the BLM and the Antifa people.

And they were able to find a lot of the people and arrest them and charge them. So they used in Philadelphia , Again protest footage against Instagram photos to identify and arrest restaurant protestor there in November. The Washington post reported that investigators from 14 local and federal agencies in the DC area used it more than 12,000 times since 2019. So over a two year period, and they haven't disclosed who it was, et cetera. And in many cases they odd few skate where they got the photo from the, this is a technique that the police department have been using more recently, like over the last decade or two, where. They don't want to disclose the way they found out about something.

And a good example of that are these stingray devices, which are fake mobile towers that the police will put in place. Now they're not a tower, it's a mobile, it's a a cellular site. And so any phone that comes within that cell sites area is going to link up to the stingray device.

And then the stingray device is going to monitor everything going through it, which means, by the way, remember your text messages, your SMS messages can all be grabbed by a stingray device, which is really a huge problem. So they were trying to hide the source of the stingray as being the source, because they didn't want to reveal that these stingray, these fake cell sites they were using were actually in use that they even existed.

They were denying even the existence for a long time. And eventually we found out, yeah, that's what. They were doing until that's over with. But anyways, what they do oftentimes when they don't want to reveal the source is they'll lie about it. So they'll use that source, like a stingray device to identify someone, and then they'll go the next step and investigate that person a little bit and try and find something else and say yeah.

Someone at this diner reported this person, or we were at this diner having lunch, and we saw this person walk in knowing full well that the only reason they're there they're at that diner, which is 20 miles off of their beat, if you will, was because the stingray device had grabbed that person's phone number and they knew that they had been communicating and in fact, maybe planning some operation. Or another. Okay. So they'll lie about the source and we've seen that again and again many times. So the law enforcement now is using also something called geo-fence warrants. And they take them to companies like Google who is collecting data on us and where we are.

If you have an Android phone, it's guaranteed, the Google is tracking you. So one of these geo-fence warrant is issued saying, I want to know. Everyone that was within this area. That's geo fences and they will look in their database and check and see, okay. Who was in that area at that time. And then they'll give it.

This list of all mobile devices that were within that geographic carrier during the given time, they'll give it to law enforcement, then we've seen how people have been arrested and even charged for no good reason other than they got caught up in one of these geo-fence warrants. 

Now, I don't want you guys to get the wrong idea here. The reason I'm telling you this is these tools for identifying people are not just in the hands of law enforcement. They are in the hands of bad guys. They're in the hands of advertisers. They're in everybody's hands. Remember Google, their whole business model, is making money off of you by you being the product. So if you are using Google maps, even if it's on an iPhone, Google knows where you are.

They may not know exactly what you're doing, but they probably have a pretty good idea. And they're willing to sell this to absolutely anyone, the data aggregators, the same sort of a thing that free app that you play. Isn't it fun? Yeah. Yeah. Well, Apple shut down the ability of many of these apps now to track you because that's how they were paying for themselves.

It wasn't that, you know, Hey, I made this free app out of the goodness of my heart. Isn't this wonderful look at this. No, no, no. It's because they were tracking you. Some of these were even malicious, particularly in the early days of Android screensavers that were downloading everything. It was just, it was crazy what was going on back in the days.

But our social media, the pictures that we're posted  are available, not just to law enforcement, but to bad guys, nation States like China, uh, Russia, North Korea. Now we've got Iran and Vietnam involved in some of these things. And when we're posting the pictures, some of these sites will remove the geo information from the pictures and the videos. Others do not. 

So be very careful with them, you might want to double check it. And it's handy sometimes, right? Like you can look at that beautiful trip to Disney world that you talk just by the geo codes on those pictures. Putting it all together. That's how some of these services, like if you have Amazon and you're uploading your photos to Amazon, they will put together a little photo book for you because they know, okay, from this day to this day, you were in Disney world and off it goes, and you can make your nice little photo book.

So be very, very careful about this because you, the identities that we have are not so secret and letting all of this stuff go, letting it become effectively public knowledge, I think is potentially a big problem. It isn't that I have anything to hide. It's that I have nothing to share. It's a great concept.

Remember, on, on all of that stuff, people were reporting what they were doing in DC and at these other riots around the country. Including, putting them up on Parler, which is offline, going to be online, probably would be offline. Gab is another big one, Telegram's, another one. But we gotta be very, very careful.

Okay. Be careful. Uh, there's home, honey. So many things we could talk about here. It's it's just absolutely crazy. Uh, but I want to get into Elon Musk here for a quick minute. He has been absolutely amazing. This man has taken some huge, huge risks. He said moving to the United States was the best move he ever made.

And I can see that. And he says, it's because of the freedoms we have here. Again, my cautionary tales here about regulation. You got to be very careful. He's now, Elon Musk, worth more than $180 billion looking at his shares. Isn't that crazy? And that of course is mostly because of Tesla. He has a lot of great ideas, including he's got this whole thing about going to Mars and he also has the, uh, the boring company, few other things, including a little thing called Space X, uh, stuff you might've heard about before too.

He's got some amazing rockets, but that is just, just amazing this week, at least on one point, Tesla was valued at almost $800 billion, which is several times more than any other car company. Which means that investors are thinking that Tesla is going to be worth more than any other car company and you know what? I think they're probably right.

  I think Tesla is going to pretty much own the automobile industry and just a few years from now. Oh. And speaking of that, I don't know if you saw this, but apparently Apple is in talks right now. The very preliminary stage with Hyundai, who is a huge manufacturer, not just of cars, like the Hyundai and Kia brands, but of ships.

And that's how I've known them too, in the shipping industry. Having some kids in that industry. But think about this just over a year ago, 2020 Musk was only worth 27 billion. It's just, just absolutely amazing. So Tesla is really winning the game. They have the most miles they have the most cars. Uh, we'll see, and we'll see how this goes.

And by the way, mosque is making a lot of his money. From stock options that he gets based on the valuation of the company, which is not a bad way to incentivize these people. I mentioned earlier Parler. It was banned and is banned from the Android store, from the Apple's store. And also from Amazon, which was a major platform they were using.

We have seen over the last week, a ton of conservatives just being de-platformed and Parler was this free speech app. No, it wasn't the wild, wild West. They had restrictions on speech and it was clearly spelled out and Parler had committees that would look at things that were questionable. That had been reported. And were we moving things and because of that and the wording in what was said by these trillion dollar tech companies has got Parler now suing them.

So we'll see how that ends up going. 

But this is just absolutely amazing to me. There is. Or at least there was no true free speech outlet online until Parler came up. Well, recently, right? Until Parley came along, we used to be a lot of free speech online, but you know, it gets, gets a little troublesome sometimes.

 Google, it's just, it's incredible what they did here. And what Amazon did. Amazon pulled all of their servers. All of the services Parler was using and knocked it offline. So there are some lawsuits underway, expect more lawsuits over time. We'll see what happens. 

A lot of  libertarian as well as conservative people have had their platforms yanked. Ron Paul, who has never been one out there saying anything about an insurrection. Ron Paul's account was also yanked. So it's, I don't know. It's just crazy. What's going on. Guess we'll see, keep up, keep watching, keep listening.

Many people have gone over to some other sites like Gab right now is a Twitter replacement and good for them too. Pretty decent Twitter replacement, frankly, but there's another one out there called Mastodon.

This is really an interesting one. I like it. It's open source. Everybody can view the source. Anyone can run their own Mastodon server, which I think is just absolutely amazing here. And the idea behind Mastodon is all of these Mastodon servers can talk to each other, can share things so you can have the large conversations, but each server can have its own set of rules.

That's the part that makes it really interesting. And that's why I want to try and bring a Mastodon server up on the line

And I am looking for someone right now who loves to correspond to people and do some follow-up because I get a lot of inquiries and I want to make sure that I am getting back to people and getting back to them in a timely manner, because frankly, I get distracted as well . 

So if you are someone that has a question, or if you think you might be able to help, wanna little bit of work and you know, every day to, do some follow-up and some tracking, make sure you just email me [email protected]. I'd absolutely love to hear from you. 

Before the break we were talking about some of these social media sites and how conservative voices have been shut down. What's interesting is that Gab has picked up a lot of people, including president Trump, but Gab's had a problem too. 

Gab has been kind of taken over by some of these. People might call them far right. Wingers, but that's not true. The United States has a different political scale than any other country, really in the world. In the United States, if you are on the right of the political scale. The far right is complete libertarian small "L" Libertine that's on the far right.

And then you start moving left to get into the conservatives, and then you keep moving a lot further left. You ended up in the Democrats and then further left from them you have the communist and further left from them you have the Nazis, right? All different forms of socialism. On the left. So left is socialism, right is freedom is kind of how you boil it down. That's the way it works in the United States. 

In Europe, it is a different scale. In Europe. The scale is entirely socialist. The assumption has in Europe has gotten to the point where everyone wants to be socialist. It's just what kind of socialist. So on the right hand side of the European political scale, you have the national socialists, IE, the Nazis.

So the national socialists are on the right side of the scale. And on the left side of the European political scale, you have the communists, which are the international socialists. And then in the middle, you have these socialists that are, you know, kind of pro their country , maybe a little bit more international.

So think of a communist as it's my, my union brother, uh, in Minsk. And I am here in Detroit. That's what a communist would be. It's international. It's kind of what the United Nations is doing. It's an international socialist organization. And then you have over on the far right of the European scale these people who are Nazis, which is, I am in Detroit. I am a union member. I am making automobiles. And that's all that matters, you know, forget about Minsk. You know, I don't forget about it. Right. So that's the big difference nationalist versus internationalist. 

Well, when we're talking about Gab.com, which is one of these social media sites out there, there have been many people who are national socialists who have been prominent on gab.

Of course, the people that make the most noise, the people that are the least appealing, the people that are the most offensive are the squeaky wheel by definition. And they're the ones who are going to be talking about right. So I think that's a, that's a good thing. And so a lot of these people migrated, these people on the socialist scales, the national socialists and the international socialists, both of whom want to control your life.

They started going over onto Gab and the. Only real free and open social network right now is something called Mastodon, M A S T O D O N. And it is based on originalist internet views of the internet. And I explained that last hour as well. I'm an internet originalist. I believe the internet should be open. It should be freedom to speak and speak our mind. And obviously there's a line there and that is where it's legal to speak our minds. Right. You can't be, be plotting. Things are going to result in imminent death or destruction, et cetera. Um, But that's where I sit. And I also think that anyone should be able to make anything and have it go on the internet for anyone to use and compete freely.

Well that complete freely is not a big part of the internet nowadays. Unfortunately. So with Mastodon, you can put your own server up and there is a map out there right now that's showing this is unofficial, but showing about 2,500 mastodon servers that are out there. That's pretty huge. That's a very, very big deal.

And it is kind of a friendlier social network, but some people have moved there that have these extremist ideas like BLM and Antifa, uh, who are, you know, obviously facist organizations in both cases. In other words, national socialists. And Mastodon's admins have been forced to deal with this problem, but the beauty of Mastodon.

Is it as completely decentralized kind of like the internet was designed going right back to what I was saying about being an internet originalist. You don't want any single point of failure, so I'll, I'll let you know how it goes here. I'm going to put a Mastodon server up. And maybe we can try it. Maybe I'll invite you guys to it once I kind of got at work and we can see how it does and how it all works, but you can find it out there right now.

There's lots of apps that speak this protocol that is used by these Mastodon servers, which have apparently been also integrated into other websites and network, but it's essentially a way to host a social media website. Users can post 500 character messages called "toots." Uh, and you can repost or boost messages on your own timeline, follow, or privately message other users.

But instead of it being a single site run by a company it is software built on open source freely available and using this Activity Pub protocol. So we'll see how this all goes. I will let you guys know. 

Consumer electronics show. I am just disappointed . It was canceled due to the lockdown.

And that means that we aren't out in Vegas. And the beautiful thing about it was you could wander around the floors for days, seeing new gadgets, seeing new technology improvements, dramatically new ones. There's so many things. And it's just not happening this year. Now they have this virtual version that I signed up for, and I've got a lot of emails from people who are promoting the different products and, you know, the all well and good.

But when you get back down to it, um, It's just not, it's not the same. Right? How can you get excited? How can you have buzz? It just doesn't make sense, but some of the things that people have pointed out, like CNET has a lot of coverage this year, they have been the official coverage platform for the consumer electronics show for quite a while. But it is not like it used to be because they got caught with some bribes and other things. 

So here's a few things just for you to keep an eye out for remember oftentimes stuff shown at CES doesn't show up for six months or a year, but foldable phones are one thing, but LG has shown off.

A rollable smartphone. Yeah, really the expecting to release it later on this year and you roll it up and you stick it  in your pocket. I'm looking at a picture right now of  a company called TCLs new phone. This is a Chinese company and it has a 6.7 inch phone that can expand into a 7.8 inch tablet.

And actually. Pretty big tablet looking at this picture here. They also have a 17 inch. That's what I'm looking at. 17 inch printed, OLED scrolling display that can be unfurled and has a 100% color gamut. So I'm looking at this thing. It's basically a rollout think of your blinds in your windows, where you pull it out.

That's what it is. And it rolls out to a 17 inch wide screen. Absolutely amazing. Now we are giving some of our clients, um, we actually haven't handed them out yet. This was an end of year gift and it took us until now to get it together. But these little devices that you can put your phone in, and it has an inductive charger, it creates ozone. And also has ultraviolet light. So in other words, it kills germs. 

There's a company that introduced an ultraviolet light treatment system for your car to kill pathogens. This man, this frame TV from Samsung is amazing. This thing is only 25 millimeters thick, which is crazy. It's the smallest ever. And 75 inches, seven, five inch display. Is that something or what? 

A bunch of a wireless phone chargers that came out. There is a kind of a neat little, um, Bluetooth shower speaker from AMP that is powered by the water that flows through it. Right? So it's stealing some of the water energy. 

This Cold Snap you might've seen. They won an innovation award this year. It kind of was like a career machine you'd use for making coffee, but it makes single serve. Pod dispensed ice cream. It's just amazing. 

An infinity table game. This kind of reminds me of Ms. Pac-Man and the table version that you can use for running games. 

Samsung has new robots for the home. They have three of them. They've got one that's for helping to clean the house. One's a personal assistant and also acts as a security camera. 

OWC I love these guys, Other World Computing. I've had them on the show a lot of times. They got a new charging port again, uh, it's amazing what these guys were able to do, but there's, there's lots of cool stuff that's coming out this year.

I think it's going to be a bit of a slower year than usual for some of these innovations. But, I expect next year we'll be back in full swing. 

Thanks for listening today. Make sure you are on my email list. I've been sending out trainings about what to do with VPNs, how to lock down your Windows computer, and much more.

And you only get that if you're on my email list and I send out that email once a week, Craigeterson.com. And you'll find my podcast there. The articles I talk about my appearances on radio ,TV, everything. CraigPeterson.com and have a great week.

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Good morning everybody!

I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon and started this morning talking about some interesting developments that happened involving one of Jupiter's moons. Then we discussed how Gen Z is sharing so much on Social Media and how it is being used against them in some cases by law enforcement. Then we talked about secure communications. Here we go with Matt.

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

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. Ganymede my gosh. I've been watching this space opera, but I absolutely love it. They've done such a good job that was actually written. These books were written by a group of people who got together and they have a pseudo gnome that they're calling themselves, but it's just, it's amazing.

Anyway, when I saw Ganymede in the news and this is probably why it made it to the news, frankly. But when I saw Ganymede in the news, which is one of the moons of Jupiter and FM radio signals coming from it, it blew my mind. Absolutely blew my mind.

So I talked to Matt about that because I'm a bit of a space geek, and of course we got into what's the problem right now. What's going on in technology-wise with this internet shutdown on conservative voices and being able to track people who were down in the Capitol. What are they doing? What's the FBI and everybody else up to? So here we go with Mr. Matt Gagnon

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:03] Speaking of things that are usually done on Wednesdays, how about Craig Peterson? Our tech guru who joins us now as he always does. Of course, you can hear him on Saturdays at one o'clock, as well, for his show where he goes into greater depth on all of these questions that we're about to ask him right now on the show. Craig, how are you this morning?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:21] I'm doing well. We're on Newsradio 98.5 FM as well as am 560.

I don't know if you heard this one or not. This just absolutely amazed me. I'm a science buff. You may not know it, but I was actually one of the contractors or subcontractors to the RCA Astro space people and help design parts of the subsystems for the space shuttle back in the day. So a bit of a space fan.

But you know what Ganymede is?

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:51] Yeah Ganymede is a Moon of Jupiter, right?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:53] Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:54] You're do know who you're talking to don't you?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:55] That's true too. We can talk about the show.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:57] We can nerd out all. If you don't want to talk about technology, we can talk about space and just have everybody turn off the dial. That's fine.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:03] We have a satellite that is circling Jupiter right now and it picked up an FM radio transmission from Ganymede. It was about a five-second burst. It was frequency modulating. And they're saying it probably wasn't ET. It was probably just the clouds in Ganymede and the electrons creating the cyclotron thing, but anyway. Totally geeked out. I loved it.

I wasn't sure if you heard,

Matt Gagnon: [00:02:35] Are you kidding? I knew the moment you said, Ganymede. I knew exactly what you were talking about. I did see it. I did see a news article was written on it that said that scientists are explaining it as probably a natural phenomenon, but they have absolutely no idea what it is, basically.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:48] So cool. Anyway.

Matt Gagnon: [00:02:50] That could in fact be an alien base on Ganymede and they were about to invade us. That's, 2021, right?

2021.

All right. Craig Peterson certainly while that is a technological topic, we have earthbound technological topics to get to, and we can't get away from the fact that the big story of last week was of course what happened on Capitol Hill.

One of the interesting stories that you and I were chatting about before that I'd like to ask you about a little bit more here is about the stupidity of some of these people because the social media feeds for many of the people that participated in this is giving all the police, the feds, everybody who's investigating this just tons and tons of evidence to go after them.

I'm thinking of the picture of the guy who had the podium walking away Hey, look, there's my face just waving at the camera. The Viking guy, everybody else, all seemed to gleefully and happily share all the information about all the laws they were breaking on social media, making the law enforcement job pretty easy. Isn't it?

Craig Peterson: [00:03:44] Yeah, it's really easy. We talked about some of the alternative social media sites out there as well, like Parler, Gab, and Mastodon and some of these others. Did you also see that this one lady a programmer? She wrote a piece of code that was 400 lines long now, for those of us, that aren't total geeks. That means it's a very simple, very small program and she was able to pull down everything off of Parler. That includes, this is before Parler went offline, the videos, the photos with all of the GPS information still embedded in them. Apparently, this is just a treasure trove of even more information.

Like you were just talking about people that we're sharing it over there on Parler, and it wasn't stripped of any of the identifying information. You're right. This is just making it so easy for law enforcement to find all of these people and that's where it's going to get really interesting. Obviously, these people were among the more extreme out there.

Matt Gagnon: [00:04:52] So speaking of Parler, I do have to ask a little bit about what's been going on this, and frankly, we could probably take up an entire segment or two or three on this topic alone here, but Google, Apple, Amazon, and others. All banning Parler. It's only one of many recent moves that have had greatly concerned me about what's going on with the tech giants and how they're essentially sensor censoring an entire ideology away from their app stores and their social media feeds and everything else.

Talk to me a little bit about this move and what you think the ultimate implications of it are.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:23] I'm sitting down, which is good because it's absolutely incredible. I call myself an internet originalist, right? You've heard of constitutional originalists. We believe in why it was created and the internet.

Remember, I've been on the internet since about 81, 82. Before it was, frankly, the internet, and back then it was exciting because finally, we had a way to communicate. We had free speech online. We didn't have to buy a $200,000 printing press in order to share stuff, including silly little poems that we add back then. We were into Monty Python.

It was a different world. It was really evolving, nicely. Although the internet was designed to resist a nuclear attack, so we could lose an entire city, major city, you name it doesn't matter. We could still continue to communicate because it was designed for these research institutions primarily, at the time universities, to be able to communicate with each other. And also with the military for all of the research they were doing.

It was just a beautiful design, amazing what was done with it. Now the problem that we're seeing. Is that we have companies like Amazon that are in literal control of a good 60% of the internet. Part of the reason the internet was just so resilient is it is by definition interconnected networks.

It was, I've got my network of computers and I might be a small company, I might be a big company and we all get together and we pass each other's data. That's how it works. It's not like there's one big pipe somewhere that nobody's paying for because it's all free and the internet should be free, all of these crazy ideas. It's you name your local internet provider these cellular providers, all of these different companies, they all connect to the networks together and they then route data for other companies through their networks. That's been part of the problem with Netflix, for instance, that at times is consumed more than half of the internet bandwidth. People got upset because, Hey, listen, I'm just a small rural internet service provider and I'm pulling all of this data through my network not even for people who are paying me. For other people's customers and it's been back and forth and we'll have those discussions again in the future I'm sure with the new Biden administration.

But where we've now run into the problem, that we're seeing, is what happens when Amazon has 60% of the internet, based in Amazon?

Now I'm not talking about people buying and stuff for Amazon.

Matt Gagnon: [00:08:27] Are you talking about their cloud servers and stuff?

Craig Peterson: [00:08:29] Exactly. Exactly. Then with those cloud servers, they built their own extra services. So again, let's pick on Parler. Parler was not only using Amazon to host computers, which is what a lot of companies do.

They were using Amazon to host their name service so people could find them. They were using Amazon to do queuing for people's posts. Completely using the queuing services. They were using. Amazon's database services. They were using Amazon storage services. So now when Amazon kicks them off, all of a sudden they're out of business because they were a hundred percent dependent on Amazon services. Specifically, Amazon.

Twitter's in the same boat. Twitter is almost entirely inside the Amazon services.

So you now have these huge companies and GoDaddy's other example, right? Who pulled many conservative sites DNS, domain name service, but these huge companies control so much of the internet. They can say, no, we're deplatforming you.

If enough of them get together, and frankly, sometimes all it takes is Amazon. Even Amazon saying we're not going to allow your data to pass through our networks can put you out of business. It's great that some small internet service provider up in Idaho said forget about it. We're not carrying Facebook's traffic or Twitter or some of these other sites anymore.

But they really aren't going to impact anyone except for their customers. We're in big trouble.

Matt Gagnon: [00:10:12] All right. That's Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday, as he always does to go over the world of technology, including technology in space.

Thanks a lot, Craig. Appreciate it. Good luck on Saturday, as always. Make sure you tune in and listen to that here on WGAN one o'clock and we'll talk again next week, sir.

Craig Peterson: [00:10:27] Take care, Matt.

Matt Gagnon: [00:10:28] All right. Thanks.

Craig Peterson: [00:10:29] Can't believe it's been another week. Man, time is just flying now. It seemed like the election was years ago.

As well as of course, all of these things that have been going on, it was dragging for so long, because of the lockdown. Now things are just flying. It's just, wow, incredible.

Have a great day.

We are finishing up on what we're now calling our Introduction to Windows Security course.

That will be out very soon. Keep an eye out for that.

Take care, Everybody. We'll be back.

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:

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody! 

I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon and started this morning talking about some interesting developments that happened involving one of Jupiter's moons.  Then we discussed how Gen Z is sharing so much on Social Media and how it is being used against them in some cases by law enforcement. Then we talked about secure communications. Here we go with Matt.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. Ganymede my gosh. I've been watching this space opera, but I absolutely love it. They've done such a good job that was actually written. These books were written by a group of people who got together and they have a pseudo gnome that they're calling themselves, but it's just, it's amazing.

Anyway, when I saw Ganymede in the news and this is probably why it made it to the news, frankly. But when I saw Ganymede in the news, which is one of the moons of Jupiter and FM radio signals coming from it, it blew my mind. Absolutely blew my mind.

So I talked to Matt about that because I'm a bit of a space geek, and of course we got into what's the problem right now. What's going on in technology-wise with this internet shutdown on conservative voices and being able to track people who were down in the Capitol. What are they doing? What's the FBI and everybody else up to? So here we go with Mr. Matt Gagnon

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:03] Speaking of things that are usually done on Wednesdays, how about Craig Peterson? Our tech guru who joins us now as he always does. Of course, you can hear him on Saturdays at one o'clock, as well, for his show where he goes into greater depth on all of these questions that we're about to ask him right now on the show. Craig, how are you this morning?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:21] I'm doing well. We're on Newsradio 98.5 FM as well as am 560.

I don't know if you heard this one or not. This just absolutely amazed me. I'm a science buff. You may not know it, but I was actually one of the contractors or subcontractors to the RCA Astro space people and help design parts of the subsystems for the space shuttle back in the day. So a bit of a space fan.

But you know what Ganymede is?

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:51] Yeah Ganymede is a Moon of Jupiter, right?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:53] Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:54] You're do know who you're talking to don't you?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:55] That's true too. We can talk about the show.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:57] We can nerd out all. If you don't want to talk about technology, we can talk about space and just have everybody turn off the dial. That's fine.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:03] We have a satellite that is circling Jupiter right now and it picked up an FM radio transmission from Ganymede. It was about a five-second burst. It was frequency modulating. And they're saying it probably wasn't ET. It was probably just the clouds in Ganymede and the electrons creating the cyclotron thing, but anyway. Totally geeked out. I loved it.

I wasn't sure if you heard,

Matt Gagnon: [00:02:35] Are you kidding? I knew the moment you said, Ganymede. I knew exactly what you were talking about. I did see it. I did see a news article was written on it that said that scientists are explaining it as probably a natural phenomenon, but they have absolutely no idea what it is, basically.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:48] So cool. Anyway.

Matt Gagnon: [00:02:50] That could in fact be an alien base on Ganymede and they were about to invade us. That's, 2021, right?

2021.

All right. Craig Peterson certainly while that is a technological topic, we have earthbound technological topics to get to, and we can't get away from the fact that the big story of last week was of course what happened on Capitol Hill.

One of the interesting stories that you and I were chatting about before that I'd like to ask you about a little bit more here is about the stupidity of some of these people because the social media feeds for many of the people that participated in this is giving all the police, the feds, everybody who's investigating this just tons and tons of evidence to go after them.

I'm thinking of the picture of the guy who had the podium walking away Hey, look, there's my face just waving at the camera. The Viking guy, everybody else, all seemed to gleefully and happily share all the information about all the laws they were breaking on social media, making the law enforcement job pretty easy. Isn't it?

Craig Peterson: [00:03:44] Yeah, it's really easy. We talked about some of the alternative social media sites out there as well, like Parler, Gab, and Mastodon and some of these others. Did you also see that this one lady a programmer? She wrote a piece of code that was 400 lines long now, for those of us, that aren't total geeks. That means it's a very simple, very small program and she was able to pull down everything off of Parler.  That includes, this is before Parler went offline, the videos, the photos with all of the GPS information still embedded in them. Apparently, this is just a treasure trove of even more information.

Like you were just talking about people that we're sharing it over there on Parler, and it wasn't stripped of any of the identifying information. You're right. This is just making it so easy for law enforcement to find all of these people and that's where it's going to get really interesting. Obviously, these people were among the more extreme out there.

Matt Gagnon: [00:04:52] So speaking of Parler, I do have to ask a little bit about what's been going on this, and frankly, we could probably take up an entire segment or two or three on this topic alone here, but Google, Apple, Amazon, and others. All banning Parler. It's only one of many recent moves that have had greatly concerned me about what's going on with the tech giants and how they're essentially sensor censoring an entire ideology away from their app stores and their social media feeds and everything else.

Talk to me a little bit about this move and what you think the ultimate implications of it are.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:23] I'm sitting down, which is good because it's absolutely incredible. I call myself an internet originalist, right? You've heard of constitutional originalists. We believe in why it was created and the internet.

Remember, I've been on the internet since about 81, 82. Before it was, frankly, the internet, and back then it was exciting because finally, we had a way to communicate. We had free speech online. We didn't have to buy a $200,000 printing press in order to share stuff, including silly little poems that we add back then. We were into Monty Python.

It was a different world. It was really evolving, nicely. Although the internet was designed to resist a nuclear attack, so we could lose an entire city, major city, you name it doesn't matter. We could still continue to communicate because it was designed for these research institutions primarily, at the time universities, to be able to communicate with each other. And also with the military for all of the research they were doing.

It was just a beautiful design, amazing what was done with it. Now the problem that we're seeing. Is that we have companies like Amazon that are in literal control of a good 60% of the internet. Part of the reason the internet was just so resilient is it is by definition interconnected networks.

It was, I've got my network of computers and I might be a small company, I might be a big company and we all get together and we pass each other's data. That's how it works. It's not like there's one big pipe somewhere that nobody's paying for because it's all free and the internet should be free, all of these crazy ideas. It's you name your local internet provider these cellular providers, all of these different companies, they all connect to the networks together and they then route data for other companies through their networks. That's been part of the problem with Netflix, for instance, that at times is consumed more than half of the internet bandwidth. People got upset because, Hey, listen, I'm just a small rural internet service provider and I'm pulling all of this data through my network not even for people who are paying me. For other people's customers and it's been back and forth and we'll have those discussions again in the future I'm sure with the new Biden administration.

But where we've now run into the problem, that we're seeing, is what happens when Amazon has 60% of the internet, based in Amazon?

Now I'm not talking about people buying and stuff for Amazon.

Matt Gagnon: [00:08:27] Are you talking about their cloud servers and stuff?

Craig Peterson: [00:08:29] Exactly. Exactly. Then with those cloud servers, they built their own extra services. So again, let's pick on Parler. Parler was not only using Amazon to host computers, which is what a lot of companies do.

They were using Amazon to host their name service so people could find them. They were using Amazon to do queuing for people's posts. Completely using the queuing services. They were using. Amazon's database services. They were using Amazon storage services. So now when Amazon kicks them off, all of a sudden they're out of business because they were a hundred percent dependent on Amazon services. Specifically, Amazon.

Twitter's in the same boat. Twitter is almost entirely inside the Amazon services.

So you now have these huge companies and GoDaddy's other example, right? Who pulled many conservative sites DNS, domain name service, but these huge companies control so much of the internet. They can say, no, we're deplatforming you.

If enough of them get together, and frankly, sometimes all it takes is Amazon. Even Amazon saying we're not going to allow your data to pass through our networks can put you out of business.  It's great that some small internet service provider up in Idaho said forget about it. We're not carrying Facebook's traffic or Twitter or some of these other sites anymore.

But they really aren't going to impact anyone except for their customers. We're in big trouble.

Matt Gagnon: [00:10:12] All right. That's Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday, as he always does to go over the world of technology, including technology in space.

Thanks a lot, Craig. Appreciate it. Good luck on Saturday, as always. Make sure you tune in and listen to that here on WGAN one o'clock and we'll talk again next week, sir.

Craig Peterson: [00:10:27] Take care, Matt.

Matt Gagnon: [00:10:28] All right. Thanks.

Craig Peterson: [00:10:29] Can't believe it's been another week. Man, time is just flying now. It seemed like the election was years ago.

As well as of course, all of these things that have been going on, it was dragging for so long, because of the lockdown. Now things are just flying. It's just, wow, incredible.

Have a great day.

We are finishing up on what we're now calling our Introduction to Windows Security course.

That will be out very soon. Keep an eye out for that.

Take care, Everybody. We'll be back.

Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on WTAG this morning with Jim Polito. We had a lively discussion about the inner workings of the Internet and the decisions that Parler made that may have cost them their business. Censorship, Collusion, and Anti-Trust. Has Big Tech, the Sultans of Silicon Valley, become like the Robberbarrons of yesteryear?

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning and we had a great discussion here. If you want to know what's going on with the internet, and why I call myself an internet originalist, and why you should stick around because here we go with Mr. Jim Polito of course.

Jim Polito: [00:00:19] You know what, right now, you want to be right here. We got our guy standing by who better to have with us right now than the tech talk guru. Craig Peterson.

Craig Peterson: [00:00:36] Tis I. Good morning.

I wanted you to get all excited, and say woo I'm here. I just want it. We have, we're w we're in Providence now we have expanded and the Providence audience doesn't know this and they might think I'm joking.

But Craig Peterson actually did help to invent the internet, Al Gore likes to take credit for it. But Craig Peterson wrote code for the internet that is still in use today.

Okay. He didn't invent it, but he was like one of the guys at NASA. Who got the Apollo program to the moon? There were many of them and Craig Peterson is one of the many people who get the internet to work. So I just want to make sure people understand those credentials.

Jim Polito: [00:01:28] Today we're going to talk about the internet. What perfect timing to have you here today, when there's craziness. There are how many businesses that really could, how many large corporations, big tech, very few who control the whole thing right now. Isn't that correct, Craig?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:51] By the way, one more thing for you. I also designed systems that helped to build design and fly the space shuttle. I don't know if you knew that.

Jim Polito: [00:02:02] Woah, Woah.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:07] Yeah, years ago. I don't think I mentioned that too before. Way back when I was down in New Jersey as a contractor consultant and I wrote this code. It was my company that was hired and we put together systems for RCA Astrospace who was building part of this. One of these days we'll have to talk about it. It was cool.

Jim Polito: [00:02:26] I want to hear about that because getting the shuttle to fly, they said was like getting a brick to fly. That's the way that the pilots who piloted it, explained it. So we need to hear that.

But look, here's what I'm bothered about. That Apple, Google, and Amazon can say, you know what Parler you're done now. They can say it's because of some disturbing material, but we all know it's because of competition. Come on. That's three companies. That sounds to me like the old robber barons and why we have antitrust laws.

Craig Peterson: [00:03:02] Yeah. This is really interesting because we've had so many people, libertarians on out, say it, remember the first amendment, the right to free speech only applies to government.

But the concept of free speech is part of the basis of this country. It doesn't just stop at the edge of the first amendment, frankly. I want to point out something else related to this. And that is I am an internet originalist.

So speaking about the Constitution and the Supreme court, I'm an originalist. The internet was designed to be decentralized. You could say and do almost anything, as long as it wasn't illegal online. The whole idea behind it was to create and implement new ideas. Anyone could now connect anything to anything.

Heck, we even got light bulbs now on the internet?

It was an open, free, fair society. It was initially used by the military research people. It was used by universities to communicate with each other. That kind of evolved into the ARPANET. And then they were connected together and it became the internet.

Even the term internet tells you what it is. It's an interconnected network of networks. It had no one place that was vulnerable. We could not have Russia blow up a city in the United States and have the internet disappear. It was entirely designed to be decentralized and still pretty much is. The problem is we have these companies, like you mentioned, who are so big, and ultimately so powerful that they can shut things down.

So when you talked about Parler as an example of how it was shut down. There are attorneys looking into antitrust regulations because of this. Amazon pulled access to their systems. Now Amazon runs about 60% of the computers in the United States of America. And certainly at a minimum of 60% of the computers that run the internet today.

What's happened is they have all of this computing power. They have all of this network connectivity. Remember I said, these are interconnected networks. So someone like Amazon can block data from Parler from even traveling over their networks.

Now the internet there are protocols like BGP and others. We won't get too technical, that are designed, well if Amazon goes off the air, or won't route the packets for Parler, we'll send them around another way. It's just like water seeking another way around and it can do that. It does do that. The real problem Parler seems to be facing right now is Amazon doesn't just provide computers. It doesn't just provide network bandwidth. Amazon has quite a number of services.

You can register with Amazon, for instance, and have it handle what's called your DNS, which is the internet addressing system. Parler did that. You can have Amazon handle the queue processing, automatic load balancing. Can manage your databases, can manage all of your data storage, but if you're going to have Amazon do these things, you have to write your program, your code, so that it knows how to use all of this stuff on Amazon. All of a sudden now, You are 100% dependent on Amazon. If you're a company that made the mistake of being Amazon, not just centric, but Amazon dependent, like Parler apparently is, if Amazon pulls the plug on you, you are out of business.

And then to top it off, you've got apple pulling the plug on Parler's app and you've got Google pulling the plug on Parler's app.

Parler was smart enough to say what would happen potentially if the apps were pulled.

Parler could be used via a web browser, except for the fact that they're a hundred percent dependent on Amazon and Amazon pulled the plug.

Jim Polito: [00:07:36] We're talking with our good friend, tech talk guru, Craig Peterson.

So Craig, look you and I could start up a small business right now and with nothing to do with the internet. Craig and Jim's coffee shop. Okay. There's a lot of red tape to go through, but we could start it up and we could do it and we wouldn't be dependent on these corporations. Some people may say you may be dependent to promote it.

But what I mean is we could actually start a coffee shop and if we were on a busy enough corner, be okay. We would have certain entities that would have to go to like banks. Okay. Yeah. Small business administration. Yeah. But still, there are ways to do that.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:21] There's no real way to do it.

You need truckers. You've got to buy the coffee. You have to have the truckers delivered every day. You have to work with a conglomerate, which is distributing cream that you would buy, right? You're not buying it from the local farm. By the way, that truck is probably driven by a union member. So any one of those people. Even if you want to compare what's happening now to starting a printing press and printing your own newspaper broadsheet, whatever it might be, you still have to get the paper. You still have to get the ink. Those suppliers when they are big enough can stop you from competing. They look at newspapers today, for instance, how many newspapers are printed by the New York Times, The Boston globe, including local newspapers. It's one company. Nobody has all of these presses, anymore.

I think we've just become far too reliant on these big companies.

Now there are some options. There's something called Mastodon out there that is a completely decentralized kind of Twitter, Facebook replacement.

Some people have moved to MeWe. The same type of thing can happen if they didn't plan, Jim.

Jim Polito: [00:09:40] Yeah, I guess I understand that, but there's no one thing that can shut you down. Like they can shut you down. They can really shut you down. You're done. You want to be in the world online. You're done.

Now. My question is so Parler signs a contract with Amazon and less, the Department of Justice decides to go after. Amazon and Apple for and others for antitrust. It's probably not that much Parler can do. Cause you know, I'm a free marketer and a free marketer is Hey Craig Peterson, and his amazing work. He can do business with whoever the heck he wants to.

That's Craig Peterson's prerogative and you can't force him to do certain things. I'm not one of those people. When you have this kind of power, I think robber baron, I think back to John Rockefeller and Standard Oil, it reminds me of that.

Craig Peterson: [00:10:42] Apparently, by the way, Amazon did violate the terms. Parler every time Amazon has asked us to remove something. We have removed it after, we double-checked it all. We have removed it and they have a 30 day period, according to the contract with Amazon, that if Amazon complains about something, there's a 30 day period where they have the ability to remove it and negotiate with Amazon, et cetera, et cetera.

None of that was honored. This all happened over the weekend. Basically with all of these companies. So now we're looking at collusion here. This is fascinating.

Then Ron Paul now, it's reported in the Washington Times, Ron Paul says I'm not calling for anything illegal and he's blocked by Facebook.

Jim Polito: [00:11:38] Yeah. Yeah. In the weeks to come, I'm sure we'll be discussing this more, but I'm glad you were here.

Craig Peterson, how do people get more from Craig Peterson?

Craig Peterson: [00:11:50] The best way is just to go to Craigpeterson.com. You'll see right there, the ability to subscribe. You'll see all my podcasts.

You'll see a lot of the articles and I've got training starting here in about two weeks on improving windows security. So it's step one. I have these all planned out. We're going to be doing VPNs and everything. Make sure you sign up.

Jim Polito: [00:12:17] You can find out about Craig peterson.com. I love it.

Craig as usual. Thank you for your expertise. I can't wait till we'll have to talk, NASA someday. About how you taught a brick to fly. But we'll get into that. Thank you very much, Craig.

Talk to you soon.

Bye-bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

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Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on WTAG this morning with Jim Polito.  We had a lively discussion about the inner workings of the Internet and the decisions that Parler made that may have cost them their business.  Censorship, Collusion, and Anti-Trust. Has Big Tech, the Sultans of Silicon Valley, become like the Robberbarrons of yesteryear?

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

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning and we had a great discussion here. If you want to know what's going on with the internet, and why I call myself an internet originalist, and why you should stick around because here we go with Mr. Jim Polito of course.

Jim Polito: [00:00:19] You know what, right now, you want to be right here. We got our guy standing by who better to have with us right now than the tech talk guru. Craig Peterson.

Craig Peterson: [00:00:36] Tis I. Good morning.

I wanted you to get all excited, and say woo I'm here. I just want it. We have, we're w we're in Providence now we have expanded and the Providence audience doesn't know this and they might think I'm joking.

But Craig Peterson actually did help to invent the internet, Al Gore likes to take credit for it. But Craig Peterson wrote code for the internet that is still in use today.

Okay. He didn't invent it, but he was like one of the guys at NASA. Who got the Apollo program to the moon? There were many of them and Craig Peterson is one of the many people who get the internet to work. So I just want to make sure people understand those credentials.

Jim Polito: [00:01:28] Today we're going to talk about the internet. What perfect timing to have you here today, when there's craziness.  There are how many businesses that really could, how many large corporations, big tech, very few who control the whole thing right now. Isn't that correct, Craig?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:51] By the way, one more thing for you. I also designed systems that helped to build design and fly the space shuttle. I don't know if you knew that.

Jim Polito: [00:02:02] Woah, Woah.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:07] Yeah, years ago. I don't think I mentioned that too before. Way back when I was down in New Jersey as a contractor consultant and I wrote this code. It was my company that was hired and we put together systems for RCA Astrospace who was building part of this. One of these days we'll have to talk about it. It was cool.

Jim Polito: [00:02:26] I want to hear about that because getting the shuttle to fly, they said was like getting a brick to fly. That's the way that the pilots who piloted it, explained it. So we need to hear that.

But look, here's what I'm bothered about. That Apple, Google, and Amazon can say, you know what Parler you're done now. They can say it's because of some disturbing material, but we all know it's because of competition. Come on.  That's three companies. That sounds to me like the old robber barons and why we have antitrust laws.

Craig Peterson: [00:03:02] Yeah. This is really interesting because we've had so many people, libertarians on out, say it, remember the first amendment, the right to free speech only applies to government.

But the concept of free speech is part of the basis of this country. It doesn't just stop at the edge of the first amendment, frankly.  I want to point out something else related to this. And that is I am an internet originalist.

So speaking about the Constitution and the Supreme court, I'm an originalist. The internet was designed to be decentralized. You could say and do almost anything, as long as it wasn't illegal online. The whole idea behind it was to create and implement new ideas. Anyone could now connect anything to anything.

Heck, we even got light bulbs now on the internet?

It was an open, free, fair society. It was initially used by the military research people. It was used by universities to communicate with each other. That kind of evolved into the ARPANET. And then they were connected together and it became the internet. 

Even the term internet tells you what it is. It's an interconnected network of networks. It had no one place that was vulnerable. We could not have Russia blow up a city in the United States and have the internet disappear. It was entirely designed to be decentralized and still pretty much is. The problem is we have these companies, like you mentioned, who are so big, and ultimately so powerful that they can shut things down.

So when you talked about Parler as an example of how it was shut down. There are attorneys looking into antitrust regulations because of this. Amazon pulled access to their systems. Now Amazon runs about 60% of the computers in the United States of America. And certainly at a minimum of 60% of the computers that run the internet today.

What's happened is they have all of this computing power. They have all of this network connectivity. Remember I said, these are interconnected networks. So someone like Amazon can block data from Parler from even traveling over their networks.

Now the internet there are protocols like BGP and others. We won't get too technical, that are designed, well if Amazon goes off the air, or won't route the packets for Parler, we'll send them around another way. It's just like water seeking another way around and it can do that. It does do that. The real problem Parler seems to be facing right now is Amazon doesn't just provide computers. It doesn't just provide network bandwidth. Amazon has quite a number of services.

You can register with Amazon, for instance, and have it handle what's called your DNS, which is the internet addressing system. Parler did that. You can have Amazon handle the queue processing, automatic load balancing. Can manage your databases, can manage all of your data storage, but if you're going to have Amazon do these things, you have to write your program, your code, so that it knows how to use all of this stuff on Amazon. All of a sudden now, You are 100% dependent on Amazon.  If you're a company that made the mistake of being Amazon, not just centric, but Amazon dependent, like Parler apparently is, if Amazon pulls the plug on you, you are out of business.

And then to top it off, you've got apple pulling the plug on Parler's app and you've got Google pulling the plug on Parler's app.

Parler was smart enough to say what would happen potentially if the apps were pulled.

Parler could be used via a web browser, except for the fact that they're a hundred percent dependent on Amazon and Amazon pulled the plug.

Jim Polito: [00:07:36] We're talking with our good friend, tech talk guru, Craig Peterson.

So Craig, look you and I could start up a small business right now and with nothing to do with the internet. Craig and Jim's coffee shop. Okay. There's a lot of red tape to go through, but we could start it up and we could do it and we wouldn't be dependent on these corporations. Some people may say you may be dependent to promote it.

But what I mean is we could actually start a coffee shop and if we were on a busy enough corner, be okay.  We would have certain entities that would have to go to like banks. Okay. Yeah. Small business administration. Yeah. But still, there are ways to do that.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:21] There's no real way to do it.

You need truckers. You've got to buy the coffee. You have to have the truckers delivered every day. You have to work with a conglomerate, which is distributing cream that you would buy, right? You're not buying it from the local farm.  By the way, that truck is probably driven by a union member. So any one of those people. Even if you want to compare what's happening now to starting a printing press and printing your own newspaper broadsheet, whatever it might be, you still have to get the paper. You still have to get the ink. Those suppliers when they are big enough can stop you from competing. They look at newspapers today, for instance, how many newspapers are printed by the New York Times, The Boston globe, including local newspapers. It's one company. Nobody has all of these presses, anymore.

I think we've just become far too reliant on these big companies.

Now there are some options.  There's something called Mastodon out there that is a completely decentralized kind of Twitter, Facebook replacement.

Some people have moved to MeWe. The same type of thing can happen if they didn't plan, Jim.

Jim Polito: [00:09:40] Yeah, I guess I understand that, but there's no one thing that can shut you down. Like they can shut you down. They can really shut you down. You're done. You want to be in the world online. You're done.

Now. My question is so Parler signs a contract with Amazon and less, the Department of Justice decides to go after. Amazon and Apple for and others for antitrust. It's probably not that much Parler can do. Cause you know, I'm a free marketer and a free marketer is Hey Craig Peterson, and his amazing work. He can do business with whoever the heck he wants to.

That's Craig Peterson's prerogative and you can't force him to do certain things. I'm not one of those people. When you have this kind of power, I think robber baron, I think back to John Rockefeller and Standard Oil, it reminds me of that.

Craig Peterson: [00:10:42] Apparently, by the way, Amazon did violate the terms. Parler every time Amazon has asked us to remove something. We have removed it after, we double-checked it all. We have removed it and they have a 30 day period, according to the contract with Amazon, that if Amazon complains about something, there's a 30 day period where they have the ability to remove it and negotiate with Amazon, et cetera, et cetera.

None of that was honored. This all happened over the weekend. Basically with all of these companies. So now we're looking at collusion here. This is fascinating.

Then Ron Paul now, it's reported in the Washington Times, Ron Paul says I'm not calling for anything illegal and he's blocked by Facebook.

Jim Polito: [00:11:38] Yeah. Yeah. In the weeks to come, I'm sure we'll be discussing this more, but I'm glad you were here.

Craig Peterson, how do people get more from Craig Peterson?

Craig Peterson: [00:11:50] The best way is just to go to Craigpeterson.com. You'll see right there, the ability to subscribe. You'll see all my podcasts.

You'll see a lot of the articles and I've got training starting here in about two weeks on improving windows security. So it's step one. I have these all planned out. We're going to be doing VPNs and everything. Make sure you sign up. 

Jim Polito: [00:12:17] You can find out about Craig peterson.com. I love it.

Craig as usual. Thank you for your expertise. I can't wait till we'll have to talk, NASA someday. About how you taught a brick to fly. But we'll get into that.  Thank you very much, Craig.

Talk to you soon.

Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome,

Craig Peterson here. I was on with Chris Ryan on NH Today. We talked about Online censorship and the flurry of de-platforming that is going and the effects it is having and will have on our society. We also discussed if removing Section 230 protections for these Internet publishers will make it better or worse. Here we go with Chris.

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

- CraigPeterson.com

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here, I was on with Chris this morning and I think was very interesting because I was able to explain section two 30 of the communications decency act. I know there is a lot of confusion out there, particularly among some of the people who are more towards the right, but it's all the way across the board.

What's censorship? When is it legal? How about libelous content? How does this all work? Would things actually be better or worse, if we got rid of section two 30? So here we go with Chris

Chris Ryan: [00:00:37] NH today, I am Chris Ryan appreciate you joining us for the program. Craig Peterson hosts tech talk. He joins us here each Monday on New Hampshire today.

Obviously. A lot to talk about with tech and censorship, after what happened this past weekend. Joining us right now on the program is Craig Peterson.

Craig, how are you?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:53] Hey, good morning. I'm not sure if you would have noticed what was going on with censorship. It's been quiet, frankly.

Yeah. Really heard anything about it. It's been really, as you mentioned in the backdrop of what's taken place. I think a significant figure was dropped from social media this past weekend. I can't remember who quite offhand. In regards to that, I'm interested in your thoughts. Because to me, whenever we use any of these platforms for free, whether it's Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or whatever the case may be TikTok.

We, in my view, are utilizing a product and there are individuals that can make a determination as to whether we get to use that or not. I, whenever I use this or I'm always thinking about what is their model and how do they make money off of this? We have a very good idea as to how that takes place.

What are your thoughts? Do you view a large tech company, such as a Twitter or a Facebook, differently than another media platform, such as iHeart, or the New York Times, or other entities that long have established gatekeepers who determine content? Who is on the air? Who is not on the air? What gets discussed? What doesn't get discussed? To me, there's this false notion that Twitter or Facebook is different than that and that there is as a first amendment, right, because you're getting to say whatever you want and putting it out there. That when that gets stopped all of a sudden, the first amendment jumps in.

Of course, to start this whole thing out, we are the product. If you're using something for free, like you're using Facebook or Twitter or whatever it might be, they're making money off of gathering your information and selling your information, right?

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And when you start talking about the next step here. Which is okay who's censoring? What's going on? What rights do we have? What rights do they have? The bottom line is there, there's always censoring. There always has been censoring. There's a huge difference between these online companies and your regular media companies.

That comes from, what there's been a lot of talk about over the last few weeks, which is section two. 30 of the communications decency act. These companies, specifically the Twitters and the Facebooks of the world, have been granted immunity from lawsuits where people are saying I was defamed.

If you are a newspaper, if you Chris on the radio, say something that you don't have any real backing on, you don't add the word alleged or alleged depending on how you want to pronounce it, to something that you're talking about. There's some personal liability. There's a liability against the radio stations, et cetera, et cetera.

Then there's the opinion pieces and various other things. So, this is really rather convoluted.

Although you have the first amendment yeah.

Chris Ryan: [00:03:45] When you're making the argument in regards to section two 30, you're making the argument for not you specifically, I'm talking about you in general. I'm sure you're making an argument for more censorship. One in which I think it was worth listening to and worth discussing because very often individuals are defamed on social media.

There's it's basically social media to a large degree has become, as I mentioned, you're spying on yourself. You're putting your true thoughts out there. The conversation that maybe would just take place with you and a couple of friends at the bar. Then all of a sudden is up on social media.

You're talking about coworkers, you're talking about other people, at times, and you're going after those people and saying things that are inflammatory, in my view by instituting two 30, that increases the censorship. In some circumstances that might be something that makes sense.

Craig Peterson: [00:04:34] You're right. Chris getting rid of two 30 does change the whole conversation about this. Now if without section two 30, and I think this is a mistake that many conservatives and libertarians even have been making, if you get rid of section two 30, now you will have more censorship.

Chris Ryan: [00:04:54] Yeah.

Craig Peterson: [00:04:54] Now without two 30, there is no wall between these big tech companies and lawsuits that are going to come their way. So they're going to say, okay we're going to tighten it up even more. So I'm not sure why people are thinking that get rid of section two 30 is somehow going to allow more free speech, it's not.

It gets back to these platforms again. Where are you talking? What are you doing? What rights do you have? Frankly, the rights that you have to say things are based on the platform. What the platform says. For instance, we have Parler, which was a complete free for all.

Pretty much anybody could say pretty much anything on this app and website. Google and Apple both removed it because of their standards. The restrictions they put in place. Amazon removed them and have removed some of these others.

So now the Parler is scrambling to try and find all kinds of new services. They're going to have to rewrite some of their software. This is going to be a big hit on them. There are other more diverse social media platforms that are out there, like Mastodon that people will be moving to.

Some of these conversations are going to move to the dark web. They're going to be even harder to find than they are right now, which goes again, back to something I've been saying for a long time, I'd rather know somebody is a real racist or is an actual fascist, et cetera, et cetera. The way I know that is because they're in the town square, marching around in a bearskin hat on with horns, whatever that was. We know what they're saying. We know where they're coming from versus having them all hiding everywhere. But, Chris, it goes right back to, again, your point.

This is, these are platforms. They are owned by businesses. They grant you certain abilities, I wouldn't even say. If you go beyond those, they have every right to knock you off.

Chris Ryan: [00:06:56] Yeah. Two things off of that. One - I feel that if these conversations are taking place in public, A, as you mentioned, who's who, I think that's a good thing in a lot of ways.

B, it's also easier for law enforcement to track what's taking place. People may think that things are safe and the FBI and other entities may be able to work behind the scenes to figure out what's going on. The conversations are happening, on the dark web and individuals are gathering and, setting things to come into fruition things may not be as safe from a law enforcement perspective.

The other thing on two 30. Is that we as broadcasters or media individuals self-censor and are also censored, but litigation is such a significant determinant in what people do. Whether it's from a medical perspective, whether it's from a broadcasting perspective and just the sheer threat of potential litigation would change the way that Facebook and Twitter operate in an incredible way.

In my view that the censorship that we're seeing now would be nothing as compared to what would take place in an environment where two 30 was taken away.

Justin McIssac: [00:08:06] How many libelous things I'd say if I couldn't get sued. Just about Chris, forget about everybody else, or slanderous, however, that works.

Chris Ryan: [00:08:13] Well as we well know, since I am. Public figure and a celebrity. Pretty much people can say whatever they want. So, Justin, you're free to go wherever you want.

Justin McIssac: [00:08:20] Let me make a list here. I'm going to get back to you.

Chris Ryan: [00:08:22] Go ahead, Craig.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:25] Yeah, we're looking at something that's very difficult to remember.

Everyone self-censors. Every news organization self-censors. You decide what's worth talking about on your radio show and that is a form of censorship. So it's been with us forever. It'll always be with us. Some of the things that happened that were printed in newspapers back near the founding of this country were absolutely incredibly libelous.

This is normal. It goes back and forth. Let's not totally freak out about this. Frankly, if you want to say something, maybe you should start your own little newspaper or this day and age a website or an app. You are going to be throttled. It just doesn't matter. It throttled by people who just don't care what you have to say, all the way through these platforms.

Chris Ryan: [00:09:16] Craig, always appreciate you joining us for the program. We shall chat again next week.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:20] All right. Take care of Chris.

Chris Ryan: [00:09:21] All right. That is Craig Peterson. You hear him on Saturday at 11:30 AM with Tech Talk replayed on Sundays on news radio, 610 and 96.7. I am Chris Ryan, Chuck Zada from the financial exchanges is next.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:32] Of course, right after I recorded this, I had a coughing fit. So thank goodness I was off the air at that point. All right, everybody, take care. We'll be back tomorrow.

Bye-bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome,

Craig Peterson here. I was on with Chris Ryan on NH Today. We talked about Online censorship and the flurry of de-platforming that is going and the effects it is having and will have on our society.  We also discussed if removing Section 230 protections for these Internet publishers will make it better or worse.   Here we go with Chris. 

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

- CraigPeterson.com

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here, I was on with Chris this morning and I think was very interesting because I was able to explain section two 30 of the communications decency act. I know there is a lot of confusion out there, particularly among some of the people who are more towards the right, but it's all the way across the board.

What's censorship? When is it legal? How about libelous content? How does this all work? Would things actually be better or worse, if we got rid of section two 30? So here we go with Chris

Chris Ryan: [00:00:37] NH today, I am Chris Ryan appreciate you joining us for the program. Craig Peterson hosts tech talk. He joins us here each Monday on New Hampshire today.

Obviously. A lot to talk about with tech and censorship, after what happened this past weekend. Joining us right now on the program is Craig Peterson.

Craig, how are you?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:53] Hey, good morning. I'm not sure if you would have noticed what was going on with censorship. It's been quiet, frankly.

Yeah. Really heard anything about it. It's been really, as you mentioned in the backdrop of what's taken place. I think a significant figure was dropped from social media this past weekend. I can't remember who quite offhand. In regards to that, I'm interested in your thoughts. Because to me, whenever we use any of these platforms for free, whether it's Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or whatever the case may be TikTok.

We, in my view, are utilizing a product and there are individuals that can make a determination as to whether we get to use that or not. I, whenever I use this or I'm always thinking about what is their model and how do they make money off of this?  We have a very good idea as to how that takes place.

What are your thoughts? Do you view a large tech company, such as a Twitter or a Facebook, differently than another media platform, such as iHeart, or the New York Times, or other entities that long have established gatekeepers who determine content? Who is on the air? Who is not on the air? What gets discussed? What doesn't get discussed? To me, there's this false notion that Twitter or Facebook is different than that and that there is as a first amendment, right, because you're getting to say whatever you want and putting it out there. That when that gets stopped all of a sudden, the first amendment jumps in.

Of course, to start this whole thing out, we are the product. If you're using something for free, like you're using Facebook or Twitter or whatever it might be, they're making money off of gathering your information and selling your information, right?

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And when you start talking about the next step here. Which is okay who's censoring? What's going on? What rights do we have? What rights do they have? The bottom line is there, there's always censoring. There always has been censoring. There's a huge difference between these online companies and your regular media companies.

That comes from, what there's been a lot of talk about over the last few weeks, which is section two. 30 of the communications decency act. These companies, specifically the Twitters and the Facebooks of the world, have been granted immunity from lawsuits where people are saying I was defamed.

If you are a newspaper, if you Chris on the radio, say something that you don't have any real backing on, you don't add the word alleged or alleged depending on how you want to pronounce it, to something that you're talking about. There's some personal liability. There's a liability against the radio stations, et cetera, et cetera.

Then there's the opinion pieces and various other things. So, this is really rather convoluted. 

Although you have the first amendment yeah.

Chris Ryan: [00:03:45] When you're making the argument in regards to section two 30, you're making the argument for not you specifically, I'm talking about you in general. I'm sure you're making an argument for more censorship. One in which I think it was worth listening to and worth discussing because very often individuals are defamed on social media.

There's it's basically social media to a large degree has become, as I mentioned, you're spying on yourself. You're putting your true thoughts out there. The conversation that maybe would just take place with you and a couple of friends at the bar. Then all of a sudden is up on social media.

You're talking about coworkers, you're talking about other people, at times, and you're going after those people and saying things that are inflammatory, in my view by instituting two 30, that increases the censorship. In some circumstances that might be something that makes sense.

Craig Peterson: [00:04:34] You're right. Chris getting rid of two 30 does change the whole conversation about this.  Now if without section two 30, and I think this is a mistake that many conservatives and libertarians even have been making, if you get rid of section two 30, now you will have more censorship.

Chris Ryan: [00:04:54] Yeah.

Craig Peterson: [00:04:54] Now without two 30, there is no wall between these big tech companies and lawsuits that are going to come their way. So they're going to say, okay we're going to tighten it up even more. So I'm not sure why people are thinking that get rid of section two 30 is somehow going to allow more free speech, it's not.

It gets back to these platforms again. Where are you talking? What are you doing? What rights do you have?  Frankly, the rights that you have to say things are based on the platform. What the platform says. For instance, we have Parler, which was a complete free for all.

Pretty much anybody could say pretty much anything on this app and website. Google and Apple both removed it because of their standards. The restrictions they put in place. Amazon removed them and have removed some of these others.

So now the Parler is scrambling to try and find all kinds of new services. They're going to have to rewrite some of their software. This is going to be a big hit on them. There are other more diverse social media platforms that are out there, like Mastodon that people will be moving to.

Some of these conversations are going to move to the dark web. They're going to be even harder to find than they are right now, which goes again, back to something I've been saying for a long time, I'd rather know somebody is a real racist or is an actual fascist, et cetera, et cetera. The way I know that is because they're in the town square, marching around in a bearskin hat on with horns, whatever that was. We know what they're saying. We know where they're coming from versus having them all hiding everywhere. But, Chris, it goes right back to, again, your point.

This is, these are platforms. They are owned by businesses. They grant you certain abilities, I wouldn't even say. If you go beyond those, they have every right to knock you off.

Chris Ryan: [00:06:56] Yeah. Two things off of that. One - I feel that if these conversations are taking place in public, A, as you mentioned, who's who, I think that's a good thing in a lot of ways.

B, it's also easier for law enforcement to track what's taking place. People may think that things are safe and the FBI and other entities may be able to work behind the scenes to figure out what's going on. The conversations are happening, on the dark web and individuals are gathering and, setting things to come into fruition things may not be as safe from a law enforcement perspective. 

The other thing on two 30. Is that we as broadcasters or media individuals self-censor and are also censored, but litigation is such a significant determinant in what people do. Whether it's from a medical perspective, whether it's from a broadcasting perspective and just the sheer threat of potential litigation would change the way that Facebook and Twitter operate in an incredible way.

In my view that the censorship that we're seeing now would be nothing as compared to what would take place in an environment where two 30 was taken away.

Justin McIssac: [00:08:06] How many libelous things I'd say if I couldn't get sued. Just about Chris, forget about everybody else, or slanderous, however, that works.

Chris Ryan: [00:08:13] Well as we well know, since I am. Public figure and a celebrity. Pretty much people can say whatever they want. So, Justin, you're free to go wherever you want.

Justin McIssac: [00:08:20] Let me make a list here. I'm going to get back to you.

Chris Ryan: [00:08:22] Go ahead, Craig.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:25] Yeah, we're looking at something that's very difficult to remember.

Everyone self-censors. Every news organization self-censors. You decide what's worth talking about on your radio show and that is a form of censorship. So it's been with us forever. It'll always be with us. Some of the things that happened that were printed in newspapers back near the founding of this country were absolutely incredibly libelous.

This is normal. It goes back and forth. Let's not totally freak out about this. Frankly, if you want to say something, maybe you should start your own little newspaper or this day and age a website or an app.   You are going to be throttled. It just doesn't matter. It throttled by people who just don't care what you have to say, all the way through these platforms.

Chris Ryan: [00:09:16] Craig, always appreciate you joining us for the program. We shall chat again next week.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:20] All right. Take care of Chris.

Chris Ryan: [00:09:21] All right. That is Craig Peterson. You hear him on Saturday at 11:30 AM with Tech Talk replayed on Sundays on news radio, 610 and 96.7. I am Chris Ryan, Chuck Zada from the financial exchanges is next.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:32] Of course, right after I recorded this, I had a coughing fit. So thank goodness I was off the air at that point. All right, everybody, take care. We'll be back tomorrow.

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 and started this morning talking about Tax Time and the surprising effects that may come in April for many of us. Then we got into changes in the way Hackers are attacking businesses and then we got into Facial Recognition Technology and how it is being used. Here we go with Matt.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

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

Today, we talked a little bit about distributed denial of service attacks. I explain what they are, how they're hurting businesses, particularly small businesses as the bad guys are doing more and more of them. We talked also about this problem with facial recognition software that has just completely gotten out of hand.

So here we go with Mr. Matt Gagnon

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:30] Tech talk with Craig Peterson right now on news radio 98.5 FM and AM 560 W G A N seven 36 Wednesday morning. Great time to talk to Craig Peterson, our tech guru, who joins us at this time every single week. And you can also hear him on Saturdays at this very station at one o'clock.

So thanks for joining us as always. Craig, how are you this morning?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:54] Hey doing well, coming out fighting to my Rocky theme.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:58] Indeed. It is 2021, sir. Nice to talk to you in the new year. Hopefully a better one than last year, certainly. 2021 means that it's probably about time too, start doing my taxes and you had some information here that I found very interesting about how the pandemic boosted remote workforce might in fact be in for a bit of a shock when it comes to tax time.

What do you think about this?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:21] We've seen so many people leaving the big cities, moving out into the suburbs, into the burbs. In many cases, just moving a long way away. People from New York City and other major metropolitan areas, Boston of course. Many have ended up right here in Maine. Just all kinds of people all over the place, even like North Dakota in places.

But the thing that is really starting to scare people, especially accountants, is the lawsuits that have had to been brought to bear. Some of these States have decided that even if you have never, ever set foot in their state if your employer is in one of these high tax States. Every one of them, by the way, Democrat-controlled States, then you have to pay.

Taxes in your state now, Maine, and not your state, but their state main and math have an agreement in place that allows a little flexibility there. But if you started working for a company, even part-time as an employee, for instance, out of New York City, or even New York state, or some of these other different areas that you have to pay in New York City.

There's city tax, income tax, county tax, and state tax for your income that you earned from that state over the course of the year. As I mentioned, there are a number of suits in play right now saying, Hey, this isn't fair. We don't work in that state. We've never worked in that state.

But those regulators they're going to come after like crazy. I, one time exhibited as a vendor at a trade showdown in Connecticut. I started right then about a week later and for the next three years having to continually fight with the State of Connecticut department of taxes or whatever, they call it down there because they said you were down here, you had a presence here. You now have to pay corporate taxes on anything you sell.

Even if it isn't in the state of Connecticut. So double-check with your Accountant. This is going to get a little nasty this year.

We're speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology.

Matt Gagnon: [00:03:46] Another interesting thing here is about this facial recognition story that you sent to me as well. Another arrest here. Based on bad facial recognition matching, which is fascinating. Cause it's an interesting technology and it's becoming more increasingly used in law enforcement and for other purposes as well.

Maybe not perfect though.

Craig Peterson: [00:04:07] No. We think about fingerprint technology that's been around for well over a hundred years and it's based on all the little swirls and imperfections that are on our fingerprints. And initially when it came out. There were a lot of questions. The science wasn't totally proven.

Now it's pretty well proven. And we can say with 95%, 8%, whatever, it might be the certainty that those fingerprints belong to this individual. However, what we've been finding with facial recognition is something quite a bit different. It's still early on that technology. Many people have the same basic features and that's where the problem comes in.

We found people who have been arrested spent time in jail, had to defend themselves, hire an attorney because their faces matched a person who committed the crimes face according to facial recognition technology.

Now we spoke a little bit, Matt, last year about this company called Clearview. This company has been going through every picture that we have posted on social media now. It's, we're on the internet and grabbing them. Then it tries to find landmarks on those pictures. Those faces is what's interesting. Yeah. Now when the police run your face through this Clearview database, which by the way, anybody almost can do with just an app on their phone.

So they take a picture of you, at a traffic stop or on the street and run the through the database. They look for those same types of landmarks, try and line them up. They may or may not match if they match. Boom. All of a sudden you're a suspect in a case.

There's a case that I just shared this week of a gentleman who was accused of shoplifting candy. This guy had to spend five grand to defend himself and they ended up dismissing the case for lack of evidence. Are you kidding me? Did anybody bother to look at the pictures? The one that Clearview or one of these other organizations companies said - yeah, it matches him or her. Did anybody bother to look at them? In some of these cases? No.

The police are sent in with an arrest warrant to arrest someone. Those police officers are not double-checking all of this data all of the time. That gets very concerning and it isn't just minorities. We've heard of, for instance, black people's faces, particularly black men. This software has a hard time recognizing. The same thing's true for Asians and many other minorities, but it's also true for us white guys.

This is not technology that's really ready yet. It might give people the police, et cetera, an idea of who it might be, but we're putting far too much trust in it. Places like Portland, Oregon, and others have said, we are banning facial recognition technology in our city. In some cases, States are taking this up because of how inaccurate it is.

Matt Gagnon: [00:07:24] Finally, Craig, before I let you go, the denial of service attacks have become a little more sophisticated, a little more complex in 2020. So that's a great harbinger for 2021. Tell me more about this.

Craig Peterson: [00:07:36] In case you're not familiar with it, these are attacks that are used for a different type of ransom. And many times they're used by these quotes, social warriors, unquote. So here's what happens. A business has a website online that website is used for disseminating news or maybe for selling products online. What'll happen is one of these bad guys will say, Hey, if you do not pay this. Ransom. If you will, we're going to hold your website hostage. They will use. Home computers, tens of thousands of them to send web requests to the website. So what's happened is these home computers have been compromised and they have a remote control on them.

So that's your own computer because you did not keep it up to date. So they'll have thousands of these computers now say give me your homepage or give me the checkout page on the website. Of course, the website now becomes completely overloaded and no one can legitimately get to the website or checkout, et cetera. It's become very prominent this last year because of the number of bot networks out there.

But also due to companies like Amazon, and others are now renting computers by the hour. Some of these bad guys come in the rent a bunch of computers. Again, they could rent a thousand of them spend maybe a thousand dollars on them and ultimately end up with tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom payments.

So it did go up, as you mentioned this year, Matt, in a big way. It's particularly harmful to small businesses that have no way to cope with these denial of service attacks and they are increasingly expensive to protect against and more and more of them.

Hard to believe. It's 2021. It's one of these, Thank God it's 2021 because hopefully, things will be a little better, no matter what happened with the election, maybe we can get these things cleaned up.

We are idiots for using technology like this in our elections.

But anyway, that's it for now? I'll be back again this weekend.

Take care, everybody.

Bye-bye.

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