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

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. WTAG experienced some issues which prevented me from joining Jim on Tuesday.  But this morning he reached out and had me on. Jim and I discussed The Internet of Things and why Businesses must be careful when they are attaching all these cool gadgets to their networks.  Then we got into the WordPress Vulnerability that is hitting business websites hard.  Then Jim asked about Apps and China. Here we go with Jim.

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

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson (2): [00:00:00] So you ask yourself, how can this app be free? Really? Whoever developed it had to put hundreds or thousands of hours into developing that app, how could they possibly afford for it to be free?

 I had a bit of a surprise this morning. This is Craig Peterson.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:00:15] I got a text from Mr. Jim Polito asking if I could come on today because their board was so messed up on Tuesday, they couldn't get me on. But he really wanted me on this week. So that was fun.

We freewheeled today. Although normally we stick with the topics that I have sent him that I also include in the newsletter. We go into deep dive on my radio show on the weekend. And of course, those are podcasts as well, but it was fun. I was a little bit of a different thing today. So here we go with Mr. Jim Polito.

No week would be complete without a visit from our good friend and tech talk guru. Craig Peterson. Missed him on Tuesday.

Jim Polito: [00:00:53] Can't wrap up the week without a visit from the man. Good morning, Craig.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:00:58] Hey, Good morning. I want to correct the thing that Fake Bernie said this morning and that is Connecticut river is entirely a New Hampshire. Vermont doesn't even have a border on the river, let alone the ocean.

Jim Polito: [00:01:14] I thought they had. 

Craig Peterson (2): [00:01:15] Did you realize that?

Jim Polito: [00:01:15] No. No. So the state line is on the other side of the river.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:01:21] It is. It came from years ago. It was an order in council signed by King George, the third back in 1764 because remember Vermont was part of New Hampshire. And then yeah, New York, in fact, we've even got ski Hills that tried to re-annex themselves a few years ago to New Hampshire, tired of all of the taxes and everything.

But, yeah, so what had happened is that New York said, No No Vermont is ours. Then so King George says, okay, I'm going to settle this. So he established the border between New Hampshire and Vermont. It could be the Western bank of the Connecticut River and then the US Supreme court in 1933, upheld that.

So normally when you go across a bridge, I don't know if you've noticed, but usually in the middle it says, you're now doomed during the state of, whatever it might be, where Joe Biden might be from this week. But, when you're going from, Vermont, New Hampshire to Vermont, you don't see the sign until you hit the ground on the Vermont side.

Jim Polito: [00:02:22] Hey, you're right. I was Chesterfield New Hampshire over the weekend and I went and did the bridge there. There's the old bridge right next to the new one. And cause they never knocked down the old one. You're right, you get over the bridge, you come to the rotary, but there's the sign before you get into the rotary. Welcome to Vermont.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:02:42] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I don't know if that's like the only one, but it's really weird. A little bit of history actually knew. How's that for strange?

Jim Polito: [00:02:50] No, that's why you're the man. And, and King George, the third, how do you like that coming up with the idea? No, it's on the banks of Connecticut.

Back in those days, The Connecticut River used to flood and break its banks. Oh, the Vermont border was a moving target. all right. I want to talk about some of the stuff that you,  gave us today, but what is top of mind for Craig Peterson right now? By this top of the most brilliant man in tech wake up on Thursday morning, which is not typical for him.

What does he wake up and say, but that other people won't understand by the way?

Craig Peterson (2): [00:03:29] Oh, okay. details. so yeah, the big thing, and I'm going to talk about this on my show on Saturday here, but the big thing that has to do with the internet of things, hardware, again. Now we're talking about all of these lights that we have that may be voice-activated, and now it's everything.

If you're a business, I can't tell you how many businesses I've walked into that have. These hick vision cameras on the wall, security cameras. They've got automatically lights that come on when entering rooms, et cetera. So there is a little bit of a study that was just conducted and they found that about 85% of the devices that were tested could and be completely 100% hacked.

It's called complete root access on these devices. This is a real problem because we're making these IoT devices, the internet of things. They've got to be small. They have to be cheap. At least we want them to be cheap. So what they do is just cost reduce cost reduce, cost reduce, and what you end up with is a little computer.

It has to be a computer inside that can talk to, of course, your wi-fi in order to send its messages. And they just leave out all concepts of security, frankly. They come pre-configured with default usernames and passwords. These things come also with the ability to be completely hacked because they cannot get updates, so many of them. They never get re flashed. In fact, this particular investigation showed that they could be completely re-flashed by hackers. So we're surrounding ourselves with all of this wonderful equipment, all of this really cool stuff. At the same time, we're exposing ourselves and we're exposing our businesses to some of the worst hacks that have ever been going on, and frankly, that's a huge problem. I'm going to talk about that one this weekend. And similar to that, I gotta bring up one more thing while I'm on my soapbox. And that is, we know we're supposed to update our computers, right? And so you go ahead and you update windows, you're reluctant to do it. Cause is it going to break. What's going to happen.

If you're on a Mac, it just happens for you automatically and it's extremely rare that anything breaks or an iPhone. Android, of course, you got the problems and trying to do updates.

The biggest problem we're finding right now is that people think that they have turned on automatic updates and they're safe. Without thinking about the dozens of other apps or programs that they have on their computer that need to be updated. To a business 99% of the time they say, yeah, we're 99% patched up. we're fine. But then you dig into it at all, then you find out, they haven't updated flash. Oh, they haven't updated their web browsers. Oh, they've got all of these plugins, these extensions on the web browser that are known to be major security hazards.

So my whole message this weekend and this morning are, Yes, you've got to patch up and right now. Over 350,000 websites out there that are hosted, that are run on WordPress, which is most business websites have a critical flaw, critical, and we've seen before where ISIS goes ahead and they hack one of our websites, Jim, and then they have uploaded videos of the beheading of Americans and American soldiers onto and attacks against the soldiers to onto our business website. Then they share that with all of their friends and it's unbeknownst to you sometimes. They just hide it and they're using it for touch and go places. The bad guys are using it for child pornography.

They're using them for attacking other websites. They are putting in skimmers, just like ATM skimmers that we've seen before, right into the website checkout pages.

So that's my big thing today and I'm going to be talking about it more on Saturday. It's terrible.

Jim Polito: [00:07:47] We're talking with Craig Peterson, our good friend, our tech talk guru, and some of the concerns, Craig, I'm going to call an audible.

I have the list of stuff that you brought to us, but something came up personally for me yesterday. I wanted to do a reverse image lookup. I wanted to find the origin of a picture. And, there's a lot of different ways you can do that. But one of the ways that your smartphone will steer you toward is getting an app to do that, and of course, I'm on Apple.

Here's my question. I started looking at all the PR of course, I don't want to pay for it. I want a free app. And I started looking at all the free apps available to do a reverse image lookup. Now, for those of you who don't know, here's a reverse image. Look up. you take a picture that you have, you put it into an app and the app tells you the other places on the internet that they can find it.

So I, I did that, but I'm looking at all these apps. Then for some reason popped up on my phone who created the app and there were, and this isn't certainly a racist thing, but there was a lot of what appears here to me to be Chinese names. I said, okay, this could be someone in the United States, who's from China. Or could these all be Chinese apps from China?

So my question was how good of a cop is Apple when it comes to allowing its apps in the Apple app store. Cause I thought to myself, wait a minute. If Apple is offering it's gotta be safe. Am I being naive?

Craig Peterson (2): [00:09:32] No, you are not a few things that come out over the last few weeks. One is there is a library that a lot of application developers are using that tracks you and your data and the application developers are paid for it.

So you ask yourself, how can this app be free? Really? Whoever developed it had to put hundreds or thousands of hours into developing that app. How could they possibly afford for it to be free? So the big problem over the last few weeks was, Oh my gosh, there's this the library that app developers are using for Apple and for Android that they're getting paid to include in their app and Apple wasn't noticing it.

Then there's another problem app and requires apps to be signed on your Mac as well as your iPhone and there are ways around that. It was also found out that Apple had, this is just the last week, approved some malware to run on Mac. Now this is unbeknownst to Apple and we have to step back a little bit, and look this isn't just Apple this is Google as well. Although Apple historically has done a better job. But in both cases on the app store from Apple and the Google play store, they use software to scan the apps, to look for potential malicious stuff. They've done an okay job over the years.

That's part of the reason Apple gets 30% of any proceeds from apps that are on there.

Jim Polito: [00:11:07] Yeah

Craig Peterson (2): [00:11:07] You brought up China. China has been flooding both app stores. Then, of course, socialist government over there wanting to get our information because once your socialist, you've squashed most, if not all innovation. So the only way you can grow is to steal it from other people that aren't socialist.

Jim Polito: [00:11:27] It's true.  it's true.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:11:28] Yeah, absolutely true. And so they've been very, It's strong or, front line thinking here on getting apps into the app stores that can leak data. Because again, they just need a little bit of data from this app. Maybe a little bit of data from that app. Get your contacts from this app, pull them all together. And now they've got a very good picture of you. Who do you work for? Where do you live? What kind of data might you have access to? Then they're using that to go spearfishing. So to answer your question, Apple does a, quite good job of vetting the apps.

Google does a good job on betting the apps. But there are many ways to obscure the code and frankly, Yeah. Having written all articles over the years and worked on a lot of different people's code, I can tell you that obfuscation seems to be the middle of the name of every programmer are known to demand, where are it's impossible to try and figure out what they're doing sometimes takes a while.

So I can't blame Apple and Google for letting some of that, this stuff into the store, but they're pretty careful about it, but this thing twice, Why is the app free? Why is the app cheap? What else are they getting out of me?

Jim Polito: [00:12:43] Let me just ask you a quick question and then, Oh, go ahead. Go ahead.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:12:47] No, I was going to say when it comes to reverse image this is a great tip for everybody that's listening. If you are in the dating realm or your kids or grandkids or whatever it might be, or out there dating. Google regular Google search has an image search on it. One of the best things you can do is take that photo that you found on the dating site and run it through the Google reverse image search and see if it's a stock photo or if it's just someone else.

Because so many of our seniors as well, they're not dating, but they're, the reaching out, some of them are lonely and you've got to make sure that this person is legit. And what Jim did with the reverse image search, just use Google. It is a wonderful idea

Jim Polito: [00:13:32] See, learn from my mistakes. Excellent.

Phil, I have since deleted the app, but who knows, there's probably code somewhere in my phone right now, from the Chinese and, and they know I'm friendly with you. So I'm  I'm the enemy.

How can folks get in touch with you?

Craig Peterson (2): [00:13:50] Why don't you check out my website? I've got a new one going up here either this weekend or next week at Craig peterson.com.

You can get my newsletter. You can get all of the articles and background that I talked about here on Saturdays at 11.  You can also of course digging a little bit more. Ask me questions, all of that. Just Craigpeterson.com.

Jim Polito: [00:14:13] Craig. Thank you. 11 o'clock Saturday. Be listening. Thank you, sir, for doing the extra duty this week and we'll catch up with you next week.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:14:22] All right. Take care. It was fun.

Jim Polito: [00:14:24] It was fun. Hey, when we return a very important thing you want to back the blue, I'll tell you how it's my final word. You're listening to the Jim Polito show your safe space.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:14:35] And safe it was. Take care, everybody.

We'll be back this weekend. Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. WTAG experienced some issues which prevented me from joining Jim on Tuesday.  But this morning he reached out and had me on. Jim and I discussed The Internet of Things and why Businesses must be careful when they are attaching all these cool gadgets to their networks.  Then we got into the WordPress Vulnerability that is hitting business websites hard.  Then Jim asked about Apps and China. Here we go with Jim.

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

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson (2): [00:00:00] So you ask yourself, how can this app be free? Really? Whoever developed it had to put hundreds or thousands of hours into developing that app, how could they possibly afford for it to be free?

 I had a bit of a surprise this morning. This is Craig Peterson.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:00:15] I got a text from Mr. Jim Polito asking if I could come on today because their board was so messed up on Tuesday, they couldn't get me on. But he really wanted me on this week. So that was fun.

We freewheeled today. Although normally we stick with the topics that I have sent him that I also include in the newsletter. We go into deep dive on my radio show on the weekend. And of course, those are podcasts as well, but it was fun. I was a little bit of a different thing today. So here we go with Mr. Jim Polito.

No week would be complete without a visit from our good friend and tech talk guru. Craig Peterson. Missed him on Tuesday.

Jim Polito: [00:00:53] Can't wrap up the week without a visit from the man. Good morning, Craig.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:00:58] Hey, Good morning. I want to correct the thing that Fake Bernie said this morning and that is Connecticut river is entirely a New Hampshire. Vermont doesn't even have a border on the river, let alone the ocean.

Jim Polito: [00:01:14] I thought they had. 

Craig Peterson (2): [00:01:15] Did you realize that?

Jim Polito: [00:01:15] No. No. So the state line is on the other side of the river.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:01:21] It is. It came from years ago. It was an order in council signed by King George, the third back in 1764 because remember Vermont was part of New Hampshire. And then yeah, New York, in fact, we've even got ski Hills that tried to re-annex themselves a few years ago to New Hampshire, tired of all of the taxes and everything.

But, yeah, so what had happened is that New York said, No No Vermont is ours. Then so King George says, okay, I'm going to settle this. So he established the border between New Hampshire and Vermont. It could be the Western bank of the Connecticut River and then the US Supreme court in 1933, upheld that.

So normally when you go across a bridge, I don't know if you've noticed, but usually in the middle it says, you're now doomed during the state of, whatever it might be, where Joe Biden might be from this week. But, when you're going from, Vermont, New Hampshire to Vermont, you don't see the sign until you hit the ground on the Vermont side.

Jim Polito: [00:02:22] Hey, you're right. I was Chesterfield New Hampshire over the weekend and I went and did the bridge there. There's the old bridge right next to the new one. And cause they never knocked down the old one. You're right, you get over the bridge, you come to the rotary, but there's the sign before you get into the rotary. Welcome to Vermont.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:02:42] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I don't know if that's like the only one, but it's really weird. A little bit of history actually knew. How's that for strange?

Jim Polito: [00:02:50] No, that's why you're the man. And, and King George, the third, how do you like that coming up with the idea? No, it's on the banks of Connecticut.

Back in those days, The Connecticut River used to flood and break its banks. Oh, the Vermont border was a moving target. all right. I want to talk about some of the stuff that you,  gave us today, but what is top of mind for Craig Peterson right now? By this top of the most brilliant man in tech wake up on Thursday morning, which is not typical for him.

What does he wake up and say, but that other people won't understand by the way?

Craig Peterson (2): [00:03:29] Oh, okay. details. so yeah, the big thing, and I'm going to talk about this on my show on Saturday here, but the big thing that has to do with the internet of things, hardware, again. Now we're talking about all of these lights that we have that may be voice-activated, and now it's everything.

If you're a business, I can't tell you how many businesses I've walked into that have. These hick vision cameras on the wall, security cameras. They've got automatically lights that come on when entering rooms, et cetera. So there is a little bit of a study that was just conducted and they found that about 85% of the devices that were tested could and be completely 100% hacked.

It's called complete root access on these devices. This is a real problem because we're making these IoT devices, the internet of things. They've got to be small. They have to be cheap. At least we want them to be cheap. So what they do is just cost reduce cost reduce, cost reduce, and what you end up with is a little computer.

It has to be a computer inside that can talk to, of course, your wi-fi in order to send its messages. And they just leave out all concepts of security, frankly. They come pre-configured with default usernames and passwords. These things come also with the ability to be completely hacked because they cannot get updates, so many of them. They never get re flashed. In fact, this particular investigation showed that they could be completely re-flashed by hackers. So we're surrounding ourselves with all of this wonderful equipment, all of this really cool stuff. At the same time, we're exposing ourselves and we're exposing our businesses to some of the worst hacks that have ever been going on, and frankly, that's a huge problem. I'm going to talk about that one this weekend. And similar to that, I gotta bring up one more thing while I'm on my soapbox. And that is, we know we're supposed to update our computers, right? And so you go ahead and you update windows, you're reluctant to do it. Cause is it going to break. What's going to happen.

If you're on a Mac, it just happens for you automatically and it's extremely rare that anything breaks or an iPhone. Android, of course, you got the problems and trying to do updates.

The biggest problem we're finding right now is that people think that they have turned on automatic updates and they're safe. Without thinking about the dozens of other apps or programs that they have on their computer that need to be updated. To a business 99% of the time they say, yeah, we're 99% patched up. we're fine. But then you dig into it at all, then you find out, they haven't updated flash. Oh, they haven't updated their web browsers. Oh, they've got all of these plugins, these extensions on the web browser that are known to be major security hazards.

So my whole message this weekend and this morning are, Yes, you've got to patch up and right now. Over 350,000 websites out there that are hosted, that are run on WordPress, which is most business websites have a critical flaw, critical, and we've seen before where ISIS goes ahead and they hack one of our websites, Jim, and then they have uploaded videos of the beheading of Americans and American soldiers onto and attacks against the soldiers to onto our business website. Then they share that with all of their friends and it's unbeknownst to you sometimes. They just hide it and they're using it for touch and go places. The bad guys are using it for child pornography.

They're using them for attacking other websites. They are putting in skimmers, just like ATM skimmers that we've seen before, right into the website checkout pages.

So that's my big thing today and I'm going to be talking about it more on Saturday. It's terrible.

Jim Polito: [00:07:47] We're talking with Craig Peterson, our good friend, our tech talk guru, and some of the concerns, Craig, I'm going to call an audible.

I have the list of stuff that you brought to us, but something came up personally for me yesterday. I wanted to do a reverse image lookup. I wanted to find the origin of a picture. And, there's a lot of different ways you can do that. But one of the ways that your smartphone will steer you toward is getting an app to do that, and of course, I'm on Apple.

Here's my question. I started looking at all the PR of course, I don't want to pay for it. I want a free app. And I started looking at all the free apps available to do a reverse image lookup. Now, for those of you who don't know, here's a reverse image. Look up. you take a picture that you have, you put it into an app and the app tells you the other places on the internet that they can find it.

So I, I did that, but I'm looking at all these apps. Then for some reason popped up on my phone who created the app and there were, and this isn't certainly a racist thing, but there was a lot of what appears here to me to be Chinese names. I said, okay, this could be someone in the United States, who's from China. Or could these all be Chinese apps from China?

So my question was how good of a cop is Apple when it comes to allowing its apps in the Apple app store. Cause I thought to myself, wait a minute. If Apple is offering it's gotta be safe. Am I being naive?

Craig Peterson (2): [00:09:32] No, you are not a few things that come out over the last few weeks. One is there is a library that a lot of application developers are using that tracks you and your data and the application developers are paid for it.

So you ask yourself, how can this app be free? Really? Whoever developed it had to put hundreds or thousands of hours into developing that app. How could they possibly afford for it to be free? So the big problem over the last few weeks was, Oh my gosh, there's this the library that app developers are using for Apple and for Android that they're getting paid to include in their app and Apple wasn't noticing it.

Then there's another problem app and requires apps to be signed on your Mac as well as your iPhone and there are ways around that. It was also found out that Apple had, this is just the last week, approved some malware to run on Mac. Now this is unbeknownst to Apple and we have to step back a little bit, and look this isn't just Apple this is Google as well. Although Apple historically has done a better job. But in both cases on the app store from Apple and the Google play store, they use software to scan the apps, to look for potential malicious stuff. They've done an okay job over the years.

That's part of the reason Apple gets 30% of any proceeds from apps that are on there.

Jim Polito: [00:11:07] Yeah

Craig Peterson (2): [00:11:07] You brought up China. China has been flooding both app stores. Then, of course, socialist government over there wanting to get our information because once your socialist, you've squashed most, if not all innovation. So the only way you can grow is to steal it from other people that aren't socialist.

Jim Polito: [00:11:27] It's true.  it's true.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:11:28] Yeah, absolutely true. And so they've been very, It's strong or, front line thinking here on getting apps into the app stores that can leak data. Because again, they just need a little bit of data from this app. Maybe a little bit of data from that app. Get your contacts from this app, pull them all together. And now they've got a very good picture of you. Who do you work for? Where do you live? What kind of data might you have access to? Then they're using that to go spearfishing. So to answer your question, Apple does a, quite good job of vetting the apps.

Google does a good job on betting the apps. But there are many ways to obscure the code and frankly, Yeah. Having written all articles over the years and worked on a lot of different people's code, I can tell you that obfuscation seems to be the middle of the name of every programmer are known to demand, where are it's impossible to try and figure out what they're doing sometimes takes a while.

So I can't blame Apple and Google for letting some of that, this stuff into the store, but they're pretty careful about it, but this thing twice, Why is the app free? Why is the app cheap? What else are they getting out of me?

Jim Polito: [00:12:43] Let me just ask you a quick question and then, Oh, go ahead. Go ahead.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:12:47] No, I was going to say when it comes to reverse image this is a great tip for everybody that's listening. If you are in the dating realm or your kids or grandkids or whatever it might be, or out there dating. Google regular Google search has an image search on it. One of the best things you can do is take that photo that you found on the dating site and run it through the Google reverse image search and see if it's a stock photo or if it's just someone else.

Because so many of our seniors as well, they're not dating, but they're, the reaching out, some of them are lonely and you've got to make sure that this person is legit. And what Jim did with the reverse image search, just use Google. It is a wonderful idea

Jim Polito: [00:13:32] See, learn from my mistakes. Excellent.

Phil, I have since deleted the app, but who knows, there's probably code somewhere in my phone right now, from the Chinese and, and they know I'm friendly with you. So I'm  I'm the enemy.

How can folks get in touch with you?

Craig Peterson (2): [00:13:50] Why don't you check out my website? I've got a new one going up here either this weekend or next week at Craig peterson.com.

You can get my newsletter. You can get all of the articles and background that I talked about here on Saturdays at 11.  You can also of course digging a little bit more. Ask me questions, all of that. Just Craigpeterson.com.

Jim Polito: [00:14:13] Craig. Thank you. 11 o'clock Saturday. Be listening. Thank you, sir, for doing the extra duty this week and we'll catch up with you next week.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:14:22] All right. Take care. It was fun.

Jim Polito: [00:14:24] It was fun. Hey, when we return a very important thing you want to back the blue, I'll tell you how it's my final word. You're listening to the Jim Polito show your safe space.

Craig Peterson (2): [00:14:35] And safe it was. Take care, everybody.

We'll be back this weekend. Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we began with talking about how to protect your kids when they are on the internet doing their school work and I gave a tip that will really help you. Then we discussed a Wordpress vulnerability and Apple's newest iOS update. Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] That will stop your kids from going to no malicious sites and some of the darker corners of the internet. Absolutely free. Check it out.

Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here, and that was me with Mr. Matt this morning. It's been one of those interesting weeks. Monday of course, was a holiday.

So I wasn't on the air. Tuesday, there was a problem with the board over at the next radio station that I'm normally on Tuesday mornings. WTAG would Jim Polito and this morning it all seemed to go all right. So here we go with Matt.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:38] It's seven 36 on the WGAN and morning news on Wednesday morning, which means Craig Peterson joins us as he always does at this time.

Craig, how are you?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:46] Hey, good morning.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:48] Doing all right. Thanks for asking

Craig Peterson: [00:00:49] Confusing stuff, elections, and everything. My gosh,

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:53] Indeed. So Craig let's get right into things here. Lots of topics to go into, but, cybersecurity and going back to school would be, I think, topical for us here to begin with, because of course, as I'm sure, most people in Maine were going back to school as of yesterday, whether they were physically going back to school or if it was remote, they were going back to school.

So why should cybersecurity be on your back school list?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:16] it's important because frankly, our kids are now being exposed to who knows what, when they're online. So the basics are your child is going online. Hopefully, they're just going to the school site. But how many of us are monitoring our kids very closely. The bottom line is they're not.

And then, on the second side of this, we've got the schools themselves who are terribly overloaded and those poor school workers who are trying to do the, IT now has to protect all of the school systems from ultimately all of this malware that's coming in. From the students' computers that are hooked up to the school, depending on how this is working.

So think about it for just a sec, your kids might be writing a paper and sending in maybe a word doc. We already know about problems with word docs and cybersecurity, where the macros that can be in some of those word docs. Can be misused. Then that gets sent into the teacher whose computers now infected.

It may be stored on a server at the school that's now infecting more and more kids. So we've gotta be careful on both sides here, both the school and the parents.

I have a quick piece of advice. There's some software out there you can get it free, or you can pay for it. I advise you to pay for it. A very inexpensive it's called Umbrella.

Again, it's by Cisco, a very good in stopping some of the ransomware spread and you can get a version of Umbrella, right there, free from their website that will stop your kids from going to no malicious sites and some of the darker corners of the internet. Absolutely free. Check it out. It's called Cisco Umbrella.

Matt Gagnon: [00:03:04] There are many dark corners of the internet, Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time as he does every Wednesday.

Craig, I am a, on the side, an amateur WordPress developer. I noticed in the number of things that you had to talk about here today, that one of those things was that there was a gigantic security flaw in WordPress sites. About 350,000 of them have been affected in some fashion. What's up with this?

Craig Peterson: [00:03:28] Yeah, this is a very, again, very big call for people to pay attention. We know we've got to update our laptops, our phones, even. Although sometimes you can't get updates on some of the older pieces of equipment, which I respond to that. Hey, get the newer pieces of equipment, if you can't get updates.

When you're talking about WordPress, this is software that used to manage the content on your website. Most smaller companies use WordPress as the basis for their website. So the big question is when was the last time. You did an update on your WordPress site because again, it's software, it needs to be updated.

There's a package that you're referring to here called file manager, which is a plugin. It advances, it augments the features. WordPress has. It has a huge vulnerability in it and people just have not been updating.

Now in the WordPress side, there are some plugins that you can get that will automatically update your website for you and update your plugins for you. I use those all the time. worth looking into. Depending on where your WordPress site is hosted, some hosting facilities will do some updates to your WordPress site, most of them are afraid of breaking your site.

Personally, I use WP-engine. Is the name of the site for hosting some of my WordPress sites, just the basic ones. They do keep it up to date. They've got great tech support. They cost a little bit more. In fact, it's a lot more.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:09] Yea they do.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:10] Have a look at those. At the very least use one of these free plugins that will do updates for you automatically.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:17] Finally Craig, before I let you go, I do also want to bring up the new iOS update because we're living in a pandemic world and the new update has a system apparently inside of it that helps to fight against the pandemic a little bit in some fashion. What does that actually entail?

Craig Peterson: [00:05:32] Yea, this was not expected, frankly, here?

This is the new release of iOS. In fact, there is a little battle going on over the new. Releases that are coming out as well. We've got Facebook fighting back on it. There was this plan that we talked about Matt, where Apple and Google had a pandemic tracker who you've come in contact with. Well, Apple included it in the latest version of iOS as 13.7.

People are a little bit concerned about it, but Apple does have it set up in such a way that it's not squealing or reporting on you. It does allow you to participate if you want to. It will prompt you to opt-in, to receive notifications. If this contract tracing data shows that you may have been exposed.

So it's up to you. You can use it, or not use it, but it wasn't a surprise. We knew they were working on it, but we didn't know. That they were about to release it.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:32] Craig Peterson our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology. Of course, you can hear more details about this on his show, which has heard on this very station on Saturdays

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

Craig Peterson: [00:06:45] Hey take care of Matt. Thanks.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:47] You bet. Thanks a lot.

Craig Peterson: [00:06:48] Hey everybody starting next week, we are planning to have some major changes up on the website, a new type of email. We're going to be sending out a couple of midweek emails with long-tail stuff. n other words, some information you need to know. Just reminding you, letting you know what's new that you can read in two or three minutes, just trying to keep this simple for everybody and keep everybody up to date.

So keep an eye out for that. Everybody who has subscribed to my email list over at craigpeterson.com will be getting those.

So have a great rest of the week and we'll be back on Saturday. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we began with talking about how to protect your kids when they are on the internet doing their school work and I gave a tip that will really help you.  Then we discussed a Wordpress vulnerability and Apple's newest iOS update. Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] That will stop your kids from going to no malicious sites and some of the darker corners of the internet. Absolutely free. Check it out.

Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here, and that was me with Mr. Matt this morning. It's been one of those interesting weeks. Monday of course, was a holiday.

So I wasn't on the air. Tuesday, there was a problem with the board over at the next radio station that I'm normally on Tuesday mornings. WTAG would Jim Polito and this morning it all seemed to go all right. So here we go with Matt.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:38] It's seven 36 on the WGAN and morning news on Wednesday morning, which means Craig Peterson joins us as he always does at this time.

Craig, how are you?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:46] Hey, good morning.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:48] Doing all right. Thanks for asking

Craig Peterson: [00:00:49] Confusing stuff, elections, and everything. My gosh,

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:53] Indeed. So Craig let's get right into things here. Lots of topics to go into, but, cybersecurity and going back to school would be, I think, topical for us here to begin with, because of course, as I'm sure, most people in Maine were going back to school as of yesterday, whether they were physically going back to school or if it was remote, they were going back to school.

So why should cybersecurity be on your back school list?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:16] it's important because frankly, our kids are now being exposed to who knows what, when they're online. So the basics are your child is going online. Hopefully, they're just going to the school site. But how many of us are monitoring our kids very closely. The bottom line is they're not.

And then, on the second side of this, we've got the schools themselves who are terribly overloaded and those poor school workers who are trying to do the, IT now has to protect all of the school systems from ultimately all of this malware that's coming in. From the students' computers that are hooked up to the school, depending on how this is working.

So think about it for just a sec, your kids might be writing a paper and sending in maybe a word doc. We already know about problems with word docs and cybersecurity, where the macros that can be in some of those word docs. Can be misused. Then that gets sent into the teacher whose computers now infected.

It may be stored on a server at the school that's now infecting more and more kids. So we've gotta be careful on both sides here, both the school and the parents.

I have a quick piece of advice. There's some software out there you can get it free, or you can pay for it. I advise you to pay for it. A very inexpensive it's called Umbrella.

Again, it's by Cisco, a very good in stopping some of the ransomware spread and you can get a version of Umbrella, right there, free from their website that will stop your kids from going to no malicious sites and some of the darker corners of the internet. Absolutely free. Check it out. It's called Cisco Umbrella.

Matt Gagnon: [00:03:04] There are many dark corners of the internet, Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time as he does every Wednesday.

Craig, I am a, on the side, an amateur WordPress developer. I noticed in the number of things that you had to talk about here today, that one of those things was that there was a gigantic security flaw in WordPress sites. About 350,000 of them have been affected in some fashion. What's up with this?

Craig Peterson: [00:03:28] Yeah, this is a very, again, very big call for people to pay attention. We know we've got to update our laptops, our phones, even. Although sometimes you can't get updates on some of the older pieces of equipment, which I respond to that. Hey, get the newer pieces of equipment, if you can't get updates.

When you're talking about WordPress, this is software that used to manage the content on your website. Most smaller companies use WordPress as the basis for their website. So the big question is when was the last time. You did an update on your WordPress site because again, it's software, it needs to be updated.

There's a package that you're referring to here called file manager, which is a plugin. It advances, it augments the features. WordPress has. It has a huge vulnerability in it and people just have not been updating.

Now in the WordPress side, there are some plugins that you can get that will automatically update your website for you and update your plugins for you. I use those all the time. worth looking into. Depending on where your WordPress site is hosted, some hosting facilities will do some updates to your WordPress site, most of them are afraid of breaking your site.

Personally, I use WP-engine. Is the name of the site for hosting some of my WordPress sites, just the basic ones. They do keep it up to date. They've got great tech support. They cost a little bit more. In fact, it's a lot more.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:09] Yea they do.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:10] Have a look at those. At the very least use one of these free plugins that will do updates for you automatically.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:17] Finally Craig, before I let you go, I do also want to bring up the new iOS update because we're living in a pandemic world and the new update has a system apparently inside of it that helps to fight against the pandemic a little bit in some fashion. What does that actually entail?

Craig Peterson: [00:05:32] Yea, this was not expected, frankly, here?

This is the new release of iOS. In fact, there is a little battle going on over the new. Releases that are coming out as well. We've got Facebook fighting back on it. There was this plan that we talked about Matt, where Apple and Google had a pandemic tracker who you've come in contact with. Well, Apple included it in the latest version of iOS as 13.7.

People are a little bit concerned about it, but Apple does have it set up in such a way that it's not squealing or reporting on you.  It does allow you to participate if you want to. It will prompt you to opt-in, to receive notifications. If this contract tracing data shows that you may have been exposed.

So it's up to you. You can use it, or not use it, but it wasn't a surprise. We knew they were working on it, but we didn't know. That they were about to release it.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:32] Craig Peterson our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology. Of course, you can hear more details about this on his show, which has heard on this very station on Saturdays

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

Craig Peterson: [00:06:45] Hey take care of Matt. Thanks.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:47] You bet. Thanks a lot.

Craig Peterson: [00:06:48] Hey everybody starting next week, we are planning to have some major changes up on the website, a new type of email. We're going to be sending out a couple of midweek emails with long-tail stuff.  n other words, some information you need to know. Just reminding you, letting you know what's new that you can read in two or three minutes, just trying to keep this simple for everybody and keep everybody up to date.

So keep an eye out for that. Everybody who has subscribed to my email list over at craigpeterson.com will be getting those.

 So have a great rest of the week and we'll be back on Saturday. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we began with talking about how to protect your kids when they are on the internet doing their school work and I gave a tip that will really help you.  Then we discussed a Wordpress vulnerability and Apple's newest iOS update. Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] That will stop your kids from going to no malicious sites and some of the darker corners of the internet. Absolutely free. Check it out.

Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here, and that was me with Mr. Matt this morning. It's been one of those interesting weeks. Monday of course, was a holiday.

So I wasn't on the air. Tuesday, there was a problem with the board over at the next radio station that I'm normally on Tuesday mornings. WTAG would Jim Polito and this morning it all seemed to go all right. So here we go with Matt.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:38] It's seven 36 on the WGAN and morning news on Wednesday morning, which means Craig Peterson joins us as he always does at this time.

Craig, how are you?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:46] Hey, good morning.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:48] Doing all right. Thanks for asking

Craig Peterson: [00:00:49] Confusing stuff, elections, and everything. My gosh,

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:53] Indeed. So Craig let's get right into things here. Lots of topics to go into, but, cybersecurity and going back to school would be, I think, topical for us here to begin with, because of course, as I'm sure, most people in Maine were going back to school as of yesterday, whether they were physically going back to school or if it was remote, they were going back to school.

So why should cybersecurity be on your back school list?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:16] it's important because frankly, our kids are now being exposed to who knows what, when they're online. So the basics are your child is going online. Hopefully, they're just going to the school site. But how many of us are monitoring our kids very closely. The bottom line is they're not.

And then, on the second side of this, we've got the schools themselves who are terribly overloaded and those poor school workers who are trying to do the, IT now has to protect all of the school systems from ultimately all of this malware that's coming in. From the students' computers that are hooked up to the school, depending on how this is working.

So think about it for just a sec, your kids might be writing a paper and sending in maybe a word doc. We already know about problems with word docs and cybersecurity, where the macros that can be in some of those word docs. Can be misused. Then that gets sent into the teacher whose computers now infected.

It may be stored on a server at the school that's now infecting more and more kids. So we've gotta be careful on both sides here, both the school and the parents.

I have a quick piece of advice. There's some software out there you can get it free, or you can pay for it. I advise you to pay for it. A very inexpensive it's called Umbrella.

Again, it's by Cisco, a very good in stopping some of the ransomware spread and you can get a version of Umbrella, right there, free from their website that will stop your kids from going to no malicious sites and some of the darker corners of the internet. Absolutely free. Check it out. It's called Cisco Umbrella.

Matt Gagnon: [00:03:04] There are many dark corners of the internet, Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time as he does every Wednesday.

Craig, I am a, on the side, an amateur WordPress developer. I noticed in the number of things that you had to talk about here today, that one of those things was that there was a gigantic security flaw in WordPress sites. About 350,000 of them have been affected in some fashion. What's up with this?

Craig Peterson: [00:03:28] Yeah, this is a very, again, very big call for people to pay attention. We know we've got to update our laptops, our phones, even. Although sometimes you can't get updates on some of the older pieces of equipment, which I respond to that. Hey, get the newer pieces of equipment, if you can't get updates.

When you're talking about WordPress, this is software that used to manage the content on your website. Most smaller companies use WordPress as the basis for their website. So the big question is when was the last time. You did an update on your WordPress site because again, it's software, it needs to be updated.

There's a package that you're referring to here called file manager, which is a plugin. It advances, it augments the features. WordPress has. It has a huge vulnerability in it and people just have not been updating.

Now in the WordPress side, there are some plugins that you can get that will automatically update your website for you and update your plugins for you. I use those all the time. worth looking into. Depending on where your WordPress site is hosted, some hosting facilities will do some updates to your WordPress site, most of them are afraid of breaking your site.

Personally, I use WP-engine. Is the name of the site for hosting some of my WordPress sites, just the basic ones. They do keep it up to date. They've got great tech support. They cost a little bit more. In fact, it's a lot more.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:09] Yea they do.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:10] Have a look at those. At the very least use one of these free plugins that will do updates for you automatically.

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:17] Finally Craig, before I let you go, I do also want to bring up the new iOS update because we're living in a pandemic world and the new update has a system apparently inside of it that helps to fight against the pandemic a little bit in some fashion. What does that actually entail?

Craig Peterson: [00:05:32] Yea, this was not expected, frankly, here?

This is the new release of iOS. In fact, there is a little battle going on over the new. Releases that are coming out as well. We've got Facebook fighting back on it. There was this plan that we talked about Matt, where Apple and Google had a pandemic tracker who you've come in contact with. Well, Apple included it in the latest version of iOS as 13.7.

People are a little bit concerned about it, but Apple does have it set up in such a way that it's not squealing or reporting on you.  It does allow you to participate if you want to. It will prompt you to opt-in, to receive notifications. If this contract tracing data shows that you may have been exposed.

So it's up to you. You can use it, or not use it, but it wasn't a surprise. We knew they were working on it, but we didn't know. That they were about to release it.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:32] Craig Peterson our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology. Of course, you can hear more details about this on his show, which has heard on this very station on Saturdays

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

Craig Peterson: [00:06:45] Hey take care of Matt. Thanks.

Matt Gagnon: [00:06:47] You bet. Thanks a lot.

Craig Peterson: [00:06:48] Hey everybody starting next week, we are planning to have some major changes up on the website, a new type of email. We're going to be sending out a couple of midweek emails with long-tail stuff.  n other words, some information you need to know. Just reminding you, letting you know what's new that you can read in two or three minutes, just trying to keep this simple for everybody and keep everybody up to date.

So keep an eye out for that. Everybody who has subscribed to my email list over at craigpeterson.com will be getting those.

 So have a great rest of the week and we'll be back on Saturday. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Craig discusses Elon Musks companies but specifically, the promising news about his Neuralink program has for those who are "locked-on" or confined to a wheelchair as a quadriplegic. Listen in to find out.

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

---

Read More:

Musk says that Neuralink implants are close to ready for human testing

Is China the World's Greatest Cyber Power?

Russian tourist offered employees $1 million to cripple Tesla with malware

Ransomware Red Flags: 7 Signs You're About to Get Hit

IT blunder permanently erases 145,000 users' personal chats in KPMG's Microsoft Teams deployment – memo

Apple won't let Facebook tell users about 30% Apple tax on events

Tesla with Autopilot hits cop car - driver admits he was watching a movie

iOS 14 Privacy settings will tank ad targeting business, Facebook warns

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We're going to be getting into Apple and their 30% tax or so they're calling it. We're also going to talk about the seven signs that you are about to get hit with ransomware. What can we do about it? Interesting article

chorus. This is Craig Peterson. So glad to have you here. You listening to me on WGAN. Of course, you can hear me also. Every Wednesday morning when I'm on with Mr. Matt Gagnon and we talked about the latest yeah. Things going on in the news that you need to know about and explained it in a way that nobody else does.

It's funny. You get all of these people now. Who were on the radio, a couple of really big names. They talk about things that they are paid by the advertisers to talk about. I just get shocked and maize at the promotions L except where they've got a no they're telling him they have to, Like we've explained VPNs before. How most of the time, these cheap and free VPNs actually make you. Less safe online. So I just don't get it. But anyway, I'm a tech expert. That's what I do. I've been helping businesses with cybersecurity ever since I got it. It way back in 91 was my first big internet hack.

It was actually called a worm that I got way back then and been doing it ever. I love doing it. Love helping people and I love doing training and stuff too. so glad to have you guys all here. Now I spoke this week a little bit about this on the air during the drive time., I think, yeah, this is just absolutely phenomenal.

about Elon Musk. You've got to he's out there everywhere now. You've got a boring company that you mean. I've heard of it out in LA and now in Vegas, it looks like they might be able to get something together, but this is a company. That makes holes in the ground and allows you to potentially drive at a hundred miles an hour, or ultimately what they want to do is have you going at two, three, four, or 500 miles an hour in a vacuum?

It's very cool. I saw a very neat little episode on it on Jay Leno's garage, where he drove a Tesla. Through one of these tunnels at the boring company had made out there now lay, this is a test tunnel and it was absolutely astounding how fast they were able to go and how well it all worked.

And so neat stuff there, of course, about the Tesla cars, which Jelena was driving at the time, you've heard about the rocket it's in the amazing things they have done. I saw a Falcon heavy videotape of the tape, Of them launching a craft, recovering the boots to rockets. like they all land in the back of the Cape and I also saw a hop, skip, and a jump that was done with this massive rocket.

They're going to use just sending people to Mars on it's just, yeah. He, this guy is just amazing. The things he's done. He's also got a satellite network up in space. That's going to give us access to the internet inexpensively worldwide. Very cool. Very cool. Now what I was talking about this week is something called Neurolink.

Now there have been a number of things that have been done. Recently trying to help people that are, have a disability, a physical disability. So let's say someone's leg was badly injured or our hand was removed arm. All of these types of appendages. You might've seen this for years. I remember when I was younger, the first time I saw one of these kinds of cloth things and it had a rubber band on it, and that was used to.

Close that, that kind of the hook, the claw. They could use it to pick up things, which is just a great step forward. But what they were doing is using no muscles. Sometimes I'd have a muscle attachment and then they got a little fancier and they put since sensors, for instance, in the arm and the sensors would pick up electrical signals.

So when someone was. Moving a muscle, although it muscle no longer moved a finger. For instance, like you're trying to move the index finger. That muscle would Twitch. When you tried to move the index finger, that was no longer there. The sensor picks that up and now moves that index finger that's on that mechanical hand, electromechanical hand also.

Very cool. So things to really help people out. There are a lot of people now who are completely locked in. They can't do anything. Think of Stephen Hawking as he approached the end of his life and how he was able to do some communication. He's lucky enough to be able to control his breath and his lip to some degree and use that to interface with a computer, to be able to speak.

You've heard him speak before. what ni Elon Musk is doing right now? What he demoed last week was something called a neural link implant. He had three little pigs while I can get more and more of that up on stage with him, this pretty low profile company. You might think, what's with the pigs, right?

they don't certainly get the publicity, the Tesla or Space X get, but he is coming up with a mass-market blood-brain implant. Ultimately that could be installed by a robot in same-day surgery. Now you might be thinking about Skynet and the Terminator and what happens when they get all of our brains hooked up to this big computer.

Some people have that as a goal. They say the reasons for this would be we would have access to all knowledge instantaneously. Think of what Google is doing. They're grabbing everything they possibly can. They are making it searchable a lot of stuff, but you really don't want them to you crabbing, They're out there and making it searchable, making it usable, but you still have to type it in. You still have to do the searching. Ultimately, what would happen if you could go and just have a thought and say, man, I wonder how long it would take me to get down to Miami right now. You'd have that answer.

You wouldn't even have to think the question, ultimately, that is decades ahead. What's happening right now with these pigs, for instance, is he has a second-generation neuro link that he is using. It's been about 12 months since he had the last version that's out, but he's changed the plan because it was far too complicated.

Of course. One of the toughest things to do is to make things simpler. That's exactly what he's done. It's very impressive. Of course, it's not him, he's not the one that's doing the hardware design and figuring out all the neuro stuff going on in the brain. There's a lot of people working on this, some amazing people.

But they did make a mess major change. That is that these pigs that were carrying his implants, they weren't able to read the brain, but they were able to determine with this one pig that was the main, the keynote pig. They were able to determine the pig's movement of a leg. Now you might wonder why that's a long way from reading someone's mind.

yeah, obviously it is, but what it is closer to is giving them the ability to know that pig intended to move its leg. So that ultimately what could happen is you put this neural link into the brain, the old version that had a thousand electrodes had to be inserted into different collections of neurons in the brain.

You had wires underneath the cranium, going to different parts of the brain no longer here. Okay. There are no only to run the wires across the surface of the brain, the whole behind that. Your hardware is gone. It's a single implant about the size of a quarter. there's whole original thing, right?

Ultimately they want to replace part of the skull. They're going to have to do that in order to detect everything. Cause they've got this pig's leg, they know where the leg is moving. They know a little bit about the movement that's going on, but different parts of your brain are there to handle different functions, different things.

So this is very cool. It is a major rethinking about how this whole thing's going to work. This particular one is like a very thick coin. It has all of the hardware. You need to keep it functional. There's a battery in it. That's good enough for full day operation and it uses inductive charging. So you don't have to plug it in.

You just put it right next to a charger can like you might with your latest smartphone, You just put it on a charging pad and there are some support chips and they've got some pretty cool stuff with Bluetooth, but. The central feature in this chips design is to determine what the neurons firing mean.

Okay. So yeah, you have all these neurons, billions of them in your brain. This device is listening in on it and is communicating by firing a series of little spikes a short burst of electrical activity, and they can detect what's going on in that area of the brain. Eh, this is fantastic. You're getting, going back to.

some of them, these brilliant people that are literally locked in their bodies, this could eventually, and in the fairly near future, frankly, allow them to interface with the world outside. Imagine Stephen Hawking being able to move around much more readily, be able to communicate much more readily, do his research to type up reports, to communicate with other teams.

This could be absolutely amazing. He is right now trying to recruit some people to work at Neurolink they've got about a hundred employees and he thinks that they are getting close to potential human trials. So they've got a breakthrough device designation from the food and drug agency, which is pretty darn cool.

And they are working on having. Some of this stuff goes further than the previous work could control a robot arm with a brain implant. this is neat. He didn't indicate when those experiments are really gonna start. But man, this is absolutely amazing. It's the type of thing that just brings tears to my eyes to think of all of these people, that technology is going to be able to help.

So stick around, we're going to be talking more about, of course, the tech this week, we're going to get into also another story about Tesla in this case of a Russian tourist, and then why he was arrested, trying to cripple Tesla, interesting stuff. Of course, Coming up here, these seven red flags that you're about to get hit with ransomware.

What are some of the things you can do about it? You're listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN and Wednesdays with Matt at seven 30. Stick around. We'll be right back.

---

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 discusses Elon Musks companies but specifically, the promising news about his Neuralink program has for those who are "locked-on" or confined to a wheelchair as a quadriplegic. Listen in to find out.

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

---

Read More:

Musk says that Neuralink implants are close to ready for human testing

Is China the World’s Greatest Cyber Power?

Russian tourist offered employees $1 million to cripple Tesla with malware

Ransomware Red Flags: 7 Signs You’re About to Get Hit

IT blunder permanently erases 145,000 users' personal chats in KPMG's Microsoft Teams deployment – memo

Apple won’t let Facebook tell users about 30% Apple tax on events

Tesla with Autopilot hits cop car - driver admits he was watching a movie

iOS 14 Privacy settings will tank ad targeting business, Facebook warns

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We're going to be getting into Apple and their 30% tax or so they're calling it. We're also going to talk about the seven signs that you are about to get hit with ransomware. What can we do about it? Interesting article

chorus. This is Craig Peterson. So glad to have you here. You listening to me on WGAN. Of course, you can hear me also. Every Wednesday morning when I'm on with Mr. Matt Gagnon and we talked about the latest yeah. Things going on in the news that you need to know about and explained it in a way that nobody else does.

It's funny. You get all of these people now. Who were on the radio, a couple of really big names. They talk about things that they are paid by the advertisers to talk about. I just get shocked and maize at the promotions L except where they've got a no they're telling him they have to, Like we've explained VPNs before. How most of the time, these cheap and free VPNs actually make you. Less safe online. So I just don't get it. But anyway, I'm a tech expert. That's what I do. I've been helping businesses with cybersecurity ever since I got it. It way back in 91 was my first big internet hack.

It was actually called a worm that I got way back then and been doing it ever. I love doing it. Love helping people and I love doing training and stuff too. so glad to have you guys all here. Now I spoke this week a little bit about this on the air during the drive time., I think, yeah, this is just absolutely phenomenal.

about Elon Musk. You've got to he's out there everywhere now. You've got a boring company that you mean. I've heard of it out in LA and now in Vegas, it looks like they might be able to get something together, but this is a company. That makes holes in the ground and allows you to potentially drive at a hundred miles an hour, or ultimately what they want to do is have you going at two, three, four, or 500 miles an hour in a vacuum?

It's very cool. I saw a very neat little episode on it on Jay Leno's garage, where he drove a Tesla. Through one of these tunnels at the boring company had made out there now lay, this is a test tunnel and it was absolutely astounding how fast they were able to go and how well it all worked.

And so neat stuff there, of course, about the Tesla cars, which Jelena was driving at the time, you've heard about the rocket it's in the amazing things they have done. I saw a Falcon heavy videotape of the tape, Of them launching a craft, recovering the boots to rockets. like they all land in the back of the Cape and I also saw a hop, skip, and a jump that was done with this massive rocket.

They're going to use just sending people to Mars on it's just, yeah. He, this guy is just amazing. The things he's done. He's also got a satellite network up in space. That's going to give us access to the internet inexpensively worldwide. Very cool. Very cool. Now what I was talking about this week is something called Neurolink.

Now there have been a number of things that have been done. Recently trying to help people that are, have a disability, a physical disability. So let's say someone's leg was badly injured or our hand was removed arm. All of these types of appendages. You might've seen this for years. I remember when I was younger, the first time I saw one of these kinds of cloth things and it had a rubber band on it, and that was used to.

Close that, that kind of the hook, the claw. They could use it to pick up things, which is just a great step forward. But what they were doing is using no muscles. Sometimes I'd have a muscle attachment and then they got a little fancier and they put since sensors, for instance, in the arm and the sensors would pick up electrical signals.

So when someone was. Moving a muscle, although it muscle no longer moved a finger. For instance, like you're trying to move the index finger. That muscle would Twitch. When you tried to move the index finger, that was no longer there. The sensor picks that up and now moves that index finger that's on that mechanical hand, electromechanical hand also.

Very cool. So things to really help people out. There are a lot of people now who are completely locked in. They can't do anything. Think of Stephen Hawking as he approached the end of his life and how he was able to do some communication. He's lucky enough to be able to control his breath and his lip to some degree and use that to interface with a computer, to be able to speak.

You've heard him speak before. what ni Elon Musk is doing right now? What he demoed last week was something called a neural link implant. He had three little pigs while I can get more and more of that up on stage with him, this pretty low profile company. You might think, what's with the pigs, right?

they don't certainly get the publicity, the Tesla or Space X get, but he is coming up with a mass-market blood-brain implant. Ultimately that could be installed by a robot in same-day surgery. Now you might be thinking about Skynet and the Terminator and what happens when they get all of our brains hooked up to this big computer.

Some people have that as a goal. They say the reasons for this would be we would have access to all knowledge instantaneously. Think of what Google is doing. They're grabbing everything they possibly can. They are making it searchable a lot of stuff, but you really don't want them to you crabbing, They're out there and making it searchable, making it usable, but you still have to type it in. You still have to do the searching. Ultimately, what would happen if you could go and just have a thought and say, man, I wonder how long it would take me to get down to Miami right now. You'd have that answer.

You wouldn't even have to think the question, ultimately, that is decades ahead. What's happening right now with these pigs, for instance, is he has a second-generation neuro link that he is using. It's been about 12 months since he had the last version that's out, but he's changed the plan because it was far too complicated.

Of course. One of the toughest things to do is to make things simpler. That's exactly what he's done. It's very impressive. Of course, it's not him, he's not the one that's doing the hardware design and figuring out all the neuro stuff going on in the brain. There's a lot of people working on this, some amazing people.

But they did make a mess major change. That is that these pigs that were carrying his implants, they weren't able to read the brain, but they were able to determine with this one pig that was the main, the keynote pig. They were able to determine the pig's movement of a leg. Now you might wonder why that's a long way from reading someone's mind.

yeah, obviously it is, but what it is closer to is giving them the ability to know that pig intended to move its leg. So that ultimately what could happen is you put this neural link into the brain, the old version that had a thousand electrodes had to be inserted into different collections of neurons in the brain.

You had wires underneath the cranium, going to different parts of the brain no longer here. Okay. There are no only to run the wires across the surface of the brain, the whole behind that. Your hardware is gone. It's a single implant about the size of a quarter. there's whole original thing, right?

Ultimately they want to replace part of the skull. They're going to have to do that in order to detect everything. Cause they've got this pig's leg, they know where the leg is moving. They know a little bit about the movement that's going on, but different parts of your brain are there to handle different functions, different things.

So this is very cool. It is a major rethinking about how this whole thing's going to work. This particular one is like a very thick coin. It has all of the hardware. You need to keep it functional. There's a battery in it. That's good enough for full day operation and it uses inductive charging. So you don't have to plug it in.

You just put it right next to a charger can like you might with your latest smartphone, You just put it on a charging pad and there are some support chips and they've got some pretty cool stuff with Bluetooth, but. The central feature in this chips design is to determine what the neurons firing mean.

Okay. So yeah, you have all these neurons, billions of them in your brain. This device is listening in on it and is communicating by firing a series of little spikes a short burst of electrical activity, and they can detect what's going on in that area of the brain. Eh, this is fantastic. You're getting, going back to.

some of them, these brilliant people that are literally locked in their bodies, this could eventually, and in the fairly near future, frankly, allow them to interface with the world outside. Imagine Stephen Hawking being able to move around much more readily, be able to communicate much more readily, do his research to type up reports, to communicate with other teams.

This could be absolutely amazing. He is right now trying to recruit some people to work at Neurolink they've got about a hundred employees and he thinks that they are getting close to potential human trials. So they've got a breakthrough device designation from the food and drug agency, which is pretty darn cool.

And they are working on having. Some of this stuff goes further than the previous work could control a robot arm with a brain implant. this is neat. He didn't indicate when those experiments are really gonna start. But man, this is absolutely amazing. It's the type of thing that just brings tears to my eyes to think of all of these people, that technology is going to be able to help.

So stick around, we're going to be talking more about, of course, the tech this week, we're going to get into also another story about Tesla in this case of a Russian tourist, and then why he was arrested, trying to cripple Tesla, interesting stuff. Of course, Coming up here, these seven red flags that you're about to get hit with ransomware.

What are some of the things you can do about it? You're listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN and Wednesdays with Matt at seven 30. Stick around. We'll be right back.

---

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 discusses Elon Musks companies but specifically, the promising news about his Neuralink program has for those who are "locked-on" or confined to a wheelchair as a quadriplegic. Listen in to find out.

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

---

Read More:

Musk says that Neuralink implants are close to ready for human testing

Is China the World’s Greatest Cyber Power?

Russian tourist offered employees $1 million to cripple Tesla with malware

Ransomware Red Flags: 7 Signs You’re About to Get Hit

IT blunder permanently erases 145,000 users' personal chats in KPMG's Microsoft Teams deployment – memo

Apple won’t let Facebook tell users about 30% Apple tax on events

Tesla with Autopilot hits cop car - driver admits he was watching a movie

iOS 14 Privacy settings will tank ad targeting business, Facebook warns

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We're going to be getting into Apple and their 30% tax or so they're calling it. We're also going to talk about the seven signs that you are about to get hit with ransomware. What can we do about it? Interesting article

chorus. This is Craig Peterson. So glad to have you here. You listening to me on WGAN. Of course, you can hear me also. Every Wednesday morning when I'm on with Mr. Matt Gagnon and we talked about the latest yeah. Things going on in the news that you need to know about and explained it in a way that nobody else does.

It's funny. You get all of these people now. Who were on the radio, a couple of really big names. They talk about things that they are paid by the advertisers to talk about. I just get shocked and maize at the promotions L except where they've got a no they're telling him they have to, Like we've explained VPNs before. How most of the time, these cheap and free VPNs actually make you. Less safe online. So I just don't get it. But anyway, I'm a tech expert. That's what I do. I've been helping businesses with cybersecurity ever since I got it. It way back in 91 was my first big internet hack.

It was actually called a worm that I got way back then and been doing it ever. I love doing it. Love helping people and I love doing training and stuff too. so glad to have you guys all here. Now I spoke this week a little bit about this on the air during the drive time., I think, yeah, this is just absolutely phenomenal.

about Elon Musk. You've got to he's out there everywhere now. You've got a boring company that you mean. I've heard of it out in LA and now in Vegas, it looks like they might be able to get something together, but this is a company. That makes holes in the ground and allows you to potentially drive at a hundred miles an hour, or ultimately what they want to do is have you going at two, three, four, or 500 miles an hour in a vacuum?

It's very cool. I saw a very neat little episode on it on Jay Leno's garage, where he drove a Tesla. Through one of these tunnels at the boring company had made out there now lay, this is a test tunnel and it was absolutely astounding how fast they were able to go and how well it all worked.

And so neat stuff there, of course, about the Tesla cars, which Jelena was driving at the time, you've heard about the rocket it's in the amazing things they have done. I saw a Falcon heavy videotape of the tape, Of them launching a craft, recovering the boots to rockets. like they all land in the back of the Cape and I also saw a hop, skip, and a jump that was done with this massive rocket.

They're going to use just sending people to Mars on it's just, yeah. He, this guy is just amazing. The things he's done. He's also got a satellite network up in space. That's going to give us access to the internet inexpensively worldwide. Very cool. Very cool. Now what I was talking about this week is something called Neurolink.

Now there have been a number of things that have been done. Recently trying to help people that are, have a disability, a physical disability. So let's say someone's leg was badly injured or our hand was removed arm. All of these types of appendages. You might've seen this for years. I remember when I was younger, the first time I saw one of these kinds of cloth things and it had a rubber band on it, and that was used to.

Close that, that kind of the hook, the claw. They could use it to pick up things, which is just a great step forward. But what they were doing is using no muscles. Sometimes I'd have a muscle attachment and then they got a little fancier and they put since sensors, for instance, in the arm and the sensors would pick up electrical signals.

So when someone was. Moving a muscle, although it muscle no longer moved a finger. For instance, like you're trying to move the index finger. That muscle would Twitch. When you tried to move the index finger, that was no longer there. The sensor picks that up and now moves that index finger that's on that mechanical hand, electromechanical hand also.

Very cool. So things to really help people out. There are a lot of people now who are completely locked in. They can't do anything. Think of Stephen Hawking as he approached the end of his life and how he was able to do some communication. He's lucky enough to be able to control his breath and his lip to some degree and use that to interface with a computer, to be able to speak.

You've heard him speak before. what ni Elon Musk is doing right now? What he demoed last week was something called a neural link implant. He had three little pigs while I can get more and more of that up on stage with him, this pretty low profile company. You might think, what's with the pigs, right?

they don't certainly get the publicity, the Tesla or Space X get, but he is coming up with a mass-market blood-brain implant. Ultimately that could be installed by a robot in same-day surgery. Now you might be thinking about Skynet and the Terminator and what happens when they get all of our brains hooked up to this big computer.

Some people have that as a goal. They say the reasons for this would be we would have access to all knowledge instantaneously. Think of what Google is doing. They're grabbing everything they possibly can. They are making it searchable a lot of stuff, but you really don't want them to you crabbing, They're out there and making it searchable, making it usable, but you still have to type it in. You still have to do the searching. Ultimately, what would happen if you could go and just have a thought and say, man, I wonder how long it would take me to get down to Miami right now. You'd have that answer.

You wouldn't even have to think the question, ultimately, that is decades ahead. What's happening right now with these pigs, for instance, is he has a second-generation neuro link that he is using. It's been about 12 months since he had the last version that's out, but he's changed the plan because it was far too complicated.

Of course. One of the toughest things to do is to make things simpler. That's exactly what he's done. It's very impressive. Of course, it's not him, he's not the one that's doing the hardware design and figuring out all the neuro stuff going on in the brain. There's a lot of people working on this, some amazing people.

But they did make a mess major change. That is that these pigs that were carrying his implants, they weren't able to read the brain, but they were able to determine with this one pig that was the main, the keynote pig. They were able to determine the pig's movement of a leg. Now you might wonder why that's a long way from reading someone's mind.

yeah, obviously it is, but what it is closer to is giving them the ability to know that pig intended to move its leg. So that ultimately what could happen is you put this neural link into the brain, the old version that had a thousand electrodes had to be inserted into different collections of neurons in the brain.

You had wires underneath the cranium, going to different parts of the brain no longer here. Okay. There are no only to run the wires across the surface of the brain, the whole behind that. Your hardware is gone. It's a single implant about the size of a quarter. there's whole original thing, right?

Ultimately they want to replace part of the skull. They're going to have to do that in order to detect everything. Cause they've got this pig's leg, they know where the leg is moving. They know a little bit about the movement that's going on, but different parts of your brain are there to handle different functions, different things.

So this is very cool. It is a major rethinking about how this whole thing's going to work. This particular one is like a very thick coin. It has all of the hardware. You need to keep it functional. There's a battery in it. That's good enough for full day operation and it uses inductive charging. So you don't have to plug it in.

You just put it right next to a charger can like you might with your latest smartphone, You just put it on a charging pad and there are some support chips and they've got some pretty cool stuff with Bluetooth, but. The central feature in this chips design is to determine what the neurons firing mean.

Okay. So yeah, you have all these neurons, billions of them in your brain. This device is listening in on it and is communicating by firing a series of little spikes a short burst of electrical activity, and they can detect what's going on in that area of the brain. Eh, this is fantastic. You're getting, going back to.

some of them, these brilliant people that are literally locked in their bodies, this could eventually, and in the fairly near future, frankly, allow them to interface with the world outside. Imagine Stephen Hawking being able to move around much more readily, be able to communicate much more readily, do his research to type up reports, to communicate with other teams.

This could be absolutely amazing. He is right now trying to recruit some people to work at Neurolink they've got about a hundred employees and he thinks that they are getting close to potential human trials. So they've got a breakthrough device designation from the food and drug agency, which is pretty darn cool.

And they are working on having. Some of this stuff goes further than the previous work could control a robot arm with a brain implant. this is neat. He didn't indicate when those experiments are really gonna start. But man, this is absolutely amazing. It's the type of thing that just brings tears to my eyes to think of all of these people, that technology is going to be able to help.

So stick around, we're going to be talking more about, of course, the tech this week, we're going to get into also another story about Tesla in this case of a Russian tourist, and then why he was arrested, trying to cripple Tesla, interesting stuff. Of course, Coming up here, these seven red flags that you're about to get hit with ransomware.

What are some of the things you can do about it? You're listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN and Wednesdays with Matt at seven 30. Stick around. We'll be right back.

---

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 explains, why Apple and Google charge Apps 30%? Listen in to find out.

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

---

Read More:

Musk says that Neuralink implants are close to ready for human testing

Is China the World's Greatest Cyber Power?

Russian tourist offered employees $1 million to cripple Tesla with malware

Ransomware Red Flags: 7 Signs You're About to Get Hit

IT blunder permanently erases 145,000 users' personal chats in KPMG's Microsoft Teams deployment – memo

Apple won't let Facebook tell users about 30% Apple tax on events

Tesla with Autopilot hits cop car - driver admits he was watching a movie

iOS 14 Privacy settings will tank ad targeting business, Facebook warns

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] You're buying apps from those app stores. Did you know that the app stores take your commission, shocker, and some people are very upset about this, and particularly Facebook, as it turns out, we'll tell you why?

Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for being with us today. This is a great weekend. I love the weekends. I love it when they come around, take a little bit of time and enjoy it. Hey, Apple, these guys, right? Apple's built a pretty darn big business nurse. In fact, right now, I think Apple's still the most highly valued business ever.

It's like the first business in history to hit a 2 billion or trillion, I should say. A dollar, a valuation. That's just an absolutely amazing kid right down to this. Apple is doing some just frankly, astounding things. Now Apple has never been one to really create a market. There were some amazing MP3 players before Apple came out with their iPod.

There were other smart devices before Apple came up Newton or, the iPhone as we have today. Of course, there were other operating systems around before Macko S which was is based on a Unix operating system. We'll leave it at that don't want to get too geeky on everybody. Apple, of course, came up with the iPad, which is just a bigger smart device, right?

They weren't the first ones to have a tablet, but what they've been able to do is really capture people's imagination and help them to make a big change in their lives with technology. One of the things Apple has stressed and has been very good at is trying to keep our information safe. I mentioned Google in the last segment and Google.

Is a company that's just trying to suck up everything and sell everything about you. Apple is not trying to do that at all. Apple wants to make money. Yeah. But it wants to make money because you like them. So you buy an app. When you buy an app off of that app store, Guess what happens? Apple we'll charge the developer a fee.

Now I don't consider that to be very surprising, I guess I don't know about you, but Apple, they made this ecosystem. They own this ecosystem. Apple has done just amazing things with it. It has people who review the software. That's submitted for inclusion in the apps to make sure that there's no bad code in there.

That's going to try and steal your data. Now, nothing to a hundred percent. But they do. Police did pretty darn well. They also advertise it. The apps they promote the apps. They give the developers, this, all the software. They need to develop apps for a hundred bucks. You can join the whole Apple developers program, do all kinds of stuff, even camp with a new programming language called Swift.

So there is an article this week in ARS Technica. That's talking about-face now. Again. Oh, let's talk about what happens here. You buy an app off of the app store. Apple gets 30%. Of that revenue. So if you pay a dollar, Apple gets 30 cents just to keep this simple. The same thing is true for the Google play store.

Now, the reason I'm bringing this all up is that we just had some big news out there about some of these app stores and apps being banned. From the Apple store. So it started first with the Apple store and then Google jumped right on it very quickly. Fortnite is out there saying, you can't ban us from the store.

why was it banned? it has to do again with this payment system. If you buy an app for 10 bucks, Apple gets 30% of that. So they'll get three bucks, but you notice a lot of apps have in-app purchases. That's particularly true when you start talking about these games and Fortnite is Epic games.

It's just a perfect example of that. You want to move further along in the game, you want to buy some additional virtual property inside the game. Remember how your assets trying to tax that, you want to do any of that stuff. They might charge you 50 cents or a buck. How about candy crush, right?

How many people have I seen playing candy crush and they pay to play it and they pay to get cheats in candy crush? I remember getting cheats for doom way back when I found out what they were, I didn't pay for them little sneeze there. People are using these in-app purchases and that's where the problem's coming in.

Now, of course, they'd rather you didn't. They have to pay 30% that developers right to Apple, but Apple's rules, state quite clearly that an app developer, she really has to use them. The purchase features that Apple provides them with. Which also, by the way, provide you with protection so that you don't have to worry about how good is the developer's store that's might be storing my credit card information, et cetera, but they say you have to use our technology.

If you are going to be selling something inside your app. That's where the big problem came in the big divide because Epic games decided they were going to just set it up. So yeah, you can get the app. why not have the app for free? Yeah. It's for free on the app store. Then if you want to upgrade, just you just go to go, yeah.

Go to our website there. They're over at Epic games and, we'll give you a 20% discount. So there's still making more money than they would have. If they had gone through the Apple app store. So Apple got very upset with them and not only did Apple but Google when they can figure it out, what was going on and this kind of Daisy chained into the WordPress app and everything else that it really got amazing here.

So Apple found out about something Facebook was going to do inside the Facebook app. Facebook put something in there to warn users of the Facebook app that Apple would take 30% of the in-event payments. So if you registered for any event, a cooking class, whatever it might be on Facebook, Apple would take 30%.

Facebook is trying to be actually for over a year now, make it so their platform can be used for training where you can sell it information products, where they can be sold. You can just go there. So they were going to put a message in there saying Apple is going to take 30% of the event payments, Apple wasn't too happy about that.

And they nixed that message, frankly. Then Facebook announced a new feature. For paid events earlier this month, so that you could host these workout sessions, happy hours, whatever you wanted to charge people to participate in. In its announcement, Facebook said that on its site, that it was not taking a cut of customer's payments.

So businesses could keep up a hundred percent of the revenue they generate over on the Android platform because Google was not going to charge that commission on events. So back and forth and back and forth. The big question that it comes down to is whose platform is it? And I want all of you guys that are business people out there to remember that and remember that well, whose platform is it?

Is it Facebook's platform? If you're on the facebook.com site, is it Apple's platform if you were writing or using an iOS app? So whose customer is it? Is it Facebook's customer. Is it Apple's customer? Is it Google's customer or is it your customer? So remember that because, in reality, any of these companies can change any of their rules at almost any time.

So always make sure if you are communicating with your customers or prospects that you. Drive them off of that platform onto something you own like a website so that you can continue to communicate with them, even if Apple and Google and Facebook decide to up to an eight percent tax if you will. All right, Steve, go round.

When we get back, we're going to be talking about it. The seven signs that you're about to get hit by ransomware. A great article out on dark reading. Make sure you sign up for my newsletter. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Stick around. We'll be right back.

---

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 explains, why Apple and Google charge Apps 30%? Listen in to find out.

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

---

Read More:

Musk says that Neuralink implants are close to ready for human testing

Is China the World’s Greatest Cyber Power?

Russian tourist offered employees $1 million to cripple Tesla with malware

Ransomware Red Flags: 7 Signs You’re About to Get Hit

IT blunder permanently erases 145,000 users' personal chats in KPMG's Microsoft Teams deployment – memo

Apple won’t let Facebook tell users about 30% Apple tax on events

Tesla with Autopilot hits cop car - driver admits he was watching a movie

iOS 14 Privacy settings will tank ad targeting business, Facebook warns

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] You're buying apps from those app stores. Did you know that the app stores take your commission, shocker, and some people are very upset about this, and particularly Facebook, as it turns out, we'll tell you why?

Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for being with us today. This is a great weekend. I love the weekends. I love it when they come around, take a little bit of time and enjoy it. Hey, Apple, these guys, right? Apple's built a pretty darn big business nurse. In fact, right now, I think Apple's still the most highly valued business ever.

It's like the first business in history to hit a 2 billion or trillion, I should say. A dollar, a valuation. That's just an absolutely amazing kid right down to this. Apple is doing some just frankly, astounding things. Now Apple has never been one to really create a market. There were some amazing MP3 players before Apple came out with their iPod.

There were other smart devices before Apple came up Newton or, the iPhone as we have today. Of course, there were other operating systems around before Macko S which was is based on a Unix operating system. We'll leave it at that don't want to get too geeky on everybody. Apple, of course, came up with the iPad, which is just a bigger smart device, right?

They weren't the first ones to have a tablet, but what they've been able to do is really capture people's imagination and help them to make a big change in their lives with technology. One of the things Apple has stressed and has been very good at is trying to keep our information safe. I mentioned Google in the last segment and Google.

Is a company that's just trying to suck up everything and sell everything about you. Apple is not trying to do that at all. Apple wants to make money. Yeah. But it wants to make money because you like them. So you buy an app. When you buy an app off of that app store, Guess what happens? Apple we'll charge the developer a fee.

Now I don't consider that to be very surprising, I guess I don't know about you, but Apple, they made this ecosystem. They own this ecosystem. Apple has done just amazing things with it. It has people who review the software. That's submitted for inclusion in the apps to make sure that there's no bad code in there.

That's going to try and steal your data. Now, nothing to a hundred percent. But they do. Police did pretty darn well. They also advertise it. The apps they promote the apps. They give the developers, this, all the software. They need to develop apps for a hundred bucks. You can join the whole Apple developers program, do all kinds of stuff, even camp with a new programming language called Swift.

So there is an article this week in ARS Technica. That's talking about-face now. Again. Oh, let's talk about what happens here. You buy an app off of the app store. Apple gets 30%. Of that revenue. So if you pay a dollar, Apple gets 30 cents just to keep this simple. The same thing is true for the Google play store.

Now, the reason I'm bringing this all up is that we just had some big news out there about some of these app stores and apps being banned. From the Apple store. So it started first with the Apple store and then Google jumped right on it very quickly. Fortnite is out there saying, you can't ban us from the store.

why was it banned? it has to do again with this payment system. If you buy an app for 10 bucks, Apple gets 30% of that. So they'll get three bucks, but you notice a lot of apps have in-app purchases. That's particularly true when you start talking about these games and Fortnite is Epic games.

It's just a perfect example of that. You want to move further along in the game, you want to buy some additional virtual property inside the game. Remember how your assets trying to tax that, you want to do any of that stuff. They might charge you 50 cents or a buck. How about candy crush, right?

How many people have I seen playing candy crush and they pay to play it and they pay to get cheats in candy crush? I remember getting cheats for doom way back when I found out what they were, I didn't pay for them little sneeze there. People are using these in-app purchases and that's where the problem's coming in.

Now, of course, they'd rather you didn't. They have to pay 30% that developers right to Apple, but Apple's rules, state quite clearly that an app developer, she really has to use them. The purchase features that Apple provides them with. Which also, by the way, provide you with protection so that you don't have to worry about how good is the developer's store that's might be storing my credit card information, et cetera, but they say you have to use our technology.

If you are going to be selling something inside your app. That's where the big problem came in the big divide because Epic games decided they were going to just set it up. So yeah, you can get the app. why not have the app for free? Yeah. It's for free on the app store. Then if you want to upgrade, just you just go to go, yeah.

Go to our website there. They're over at Epic games and, we'll give you a 20% discount. So there's still making more money than they would have. If they had gone through the Apple app store. So Apple got very upset with them and not only did Apple but Google when they can figure it out, what was going on and this kind of Daisy chained into the WordPress app and everything else that it really got amazing here.

So Apple found out about something Facebook was going to do inside the Facebook app. Facebook put something in there to warn users of the Facebook app that Apple would take 30% of the in-event payments. So if you registered for any event, a cooking class, whatever it might be on Facebook, Apple would take 30%.

Facebook is trying to be actually for over a year now, make it so their platform can be used for training where you can sell it information products, where they can be sold. You can just go there. So they were going to put a message in there saying Apple is going to take 30% of the event payments, Apple wasn't too happy about that.

And they nixed that message, frankly. Then Facebook announced a new feature. For paid events earlier this month, so that you could host these workout sessions, happy hours, whatever you wanted to charge people to participate in. In its announcement, Facebook said that on its site, that it was not taking a cut of customer's payments.

So businesses could keep up a hundred percent of the revenue they generate over on the Android platform because Google was not going to charge that commission on events. So back and forth and back and forth. The big question that it comes down to is whose platform is it? And I want all of you guys that are business people out there to remember that and remember that well, whose platform is it?

Is it Facebook's platform? If you're on the facebook.com site, is it Apple's platform if you were writing or using an iOS app? So whose customer is it? Is it Facebook's customer. Is it Apple's customer? Is it Google's customer or is it your customer? So remember that because, in reality, any of these companies can change any of their rules at almost any time.

So always make sure if you are communicating with your customers or prospects that you. Drive them off of that platform onto something you own like a website so that you can continue to communicate with them, even if Apple and Google and Facebook decide to up to an eight percent tax if you will. All right, Steve, go round.

When we get back, we're going to be talking about it. The seven signs that you're about to get hit by ransomware. A great article out on dark reading. Make sure you sign up for my newsletter. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Stick around. We'll be right back.

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