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

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

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

  • AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: When to Update, Elon Musk Neuralink project, and Autonomous Cars.

    Good morning everybody!

    I was on with Matt this morning and we started out with a question from a listener about Updates.  Then we discussed autonomous, self-driving cars and what they really are. Then we discussed one of Elon Musks' projects that when it comes to fruition is going to help a lot of people.  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: Left it right there in the lane. So it was a two-lane road. This balloon car was sitting there and in the slow lane. Almost all of those cars that were supposedly auto driving, rear-ended it.

    [00:00:14] Morning. Craig Peterson here, if you are someone who uses windows and you've been wondering whether or not you should do those updates well we had that question this morning on WG A N when we talked about that.  We also had a little chance to talk about a couple of different Elon Musk issues. So here we go with Mr. Matt, Gagnon.

    [00:00:38] Matt Gagnon: Seven 36 WGAN morning news. Craig Peterson joining us now, Craig, how are you this morning, sir?

    [00:00:44] Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning. A new little intro there professionally.

    [00:00:49] Matt Gagnon: We like Mr. Voice to give us a new option sometimes. So it's good to have a good to have you on the program and good to have you announced properly.

    [00:00:56] Craig, I actually have a pretty decent, at least the listener question to kick off things with you here. If you don't mind, I will warn you in advance. However, it is about windows 10.

    [00:01:06] Craig Peterson: The answer is 42.

    [00:01:09] Matt Gagnon: Oh, very nice. Yeah, that's a good reference. so the question that came into me this morning, and this is from a listener, Phillip, when windows 10 version 2004, that's the May 2020 updates. first came out. He tried to download it, but it was not a successful download.

    [00:01:24] He then heard a whole bunch about bugs and a bunch of problems with this version and whatever. But now that it's been out for a few months, he wants to know whether or not it is good to download this, or whether or not he should wait longer.

    [00:01:37] Craig Peterson: It's such a great question. It's always a problem you have with Windows

    [00:01:41] Matt Gagnon: no, here it comes, here it comes.

    [00:01:44] Craig Peterson: Yeah.

    [00:01:45] Matt Gagnon: Throw out your Windows machine by a Mac, right

    [00:01:48] Craig Peterson: Updates break badly or Mac, or maybe you could go to Linux or something, but the updates can break badly. So it's a really good question. It was terrible, the May update. The answer is right now, I would absolutely try to update.

    [00:02:01]Before you update any time, any computer, even a Mac if you can believe that, man, make sure you have a good backup of the computer.

    [00:02:11] Now, Windows has a new feature, that's been in there for a little while that allows you to hook up, a little external hard disk. You can just buy them anywhere, a little USB desk, and it'll go ahead and back up to that. You've got to configure it. Don't just plug in the disc and think everything's going to be wonderful. Unless you're using a Mac, in which case they said, do you want me to use this for backup? You say yes. Windows needs a little more configuration. Just in case the worst goes before you do that 10 May 2020 date, make sure you've got a very good backup. It's definitely time to do that update if you haven't done it already.

    [00:02:46] Matt Gagnon: We're talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us on Wednesdays at this time to go over what's happening in the world of technology. Speaking of interesting hardware, uplinks, the Neuralink. Elon Musk is out there talking about this an awful lot and apparently according to him, and of course he is a bit of a carnival barker in some ways, but you never know, could actually be true. He does say now that the neuralink is close to being ready for human testing. What is this all about, sir?

    [00:03:14]Craig Peterson: He may be a pig farmer too. I don't know if you saw him on stage just last week.

    [00:03:19] Matt Gagnon: But he's also very rich.

    [00:03:22] Craig Peterson: He is. He had three pigs out there on stage last week and they have been using this neuralink implant in them.

    [00:03:31] What it is. It's a device it's about the size around of a quarter and has a much. Thicker presence. and it was about a thousand wires in it that gets implanted in the skull. And apparently it can be done without general anesthesia. You just do a local and now you've got all of these probes in the brain and a lot of people are thinking, Oh my gosh, he's going to be able to read our brains, et cetera.

    [00:04:01] Matt Gagnon: Yeah. This is definitely a science fiction movie waiting to happen.

    [00:04:03] Craig Peterson: Big time. We've already had a few about this one. And what are you able to demonstrate with these pigs is at least one of them, who was a little shy coming on stage, never work with animals. Finally came out this neuralink had been monitoring the signals of the brain that it could see.

    [00:04:21] Now, remember, the brain is chemical and electrical. The only thing that neuralink can pick up is electrical signals. It can only pick them up right there next to it. It can't go pick them up all the way across the brain. But what they were able to do is read that pig's movement of a leg. So it could see in the brain that the pig was moving the leg and a little bit more than that, but not much more than that.

    [00:04:49] You might be asking, why? Does Skynet need this now?

    [00:04:57] Matt Gagnon: Yes. I actually am asking that.

    [00:05:00] Here's why think of all of these people who are locked in, quadriplegics, and worse people like one of the smartest minds that has ever lived Stephen Hawking. Now he, of course, had a little bit of a moment. He could be, he could move a little bit in his mouth and he used that to help interface him.

    [00:05:20] Craig Peterson: But ultimately where this could be heading and what he's aiming for is to make it so that not so that we can just think of a question and get an instant answer. Google, if you will go out and searches the whole internet, but the ability for people who have a leg that doesn't work anymore, paraplegic, quadriplegic, people that are locked in. hen be able to interface with the outside world and maybe even walk again in some cases. So what we're so early on and all of this. I mentioned this before, but it brought a tear to my eye when I realized what was really going on here, that this is fantastic.

    [00:06:04] Matt Gagnon: We're speaking with Craig Peterson. You hear him on this very radio station on Saturday at one o'clock, his show goes into all these issues and more in greater depth.

    [00:06:13] Craig, the conversations we've had over the preceding, actually a couple of years, frankly, that you've been joining us, about auto-driving cars, is always interesting to me because I am firmly of the opinion that this is what my kids are going to be doing or I guess maybe at least my grandkids are going to be doing, in the next few decades. They're not even going to drive their cars anymore. There still are some things to iron out for problems though. There was apparently, a Tesla that had his autopilot on that hit a cop car and the driver was watching a movie at the time, which is exactly what's going to happen when everybody has an auto-driving car.

    [00:06:48] Tell me more about the story.

    [00:06:50]Craig Peterson: We've got to remember that there are very few auto-driving cars. If you have a Tesla, there's this misnomer about the auto-driving feature, right? Autonomous, it's really just fancy cruise control. That's all it is. You still have to have your hands on the wheels, you still have to be paying attention.

    [00:07:09]A couple of weeks ago, I talked about this on the show, in fact, on Saturday at 1:00 PM and at the same stations. I talked about this on the show where we delved into it some more and. What they did is they put a car on the road. It was actually a balloon in the shape of a car.

    [00:07:26] It was reflective to these sensors in these soldiers, all the tournament systems. And they left it right there in the lane.  It was a two-lane road. This balloon car was sitting there in the slow lane and almost all of those cars that were supposedly auto-driving rear-ended it.  We've seen this before, where these autopilots, if you will, cars rear end, even firetrucks. If you can imagine that. The reason for it is they make a basic assumption that's wrong.  That is if something is not moving if it doesn't detect it moving, it makes the assumption of, my sensor must not be quite right. It's gotta be off the road to the side, like a sign or something and it doesn't even bother slowing down. Matt. This is just another example of, in fact, the truth of this study this is happening in the real world. If you have one of these, whether it's the Cadillac system that works very well or a Tesla. All you can think about really is that it's just stuff, fancy cruise control, pay attention.

    [00:08:39] In this case, There was a Nash County, deputy, and a trooper with a highway patrol. We went on this side of the road, responding to a previous crash when this Tesla and right into the deputies cruiser.  The good news is that everybody was okay. The deputy was thrown to the ground and the trooper, as well, as her car kind of pushed them over the side of the road. So it all worked out. Okay.

    [00:09:06]Remember that, okay. these cars really are not fully self-driving

    [00:09:11] Matt Gagnon: Craig Peterson. You hear him on Saturdays on this very station for a more in-depth. Look at all of these issues. Craig, we appreciate it as always. Thanks for joining us as you do typically do on Wednesdays and we'll talk to you again next week, sir.

    [00:09:23] Craig Peterson: All right. Take care, Matt.

    [00:09:24] Matt Gagnon: Thanks a lot. Alright, coming up next.

    [00:09:26] Craig Peterson: Is me. Hey everybody, thanks for listening this morning or this afternoon or this evening, whenever you listen to it. I like this morning, it just has a nice ring to it. A great little phrase.

    [00:09:36] So on Saturday we will be back and we are finishing up some of the changes you'll be seeing here about mid-month. And so that's the only couple of weeks away. I can't believe its September. Have a great rest of the week. 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:

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    For questions, call or text:

    855-385-5553

    10 min
  • AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Elon Musk Neuralink, Tesla Enhanced Cruise Control and Zoom and Regulated Industries Don't Mix and

    Welcome!

    Good morning, everybody. I was on the Jim Polito show this morning. Jim and I discussed securing Elon Musks' new medical endeavor called Neuralink. Then we got into autopilot cars -- no these don't really exist commercially. You can't watch a movie and drive a car you have enhanced autopilot. Then I got on my soapbox and shouted from the rafters about ZOOM! If you are in a regulated industry you will want to Listen up! Here we go with Jim.

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

    ---

    Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

    Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] These people who have been locked in, I can't imagine what that would be like. And just horrific. We'll be able to finally interact with the world.

    I may have gotten a little carried away this morning with Jim, but with zoom stocks, soaring, and so many people using it that are. Literally breaking the law because it is either illegal.

    I got on a soapbox anyway, Craig Peterson here and here we go with Mr. Polito talked a little bit about a new Tesla company. You might not have heard of it as well.

    Jim Polito: [00:00:40] Ah, this is the man with all the answers, the man on top of everything and one of our most popular guests. He is our tech talk guru and he is Craig Peterson.

    Good morning, sir.

    Craig Peterson: [00:00:51] Hey, that's me. Good morning, Jim

    Jim Polito: [00:00:55] Of course. it's you, Craig, of course. It's you Craig? Hey, we got to talk about Elon Musk. Look, he just had a home run with Space X and his dragon capsule and going up to the international space station, all that and recovering the booster rocket, all great stuff.

    And we had. let's see, Tesla is coming around his automobile company, but not a lot of people know about his other company called Neuralink. you hear about it. George Nori on coast-to-coast will talk about it. Conspiracy theorists will talk about it. This is real. And that's why we're asking Craig Peterson about it.

    Craig Peterson: [00:01:37] Yeah, this is really real. What we're talking about is a device right now. That's about the size of a quarter, but thicker than a quarter. He implanted into the skull. With just local anesthesia that, and, it has a thousand wires that connect into the brain. And a lot of people are wondering, is this like the satellite system that becomes sentient. I don't know why. I can't remember the name of it.

    Jim Polito: [00:02:05] Oh, Skynet

    Craig Peterson: [00:02:07] Skynet.

    Jim Polito: [00:02:08] Listen, we've laughed at people putting tin foil on their heads and we don't really laugh at people with mental illness, but you may have to put the tinfoil on your head someday.

    Craig Peterson: [00:02:18] Yeah. in this case what's happened, and he just did a demo this last week, where he had three pigs that they have implanted this into their brains. And, one of them particularly, apparently it was, she was a little shy coming out on stage.

    And as you and I know. Never work with animals or children. And when you're acting,

    Jim Polito: [00:02:38] Right. You don't want to be upstaged

    Craig Peterson: [00:02:40] Exactly. And this big, this didn't want to come out and she finally came out and they were able to detect the movements of her. One of her legs. Now you might ask yourself.

    Yeah, it's very cool. why? we, any guesses, Why they would do something like this?

    Jim Polito: [00:03:00] I don't know. Is there a medical application? I don't know.

    Craig Peterson: [00:03:06] This is I think the best and coolest thing Elon Musk has ever done. It brought tears to my eyes when I started reading what he's able to accomplish.

    And here's why I am worried a little bit about computers taking over and I'm mind reading and it's here. But think about people that are locked in quadriplegics, people like Stephen Hawkins. One of the most brilliant men ever, if we can tap into their brain and be able to detect him, trying to move a leg, a muscle, et cetera, right there in the brain.

    These people who have been locked in, I can't imagine what that would be like, it just horrific. We'll be able to finally interact with the world. That's what he's doing here.

    Jim Polito: [00:04:06] That would be incredible. Look, we've all seen, some of these intricate harnesses that they can put on someone who's paraplegic and get them to walk, and they've got a heavy piece of computer equipment attached to this thing because all of the brain work is being done outside of the body.

    But yes, if you could get that electrical impulse. Caused by a chemical reaction in the brain to send a message to a muscle that hasn't moved. And bypass the spinal column. that's something else.

    Craig Peterson: [00:04:47] Yeah, this is just amazing. So the fact that he was able to read the movements of this pig's leg is phenomenal.

    An amazing step forward. Now, I'm not too worried. Frankly about them being able to read our brains, our minds, et cetera because we're far too complex at this point for computers to be able to figure out what we're thinking about. I think we'll be safe there for decades to come, but this is very early technology, but once it's in place, think of if you've seen a cochlear implant like rush Limbaugh has.

    Where you have an interface right into your ear. So he can hear, this would be an interface that would go into your brain. Right now it's learning. It's trying to figure out what do these impulses look like? What do they mean? It would have to be trained for each individual. It's this is just its groundbreaking, Neuralink. Keep an eye out. They're going to do some amazing things.

    Jim Polito: [00:05:49] We're talking with our tech talk guru Craig Peterson. I do find it fascinating. Craig. The only thing is if he's able to help you to move with that, he may be also able to stop you from moving with that. Now you might say, Hey, that's a pretty good application for say law enforcement or something else, but in the wrong hands, it could be a real problem.

    Craig Peterson: [00:06:14] Yeah, it absolutely could be. Think of ED2009, Another older movie.

    Jim Polito: [00:06:18] Yeah.

    Craig Peterson: [00:06:19] It could be a problem. Eventually, this type of technology is likely to lead to a human-machine interface. Some people have that as their goal where you think about, you wonder something, you don't have to go to Duck Duck Go to look it up.

    You actually have all of the answers available to you instantly. So that day will come, but it is a long way away.

    Jim Polito: [00:06:43] Alright, let's go to his other company, Tesla, and he's got this famous. Tesla autopilot program in his cars. I've actually talked with one of our other guests, Mike Quincy from consumer reports about this, and they, and consumer reports have some reservations about these autopilots.

    And apparently one of the accidents you sent me an interesting piece on it. One of the accidents where a Tesla car, hit a, a trooper, the driver of the autopilot, Tesla admits he was watching a movie, wasn't paying attention to the road that's bad. and that just shows the system is not foolproof.

    Craig Peterson: [00:07:30] Yeah, not at all. It is not autopilot. Everybody, no car on the road today with very few exceptions actually has an autopilot. We're really talking about something that more or less helps you stay in the lane and will help you not hit things. However, if you're listening to my show a couple of weeks ago, right here, these same bat stations, 11:00 AM on Saturday.

    I talked about a study that was just completed and I think Jim, you, and I talked about it as well. Where they put a balloon shaped like a car on the road in the lane and almost every car ran right into it. So this is again proof. it went full force into it. We've seen Tesla's go full force into the back of a fire truck.

    That is parked on the lane, trying to do rescue work. I will. this is everybody. This is bad. Okay. You still have to drive your car. Really. All you have is enhanced cruise control. Keep that in mind. I got throwing something real quick too. And that has to do with zoom. If you are in a regulated industry like you're in the financial industry, FINRA for instance. Do not use Zoom it is illegal, OK. If you are a DOD contractor or subcontractor, you have CMMC or ITAR, et cetera. Do not use Zoom. It is illegal. I don't know how you get it through people's minds. It is very bad to use Zoom for almost any business and any regulated business, it is illegal to use it. It is not secure. So It just drives me crazy when I hear people talking about using it and they are in a regulated industry.

    I know we're with Microsoft teams at iHeart. Now I will say this. We were talking with Barry Armstrong, who does a show on the station, the financial exchange earlier today. He said, Zooms earnings, boy COVID was good for Zoom. They're four times what they were last year at this time, four times.

    Yeah. That's where I had to bring it up. People are hearing about it and they think, Oh, maybe we should use them. No. There's only two that you should consider WebEx teams is by far the best and most secure. It meets every regulatory standard, WebEx teams. Then secondarily, Microsoft teams. Just as a side note, I do use and sell WebEx teams just so people know. It's the only one that's completely regulatory compliant.

    Jim Polito: [00:10:08] Yeah. But look, we're under regulatory agencies like the FCC, but come on, we're not discussing rocket science here. Come on. it's simply doing a radio show. So I think Microsoft Teams is fine.

    Anyway, it's always great to have you, Craig. Yeah, I'm right. It's always great to have you, how do folks get in touch with you.

    Craig Peterson: [00:10:32] If you're interested in getting my newsletters and little training and stuff, just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. You'll get all of this stuff we're talking about.

    Plus coming up in about two weeks, they're going to start some more micro training from people. very, small, quick training. Two minutes to read emails that are really gonna help you understand this stuff.

    Jim Polito: [00:10:54] Alright, there he is folks. Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. Sir. We'll talk to you next week. Thank you so much.

    Craig Peterson: [00:11:02] Take care. Thanks, Jim.

    Jim Polito: [00:11:05] Alrighty.

    Craig Peterson: [00:11:06] Take care, everybody. We will be back tomorrow and hopefully, by then, I've calmed down at least a little bit. Right?

    In case you didn't get that URL, of course, is Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

    Take care.

    ---

    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

    12 min
  • AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Elon Musk Neuralink, Tesla Enhanced Cruise Control and Zoom and Regulated Industries Don't Mix and

    Welcome!

    Good morning, everybody. I was on the Jim Polito show this morning. Jim and I discussed securing Elon Musks' new medical endeavor called Neuralink. Then we got into autopilot cars -- no these don't really exist commercially.  You can't watch a movie and drive a car you have enhanced autopilot.  Then I got on my soapbox and shouted from the rafters about ZOOM!  If you are in a regulated industry you will want to Listen up! Here we go with Jim.

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

    --- 

    Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

    Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] These people who have been locked in, I can't imagine what that would be like. And just horrific. We'll be able to finally interact with the world.

    I may have gotten a little carried away this morning with Jim, but with zoom stocks, soaring, and so many people using it that are. Literally breaking the law because it is either illegal.

    I got on a soapbox anyway, Craig Peterson here and here we go with Mr. Polito talked a little bit about a new Tesla company. You might not have heard of it as well.

    Jim Polito: [00:00:40] Ah, this is the man with all the answers, the man on top of everything and one of our most popular guests. He is our tech talk guru and he is Craig Peterson.

    Good morning, sir.

    Craig Peterson: [00:00:51] Hey, that's me. Good morning, Jim

    Jim Polito: [00:00:55] Of course. it's you, Craig, of course. It's you Craig? Hey, we got to talk about Elon Musk. Look, he just had a home run with Space X and his dragon capsule and going up to the international space station, all that and recovering the booster rocket, all great stuff.

    And we had. let's see, Tesla is coming around his automobile company, but not a lot of people know about his other company called Neuralink. you hear about it. George Nori on coast-to-coast will talk about it. Conspiracy theorists will talk about it. This is real. And that's why we're asking Craig Peterson about it.

    Craig Peterson: [00:01:37] Yeah, this is really real. What we're talking about is a device right now. That's about the size of a quarter, but thicker than a quarter. He implanted into the skull. With just local anesthesia that, and, it has a thousand wires that connect into the brain. And a lot of people are wondering, is this like the satellite system that becomes sentient. I don't know why. I can't remember the name of it.

    Jim Polito: [00:02:05] Oh, Skynet

    Craig Peterson: [00:02:07] Skynet. 

    Jim Polito: [00:02:08] Listen, we've laughed at people putting tin foil on their heads and we don't really laugh at people with mental illness, but you may have to put the tinfoil on your head someday.

    Craig Peterson: [00:02:18] Yeah. in this case what's happened, and he just did a demo this last week, where he had three pigs that they have implanted this into their brains. And, one of them particularly, apparently it was, she was a little shy coming out on stage.

    And as you and I know. Never work with animals or children. And when you're acting,

    Jim Polito: [00:02:38] Right. You don't want to be upstaged

    Craig Peterson: [00:02:40] Exactly. And this big, this didn't want to come out and she finally came out and they were able to detect the movements of her. One of her legs. Now you might ask yourself.

    Yeah, it's very cool. why? we, any guesses, Why they would do something like this?

    Jim Polito: [00:03:00] I don't know. Is there a medical application? I don't know.

    Craig Peterson: [00:03:06] This is I think the best and coolest thing Elon Musk has ever done. It brought tears to my eyes when I started reading what he's able to accomplish.

    And here's why I am worried a little bit about computers taking over and I'm mind reading and it's here. But think about people that are locked in quadriplegics, people like Stephen Hawkins. One of the most brilliant men ever, if we can tap into their brain and be able to detect him, trying to move a leg, a muscle, et cetera, right there in the brain.

    These people who have been locked in, I can't imagine what that would be like, it just horrific. We'll be able to finally interact with the world. That's what he's doing here.

    Jim Polito: [00:04:06] That would be incredible. Look, we've all seen, some of these intricate harnesses that they can put on someone who's paraplegic and get them to walk, and they've got a heavy piece of computer equipment attached to this thing because all of the brain work is being done outside of the body.

    But yes, if you could get that electrical impulse. Caused by a chemical reaction in the brain to send a message to a muscle that hasn't moved. And bypass the spinal column. that's something else.

    Craig Peterson: [00:04:47] Yeah, this is just amazing. So the fact that he was able to read the movements of this pig's leg is phenomenal.

    An amazing step forward. Now, I'm not too worried. Frankly about them being able to read our brains, our minds, et cetera because we're far too complex at this point for computers to be able to figure out what we're thinking about. I think we'll be safe there for decades to come, but this is very early technology, but once it's in place, think of if you've seen a cochlear implant like rush Limbaugh has.

    Where you have an interface right into your ear. So he can hear, this would be an interface that would go into your brain. Right now it's learning. It's trying to figure out what do these impulses look like? What do they mean? It would have to be trained for each individual. It's this is just its groundbreaking, Neuralink. Keep an eye out. They're going to do some amazing things. 

    Jim Polito: [00:05:49] We're talking with our tech talk guru Craig Peterson. I do find it fascinating. Craig. The only thing is if he's able to help you to move with that, he may be also able to stop you from moving with that. Now you might say, Hey, that's a pretty good application for say law enforcement or something else, but in the wrong hands, it could be a real problem.

    Craig Peterson: [00:06:14] Yeah, it absolutely could be. Think of ED2009, Another older movie.

    Jim Polito: [00:06:18] Yeah.

    Craig Peterson: [00:06:19] It could be a problem. Eventually, this type of technology is likely to lead to a human-machine interface. Some people have that as their goal where you think about, you wonder something, you don't have to go to Duck Duck Go to look it up.

    You actually have all of the answers available to you instantly. So that day will come, but it is a long way away.

    Jim Polito: [00:06:43] Alright, let's go to his other company, Tesla, and he's got this famous. Tesla autopilot program in his cars. I've actually talked with one of our other guests, Mike Quincy from consumer reports about this, and they, and consumer reports have some reservations about these autopilots.

    And apparently one of the accidents you sent me an interesting piece on it. One of the accidents where a Tesla car, hit a, a trooper, the driver of the autopilot, Tesla admits he was watching a movie, wasn't paying attention to the road that's bad. and that just shows the system is not foolproof.

    Craig Peterson: [00:07:30] Yeah, not at all. It is not autopilot. Everybody, no car on the road today with very few exceptions actually has an autopilot. We're really talking about something that more or less helps you stay in the lane and will help you not hit things. However, if you're listening to my show a couple of weeks ago, right here, these same bat stations, 11:00 AM on Saturday.

    I talked about a study that was just completed and I think Jim, you, and I talked about it as well. Where they put a balloon shaped like a car on the road in the lane and almost every car ran right into it. So this is again proof. it went full force into it. We've seen Tesla's go full force into the back of a fire truck.

    That is parked on the lane, trying to do rescue work. I will. this is everybody. This is bad. Okay. You still have to drive your car. Really. All you have is enhanced cruise control. Keep that in mind. I got throwing something real quick too. And that has to do with zoom. If you are in a regulated industry like you're in the financial industry, FINRA for instance. Do not use Zoom it is illegal, OK. If you are a DOD contractor or subcontractor, you have CMMC or ITAR, et cetera. Do not use Zoom. It is illegal.  I don't know how you get it through people's minds. It is very bad to use Zoom for almost any business and any regulated business, it is illegal to use it. It is not secure. So It just drives me crazy when I hear people talking about using it and they are in a regulated industry.

    I know we're with Microsoft teams at iHeart. Now I will say this. We were talking with Barry Armstrong, who does a show on the station, the financial exchange earlier today. He said, Zooms earnings, boy COVID was good for Zoom. They're four times what they were last year at this time, four times.

    Yeah. That's where I had to bring it up. People are hearing about it and they think, Oh, maybe we should use them. No. There's only two that you should consider WebEx teams is by far the best and most secure. It meets every regulatory standard, WebEx teams. Then secondarily, Microsoft teams. Just as a side note, I do use and sell WebEx teams just so people know. It's the only one that's completely regulatory compliant.

    Jim Polito: [00:10:08] Yeah. But look, we're under regulatory agencies like the FCC, but come on, we're not discussing rocket science here. Come on. it's simply doing a radio show. So I think Microsoft Teams is fine.

    Anyway, it's always great to have you, Craig. Yeah, I'm right. It's always great to have you, how do folks get in touch with you.

    Craig Peterson: [00:10:32] If you're interested in getting my newsletters and little training and stuff, just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. You'll get all of this stuff we're talking about.

    Plus coming up in about two weeks, they're going to start some more micro training from people. very, small, quick training. Two minutes to read emails that are really gonna help you understand this stuff.

    Jim Polito: [00:10:54] Alright, there he is folks. Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru. Sir. We'll talk to you next week. Thank you so much.

    Craig Peterson: [00:11:02] Take care. Thanks, Jim.

    Jim Polito: [00:11:05] Alrighty.

    Craig Peterson: [00:11:06] Take care, everybody. We will be back tomorrow and hopefully, by then, I've calmed down at least a little bit. Right?

    In case you didn't get that URL, of course, is Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

    Take care.

    --- 

    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

    12 min
  • AS HEARD ON NH Today with Jack Heath WGIR-AM 610: Elon Musk Neuralink, Alicia gets PWNED, and

    Welcome,

    Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Alicia Preston this morning who was sitting in for Jack Heath and we discussed some of the hacking that has been going on here using breached information that has been gathered. We also discussed Elon Musks Neuralink implants and Russia and Chinese espionage. Here we go with Alicia.

    These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit

    - CraigPeterson.com

    ---

    Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

    Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] It's estimated right now over 300 billion records. And so they've been taking all of those, put into them together, trying to find the matches and they have been finding matches and it turns out the out they found, Alicia Preston's, and they sent Alicia an email, pretending it was from the aunt. Hi, Craig Peterson here.

    I haven't had that much fun in a while. I had a great little chat this morning. Alicia Preston sitting in for Mr. Jack Heath, and we talked about three or four different things, including a red flag here about being hacked and ransomware and a warning of the latest warning. In fact that I have been giving out this last week.

    So here we go with Alicia.

    Alisha Preston: [00:00:45] Good morning. Welcome back to New Hampshire today. Alicia Preston in for Jack Heath today. Joining us on the AutoFair listener line. We have Craig Peterson. He hosts Tech-Talk on the station over the weekends, and he's going to tech talk with us now. How are you this morning?

    Craig Peterson: [00:01:01] Doing well.

    You brought back some memories this morning about talking when you were first a reporter and stuff, man, it's been a while.

    Alisha Preston: [00:01:09] I know, I forgot when I tell these stories that it points out that I'm old or ish.

    Craig Peterson: [00:01:15] Hey, I got you beat. I say, yeah.

    Alisha Preston: [00:01:19] Yeah.

    Craig Peterson: [00:01:20] There's a lot going on in the tech side this week and it's interesting to look at it.

    We all know Elon Musk, right? you're familiar with, of course, the Tesla and Space X. he's been doing something else too. He has another company that's been tracked in the scientific community called neuralink, N E U R a link. And these are implants that he says are close to being ready for human testing.

    The size of a very thick quarter that would be implanted in your brain about a thousand wires coming from this thing into your brain, that monitors your brain and the brain function, and the idea, ultimately, he'll be able to hook you up to the internet.

    Now I can see all sorts of potential for this thing. With the pigs, what he was able to do though is see the pig moving it's leg via this implant.

    So we got a long time to go before this is something to worry about. And we all become part of this star net, which also he's putting up in outer space, which is easy, low earth orbit satellites we'll be using for communications.

    Justin McIssac: [00:02:37] So Craig, space X I think is great. I'm down with that. That's awesome. I liked the fact that Elon Musk shot a car into the, into outer space for no reason. That was cool.

    Can't wait to be able to afford a Tesla someday. I'm going to put the brakes on Elon Musk, putting a chip in my head because I've seen enough sci-fi movies to know where this ends up and it doesn't end up in a good place. I don't think.

    Alisha Preston: [00:02:57] Yeah. I'm with you, Justin. I'm going hard. No, I don't know why I would want that.

    I want to know. So he can see the pigs move. Can he read their minds? Because if it's, what are the pigs thinking about?

    Craig Peterson: [00:03:15] Yeah, we haven't gotten to that stage yet. all he can do is he can sense the pig's movement of its feet through the brain. You probably know different parts of the brain are responsible for a different stops without getting into all of it. But as far as reading your mind goes, The estimates are, we are many decades away from that, we've been surprised before Alicia.

    It's absolutely amazing what's happening out there. The other big story of course, of the week, is Apple. Hey, it turns out that Apple developed this huge platform. They have this app store where they review all of the apps to make sure they're safe. They market the apps and make them available to people. Heaven forbid Apple is charging developers to put their apps up on the app store. It's amazing.

    Now Facebook is fighting them. Facebook's trying to tell people Apple charges as 30% tax, is what they're calling it, on anything we sell via an app. Which has been happening for a long time, Alicia?

    Alisha Preston: [00:04:19] I actually know about this one because the kid plays Fortnite and had to get the PlayStation version so she could play because she can't do it on her phone anymore. Cause they're butting heads, the app store and fortnight.

    Craig Peterson: [00:04:34] Big time and they're removing a number of these games from the Apple app store.

    The reason is that now the makers of Fortnite and others have decided, we don't like to pay this, afterward tax, they'd call it. So we're just going to have people buy it directly from us and we'll give them a 10 or 20% discount. So they're actually making a few extra bucks and Apple said, wait a minute, that's against all of the terms, but it isn't just Apple. Google's doing the same thing with its play store. So this battle will continue for a while.

    On one other quick thing. we just talked about Tesla and Elon Musk. Did you hear now about this Russian tourist that was just arrested he'd been chatting up a Tesla employee and offered him a million dollars to cripple. Tesla's Nevada Gigafactory that makes batteries with malware.

    Talking about espionage. It's not just the Chinese, the Russians are putting their money where the Chinese mouth is, right?

    Alisha Preston: [00:05:37] Why what's their problem with Tesla?

    Craig Peterson: [00:05:38] They want to get a head in both China and Russia of our technology and they have stolen it.

    I've seen it. With my own two eyes right here in New Hampshire with active Chinese backorders. But in this case, they really wanted to cripple the company.

    That's a good question. Were they going after the country? They wanted us to fall behind because Russia does have, in fact, a ripped-off version of the new Tesla truck that's being made by a couple of small companies over there.

    Or was this something else, that they haven't said yet? But the FBI has been busy arresting the Chinese nationals and now Russians for absolute out and out espionage.

    Justin McIssac: [00:06:22] Listen, I give you a million dollars. Perhaps you make Tesla not function as well. Eh, you put the moose and squirrel code into a Tesla source code. They didn't make it go away.

    Craig Peterson: [00:06:35] Yes. Exactly. So the Russians really did do something after all.

    Alisha Preston: [00:06:41] See. Now, I see you're going to be talking about ransomware red flags. Technology seems to be getting ahead when it comes to being able to contact people and try to get money from them.

    Just the other day, I get an email from an aunt I hadn't spoken to in two years and it was her name and it was to my actual email address saying, she needed to get an Amazon gift card for her niece. Could I get one for her? I thought to myself, she's older, maybe she actually doesn't know how to do this, but I decided to call my cousin, her son instead and she knew nothing about it. But that's how specific the targeting is getting. The people are replicating names and emails and contacting their contacts.

    Craig Peterson: [00:07:21] You're absolutely right. I've got one of those last weeks, too. I have a whole file of them and I break them out, when I'm doing these free training I do, to show people what's going on.

    That's a big one right now. I need an Amazon gift card for a relative. You've talked about the targeting. There have been many breaches of large systems, Equifax being the one that comes to mind for most people. Where well over 200 million people's personal information.

    Everything's available online, but the bad guys have been doing, not only do they have your name, social security number, et cetera, but they have breaches across the board. It's estimated right now, over 300 billion records. They've been taking all of those, putting them together, trying to find matches and they have been finding matches and it turns out, yeah, they found Alicia Prestons and they sent out Alicia an email, pretending it was from the aunt.

    Now, in some cases, what they do is they'll break into your aunt's email because yahoo and many others have been hacked. So let's go into the aunt's email. They will have a person look or they'll go having to have an artificial intelligence programmer, machine learning, look at the email. They'll find, Oh, she sent an email to Alicia Therefore, I'm going to send one using your aunt's actual account because her name and password were found online.

    Go to a website right now called have I been pwned.com? Have I been pwned and type in your email address, and it'll tell you everywhere that email is found on the dark web, all along with all of your other information that was stolen along with your email.

    Alisha Preston: [00:09:02] I'm not going to do that because I don't want to know, but that's good information.

    Craig Peterson: [00:09:09] P W N E D by the way, P W N E D

    Alisha Preston: [00:09:11] For those who want to be completed incredibly stressed out, go to that website and find out.

    Craig Peterson. Thank you so much for joining us. You can hear him on tech talk during, on the weekend on this station.

    Craig Peterson: [00:09:22] You too. that was fun and got a little bit longer than not usually too with Jack this morning. But, man, we are getting closer. I can't believe it's all like what September tomorrow.

    We will we'll have some stuff comin' up for you. We've been very busy. So keep an eye out on your emails. Hopefully, you're on my email list. If you're not, you won't get my newsletter. But you also won't find out about all this training they're going to be doing and all kinds of very cool information.

    The goal here is to send out the newsletter, but also to other little emails every week, just going down one big point. We were trying to keep it. So it's two or three minutes, but doing some education, on, of course, cybersecurity, the weekend newsletter is going to be like, it always has been more or less, some cybersecurity, some other cool stuff. Like I was talking with Alicia this morning about with, over at Elon Musk's company where they're doing brain implants. The midweek stuff is going to be little bits of training to help you out. Keep your mind on. Just remember their cybersecurity issues out there. So make sure you've subscribed. Again, Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

    I expect I'll be back on the 'morrow. Take care of 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

    11 min
  • AS HEARD ON NH Today with Jack Heath WGIR-AM 610: Elon Musk Neuralink, Alicia gets PWNED, and

    Welcome,

    Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Alicia Preston this morning who was sitting in for Jack Heath and we discussed some of the hacking that has been going on here using breached information that has been gathered.  We also discussed Elon Musks Neuralink implants and Russia and Chinese espionage.  Here we go with Alicia.

    These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit

    - CraigPeterson.com

    --- 

    Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

    Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] It's estimated right now over 300 billion records. And so they've been taking all of those, put into them together, trying to find the matches and they have been finding matches and it turns out the out they found, Alicia Preston's, and they sent Alicia an email, pretending it was from the aunt. Hi, Craig Peterson here.

    I haven't had that much fun in a while. I had a great little chat this morning. Alicia Preston sitting in for Mr. Jack Heath, and we talked about three or four different things, including a red flag here about being hacked and ransomware and a warning of the latest warning. In fact that I have been giving out this last week.

    So here we go with Alicia.

    Alisha Preston: [00:00:45] Good morning. Welcome back to New Hampshire today. Alicia Preston in for Jack Heath today. Joining us on the AutoFair listener line. We have Craig Peterson. He hosts Tech-Talk on the station over the weekends, and he's going to tech talk with us now. How are you this morning?

    Craig Peterson: [00:01:01] Doing well.

    You brought back some memories this morning about talking when you were first a reporter and stuff, man, it's been a while.

    Alisha Preston: [00:01:09] I know, I forgot when I tell these stories that it points out that I'm old or ish.

    Craig Peterson: [00:01:15] Hey, I got you beat. I say, yeah.

    Alisha Preston: [00:01:19] Yeah.

    Craig Peterson: [00:01:20] There's a lot going on in the tech side this week and it's interesting to look at it.

    We all know Elon Musk, right? you're familiar with, of course, the Tesla and Space X. he's been doing something else too. He has another company that's been tracked in the scientific community called neuralink, N E U R a link. And these are implants that he says are close to being ready for human testing.

    The size of a very thick quarter that would be implanted in your brain about a thousand wires coming from this thing into your brain, that monitors your brain and the brain function, and the idea, ultimately, he'll be able to hook you up to the internet.

    Now I can see all sorts of potential for this thing. With the pigs, what he was able to do though is see the pig moving it's leg via this implant.

    So we got a long time to go before this is something to worry about. And we all become part of this star net, which also he's putting up in outer space, which is easy, low earth orbit satellites we'll be using for communications.

    Justin McIssac: [00:02:37] So Craig, space X I think is great. I'm down with that. That's awesome. I liked the fact that Elon Musk shot a car into the, into outer space for no reason. That was cool.

    Can't wait to be able to afford a Tesla someday. I'm going to put the brakes on  Elon Musk, putting a chip in my head because I've seen enough sci-fi movies to know where this ends up and it doesn't end up in a good place. I don't think.

    Alisha Preston: [00:02:57] Yeah. I'm with you, Justin. I'm going hard. No, I don't know why I would want that.

    I want to know. So he can see the pigs move. Can he read their minds? Because if it's, what are the pigs thinking about?

    Craig Peterson: [00:03:15] Yeah, we haven't gotten to that stage yet. all he can do is he can sense the pig's movement of its feet through the brain. You probably know different parts of the brain are responsible for a different stops without getting into all of it. But as far as reading your mind goes, The estimates are, we are many decades away from that, we've been surprised before Alicia.

    It's absolutely amazing what's happening out there. The other big story of course, of the week, is Apple. Hey, it turns out that Apple developed this huge platform. They have this app store where they review all of the apps to make sure they're safe. They market the apps and make them available to people. Heaven forbid Apple is charging developers to put their apps up on the app store. It's amazing.

    Now Facebook is fighting them. Facebook's trying to tell people Apple charges as 30% tax, is what they're calling it, on anything we sell via an app. Which has been happening for a long time, Alicia?

    Alisha Preston: [00:04:19] I actually know about this one because the kid plays Fortnite and had to get the PlayStation version so she could play because she can't do it on her phone anymore. Cause they're butting heads, the app store and fortnight.

    Craig Peterson: [00:04:34] Big time and they're removing a number of these games from the Apple app store.

    The reason is that now the makers of Fortnite and others have decided, we don't like to pay this, afterward tax, they'd call it. So we're just going to have people buy it directly from us and we'll give them a 10 or 20% discount. So they're actually making a few extra bucks and Apple said, wait a minute, that's against all of the terms, but it isn't just Apple. Google's doing the same thing with its play store. So this battle will continue for a while.

     On one other quick thing. we just talked about Tesla and Elon Musk. Did you hear now about this Russian tourist that was just arrested he'd been chatting up a Tesla employee and offered him a million dollars to cripple. Tesla's Nevada Gigafactory that makes batteries with malware.

    Talking about espionage. It's not just the Chinese, the Russians are putting their money where the Chinese mouth is, right?

    Alisha Preston: [00:05:37] Why what's their problem with Tesla?

    Craig Peterson: [00:05:38] They want to get a head in both China and Russia of our technology and they have stolen it.

    I've seen it. With my own two eyes right here in New Hampshire with active Chinese backorders. But in this case, they really wanted to cripple the company.

    That's a good question. Were they going after the country? They wanted us to fall behind because Russia does have, in fact, a ripped-off version of the new Tesla truck that's being made by a couple of small companies over there.

    Or was this something else, that they haven't said yet? But the FBI has been busy arresting the Chinese nationals and now Russians for absolute out and out espionage.

    Justin McIssac: [00:06:22] Listen, I give you a million dollars. Perhaps you make Tesla not function as well. Eh, you put the moose and squirrel code into a Tesla source code. They didn't make it go away.

    Craig Peterson: [00:06:35] Yes. Exactly. So the Russians really did do something after all.

    Alisha Preston: [00:06:41] See. Now, I see you're going to be talking about ransomware red flags. Technology seems to be getting ahead when it comes to being able to contact people and try to get money from them.

    Just the other day, I get an email from an aunt I hadn't spoken to in two years and it was her name and it was to my actual email address saying, she needed to get an Amazon gift card for her niece. Could I get one for her?  I thought to myself, she's older,  maybe she actually doesn't know how to do this, but I decided to call my cousin, her son instead and she knew nothing about it. But that's how specific the targeting is getting. The people are replicating names and emails and contacting their contacts.

    Craig Peterson: [00:07:21] You're absolutely right. I've got one of those last weeks, too. I have a whole file of them and I break them out, when I'm doing these free training I do, to show people what's going on.

    That's a big one right now. I need an Amazon gift card for a relative. You've talked about the targeting. There have been many breaches of large systems, Equifax being the one that comes to mind for most people. Where well over 200 million people's personal information.

    Everything's available online, but the bad guys have been doing, not only do they have your name, social security number, et cetera, but they have breaches across the board. It's estimated right now, over 300 billion records. They've been taking all of those, putting them together, trying to find matches and they have been finding matches and it turns out, yeah, they found Alicia Prestons and they sent out Alicia an email, pretending it was from the aunt.

    Now, in some cases, what they do is they'll break into your aunt's email because yahoo and many others have been hacked. So let's go into the aunt's email. They will have a person look or they'll go having to have an artificial intelligence programmer, machine learning, look at the email. They'll find, Oh, she sent an email to Alicia Therefore, I'm going to send one using your aunt's actual account because her name and password were found online.

    Go to a website right now called have I been pwned.com? Have I been pwned and type in your email address, and it'll tell you everywhere that email is found on the dark web, all along with all of your other information that was stolen along with your email.

    Alisha Preston: [00:09:02] I'm not going to do that because I don't want to know, but that's good information.

    Craig Peterson: [00:09:09] P W N E D by the way, P W N E D

    Alisha Preston: [00:09:11] For those who want to be completed incredibly stressed out, go to that website and find out.

    Craig Peterson. Thank you so much for joining us. You can hear him on tech talk during, on the weekend on this station.

    Craig Peterson: [00:09:22] You too. that was fun and got a little bit longer than not usually too with Jack this morning. But, man, we are getting closer. I can't believe it's all like what September tomorrow.

    We will we'll have some stuff comin' up for you. We've been very busy. So keep an eye out on your emails. Hopefully, you're on my email list. If you're not, you won't get my newsletter. But you also won't find out about all this training they're going to be doing and all kinds of very cool information.

    The goal here is to send out the newsletter, but also to other little emails every week, just going down one big point. We were trying to keep it. So it's two or three minutes, but doing some education, on, of course, cybersecurity, the weekend newsletter is going to be like, it always has been more or less, some cybersecurity, some other cool stuff. Like I was talking with Alicia this morning about with, over at Elon Musk's company where they're doing brain implants. The midweek stuff is going to be little bits of training to help you out. Keep your mind on. Just remember their cybersecurity issues out there. So make sure you've subscribed. Again, Craig peterson.com/subscribe. 

    I expect I'll be back on the 'morrow. Take care of 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

    11 min
  • Welcome! Remote Work and Security of Home IoT devices on network plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

    Welcome!

    Craig discusses problems that businesses can face when remote workers have IoT devices on the network they use to connect to work.

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

    ---

    Read More:

    Newly Patched Amazon Alexa Flaws -- A Red Flag for Home Workers

    74 Days From the Presidential Election, Security Worries Mount Respawn point: The inevitable reincarnation of the corporate office Smart-Lock Hacks Point to Larger IoT Problems Cops in Miami, NYC arrest protesters from facial recognition matches 7 Ways to Keep Your Remote Workforce Safe Using Zoom Can Get You Arrested! Former Chief Security Officer For Uber Charged With Obstruction of Justice

    ---

    Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

    Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey, we got a new red flag for home workers when it comes to those smart digital assistants that we have in our homes. Yeah, indeed. Not only can it cause problems for us in our homes, but that problem can go right through to the business.

    Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me today and thanks for all of your messages. I've gotten some great comments. This week had one that I'm going to do another followup on, but it had to do with what kind of router to use at home. I did a whole webinar on this back in March. I'm going to add that back to my list again because obviously there's still a lot of questions.

    Many people can't attend these webinars, but I really would suggest when I do come out with them. That you consider attending if you possibly can. I get it. You can't always attend these things that you'd like to attend, but I responded directly anyways. and I've gotten to the point now where I look at it and say, these crappy, sorry for that term, pieces of, hardware that you buy from the big box retailers that are given to you by your friends, at the phone company, the cable company, they are not worth it. It is not worth it. You've got to at least go to the prosumer stuff. And that's what I said to him. The prosumers stuff means that really you got to get something like a Cisco go hardware.

    Really? You do. Yeah. There's a lot of alternatives out there. Juniper has some stuff. HP has some stuff, but there's only one that has a beautifully integrated ecosystem. The low end of the consumer world nowadays really has to be prosumer and me, I'll let you know if there's something that comes out that I think is as good or better.

    But, also that Cisco is what I do. My company mainstream has been the number one, installing reseller of Cisco gear in the Northeast US, quarters into quarters. So it's something I like. So just to let you know. Okay. But bottom line, my advice to him was trying to get the Cisco GO stuff.

    Now you can buy it on Amazon, but there are things that you need that you cannot buy from Amazon. You've got to go to a licensed reseller in order to get the more advanced protection that you get from some of this Cisco software that is available for the go. Of course, as you move up the line, there's better and better software, but at least start there.

    Let's start the show off here with our first article. You'll see this, of course in your newsletter that came out this week, and this is something I've talked about a long time in general. And in general, what we're talking about is. The whole internet of things concept, and how many years have we talked about that? It's been at least a decade. In fact, I was going through some of the articles on our website.

    We're just shutting some of them down because they are so old. But back in 2007, I was already talking about this. So we are 13 years later. And we still have these same problems. People still aren't taking care of them, and they're still doing things the same way and they are getting nailed. And nowadays, particularly when we're thinking about workers working from home, and I am going to be in a couple of weeks doing a little sip series about working from home and what are the top things you can do to protect your business. If you have people connecting from home now, I don't mean like they're just connecting from home an hour a week, nor do we're only gonna talk about the people who are working from home pretty much full time. Doesn't matter. There are some things you have to do, things you can't do.

    And so we'll be going into those with some of the training coming up in a couple of weeks and make sure. You are on my newsletter list. If you want to find out about that stuff. That's just Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

    So we're working from home. I think we've established that we're starting to see office space deserts now. I went to see my chiropractor, this week and massage therapist. I'm standing outside her office and she's in this cluster of offices with other people having a little business and of course, it's a type of business where she can't really do it from home now can she. She has to actually have her hands on you in order to do some of this stuff. And boy, was it. Oh, a wonderful thing. Cause my neck and my back just it's been really bad after that whole kind of COVID, in bed for a couple of weeks, thing. And. I looked around the parking lot. It was shocking to me. I was there and this was after lunch, usually, there are a lot of people who are there in the parking lot, not just for her business. there's gotta be a hundred different office spaces that are in there. There has to be that in this case, when I was there were three cars in the parking lot and that was it.

    So you talking about these office space deserts. Where the people just aren't going in there anymore. It's just astounding. Some of these big cities like New York City, the whole city is shut down. They're losing all of these restaurants and all of these places where people used to go shopping because people aren't going there.

    Where are they? They're at home. In some cases, you have to be at home. Think about all of the families or the young kids, where the kids are no longer going into school. They're sitting at home, they're on their computers, hopefully, following the teacher and doing their schoolwork. Now I got to put a side note here.

    This is the perfect opportunity for you as a parent. To see what your kids are being taught, to look over the shoulder. Now it's amazing to me. I have read quotes from teachers who said they don't want parents looking in because they don't want parents to know what's being taught. Then there are some unions in some of the local school districts that are saying, it has to do with the privacy of the other children in the class.

    You use to be able to, as a parent go and basically audit your school's classroom that your kid was in. So you could go there and sit in the back and just see what's being taught and how it's being taught. and then the teachers didn't like that because heaven forbid a parent question the professional.

    Now we found out, some of these teachers, in fact, a very large number of them are blatant Marxists, just teaching the Marxists dogma. You can see that now when you look at all of these fascists marching in the street, it's just incredible. So take that opportunity and watch what your kids are doing.

    Watch what the teachers are saying and help your kids out. But in many cases, obviously we can't and get people to watch kids. We can't get babysitters because there's such a high demand for that. So we are forced to work from home. For that very reason, just to make sure that the place doesn't burn down and maybe you can get a few minutes to watch what the teacher's saying. What's really going on there in that classroom.

    So if you're working from home, what are you doing? we are sitting there on very frequently, our own computers connected again, quite frequently to the network at the office. Now, if you've attended any of my VPN training, that VPN we're designed for businesses to connect to. Networks at different locations and that's what they're good at. They're not really designed to protect anything other than the data while it's being transported. That actually becomes a problem, if you use one of these VPN services, it makes you less secure. I go into the reasons why in my VPN course, and we'll be teaching that one again. So keep an eye out.

    But we're now looking at having people at home using their home computers, which don't have all of the protections in place that hopefully, your business computers had, the medium and large businesses have some pretty decent protections in place, but the small businesses, those businesses under 500 employees, very rarely have the right kind of protection in place.

    So now you have a personal home computer to the network at the business. What's on that home computer? We've talked about that before. That's a real problem, but now we're asking them the question of what else is on your home network that's connecting to that business network. One of the things is probably your Amazon, Alexa, or your Google home or who knows what other things. We got light bulbs hooked up. We've got all kinds of things hooked up to our home networks. They found a trio of vulnerabilities recently in Amazon Alexa devices, just as they found them in all of these others, a Google home, everything else.

    Apparently these vulnerabilities could have led to broader attacks on the home networks because of the way, most of us are misconfiguring VPNs. Those attacks can now easily spread over the network to our business computers. So these are vulnerabilities that were made public last week by researchers at Checkpoint.

    Checkpoint has been in the security business for a long time. They made firewalls. I think they're based out of Israel. They've had some very cool stuff, but we're looking at more than 200 million Alexa smart home devices. I have them in my home, but what I've done is, I actually have five different networks in my home.

    One of them is for the internet of things devices, so if they are compromised, they cannot get out and they cannot get to any of the other devices inside my network.

    Then, of course, I'm using professional gear for my network, not just prosumer gear. I would advise people to look at that very seriously.

    So next we have a study coming out about the. The presidential election and how both parties, both sides are very concerned about some security concerns.

    So we'll get into that. When we get back.

    Stick around, you're listening to Craig Peterson and I'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

    12 min
  • Welcome! Remote Work and Security of Home IoT devices on network plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

    Welcome!

    Craig discusses problems that businesses can face when remote workers have IoT devices on the network they use to connect to work.

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

    ---

    Read More:

    Newly Patched Amazon Alexa Flaws -- A Red Flag for Home Workers

    74 Days From the Presidential Election, Security Worries Mount   Respawn point: The inevitable reincarnation of the corporate office
      Smart-Lock Hacks Point to Larger IoT Problems
      Cops in Miami, NYC arrest protesters from facial recognition matches
      7 Ways to Keep Your Remote Workforce Safe   Using Zoom Can Get You Arrested!   Former Chief Security Officer For Uber Charged With Obstruction of Justice

    ---

    Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

    Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey, we got a new red flag for home workers when it comes to those smart digital assistants that we have in our homes. Yeah, indeed. Not only can it cause problems for us in our homes, but that problem can go right through to the business.

    Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me today and thanks for all of your messages. I've gotten some great comments. This week had one that I'm going to do another followup on, but it had to do with what kind of router to use at home. I did a whole webinar on this back in March. I'm going to add that back to my list again because obviously there's still a lot of questions.

    Many people can't attend these webinars, but I really would suggest when I do come out with them. That you consider attending if you possibly can. I get it. You can't always attend these things that you'd like to attend, but I responded directly anyways. and I've gotten to the point now where I look at it and say, these crappy, sorry for that term, pieces of, hardware that you buy from the big box retailers that are given to you by your friends, at the phone company, the cable company, they are not worth it. It is not worth it. You've got to at least go to the prosumer stuff. And that's what I said to him. The prosumers stuff means that really you got to get something like a Cisco go hardware.

    Really? You do. Yeah. There's a lot of alternatives out there. Juniper has some stuff. HP has some stuff, but there's only one that has a beautifully integrated ecosystem. The low end of the consumer world nowadays really has to be prosumer and me, I'll let you know if there's something that comes out that I think is as good or better.

    But, also that Cisco is what I do. My company mainstream has been the number one, installing reseller of Cisco gear in the Northeast US, quarters into quarters. So it's something I like. So just to let you know. Okay. But bottom line, my advice to him was trying to get the Cisco GO stuff.

    Now you can buy it on Amazon, but there are things that you need that you cannot buy from Amazon. You've got to go to a licensed reseller in order to get the more advanced protection that you get from some of this Cisco software that is available for the go. Of course, as you move up the line, there's better and better software, but at least start there.

    Let's start the show off here with our first article. You'll see this, of course in your newsletter that came out this week, and this is something I've talked about a long time in general. And in general, what we're talking about is. The whole internet of things concept, and how many years have we talked about that? It's been at least a decade. In fact, I was going through some of the articles on our website.

    We're just shutting some of them down because they are so old. But back in 2007, I was already talking about this. So we are 13 years later. And we still have these same problems.  People still aren't taking care of them, and they're still doing things the same way and they are getting nailed. And nowadays, particularly when we're thinking about workers working from home, and I am going to be in a couple of weeks doing a little sip series about working from home and what are the top things you can do to protect your business. If you have people connecting from home now, I don't mean like they're just connecting from home an hour a week, nor do we're only gonna talk about the people who are working from home pretty much full time. Doesn't matter. There are some things you have to do, things you can't do.

    And so we'll be going into those with some of the training coming up in a couple of weeks and make sure. You are on my newsletter list. If you want to find out about that stuff. That's just Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

    So we're working from home. I think we've established that we're starting to see office space deserts now. I went to see my chiropractor, this week and massage therapist.  I'm standing outside her office and she's in this cluster of offices with other people having a little business and of course, it's a type of business where she can't really do it from home now can she. She has to actually have her hands on you in order to do some of this stuff. And boy, was it. Oh, a wonderful thing. Cause my neck and my back just it's been really bad after that whole kind of COVID, in bed for a couple of weeks, thing. And. I looked around the parking lot. It was shocking to me. I was there and this was after lunch, usually, there are a lot of people who are there in the parking lot, not just for her business. there's gotta be a hundred different office spaces that are in there. There has to be that in this case, when I was there were three cars in the parking lot and that was it.

    So you talking about these office space deserts. Where the people just aren't going in there anymore. It's just astounding. Some of these big cities like New York City, the whole city is shut down. They're losing all of these restaurants and all of these places where people used to go shopping because people aren't going there.

    Where are they? They're at home. In some cases, you have to be at home. Think about all of the families or the young kids, where the kids are no longer going into school. They're sitting at home, they're on their computers, hopefully, following the teacher and doing their schoolwork. Now I got to put a side note here.

    This is the perfect opportunity for you as a parent. To see what your kids are being taught, to look over the shoulder. Now it's amazing to me. I have read quotes from teachers who said they don't want parents looking in because they don't want parents to know what's being taught. Then there are some unions in some of the local school districts that are saying, it has to do with the privacy of the other children in the class.

    You use to be able to, as a parent go and basically audit your school's classroom that your kid was in. So you could go there and sit in the back and just see what's being taught and how it's being taught. and then the teachers didn't like that because heaven forbid a parent question the professional.

    Now we found out, some of these teachers, in fact, a very large number of them are blatant Marxists, just teaching the Marxists dogma. You can see that now when you look at all of these fascists marching in the street, it's just incredible. So take that opportunity and watch what your kids are doing.

    Watch what the teachers are saying and help your kids out. But in many cases, obviously we can't and get people to watch kids. We can't get babysitters because there's such a high demand for that. So we are forced to work from home. For that very reason, just to make sure that the place doesn't burn down and maybe you can get a few minutes to watch what the teacher's saying. What's really going on there in that classroom.

    So if you're working from home, what are you doing? we are sitting there on very frequently, our own computers connected again, quite frequently to the network at the office. Now, if you've attended any of my VPN training, that VPN we're designed for businesses to connect to. Networks at different locations and that's what they're good at. They're not really designed to protect anything other than the data while it's being transported. That actually becomes a problem, if you use one of these VPN services, it makes you less secure. I go into the reasons why in my VPN course, and we'll be teaching that one again. So keep an eye out.

    But we're now looking at having people at home using their home computers, which don't have all of the protections in place that hopefully, your business computers had, the medium and large businesses have some pretty decent protections in place, but the small businesses, those businesses under 500 employees, very rarely have the right kind of protection in place.

    So now you have a personal home computer to the network at the business. What's on that home computer? We've talked about that before. That's a real problem, but now we're asking them the question of what else is on your home network that's connecting to that business network. One of the things is probably your Amazon, Alexa, or your Google home or who knows what other things. We got light bulbs hooked up. We've got all kinds of things hooked up to our home networks. They found a trio of vulnerabilities recently in Amazon Alexa devices, just as they found them in all of these others, a Google home, everything else.

    Apparently these vulnerabilities could have led to broader attacks on the home networks because of the way, most of us are misconfiguring VPNs. Those attacks can now easily spread over the network to our business computers. So these are vulnerabilities that were made public last week by researchers at Checkpoint.

    Checkpoint has been in the security business for a long time. They made firewalls. I think they're based out of Israel. They've had some very cool stuff, but we're looking at more than 200 million Alexa smart home devices. I have them in my home, but what I've done is, I actually have five different networks in my home.

    One of them is for the internet of things devices, so if they are compromised, they cannot get out and they cannot get to any of the other devices inside my network.

    Then, of course, I'm using professional gear for my network, not just prosumer gear. I would advise people to look at that very seriously.

    So next we have a study coming out about the. The presidential election and how both parties, both sides are very concerned about some security concerns.

    So we'll get into that. When we get back.

    Stick around, you're listening to Craig Peterson and I'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

    12 min
  • Welcome! Security Concerns on Voting Technology plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

    Welcome!

    Craig discusses problems related to Mail-in Voting and Voting technology.

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

    ---

    Read More:

    Newly Patched Amazon Alexa Flaws -- A Red Flag for Home Workers

    74 Days From the Presidential Election, Security Worries Mount Respawn point: The inevitable reincarnation of the corporate office Smart-Lock Hacks Point to Larger IoT Problems Cops in Miami, NYC arrest protesters from facial recognition matches 7 Ways to Keep Your Remote Workforce Safe Using Zoom Can Get You Arrested! Former Chief Security Officer For Uber Charged With Obstruction of Justice

    ---

    Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

    Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Red team-blue team. This is a very interesting problem that is now being confirmed. Through a study. A bipartisan study. We are in trouble with our election this year.

    Hey everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining us.

    Man alive! can anything be more political than a presidential election cycle? It is as. Downloading what has been happening when what's being said right now. There are a number of studies that have looked into the efficacy, the ability to have a fair election where we really know the results. There've been all kinds of suggestions.

    We've talked on the show before. About well, we could have, an app that we use to vote. We saw what happened with the Democrat primary in Iowa, right? Total mess. We saw what happened with this app called Vote. I don't know if you heard about this, but this is another voting company. There were some security assessments done and votes criticize the researchers and their methods.

    The security issues that were uncovered with the votes application, we've actually confirmed a security company called Trail of Bits in March this year. Some serious problems. At the USENIX security conference that just occurred here, about a week ago. Okay. They had a panel of voting experts and they got together and they talked about election security.

    They in fact had a couple of sessions at the Usenix security conference that was covering the voting systems and technology. We've talked before about the black hat. Conference and how they set up these voting machines and just see if they could be he hacked. There was like a 12-year old hacked a voting machine that just so simple for so many of these machines out there.

    The biggest problem with the voting machines is you don't have a physical audit trail in many cases. What did they do? They added some audit trails to some of them. They have a thermal printer. have you ever taken the receipt from the grocery store, stuck it in your pocket, and left it there for a couple of weeks and it becomes illegible or heaven forbid, it gets too warm? Maybe it is stuck in a hot room or a storage room or a car. It turns completely black.

    What good is that sort of thing going to do? All you have is a whole bunch of lines, one at a time about what the votes were. Very hard to tabulate. It's not like the cards that you can use to vote on which many States in new England Jews and frankly, our country right wide right now.

    But those cards. You can sit there and analyze them. You might've seen a video of what happened in the Florida election and holding these punch cards up to try and figure out. Is this a hanging Chad and pregnant? Chad was a punched. Was it not Punched? Was this intentional? Did they mean to do that instead?

    All of this craziness with the cards. Let's say the question is about the president and who was voted for, was it Joe Biden or was it, Donald Trump, and all they have to do is look at the card. Okay. there's partisan left, a partisan right, maybe a neutral observer standing there. They say this is clearly Joe Biden. So they put it in the Joe Biden pile next. Who is this? that's clearly President Trump, so we'll put it in the Donald Trump pile. Then when you're done, you just count them in the pile versus these audit trails. Yeah. They're audit trails. But how do you do that when it's a paper tape?

    How do you do that? If it's been written into a database? How do you know that database wasn't altered? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. there's, there are ways to track things in databases and databases having different types of integrity protection, but overall, you can't really trust it.

    And these researchers reverse-engineered this votes Android application, and they did a static analysis on this back end server software that was actually tallying the vote and without having access to the source code without having them a massive number of people who are trying to analyze the system as Russia does.

    Russia has its hands on some of our voting equipment. It's easy enough to buy online and pretends you're someone you aren't. So they were doing this blind, the security researchers, and they found five high severity vulnerabilities and a serious privacy issue.

    That's using one of these apps from a company that does voting. And we've talked about some of the different voting systems out there from Diebold and many others that have various types of problems. Really. The only way to know if a vote is valid. Is to have a, I like the card ID where you fill in the little circle and then that gets run through a voting machine and it's all overseen by, hopefully, independent people, but I don't care if they're partisan one way or the other and that machine tallies it and keeps the card.

    So you can now go back and do a spot analysis on it, or you can do deep analysis on it. I think all of that sort of thing makes sense.

    But that's not what we're talking about this year. We're talking about having a presidential election where people are mailing in ballots. It just blows my mind. People comparing it somehow to absentee ballots and absentee voting.

    It is not the same thing. And here's why. If you want an absentee ballot, you go to the town clerk or the election official. And you swear out in front of them that you need an absentee ballot. Now in most places that have now been removed that requirement to say, yeah, I'm going to be out of town out of the country. Eh, whatever the reason is, I'm not going to be able to vote on that day to this year. I think it's November 3rd and therefore needed an absentee ballot. Okay. So that's step one. And that's been removed in almost all cases.

    I don't have a particular problem with that. Although I would much rather see someone showing up to vote on voting day, which by the way is required by the constitution. I have no idea how this early voting stuff has happened, how it could possibly be constitutional. The vote is November 3rd. It doesn't start on September 1st. It's November 3rd, and that allows the campaigns to get their messaging straight.

    It allows the little guys to actually compete with these people who are already serving in office. Anyhow, that's a separate issue.

    You have now been standing in front of that clerk's office. And that clerk now brings out the paperwork. what ballot do you want? You might have a partisan ballot, but for the general election, you don't, you have all of the final candidates and now they verify you are who you say you are.

    In most cases, that means you present a valid ID. They check the voter rolls and make sure you are eligible to vote and once that's all taken care of, they will hand you the paperwork. Then you can go home. You can vote on that. You sealed it in an envelope, you sign the outside of the envelope across the seal. You follow the instructions. They are not that complicated. And you either drop that back at the clerk's office, which is the safest way to do it, or you mail it and it goes to the clerk's office and it has to be there before the election. And there's some argument that it just has to be stamped by the post office before the end of November 3rd. That's the absentee voting process.

    What's happening in many States is they're saying, Oh, all you have to do now is look in your mailbox because we're sending ballots to everybody that we have a name and address for and then you just fill it out. You send it in. TaDa all done. No verification of who you are.

    In some cases like the way Florida has been doing that, there is a verification that they did receive your ballot, but that's kind of it.

    And there are more problems. And these are what I'm going to talk about when we get back, what are the real problems? The deep problems when we're talking about these ballots.

    We'll get into that. Here are the problems that hackers could use. Very inexpensively, very easy for us to have zero confidence that the vote tally is right.

    So stick around. I'll be right back. You listening to Craig Peterson right here on the radio, on podcasts, and [email protected].

    Stick around.

    ---

    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

    10 min
  • Welcome! Security Concerns on Voting Technology plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

    Welcome!

    Craig discusses problems related to Mail-in Voting and Voting technology.

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

    ---

    Read More:

    Newly Patched Amazon Alexa Flaws -- A Red Flag for Home Workers

    74 Days From the Presidential Election, Security Worries Mount   Respawn point: The inevitable reincarnation of the corporate office
      Smart-Lock Hacks Point to Larger IoT Problems
      Cops in Miami, NYC arrest protesters from facial recognition matches
      7 Ways to Keep Your Remote Workforce Safe   Using Zoom Can Get You Arrested!   Former Chief Security Officer For Uber Charged With Obstruction of Justice

    ---

    Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

    Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Red team-blue team. This is a very interesting problem that is now being confirmed. Through a study. A bipartisan study. We are in trouble with our election this year.

    Hey everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining us.

    Man alive! can anything be more political than a presidential election cycle? It is as. Downloading what has been happening when what's being said right now. There are a number of studies that have looked into the efficacy, the ability to have a fair election where we really know the results. There've been all kinds of suggestions.

    We've talked on the show before. About well, we could have, an app that we use to vote. We saw what happened with the Democrat primary in Iowa, right? Total mess. We saw what happened with this app called Vote. I don't know if you heard about this, but this is another voting company. There were some security assessments done and votes criticize the researchers and their methods.

    The security issues that were uncovered with the votes application, we've actually confirmed a security company called Trail of Bits in March this year. Some serious problems.  At the USENIX security conference that just occurred here, about a week ago. Okay. They had a panel of voting experts and they got together and they talked about election security.

    They in fact had a couple of sessions at the Usenix security conference that was covering the voting systems and technology. We've talked before about the black hat. Conference and how they set up these voting machines and just see if they could be he hacked. There was like a 12-year old hacked a voting machine that just so simple for so many of these machines out there.

    The biggest problem with the voting machines is you don't have a physical audit trail in many cases. What did they do? They added some audit trails to some of them. They have a thermal printer. have you ever taken the receipt from the grocery store, stuck it in your pocket, and left it there for a couple of weeks and it becomes illegible or heaven forbid, it gets too warm? Maybe it is stuck in a hot room or a storage room or a car.  It turns completely black.

    What good is that sort of thing going to do? All you have is a whole bunch of lines, one at a time about what the votes were. Very hard to tabulate. It's not like the cards that you can use to vote on which many States in new England Jews and frankly, our country right wide right now.

    But those cards. You can sit there and analyze them. You might've seen a video of what happened in the Florida election and holding these punch cards up to try and figure out. Is this a hanging Chad and pregnant? Chad was a punched. Was it not Punched? Was this intentional? Did they mean to do that instead?

    All of this craziness with the cards. Let's say the question is about the president and who was voted for, was it Joe Biden or was it, Donald Trump, and all they have to do is look at the card. Okay. there's partisan left, a partisan right, maybe a neutral observer standing there. They say this is clearly Joe Biden. So they put it in the Joe Biden pile next. Who is this? that's clearly President Trump, so we'll put it in the Donald Trump pile. Then when you're done, you just count them in the pile versus these audit trails. Yeah. They're audit trails. But how do you do that when it's a paper tape?

    How do you do that? If it's been written into a database? How do you know that database wasn't altered? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. there's, there are ways to track things in databases and databases having different types of integrity protection, but overall, you can't really trust it.

    And these researchers reverse-engineered this votes Android application, and they did a static analysis on this back end server software that was actually tallying the vote and without having access to the source code without having them a massive number of people who are trying to analyze the system as Russia does.

    Russia has its hands on some of our voting equipment. It's easy enough to buy online and pretends you're someone you aren't. So they were doing this blind, the security researchers, and they found five high severity vulnerabilities and a serious privacy issue.

    That's using one of these apps from a company that does voting. And we've talked about some of the different voting systems out there from Diebold and many others that have various types of problems. Really. The only way to know if a vote is valid. Is to have a, I like the card ID where you fill in the little circle and then that gets run through a voting machine and it's all overseen by, hopefully, independent people, but I don't care if they're partisan one way or the other and that machine tallies it and keeps the card.

    So you can now go back and do a spot analysis on it, or you can do deep analysis on it. I think all of that sort of thing makes sense.

    But that's not what we're talking about this year. We're talking about having a presidential election where people are mailing in ballots. It just blows my mind. People comparing it somehow to absentee ballots and absentee voting.

    It is not the same thing. And here's why. If you want an absentee ballot, you go to the town clerk or the election official. And you swear out in front of them that you need an absentee ballot. Now in most places that have now been removed that requirement to say, yeah, I'm going to be out of town out of the country. Eh, whatever the reason is, I'm not going to be able to vote on that day to this year. I think it's November 3rd and therefore needed an absentee ballot. Okay. So that's step one. And that's been removed in almost all cases.

     I don't have a particular problem with that. Although I would much rather see someone showing up to vote on voting day, which by the way is required by the constitution. I have no idea how this early voting stuff has happened, how it could possibly be constitutional. The vote is November 3rd. It doesn't start on September 1st. It's November 3rd, and that allows the campaigns to get their messaging straight.

    It allows the little guys to actually compete with these people who are already serving in office. Anyhow, that's a separate issue.

    You have now been standing in front of that clerk's office. And that clerk now brings out the paperwork. what ballot do you want? You might have a partisan ballot, but for the general election, you don't, you have all of the final candidates and now they verify you are who you say you are.

    In most cases, that means you present a valid ID. They check the voter rolls and make sure you are eligible to vote and once that's all taken care of, they will hand you the paperwork. Then you can go home. You can vote on that. You sealed it in an envelope, you sign the outside of the envelope across the seal. You follow the instructions. They are not that complicated. And you either drop that back at the clerk's office, which is the safest way to do it, or you mail it and it goes to the clerk's office and it has to be there before the election. And there's some argument that it just has to be stamped by the post office before the end of November 3rd. That's the absentee voting process.

    What's happening in many States is they're saying, Oh, all you have to do now is look in your mailbox because we're sending ballots to everybody that we have a name and address for and then you just fill it out. You send it in. TaDa all done. No verification of who you are.

    In some cases like the way Florida has been doing that, there is a verification that they did receive your ballot, but that's kind of it.

    And there are more problems. And these are what I'm going to talk about when we get back, what are the real problems? The deep problems when we're talking about these ballots.

    We'll get into that. Here are the problems that hackers could use. Very inexpensively, very easy for us to have zero confidence that the vote tally is right.

     So stick around. I'll be right back. You listening to Craig Peterson right here on the radio, on podcasts, and [email protected].

    Stick around.

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  • Welcome! Mounting Election Security Concerns plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

    Welcome!

    Craig discusses the mounting security issues revolving around the upcoming elections.

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

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    Read More:

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    Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

    Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Before the break, we were talking about some of the problems with different types of voting, the electronic voting machines, the apps that have been used and developed, and serious problems with those. But now we're going to talk about the problem with the mail.

    Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson. Thanks for joining us today.

    A great little study was just performed and I kinda liked it. The way they did some of this stuff. They were looking at the problems we are going to have with the presidential election this year. A lot of States, first of all, don't bother checking your voter ID. They don't bother checking to make sure you are a legal voter. Of course, that's a problem and you might know, I live in New Hampshire, our state sport is voting up here. It is. Politics we're first in the nation when it comes to the primaries and we pay a lot of attention to this. One of the things that is illegal and yet happen every time, every two years there's a vote. This is absolutely illegal, is that these kids are in our schools. Because we have some Ivy League colleges, universities. We have even high schools that have kids in them that are of age to vote. It is illegal for them to vote because they are not New Hampshire residents are just here for school and yet they vote every year.

    It really bothers me, right? Because us taxpayers in New Hampshire, are being or election severely influenced by people that have legally no right to vote in New Hampshire. I could tell you all kinds of stories, talking with people that come up from mass to vote in New Hampshire elections that have no residency in New Hampshire. There is so much fraud. It just makes my mind boggle.

    So this year, the only, or the problems that people have already been talking about, President Trump has talked about, the Democrats used to talk about with people voting illegally. We are looking at problems of, what happens when a state mails out ballots to pretty much every person in the state.

    There have already been complaints in States where there have been ballots showing up for people who haven't lived in a house 15 years. Are you kidding me? Don't you guys purge your voter rolls? If people aren't voting it is absolutely insane. So what happens if a ballot shows up at a house and the person hasn't lived there in 15 years? Is someone going to take that ballot and fudge it for their favorite candidate?

    How about these homes that people are living in, right where we've had all these COVID deaths. Many of these people are invalid, unfortunately. So are their caretakers going to take their ballots and vote for them? How do we know that a legitimate voter voted and only voted once? We don't. Okay.

    That's a problem that many people have I've been talking about, but I talk about tech here and security behind the tech. One of the big problems that we could have right now. Has been proven by this red team-blue team approach. If you've been in the military, you are probably very familiar with red team-blue team.

    This is where you will have a team of people that are attacking. We have another team that are defending. So that whole concept has been moved into the security realm in cybersecurity. We use it. I got a book on it about what to do, how to do that sort of thing. If you're the attacker, here's how you attack.

    If you're the defender, here are some good ways to defend it again. That's why it's so important. If you're trying to defend a network to have a unified integrated defense system so you can see when things are happening. You don't have software from these guys, hardware from those guys, hardware from another party, hardware from yet a fourth party. It's impossible to defend when you have too many disparate data points. It might actually be pointing in different directions, every one of them. So you've gotta be very careful about that.

    So they had a red team group of attackers that had security professionals, election experts, and law enforcement from both sides of the political spectrum.

    They tried a whole bunch of things. Their goal was to undermine confidence in the election results themselves, as well as reducing election turnout. So we've heard accusations that four years ago, the Russians were meddling in our election. Of course, they were, and it happens every year.

    Russians meddle. They really are trying to undermine confidence in it. But the Marxists big time, that's what they want to do. They wanted to divide and conquer. They don't want to have any sort of trust, in any sort of government entity or anybody that has any authority so that they can collapse the system and then take over.

    So when we're talking about this red team, trying to do something to the election. It's very difficult for them to get into all of the secretaries of state offices computers because all of these secretaries of state have different systems. It's very difficult to break into them. Remember, we do not have a national election at all, ever in the United States.

    We have 50 individual state elections. It's designed in such a way the small States have a voice against the big States. That's very important. Unfortunately, they changed some of this here with an amendment to the constitution. Senators were supposed to protect the state and they changed all of that by turning it into a popular election, but that's a separate issue.

    You've got this red team and if they can't get into the 50 secretaries of States, individual election systems to modify the results or get into the voting machines to modify the results. What's the next best thing, obviously, you're trying to undermine the faith in elections. In voting. Undermine the faith in the results.

    We're already hearing from both sides, that we're not going to trust the results. In fact, just this week, I think it was Wednesday, maybe Tuesday, secretary of state Clinton, Hillary Clinton came out and said, no matter what, if Joe Biden doesn't win, he should never concede. Because there is fraud coming. We know President Trump's been warning about fraud as well.

    So we've got to come from both sides. Well, they found, through this study, that they can easily and inexpensively spread misinformation about new outbreaks in the COVID virus and that'll hamper people going out to vote. It's going to hamper the processes of mail-in ballots. And if the aim is undermining faith in the election and not necessarily swinging the vote towards one candidate or the other. It's very easy to do.

    So we've got a great quote on my website here. You'll find it on dark reading from Maggie McAlpine. She is a co-founder of Nordic innovation labs and it was one of the red team participants and a cyber reason, by the way, was the company that ran this whole thing. She's saying, Hey, it's quite achievable.

    And it's a very inexpensive direct quote here. There is this creeping sense of uneasiness because none of what we did was very expensive. Most of the attacks we proposed don't cost anything. Putting out a tweet that shows a crowded hallway and claiming it's a certain polling place. It's just that easy.

    Then on the tech side. Did you know how easy it is to reset the post office sorting machines? Yeah. there's been all of this complaint about machines being removed from post offices, which they have been. That was a process that was started under President Obama. It's been going on for years now.

    Did you realize that putting a specific barcode on a piece of mail, dropping it in a mailbox and that mail now goes to the post office that will reset the sorting machines? Yeah, it really is that simple. Then guess what happens? Those ballots do not make it to be counted by the secretaries of state in time.

    Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson, stick around. Cause when we come back, we're going to talk about the corporate office reincarnated.

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    More stories and tech updates at:

    www.craigpeterson.com

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    855-385-5553

    10 min

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