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

Welcome!

Craig discusses why he thinks that Tik Tok, WeChat, and Huawei bans don't go far enough.

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

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] The misinformation is mind-boggling. We're going to talk right now about Tik Tok. What's really going on. What have I seen that they've done?

Yes. Craig Peterson, here. I am your host I have seen some major nastiness coming from China with my own eyes. We have unfortunately picked up some clients who have been the victim. In terms of the Chinese and what their social discovery is doing to try and steal information from regular users, individuals, and corporations.

And I've talked about some of these over a lot the last few years because I've been seeing more and more where they have active back doors, they break into networks, they get in through different types of apps. They get in through bad firewalls, through bad VPN and on. Now we've got President Trump out there saying we've got to restrict the owners here of Tik Tok and we chat Tencent and bite dance.

[00:01:00] And it's a kind of a concerning thing for China in a very big way. So the Trump administration apparently has been working with Microsoft to potentially buy it. There are some other bidders that are there trying to buy Tik Tok I am very concerned because I don't think this is just a problem with WeChat or with Tik Tok.

I think this is a systemic problem. With any, and all of these Chinese, these companies who remember if you've got a socialist nation as China does, and they are trying to have everybody be equal, except the course, people at the top, they're more or equal than everybody else they completely discouraged any sort of individuality.

[00:02:00] And that means unless you, you are in the upper echelon of the Chinese communist party. Don't forget that's a socialist party. That's a branch of socialism unless you are high up inside the CCP, you cannot go out and start businesses. Do various things that you just take for granted here in the US.

You can't do any of that. You can't have the international transactions. You can't take your software and sell it overseas or your goods or whatever else. You have to go through Alibaba. If you had permission to start the business and hire people in the first place, because remember, again, it's the socialist government that's actually hiring them.

[00:03:00] It is the military that most people are working for over there. So it is a very big problem. All of this stuff, dealing with China, they really do want to control the world's markets we've seen them again and again, doing that and because they don't have them anywhere near the innovation that we have here in the US yes, through, constructive really demolition, The whole process of what's called capitalism, but really is free trade that humankind has had since we had opposable thumbs. It's the only thing that works. It's Adam, Smith's a hand, that's the ID and all of this stuff, The invisible hand. So if they can't innovate, if they don't have people innovating, if they don't have people who are regular people that are brilliant people innovating, what are they going to do?

they only have one thing to do. They turn to, I left to steal ideas from other countries. To steal processes from businesses to steal their intellectual property, to go after companies like Equifax and try and get all of the data on everyone in the US buying companies like Lenovo from IBM and getting along with that Lenovo deal.

[00:04:00] The name, address, and title of everyone in the federal government that had a Lenovo computer on their desktop. I fought against that way back when that was happening, but no, they'd let it happen. Intercontinental ballistic missiles. We gave them the technology, look at their jet fighters. Look at their aircraft carriers, et cetera.

They look on an awful lot like ours in many cases, those parts are interchangeable. We have a China problem. A very big China problem, because if we want our economy to keep growing, we have to be the country that is innovating that's ahead of everyone else where people come because they want that great job.

[00:05:00] They want that great opportunity because socialist nations cannot provide that. They never have been able to, they never will be able to, you can only get so far at the point of a gun is the bottom line here. So this Tik Tok talk ban is going to affect a lot of people, but I don't think it goes far enough.

And I meant shouldn't that on WGAN on Wednesday morning. This week when I was on with Matt. seven 30 by the way, every week I don't think it really goes far enough because these companies that we're talking about here, byte dance, and Tencent have already proven themselves to be unworthy of our use by stealing our information.

[00:06:00] Look at Tencent. I mentioned this to Matt. Here's a company that has some amazing investment in various types of video games. So for instance, League of legends, a very popular video game, and they're just made by riot games. Guess who owns it? China's Tim scent owns it Tencent’s latest video game release has code in it.

That gives it complete control of your operating system and computer. Can you believe that? They say, yeah, let's just stop cheating. Oh, yeah, really fast to stop cheating. You need complete control of my computer so I can read all my files. You can log all my keystrokes so you can take screenshots to see what I'm looking at, what I'm doing.

[00:07:00] You can upload all of my documents, my spreadsheets. Yeah. You need that. So again, we're looking at a company, these are the guys that make we'd chat, which is absolutely used to spy on people in China. The Chinese government admits that and is being used to spy on us here. They've been caught before too.

And then I look at stuff like in the New York times I was reading this article. I know I should never look at the here New York times and this Kevin Roose guy completely mixes everything up. I can't believe the links. They will go to bending over backward to misinform people, misinformed them entirely.

It's just incredible. He says I'll be honest. what does that tell you? First off? Bam. He's been lying and now he's going to be honest. Okay. Don't ever say that don't ever say I'll be honest or to be honest, right? That is a really bad thing to say because that's a dead giveaway that you haven't been fully honest before.

[00:08:00] So what does he do? I'll be honest. I don't buy the argument that Tik Tok is an urgent threat to America's national security. okay. So two weeks ago we caught them grabbing everything in our copy buffers, which includes things like passwords, bank, account information, anything that you would copy and paste.

they're not an urgent threat really. It is just absolutely amazing to me, a couple of other things, VPN booms as countries around the world, mole Tik Tok band. So people are getting VPN. So this is by the way. I'm a moderately legitimate reason to use a VPN. Now you shouldn't be he's super Tik Tok, but it allows you to look like you're coming from another country.

And so a lot of people are doing that and you should attend my webinar on VPNs. If you haven't. A Tik Tok, by the way, is starting to fund its top creators as they try and get more and more people involved apparently they are putting a $200 million US creator fund together. A little bit of good PR for them there themselves.

[00:09:00] They so do I think we should be banning Tik Tok and we chat? Absolutely. I think it's far too late and I think we should seriously consider banning pretty much everything to do. Technology-wise with China. We didn't even talk about the five G stuff that's been going on with China. Anyhow. All right.

Stick around. We're going to be back here in just a minute, and we're going to talk about these penetration testers and how they got arrested. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and online Craig peterson.com.

---

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

Welcome!

Craig discusses the wrong way to do penetration testing and why.

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

---

Read More:

Window Swap Lets You Enjoy the View From Other People's Windows Around the World

Report: Hundreds of apps have hidden tracking software used by the government

Researcher Finds New Office Macro Attacks for MacOS

New cars can stay in their lane—but might not stop for parked cars

Here's why Apple believes it's an AI leader—and why it says critics have it all wrong

Snapdragon chip flaws put >1 billion Android phones at risk of data theft

Trump Targets WeChat and TikTok, in Sharp Escalation With China

Pen Testers Who Got Arrested Doing Their Jobs Tell All

Information Operations Spotlighted at Black Hat as Election Worries Rise

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Hey, you hire a penetration tester to check your security out. apparently that's what happened and then they went to jail.

Hey Craig, Peterson here with a little bit of a word of warning. If you are a computer security company and you perform a penetration test. Be very cautious, because man, this is a sad story. I spoke about it a couple of months ago when it first happened. And there have been, of course now some changes and the whole status of that.

[00:01:00] That's just the way that naturally ends up going over time. But there were a couple of guys here who were doing penetration testing. This is an article you'll find on dark reading.com. A very good site. Again, I love some of the stuff that they do. I watch it closely as you can probably guess.

But when these guys were hired, they were doing, what's known as physical penetration testing. Hey, can you break into the building? And you'll, they'll use normal types of ways of doing this and playing with this where they'll try and get a card key, steal it off of someone. All the surreptitious ways you'll do it.

They'll call up on the phone and they'll do what's called vishing. Where they are calling you up and pretending they're from it or building maintenance or whatever it might be in order to try and get in. Then once they're in the building, it's okay. how far can I go?

[00:02:00] What can I get into, what can I do? What trouble could I cause not that they're going to necessarily? cause that trouble and they are what are known as red teamers. the military does this all the time. We do that as well.

You have tabletop and other sorts of exercises that are a red team, blue team. So you have some, a team that's different. Defending your infrastructure and a team that's breaking into the infrastructure. So these guys were red teamers and the concern that's come up because of this is, if you are a penetration tester, you're a red teamer, what's going to happen to you.

[00:03:00] These guys were hired by a company to check the entrance and exit after hours of the Dallas County courthouse in Iowa. They went up to the door and checked the door and they didn't hear it disengage when they tried to scan their car key. Card key. It was after midnight. This was September 11th last year. This was the last leg of their penetration testing engagement.

This was part of the stuff that was hired by the state of Iowa's judicial branch. They just grabbed the door and said, did it work? And no, it's already open. The door was locked, but they hadn't latched it all the way. So all he had to do is pull the door open. These two social engineering and physical penetration testing experts could get a more accurate take on this whole entrance security.

He closed the door and they started all over again with the card key. This time the door was not only locked, but it was latched. Then he slid a plastic cutting board that was retrofitted so that it would be able to be put into the door jam and released the latch and he was able to unlatch the door.

[00:04:00] They figured they had between 20 to 30 seconds from then until the building alarm sounded. So they ran inside and they got to the alarm panel and they started typing in the default system code. Because you go in first, you check and see what kind of alarm system is it. Think like The Italian Job, right?

What kind of alarm system is it? What's the default passcode on it. They type that in that didn't work. They typed in some common code. Most of us are still using default passwords on our firewalls. We're using them on some of the security systems, many security systems, by the way, also have, it's an administrative passcode where what ends up happening is the service guy comes in and says, Hey, I need to mess with your panel.

And he goes downstairs. He types in his code and he now has full administrative access to your panel. So they tried all of that sort of stuff and none of it worked. So the alarm went off and they went back to work seeing if they could find any other vulnerabilities while waiting to see if the cops would show up.

[00:05:00] Now they had tested three other facilities for the state and the building alarms had not dialed out to law enforcement, which is pretty bad. The alarms go off and law enforcement is not notified. They wanted to see if it would here and it did. Then what happened was an arrest. They were arrested, they got felony charges.

They spent the night in jail and nearly five months in a legal battle here. Now, this legal battle was fueled by a power struggle between the state who had hired them and County officials in Iowa, who said they had the legal jurisdiction over the courthouse, building these people had entered and not the state. Isn't that interesting?

[00:06:00] So it wasn't until January this year. So that's September through January, this year and all charges against them were dropped. Just last week at the black hat USA virtual conference, they shared their story of what had happened and their advice for penetration testing.

Now, You have to be very careful because this is an interesting problem. The company that had contracted with the state is known as coal fire. That's the name of the company and the state had court administration had hired them a number of times since 2015. This was the first time that these two guys had worked for CoalFire. So they were probably subcontractors. The engagement was for full scope, red team, project internal, external testing, penetration testing in the application, social engineering, and the physical penetration test.

[00:07:00] So they did a whole lot of stuff. They had with the call to get out of jail free letter. Written authorization signed by the judicial branch approved they were working on behalf of the state. So the officers that first responded check their IDs, the letter verified the story and found that they were legit and free to go.

Then the sheriff showed up. Everything changed. The sheriff was very upset. Dallas County sheriff, Chad Leonard, berated them. According to these two pen testers for thinking the courthouse, it was under the state's jurisdiction. How would they know, obviously the state thought that it was under their jurisdiction.

The article goes on and talks a lot about what happened. The judge was very upset with what had happened because she was not informed of the truth behind this whole thing. So they had an arraignment a little later in the day in that same courthouse they'd broken into just hours earlier.

[00:08:00] The judge they say took it personally. Clearly she had not been filled in. All she has been told is we caught these two guys last night breaking into the courthouse. Then she loses it and raises the bail 10 fold above the norm $50,000 each rather than the normal 5,000 that it would be. Now, the good news is that the company that had hired them coal-fire did stick with them, did pay for all of this legal stuff and by the way, the state was trying to back out of it saying we had nothing to do with this. These officials that had hired them denied anything and everything.

So clue number one, record the call. These guys regret that they did not record it, make your contract iron clad, and succinct. So if you are doing any pen testing, some serious words of caution.

[00:09:00] When we come back, I'm going to talk about a real cool website. In case you missed it in the first hour today we're also going to talk about some election worries here. What's going to happen when it comes to electronics and hacking and tampering?

You're listening to Craig Peterson and WGAN.

Make sure you visit me online. Craig peterson.com.

Stick around. We'll be right back.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Craig discusses the wrong way to do penetration testing and why.

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

---

Read More:

Window Swap Lets You Enjoy the View From Other People's Windows Around the World

Report: Hundreds of apps have hidden tracking software used by the government

Researcher Finds New Office Macro Attacks for MacOS

New cars can stay in their lane—but might not stop for parked cars

Here’s why Apple believes it’s an AI leader—and why it says critics have it all wrong

Snapdragon chip flaws put >1 billion Android phones at risk of data theft

Trump Targets WeChat and TikTok, in Sharp Escalation With China

Pen Testers Who Got Arrested Doing Their Jobs Tell All

Information Operations Spotlighted at Black Hat as Election Worries Rise

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Hey, you hire a penetration tester to check your security out. apparently that's what happened and then they went to jail.

Hey Craig, Peterson here with a little bit of a word of warning. If you are a computer security company and you perform a penetration test. Be very cautious, because man, this is a sad story. I spoke about it a couple of months ago when it first happened. And there have been, of course now some changes and the whole status of that.

[00:01:00] That's just the way that naturally ends up going over time. But there were a couple of guys here who were doing penetration testing. This is an article you'll find on dark reading.com. A very good site. Again, I love some of the stuff that they do. I watch it closely as you can probably guess.

But when these guys were hired, they were doing, what's known as physical penetration testing. Hey, can you break into the building? And you'll, they'll use normal types of ways of doing this and playing with this where they'll try and get a card key, steal it off of someone. All the surreptitious ways you'll do it.

They'll call up on the phone and they'll do what's called vishing. Where they are calling you up and pretending they're from it or building maintenance or whatever it might be in order to try and get in. Then once they're in the building, it's okay. how far can I go?

[00:02:00] What can I get into, what can I do? What trouble could I cause not that they're going to necessarily? cause that trouble and they are what are known as red teamers. the military does this all the time. We do that as well.

You have tabletop and other sorts of exercises that are a red team, blue team. So you have some, a team that's different. Defending your infrastructure and a team that's breaking into the infrastructure. So these guys were red teamers and the concern that's come up because of this is, if you are a penetration tester, you're a red teamer, what's going to happen to you.

[00:03:00] These guys were hired by a company to check the entrance and exit after hours of the Dallas County courthouse in Iowa. They went up to the door and checked the door and they didn't hear it disengage when they tried to scan their car key. Card key. It was after midnight. This was September 11th last year. This was the last leg of their penetration testing engagement.

This was part of the stuff that was hired by the state of Iowa's judicial branch. They just grabbed the door and said, did it work? And no, it's already open. The door was locked, but they hadn't latched it all the way. So all he had to do is pull the door open. These two social engineering and physical penetration testing experts could get a more accurate take on this whole entrance security.

He closed the door and they started all over again with the card key. This time the door was not only locked, but it was latched. Then he slid a plastic cutting board that was retrofitted so that it would be able to be put into the door jam and released the latch and he was able to unlatch the door.

[00:04:00] They figured they had between 20 to 30 seconds from then until the building alarm sounded. So they ran inside and they got to the alarm panel and they started typing in the default system code. Because you go in first, you check and see what kind of alarm system is it. Think like The Italian Job, right?

What kind of alarm system is it? What's the default passcode on it. They type that in that didn't work.  They typed in some common code. Most of us are still using default passwords on our firewalls. We're using them on some of the security systems, many security systems, by the way, also have, it's an administrative passcode where what ends up happening is the service guy comes in and says, Hey, I need to mess with your panel.

And he goes downstairs. He types in his code and he now has full administrative access to your panel. So they tried all of that sort of stuff and none of it worked. So the alarm went off and they went back to work seeing if they could find any other vulnerabilities while waiting to see if the cops would show up.

[00:05:00] Now they had tested three other facilities for the state and the building alarms had not dialed out to law enforcement, which is pretty bad. The alarms go off and law enforcement is not notified. They wanted to see if it would here and it did. Then what happened was an arrest. They were arrested, they got felony charges.

They spent the night in jail and nearly five months in a legal battle here. Now, this legal battle was fueled by a power struggle between the state who had hired them and County officials in Iowa, who said they had the legal jurisdiction over the courthouse, building these people had entered and not the state. Isn't that interesting?

[00:06:00] So it wasn't until January this year. So that's September through January, this year and all charges against them were dropped. Just last week at the black hat USA virtual conference, they shared their story of what had happened and their advice for penetration testing.

Now, You have to be very careful because this is an interesting problem. The company that had contracted with the state is known as coal fire. That's the name of the company and the state had court administration had hired them a number of times since 2015. This was the first time that these two guys had worked for CoalFire. So they were probably subcontractors. The engagement was for full scope, red team, project internal, external testing, penetration testing in the application, social engineering, and the physical penetration test.

[00:07:00] So they did a whole lot of stuff. They had with the call to get out of jail free letter.  Written authorization signed by the judicial branch approved they were working on behalf of the state. So the officers that first responded check their IDs, the letter verified the story and found that they were legit and free to go.

Then the sheriff showed up. Everything changed. The sheriff was very upset. Dallas County sheriff, Chad Leonard, berated them. According to these two pen testers for thinking the courthouse, it was under the state's jurisdiction. How would they know, obviously the state thought that it was under their jurisdiction.

The article goes on and talks a lot about what happened. The judge was very upset with what had happened because she was not informed of the truth behind this whole thing. So they had an arraignment a little later in the day in that same courthouse they'd broken into just hours earlier.

[00:08:00] The judge they say took it personally. Clearly she had not been filled in. All she has been told is we caught these two guys last night breaking into the courthouse. Then she loses it and raises the bail 10 fold above the norm $50,000 each rather than the normal 5,000 that it would be. Now, the good news is that the company that had hired them coal-fire did stick with them, did pay for all of this legal stuff and by the way, the state was trying to back out of it saying we had nothing to do with this. These officials that had hired them denied anything and everything.

So clue number one, record the call. These guys regret that they did not record it, make your contract iron clad, and succinct. So if you are doing any pen testing, some serious words of caution.

[00:09:00] When we come back, I'm going to talk about a real cool website. In case you missed it in the first hour today we're also going to talk about some election worries here. What's going to happen when it comes to electronics and hacking and tampering?

You're listening to Craig Peterson and WGAN.

Make sure you visit me online. Craig peterson.com.

Stick around. We'll be right back.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Craig discusses the disinformation campaigns by Russia and China and how they can interfere with our electoral process.

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

---

Read More:

Window Swap Lets You Enjoy the View From Other People's Windows Around the World

Report: Hundreds of apps have hidden tracking software used by the government

Researcher Finds New Office Macro Attacks for MacOS

New cars can stay in their lane—but might not stop for parked cars

Here's why Apple believes it's an AI leader—and why it says critics have it all wrong

Snapdragon chip flaws put >1 billion Android phones at risk of data theft

Trump Targets WeChat and TikTok, in Sharp Escalation With China

Pen Testers Who Got Arrested Doing Their Jobs Tell All

Information Operations Spotlighted at Black Hat as Election Worries Rise

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Stanford has a new report out. Yes, indeed. What is happening in China and Russia when it comes to the US election?

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me today. You know, if you missed any part of today's show, you can find it on your favorite podcast app. You can also find it at @craigpeterson.com. And if you want to see them all. Craigpeterson.com/podcast, but I am out there and I'd love to get a review from you.

If you wouldn't mind us, it'll take you no more than about two minutes. Hopefully, I've earned a five-star review from you. So go ahead into your podcast app and do that right now. If you wouldn't mind, give me a five-star review, leave a little comment about what you like best about the show. If I haven't earned a five-star review from you, I apologize.

[00:01:00] I would love for you to send me a note. Just email me M E. at Craig peterson.com and I'll make sure that I try and do a little better next time.

Alright, so let's get into this. This is dark reading again, and it is fascinating to look at black hat and they'd cover the whole black hat conference pretty thoroughly.

In case you don't know what that is. Black hat is a conference every year. In fact, there's a couple of them usually out in Las Vegas and they have briefings. There are all kinds of cool little seminars, if you will, that you can attend and they discuss ways to hack. Now it's not necessarily all of the bad guys, this isn't the dark web getting together and saying, okay, we're going to hack people and this is how we're going to hack them.

[00:02:00] And Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, right? What this is, is the security professionals getting together and talking about what they found and talking about what needs to change. This is an absolutely fascinating conference. I've never actually gone out there before. Could never really afford it, to go out all of the time, and then the money that's involved, but they do some absolutely amazing things.

One of the things that were discussed was what is happening with our political, at least enemies out there. More specifically, we're talking about Russia and China. Russia has what are known now internationally as best in class efforts where they try and create social divides in Western democracies.

[00:03:00] And the idea here is much like what we've seen going on, right? Rather than everybody pulling together and we're all Americans and let's make everything better. Let's make sure everyone has an equal opportunity. There are a lot of people out there that are trying to divide us into different segments based on race or based on age or where we live in the country, which is really, really sad.

That's what Russia's trying to do. A nation divided can never stand. And they haven't just been going after the United States. They've been going after other Western countries and we've got China who has been attacking, of course, dissidents within their country. They are concerned too about what people are saying internationally and all of this information and disinformation operations are becoming a much bigger threat, according to a Stanford researcher.

The Russian government doesn't spend anywhere near as much as China does on these overt state-sponsored media properties. Now that makes sense because China, of course, is a socialist country and they have to control what people think and what people say in order to retain power, because of free people would never put up socialism, right?

[00:04:00] Any form of it whether its communism or fascism or anything in between all of those. So they have to be very careful about stopping that. Russia has turned into an oligarchy, basically where the vast amount of the fortune in Russia.

I saw a number this week. It was over 80% is held by a small fraction. Like I think it was 50 people in Russia. So basically a very small handful of people control pretty much all of the wealth in Russia, which is a huge problem too. They are controlling the media to varying degrees, but it's nothing like a communist country would, it's nothing like the way Russia was back when they were a socialist country, when it was the, uh, the Soviet Union way back when, right.

[00:05:00] Hard to remember that a lot of kids nowadays have no idea. You know, I, I was talking with my kids about this year, the other day too. I was saying, I will never visit Germany. I have no desire to do it. Because I know, well I knew, cause they've passed now, I knew people who fought against the socialists in Germany.

I knew people who were imprisoned by them. I knew people whose families, I mean, personally I know people whose families were killed in the gas chambers by the socialists in Germany. I don't have any desire to go there. I just don't, right. I don't know any Russian citizens that were there either, but one of my daughters studied Russian and went and lived in St. Petersburg for about six months studying Russian. The lady she was living with an old lady said, one morning we woke up and we were all socialists now. That's what happens, right. It just creeps in creeps and creeps in until. All of a sudden, overnight, it happens as though it's kind of an instant thing.

[00:06:00] So China is trying to do some of that, as well as Russia because they want to divide us so that the country will collapse. They're getting increasingly sophisticated. We know about ads that were purchased last time around in 2016 by Russia. Many of them were just run terribly, but Russia has pulled up their socks on that.

The major advertising venues are no longer accepting ads that are clearly from these varying countries. Okay.

These campaigns from China and Russia have a number of goals and here's what they are: they want to distract the attention from their own actions, Russia in China, right. They want to persuade people to a certain point of view like socialism is good. Relations with China are important. Relations with Russia are important. You should be selling us your uranium, right? All that sort of stuff. Dividing citizens into opposing groups, which we're doing to ourselves, as well as they're trying to do. And then. The last goal is to entrenching them into hardline opinions. Aren't they being successful? Right.

[00:07:00] Have you ever seen. In our world lifetimes, the nation this divided. So many opinions that are so misinformed. You know I haven't, but I, we have been in situations like this before a number of times, frankly. So Russia right now, best in class for information operations. They have an absolute commitment to full-spectrum propaganda and they remember how to do it from the Soviet Union days.

[00:08:00] They also get into far more sophisticated actors. Activities. They are also manipulating the media as is China. Then ultimately moving towards network infiltration as well. So we've got a lot of concerns leading up to this 2020 us presidential election.

Last week I talked about how Breitbart hadn't been completely turned off by Google. We're a Google will not refer anyone searching about Joe Biden to Breitbart anymore. They have just completely silenced them. It's absolutely amazing to me. I can't believe this is happening here in the United States, but these Russian and Chinese disinflation campaigns are huge.

[00:09:00] Now, this is interesting too, because apparently the Russian disinformation campaign leading up to the 2016 election influenced not just the United States, but obviously people from all over the world. We've got China cracking down now on information about the protest in Hong Kong. We've got Saudi Arabia attempting to control the narrative, following the assassination of author and writer Jamal Khashoggi. Not that he was a great guy, okay. But that assassination was just unreal. What happened there?

What are we going to do? And we've got our president concerned about this to know mail-in ballot thing where some States are planning on mailing ballots to every name, every address that they've ever seen at any house. These databases are completely out of date and no one has to show ID. No one has to prove that they are registered voters.

[00:10:00] This is going to be one heck of a year. Okay. Absolutely amazing.

The Russians have also got some algorithms they've programmed to figure out what's working, how to disseminate it. Oh, man.

Just this last week here, Google announced that YouTube had shuttered almost 2,600 YouTube channels as part of its efforts into coordinated information operations by China. Isn't that amazing?

There is so much misinformation going on. We are digging our own grave. I hate to say that.

We have been very busy in the studio putting together stuff. I think this is going to be really good, informative for you guys and I don't want you to miss a thing. I want you to be able to get all of the pieces of training that we're doing, the videos, the live training, the webinars.

[00:11:00] I really need you guys to understand this stuff so you can protect yourself. I can explain it to you. You don't need to be afraid of it, right? I know many people think that they just can't do it. They can't do it well with it. They have many other important things in life, but it is not going to take much time at all.

To learn how to deal with this, deal with this correctly, not get ripped off. You know, you do a search on Google and there are millions of results, and you have no idea what to use. You have, of course, all of these different systems, software, hardware that don't work together that make your life more difficult.

I am going to try and make this easy for you, which free tools to use. What can you do by yourself? Then more advanced stuff as you need it, as well. Okay. So make sure you sign up, go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe, Craigpeterson.com/subscribe.

[00:12:00] This stuff is going to be starting up this fall. I did a lot of training in February, March, April of this year.

And then if you got my email, you know why. I've been kind of off the chart here for the last couple of months. But c'est la vie pourvu que ça dure. Right? So have a great week.

Make sure you follow some of the stuff that I'm doing. I'm going to be posting all over the place. I think you'll see me kinda everywhere and join me on Wednesday morning with Mr. Matt Gagnon. As we get together at seven 30, 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

Welcome!

Craig discusses the disinformation campaigns by Russia and China and how they can interfere with our electoral process. 

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

---

Read More:

Window Swap Lets You Enjoy the View From Other People's Windows Around the World

Report: Hundreds of apps have hidden tracking software used by the government

Researcher Finds New Office Macro Attacks for MacOS

New cars can stay in their lane—but might not stop for parked cars

Here’s why Apple believes it’s an AI leader—and why it says critics have it all wrong

Snapdragon chip flaws put >1 billion Android phones at risk of data theft

Trump Targets WeChat and TikTok, in Sharp Escalation With China

Pen Testers Who Got Arrested Doing Their Jobs Tell All

Information Operations Spotlighted at Black Hat as Election Worries Rise

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Stanford has a new report out. Yes, indeed. What is happening in China and Russia when it comes to the US election?

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me today. You know, if you missed any part of today's show, you can find it on your favorite podcast app. You can also find it at @craigpeterson.com. And if you want to see them all. Craigpeterson.com/podcast, but I am out there and I'd love to get a review from you.

If you wouldn't mind us, it'll take you no more than about two minutes. Hopefully, I've earned a five-star review from you. So go ahead into your podcast app and do that right now. If you wouldn't mind, give me a five-star review, leave a little comment about what you like best about the show. If I haven't earned a five-star review from you, I apologize.

[00:01:00] I would love for you to send me a note. Just email me M E. at Craig peterson.com and I'll make sure that I try and do a little better next time.

Alright, so let's get into this. This is dark reading again, and it is fascinating to look at black hat and they'd cover the whole black hat conference pretty thoroughly.

 In case you don't know what that is. Black hat is a conference every year. In fact, there's a couple of them usually out in Las Vegas and they have briefings. There are all kinds of cool little seminars, if you will, that you can attend and they discuss ways to hack. Now it's not necessarily all of the bad guys, this isn't the dark web getting together and saying, okay, we're going to hack people and this is how we're going to hack them.

[00:02:00] And Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, right? What this is, is the security professionals getting together and talking about what they found and talking about what needs to change. This is an absolutely fascinating conference. I've never actually gone out there before. Could never really afford it, to go out all of the time, and then the money that's involved, but they do some absolutely amazing things.

One of the things that were discussed was what is happening with our political, at least enemies out there. More specifically, we're talking about Russia and China. Russia has what are known now internationally as best in class efforts where they try and create social divides in Western democracies.

[00:03:00] And the idea here is much like what we've seen going on, right? Rather than everybody pulling together and we're all Americans and let's make everything better. Let's make sure everyone has an equal opportunity. There are a lot of people out there that are trying to divide us into different segments based on race or based on age or where we live in the country, which is really, really sad.

That's what Russia's trying to do. A nation divided can never stand. And they haven't just been going after the United States. They've been going after other Western countries and we've got China who has been attacking, of course, dissidents within their country. They are concerned too about what people are saying internationally and all of this information and disinformation operations are becoming a much bigger threat, according to a Stanford researcher.

The Russian government doesn't spend anywhere near as much as China does on these overt state-sponsored media properties. Now that makes sense because China, of course, is a socialist country and they have to control what people think and what people say in order to retain power, because of free people would never put up socialism, right?

[00:04:00] Any form of it whether its communism or fascism or anything in between all of those. So they have to be very careful about stopping that. Russia has turned into an oligarchy, basically where the vast amount of the fortune in Russia.

I saw a number this week. It was over 80% is held by a small fraction. Like I think it was 50 people in Russia. So basically a very small handful of people control pretty much all of the wealth in Russia, which is a huge problem too. They are controlling the media to varying degrees, but it's nothing like a communist country would, it's nothing like the way Russia was back when they were a socialist country, when it was the, uh, the Soviet Union way back when, right.

[00:05:00] Hard to remember that a lot of kids nowadays have no idea. You know, I, I was talking with my kids about this year, the other day too.  I was saying, I will never visit Germany. I have no desire to do it. Because I know, well I knew, cause they've passed now, I knew people who fought against the socialists in Germany.

I knew people who were imprisoned by them. I knew people whose families, I mean, personally I know people whose families were killed in the gas chambers by the socialists in Germany. I don't have any desire to go there. I just don't, right. I don't know any Russian citizens that were there either, but one of my daughters studied Russian and went and lived in St. Petersburg for about six months studying Russian. The lady she was living with an old lady said, one morning we woke up and we were all socialists now. That's what happens, right. It just creeps in creeps and creeps in until. All of a sudden, overnight, it happens as though it's kind of an instant thing.

[00:06:00] So China is trying to do some of that, as well as Russia because they want to divide us so that the country will collapse. They're getting increasingly sophisticated. We know about ads that were purchased last time around in 2016 by Russia. Many of them were just run terribly, but Russia has pulled up their socks on that.

The major advertising venues are no longer accepting ads that are clearly from these varying countries. Okay.

These campaigns from China and Russia have a number of goals and here's what they are: they want to distract the attention from their own actions, Russia in China, right. They want to persuade people to a certain point of view like socialism is good.  Relations with China are important. Relations with Russia are important. You should be selling us your uranium, right? All that sort of stuff. Dividing citizens into opposing groups, which we're doing to ourselves, as well as they're trying to do. And then. The last goal is to entrenching them into hardline opinions. Aren't they being successful? Right.

[00:07:00] Have you ever seen. In our world lifetimes, the nation this divided. So many opinions that are so misinformed. You know I haven't, but I, we have been in situations like this before a number of times, frankly. So Russia right now, best in class for information operations. They have an absolute commitment to full-spectrum propaganda and they remember how to do it from the Soviet Union days.

[00:08:00] They also get into far more sophisticated actors. Activities. They are also manipulating the media as is China. Then ultimately moving towards network infiltration as well. So we've got a lot of concerns leading up to this 2020 us presidential election.

 Last week I talked about how Breitbart hadn't been completely turned off by Google. We're a Google will not refer anyone searching about Joe Biden to Breitbart anymore. They have just completely silenced them. It's absolutely amazing to me. I can't believe this is happening here in the United States, but these Russian and Chinese disinflation campaigns are huge.

[00:09:00] Now, this is interesting too, because apparently the Russian disinformation campaign leading up to the 2016 election influenced not just the United States, but obviously people from all over the world. We've got China cracking down now on information about the protest in Hong Kong. We've got Saudi Arabia attempting to control the narrative, following the assassination of author and writer Jamal Khashoggi. Not that he was a great guy, okay. But that assassination was just unreal. What happened there?

What are we going to do? And we've got our president concerned about this to know mail-in ballot thing where some States are planning on mailing ballots to every name, every address that they've ever seen at any house. These databases are completely out of date and no one has to show ID. No one has to prove that they are registered voters.

[00:10:00] This is going to be one heck of a year. Okay. Absolutely amazing.

The Russians have also got some algorithms they've programmed to figure out what's working, how to disseminate it. Oh, man.

 Just this last week here, Google announced that YouTube had shuttered almost 2,600 YouTube channels as part of its efforts into coordinated information operations by China. Isn't that amazing?

There is so much misinformation going on. We are digging our own grave. I hate to say that.

We have been very busy in the studio putting together stuff. I think this is going to be really good, informative for you guys and I don't want you to miss a thing. I want you to be able to get all of the pieces of training that we're doing, the videos, the live training, the webinars.

[00:11:00] I really need you guys to understand this stuff so you can protect yourself.  I can explain it to you. You don't need to be afraid of it, right?  I know many people think that they just can't do it. They can't do it well with it. They have many other important things in life, but it is not going to take much time at all.

To learn how to deal with this, deal with this correctly, not get ripped off. You know, you do a search on Google and there are millions of results, and you have no idea what to use. You have, of course, all of these different systems, software, hardware that don't work together that make your life more difficult.

I am going to try and make this easy for you, which free tools to use. What can you do by yourself? Then more advanced stuff as you need it, as well. Okay. So make sure you sign up, go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe, Craigpeterson.com/subscribe.

[00:12:00] This stuff is going to be starting up this fall. I did a lot of training in February, March, April of this year.

And then if you got my email, you know why. I've been kind of off the chart here for the last couple of months. But c'est la vie pourvu que ça dure. Right? So have a great week.

Make sure you follow some of the stuff that I'm doing. I'm going to be posting all over the place. I think you'll see me kinda everywhere and join me on Wednesday morning with Mr. Matt Gagnon. As we get together at seven 30, 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

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about Self-Driving Cars, Adaptive Cruise Control, and what AAA found about their programming logic. Then we got into Tik Tok, WeChat, and Tencent and Why what President Trump's action was absolutely justified. 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:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Is it going to avoid it by changing lanes? By stopping? What it going to do? In almost all the cases, these cars rear-ended this car slash balloon that was sitting right there in the lane.

Hey, good morning, Craig Peterson here. I had a great little interview this morning. I was on WGAN and affiliates AM and FM they're in Maine in Portland.

And I having fun with Matt. He actually took a little bit of a different angle on this, this morning. So we talked about what I think is the number one story this week. And we talked about what our friend Matt thinks. The number one story is this week. And, uh, yeah, I opened his eyes. He didn't realize what was really going on with President Trump's executive order about Tik Tok and We Chat.

So here we go.

[00:01:00] Matt Gagnon: It is Wednesday morning. It is Craig Peterson who joins us now. He is our tech guru and joins us every Wednesday at this time. We appreciate it as always. Craig, how are you this morning, sir? Craig's try it again. Where are you? There you go. There we go. Now I hear from you.

Craig Peterson: There's always a button.

Matt Gagnon: There is always a button and it's good to have you with us and Craig, you know, I am told, although I'm not certain about this, I am told that you also have a show on Saturday here. Is that true?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, I do from one til three on Saturday, and I take a much deeper dive into all of my show notes and the hot topics for the week.

And you know, if you get my newsletter, not only do we discuss some of this stuff with Matt, but we get right into it all.

Matt Gagnon: Indeed. So Craig, on what's on the top of your mind, here's a, I'm going to approach this a little differently with you usually, because I know you send a, you send the topics every week and we talk about a lot of the things that you're talking about, but what is this.

[00:02:00] Stand out the story for you this week, in terms of tech topics, what is the thing that, that burns in your mind about what you said? Yeah,

Craig Peterson: Burning a hole here. I think kind of a big one. We've got the obvious things were some real problems with security, but that's kind of almost every week. The one that really gets to me is this article.

That's talking about a AAA study. Now everybody knows who AAA is. They are as car folk, right. That you can drive. They used to have trip ticks. I remember making those up and taking the family on vacation. Now they've, they've kind of shifted a little bit, but they were looking at these adaptive cruise controls and basically what most people are calling self-driving car technology.

[00:03:00] And there've been some reports of these adaptive cruise control, this self-driving technology, driving people right into the rear of fire trucks, from which, of course, is not a fun thing to hit, of police cars and other things. So basically, they thought they would check it out a little bit, and then he tested a number of different vehicles and the way they tested them as they parked a balloon on the road.

A lot like a car and it was designed here now to give the car an object. So you're driving down the road with your adaptive cruise control on that car sitting there. Is it going to avoid it by changing lanes, by stopping? What's it going to do? And in almost all of the cases, these cars are rear-ended this car slash balloon that was sitting right there in the lane. I don't mean like it's two inches into the lane. I mean, it was right in the lane. To me, that is huge news because we have all been looking forward to good automation, which of course isn't here yet, but many of us have these adaptive cruise controls, Matt.

[00:04:00] Matt Gagnon: Right. I was going to say, this is already a technology that is in like a lot of Tesla cars and a lot of other places that have this adaptive sort of technology that, uh, that I think Lee makes a lot of people feel. Like if it's in the car and sellable to you right now that it's totally safe and you're fine.

And you can, you can just kinda like put it on cruise control almost and let it do the rest.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. So, it's not a hundred percent of the time. Some of the cars, like the BMW X7, stopped in one out of three runs and that new Kia Telluride, which is a gorgeous car. I hit the dummy vehicle in all three 30 mile-an-hour runs.

The problem appears to be that they have maps of the roads and it doesn't have that map doesn't have everything that's around the road. Of course, the surroundings are changing, and these cars seem to be assuming that if something is fixed. It's probably off of the road. It's probably a road sign except, or et cetera.

[00:05:00] And this is where the big arguments coming out now, are we better off having something like LIDAR on our cars, which is giving it a full three-D view. It can figure out if things are moving, where they are. In respect to you. Or go with what Tesla is doing because Elon Musk and Tesla are very heavily reliant on just cameras.

So, they don't use a three-D view. Yeah. So, what's going to work best and there still are some radar-based systems. And that's the check really from 10 to 20 years.

Matt Gagnon: And those things basically, I mean, they send out like a, almost a Doppler signal to see. Where things are and, and, and basically how physically close they are.

And they use, you know, the complex math system and the computers to try to judge the car's speed and angle and whatever, to try to make sure that, of course, it avoids things. It just, it strikes me as weird. That be the way that we want a car that is autonomous in some way to operate. Right. I mean, you want, you know, who cares if a stationary object is a sign or something else if it's on the curb of the road and you're about to run into it. You want a car to see that? I mean, think about it like a kid that's frozen or a deer that's not moving or, I mean, any number of things, right. You want to be able to judge where that thing actually is.

[00:06:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, absolutely. So these adaptive cruise control. If you have it and you want to use it, what it is is good for is keeping you in the lane.

What is not good for it appears here from this study is avoiding accidents. By the way, Cadillac's super crew. Was it different than some of these other vehicles they tested from being BMW Ford, Kia and Subaru at its drivers only had to intervene about eight times and 800 miles of driving. So, it was actually pretty good.

So, these things are going to get better, but just don't trust the stuff itself.

[00:07:00] Matt Gagnon: Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology, Craig, it would be remiss of me to not bring up Tik Tok with you here. I know that we've touched on and hovered around this topic a little bit, uh, you know, in previous weeks here, but you know, the president signed that executive order that basically threw the hammer down on the Chinese company.

Any part of Tik Tok as it operates in the United States? Um, I guess my question for you is, is twofold. Number one, exactly. How does it work? What, what they're, what that app is doing, and what is the real security concern, and then number two, what do you think of the executive order?

I mean, is that the appropriate action to be taking in this regard?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, we've got a couple of things we're looking at here. We have WeChat and Tik Tok, which are both equally effective money transactions were banned from these Chinese companies. So it's Bytedance and Tencent. Those are the names of the companies that own those technologies.

[00:08:00] Now, we have caught our friends at Tik Tok multiple times now getting information from our phones and stealing information from our phones. Particularly if your phone has been rooted, if you have jailbroken your phone, you have now opened up your phone to all kinds of evil, and we have caught Tik Tok doing that.

Tencent, this is really kind of scary here because this is, this is a bad thing for Tencent, but I talked about Tencent on my show a couple of months ago here, because what they were caught doing is putting code into windows operating system that allowed them 100% access to everything on your machine, from your keyboard and mouse.

Through every file on your machine. And Tencent said they did that in order to help stop cheating. Tencent has some of the most popular video games in use today in the United States. Tik Tok, of course, which is Bytedance has this wonderful little app. That's very, very addictive. And obviously the Chinese spent a lot of money on it.

[00:09:00] Is it worth doing? I can say. Absolutely. Yes. I was so disappointed the owners and CEOs of these big tech companies, testifying, I have personally seen right here, multiple companies throughout New England who are now clients of mine who had. Active Chinese back doors in their systems where the Chinese had stolen their intellectual property.

And in some cases, yeah, stolen every penny out of their operating accounts. So, is China a threat? 100%! Is it doing it? I have firsthand knowledge of them doing it in companies that are now my clients. And it puts businesses just completely out of business. Is Tik Tok a threat. Absolutely. The latest thing they were caught doing is capturing everything from your copy buffer. Is Tencent a threat? Are you kidding me having complete control over your computer without your knowledge? So you can play a video game. Yeah, I don't think President Trump went far enough.

[00:10:00] Matt Gagnon: There you go. Well, Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time to go over the world of technology as he always does.

And of course, as you heard just a few moments ago, he also has a show on Saturdays that you can hear as well. If you want to get any of these topics and so many more in more depth and detail, Craig, we really appreciate it as always. And we'll talk to you again very soon.

Craig Peterson: Hey, take care, Matt.

Matt Gagnon: Thanks a lot.

Alright, so coming up next. Sure.

Craig Peterson: Hey, thanks, guys. I appreciate you joining me today. I was spent time yesterday, a few hours with our video guy. We're going to do some more work today. And what I'm trying to do here is put together a bunch of well kind of classes, courses, and stuff. So I think what I'm going to do before really get into this too much is send out an email.

[00:11:00] To everybody kind of asking you. So what if you had the opportunity, what would you do? So, uh, or what you'd like me to do here for you? Uh, for instance, you want to become like, uh, my friend Guy who decided after a full career, pretty much he wanted to go into cybersecurity. Cause there are millions of open jobs, even right now there are jobs in cybersecurity, but you have to learn it.

So do you want me to teach you guys? More about cybersecurity. So you have more job security and job options. Would you like me to just kind of get you out of a hole that you might be in with your cybersecurity? What do I do? What are the basics? Then give me the basics or something in between. So let me know.

[00:12:00] I would love to know. Okay. Cause I really want to help you guys out. It's me M E @craigpeterson.com. So drop me an email. Now I'm going to do a lot of free training as well as some of the paid training. And obviously the free training is going to be kind of long-tail just on some specific narrow topics, but lots of them, cause I don't want to confuse people, but uh, how about a more professional sort of course.

So let me know. Again, Craig at Craig peterson.com. Take care, everybody. And we'll be back this weekend.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about Self-Driving Cars, Adaptive Cruise Control, and what AAA found about their programming logic. Then we got into Tik Tok, WeChat, and Tencent and Why what President Trump's action was absolutely justified.   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:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Is it going to avoid it by changing lanes? By stopping? What it going to do? In almost all the cases, these cars rear-ended this car slash balloon that was sitting right there in the lane.

Hey, good morning, Craig Peterson here. I had a great little interview this morning. I was on WGAN and affiliates AM and FM they're in Maine in Portland.

And I having fun with Matt. He actually took a little bit of a different angle on this, this morning. So we talked about what I think is the number one story this week. And we talked about what our friend Matt thinks. The number one story is this week. And, uh, yeah, I opened his eyes. He didn't realize what was really going on with President Trump's executive order about Tik Tok and We Chat.

So here we go.

[00:01:00] Matt Gagnon: It is Wednesday morning. It is Craig Peterson who joins us now. He is our tech guru and joins us every Wednesday at this time. We appreciate it as always. Craig, how are you this morning, sir? Craig's try it again. Where are you? There you go. There we go. Now I hear from you.

Craig Peterson: There's always a button.

Matt Gagnon: There is always a button and it's good to have you with us and Craig, you know, I am told, although I'm not certain about this, I am told that you also have a show on Saturday here. Is that true?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, I do from one til three on Saturday, and I take a much deeper dive into all of my show notes and the hot topics for the week.

And you know, if you get my newsletter, not only do we discuss some of this stuff with Matt, but we get right into it all.

Matt Gagnon: Indeed. So Craig, on what's on the top of your mind, here's a, I'm going to approach this a little differently with you usually, because I know you send a, you send the topics every week and we talk about a lot of the things that you're talking about, but what is this.

[00:02:00] Stand out the story for you this week, in terms of tech topics, what is the thing that, that burns in your mind about what you said? Yeah,

Craig Peterson: Burning a hole here. I think kind of a big one. We've got the obvious things were some real problems with security, but that's kind of almost every week. The one that really gets to me is this article.

That's talking about a AAA study. Now everybody knows who AAA is. They are as car folk, right. That you can drive. They used to have trip ticks. I remember making those up and taking the family on vacation. Now they've, they've kind of shifted a little bit, but they were looking at these adaptive cruise controls and basically what most people are calling self-driving car technology.

[00:03:00] And there've been some reports of these adaptive cruise control, this self-driving technology, driving people right into the rear of fire trucks, from which, of course, is not a fun thing to hit, of police cars and other things. So basically, they thought they would check it out a little bit, and then he tested a number of different vehicles and the way they tested them as they parked a balloon on the road.

A lot like a car and it was designed here now to give the car an object. So you're driving down the road with your adaptive cruise control on that car sitting there. Is it going to avoid it by changing lanes, by stopping? What's it going to do? And in almost all of the cases, these cars are rear-ended this car slash balloon that was sitting right there in the lane. I don't mean like it's two inches into the lane. I mean, it was right in the lane. To me, that is huge news because we have all been looking forward to good automation, which of course isn't here yet, but many of us have these adaptive cruise controls, Matt.

[00:04:00] Matt Gagnon: Right. I was going to say, this is already a technology that is in like a lot of Tesla cars and a lot of other places that have this adaptive sort of technology that, uh, that I think Lee makes a lot of people feel. Like if it's in the car and sellable to you right now that it's totally safe and you're fine.

And you can, you can just kinda like put it on cruise control almost and let it do the rest.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. So, it's not a hundred percent of the time. Some of the cars, like the BMW X7, stopped in one out of three runs and that new Kia Telluride, which is a gorgeous car. I hit the dummy vehicle in all three 30 mile-an-hour runs.

The problem appears to be that they have maps of the roads and it doesn't have that map doesn't have everything that's around the road. Of course, the surroundings are changing, and these cars seem to be assuming that if something is fixed. It's probably off of the road. It's probably a road sign except, or et cetera.

[00:05:00] And this is where the big arguments coming out now, are we better off having something like LIDAR on our cars, which is giving it a full three-D view. It can figure out if things are moving, where they are. In respect to you. Or go with what Tesla is doing because Elon Musk and Tesla are very heavily reliant on just cameras.

So, they don't use a three-D view. Yeah. So, what's going to work best and there still are some radar-based systems. And that's the check really from 10 to 20 years.

Matt Gagnon: And those things basically, I mean, they send out like a, almost a Doppler signal to see. Where things are and, and, and basically how physically close they are.

And they use, you know, the complex math system and the computers to try to judge the car's speed and angle and whatever, to try to make sure that, of course, it avoids things. It just, it strikes me as weird. That be the way that we want a car that is autonomous in some way to operate. Right. I mean, you want, you know, who cares if a stationary object is a sign or something else if it's on the curb of the road and you're about to run into it. You want a car to see that? I mean, think about it like a kid that's frozen or a deer that's not moving or, I mean, any number of things, right. You want to be able to judge where that thing actually is.

[00:06:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, absolutely. So these adaptive cruise control. If you have it and you want to use it, what it is is good for is keeping you in the lane.

What is not good for it appears here from this study is avoiding accidents. By the way, Cadillac's super crew. Was it different than some of these other vehicles they tested from being BMW Ford, Kia and Subaru at its drivers only had to intervene about eight times and 800 miles of driving. So, it was actually pretty good.

So, these things are going to get better, but just don't trust the stuff itself.

[00:07:00] Matt Gagnon: Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology, Craig, it would be remiss of me to not bring up Tik Tok with you here. I know that we've touched on and hovered around this topic a little bit, uh, you know, in previous weeks here, but you know, the president signed that executive order that basically threw the hammer down on the Chinese company.

Any part of Tik Tok as it operates in the United States? Um, I guess my question for you is, is twofold. Number one, exactly. How does it work? What, what they're, what that app is doing, and what is the real security concern, and then number two, what do you think of the executive order?

I mean, is that the appropriate action to be taking in this regard?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, we've got a couple of things we're looking at here. We have WeChat and Tik Tok, which are both equally effective money transactions were banned from these Chinese companies. So it's Bytedance and Tencent. Those are the names of the companies that own those technologies.

[00:08:00] Now, we have caught our friends at Tik Tok multiple times now getting information from our phones and stealing information from our phones. Particularly if your phone has been rooted, if you have jailbroken your phone, you have now opened up your phone to all kinds of evil, and we have caught Tik Tok doing that.

Tencent, this is really kind of scary here because this is, this is a bad thing for Tencent, but I talked about Tencent on my show a couple of months ago here, because what they were caught doing is putting code into windows operating system that allowed them 100% access to everything on your machine, from your keyboard and mouse.

Through every file on your machine. And Tencent said they did that in order to help stop cheating. Tencent has some of the most popular video games in use today in the United States. Tik Tok, of course, which is Bytedance has this wonderful little app. That's very, very addictive. And obviously the Chinese spent a lot of money on it.

[00:09:00] Is it worth doing? I can say. Absolutely. Yes. I was so disappointed the owners and CEOs of these big tech companies, testifying, I have personally seen right here, multiple companies throughout New England who are now clients of mine who had. Active Chinese back doors in their systems where the Chinese had stolen their intellectual property.

And in some cases, yeah, stolen every penny out of their operating accounts. So, is China a threat? 100%! Is it doing it? I have firsthand knowledge of them doing it in companies that are now my clients. And it puts businesses just completely out of business. Is Tik Tok a threat. Absolutely. The latest thing they were caught doing is capturing everything from your copy buffer. Is Tencent a threat? Are you kidding me having complete control over your computer without your knowledge? So you can play a video game. Yeah, I don't think President Trump went far enough.

[00:10:00] Matt Gagnon: There you go. Well, Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time to go over the world of technology as he always does.

And of course, as you heard just a few moments ago, he also has a show on Saturdays that you can hear as well. If you want to get any of these topics and so many more in more depth and detail, Craig, we really appreciate it as always. And we'll talk to you again very soon.

Craig Peterson: Hey, take care, Matt.

Matt Gagnon: Thanks a lot.

Alright, so coming up next. Sure.

Craig Peterson: Hey, thanks, guys. I appreciate you joining me today. I was spent time yesterday, a few hours with our video guy. We're going to do some more work today. And what I'm trying to do here is put together a bunch of well kind of classes, courses, and stuff. So I think what I'm going to do before really get into this too much is send out an email.

[00:11:00] To everybody kind of asking you. So what if you had the opportunity, what would you do? So, uh, or what you'd like me to do here for you? Uh, for instance, you want to become like, uh, my friend Guy who decided after a full career, pretty much he wanted to go into cybersecurity. Cause there are millions of open jobs, even right now there are jobs in cybersecurity, but you have to learn it.

So do you want me to teach you guys? More about cybersecurity. So you have more job security and job options. Would you like me to just kind of get you out of a hole that you might be in with your cybersecurity? What do I do? What are the basics? Then give me the basics or something in between. So let me know.

[00:12:00] I would love to know. Okay. Cause I really want to help you guys out. It's me M E @craigpeterson.com. So drop me an email. Now I'm going to do a lot of free training as well as some of the paid training. And obviously the free training is going to be kind of long-tail just on some specific narrow topics, but lots of them, cause I don't want to confuse people, but uh, how about a more professional sort of course.

So let me know. Again, Craig at Craig peterson.com. Take care, everybody. And we'll be back this weekend.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on with Jim Polito this morning and we talked about the Federal government buying data on US citizens that they got from spyware apps. Programmers, assumptions, and flawed logic of Self-driving cars. Also, Chinese spies, Bytedance, Tencent, and Huawei vs the Trump admin. Here we go with Jim.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah. And that's been a trip that the feds have been using for a very long time. Now are basically almost since it became illegal. They go to data aggregators and they buy whatever they can. Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. And that was me on with Mr. Jim Polito. We got into these hundreds of apps and it looks like there is a spy.

Software on them that guess who the number one customer or appears to be? Yes, indeed. The federal guy. So we went into that a little bit. We got into this whole problem now that has been disclosed by AAA with these self-driving driver assist systems that have been steering people at full highway speed into the back of police cars into the back of fire trucks.

[00:01:00] Imagine how bad that is. I've been on an accident scene where someone went full force right into the back of a firetruck before. We also got into the latest on this whole China dispute with we chat and Tik Tok. So here we go with Jim,

Jim Polito: One of the most popular guests on the show. It is our tech talk guru and good friend, Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir.

Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning, Mr. Jim.

Jim Polito: Nice to hear your voice. Okay. I want to get into Tik Tok and, uh, some of the other stuff and self-driving cars, but I want to start with this. Hold on, everybody. All of those apps on my smartphone, are you saying that uncle Sam is watching me through those apps?

Because I got page after page of them.

[00:02:00] Craig Peterson: Well, first of all, the best rule, in general, is to delete apps you're not using right now. Now on your iPhone, it's going to automatically remove the app from your phone if you're not using it and it wants the space. So that's a handy thing, but just rule number one, remove it.

Number two. You know this, I think already, Jim. It's illegal for the federal government to track its citizens unless you're part of the Trump campaign, right?

Jim Polito: Wait a minute. Yeah. Define illegal because you know, like a Carter page and a lot of other people would, uh, would really like to have a talk with you about that.

You're right. Members of the Trump campaign. Uh, not only track but unmasked in large numbers.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. It's a scary thing. If the federal government comes after you and it's like this ton of weight, right. They only have what, a hundred thousand lawyers who know. And it's just little old you, losing your house.

[00:03:00] Right. So they're not allowed to track you. So what do you think they do? I spoke about this on my show. I don't remember as long as ten years ago. I had some of these information brokers on my radio show. And what they do is they take what's known as publicly sourced information, also called open source.

So they take stuff that they could find on the internet. They buy things like driver's license records from the state. The many States sell them to make a few extra bucks. I can't remember what the Commonwealth does if they do that or not.

Jim Polito: No, they don't. They don't anymore. They don't anymore. When I used to work in business, I used to be able to buy, uh, public records, license information, address, all that.

I used to be able to buy it. it stopped you couldn't after a while, they said, okay, we won't sell it anymore. But I used to pay dearly to get that information for marketing.

Craig Peterson: Right. It can be really handy. A stage going just North of the new house. I am sure you can off when you go and get registered here car, or driver's license.

[00:04:00] You can say, I don't want you to keep my social security number on file or my photograph on file. So the state doesn't keep it, but most States are not that way. So the government can't track you. So what do they do? They go to these data brokers because it's, he goes for them to buy all the information they want from a data broker.

And that comes to the point right now that we're talking about, and this is a report from the Wall Street Journal. And according to, uh, according to the Journal here, And the report that they released, at least one federal contractor puts in government tracking software in over 500 mobile applications.

[00:05:00] This is a company called Anomaly Six. They are paying application developers, mobile app developers here, to put just this little bit of code into their apps for tracking. So the app developer gets paid a few extra bucks. What the heck Anomaly Six gets all of the information that they possibly can from your phone.

In some cases, everything on the phone, particularly if you've rooted your phone and then guess who buys it from them.

Jim Polito: Ah, so, so the government can say we didn't do it. Well, we like this guy over here did, and we just bought it from him, but we didn't do it, Jim. Yeah.

We didn't do it to you, but it just so happens. There's this data miner, uh, had code like ours, and what would exactly what we were looking for. And then we bought it from them.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. And that's been a trick that the Feds have been using for a very long time. Now are basically almost since that became illegal. They go to data aggregators. And they buy whatever they can.

[00:06:00] And so the aggregators they'll get information from the phone company and just everywhere you possibly look. So any fact, the federal government is probably by doing this, getting more information on you than if they were tracking you personally. So it's very concerning. Yeah.

Jim Polito: Yeah.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. The Wall Street Journal said that they had this information, they have the reports, they know the company, but the company, of course, isn't talking.

And the wall street journal tried to figure out which apps it was in. They could not. So although the report is, this is going on and it makes a lot of sense that it would. W they're not like a thousand percent certain based on what I read in their article, but it's something that we've again, we've got to pull in some rains.

[00:07:00] Jim Polito: Yeah. But let's do that. Speaking of pulling in range, we're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru all around. Great guy. So tell me about these self-driving cars. Uh, I've got my self-driving car and it will keep me in the lane and I've had the opportunity to drive some of these vehicles with all these latest technologies.

Um, but if you come across a parked car, You may have a problem. What's this all about?

Craig Peterson: Oh yeah. And the poor occupants of that parked car are going to have even worse problems. There are a number of different systems that are being used for driver-assisted driving or computer-assisted driving right now.

So shelf driving not so much exists, but it's still there. They use the same types of technologies. Initially, they were using radar. To try and find stuff in front of them. A lot of them are using LIDAR, which is a very expensive technology, which again, again, is using lasers kind of like radar figure out where everything is, the distance for things moving, et cetera.

[00:08:00] Right. Um, and then you've got Tesla who says, I don't want any of that offensive stuff. I'm just gonna use cameras. So driving down the road, this is a test that was conducted by the AAA and driving down the road. They had a car parked in the lane. Now it was just a balloon car basically. Okay. Parked right there in the lane.

And every vehicle they tested that had any form of self-driving, rear-ended that just straight, dead on into, without even slowing down.

Jim Polito: Why, how so? We couldn't determine. Yeah. Wow.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. Here's how I'm. I'm sorry. Uh, you here's how here's why. Okay. These, the software again, have to make assumptions and to have written, I don't know, millions of lines of code over the years.

[00:09:00] I couldn't say I've made a lot of assumptions about things, and you're trying to cover all of the possibilities when you're writing this code, but apparently. Everybody seems to make the same mistake, which is if there is something that is fixed, in other words, it's not moving. The question is, is that part of the road?

Is that a sign that actually on the side of the road and the software universally appears to be making the decision that well, if it's not moving, it's part of the roadway and I'm probably getting a bit of a false signal here. So let's barrel on and they do. This is a really concerning thing. They have passed this information onto the national transportation safety board, and they've investigated several failed crashes with Tesla, which you have included crashing into parks, police cars, and fire trucks.

That seems to be a little bit about what spawned this whole AAA in bed investigation you're crashing head-on, into a parked fire truck. Now, as you know, I was in emergency medicine for 10 years. I was at a scene once and it was icy, icy, icy.

[00:10:00] It's the only time I've ever seen. A car went straight on into the back of a firetruck and that actually pushed it forward about 10 feet. Cause the guy was doing 80 miles an hour in a 65 zone. Yeah, this is very, very concerning. Again, everybody, you're supposed to have your hands on the wheel, you're supposed to be paying attention to where you're going because these systems are not mature yet.

Jim Polito: Wow. That's something to keep in mind. All right. Quickly before we go. Any new news on Tik Tok and what's the other one We chat. Is that the other Chinese? Uh,

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's called a We Chat. Yeah. Yeah.

Craig Peterson: So the basic news that many people have probably heard is these two apps or out of China.

One of those companies is owned by Tencent, the WeChat app, Tencent, which I talked about a few months ago, my radio show because they have some of the top video games in the world. People absolutely love these Tencent video games out of China again. Why I was talking about it because Tencent is doing something that frankly you should be well, not yet illegal, but no one should ever do.

[00:11:00] They take complete control of your windows machine. They are running with Kernel level privileges, it lets them. See, okay everything on your machine, every file on your machine. So you install this Tencent video game and all of a sudden, no, your entire machine has the remote control on it.

So President Trump said both the owners of We Chat and. Also Tik Tok, uh, has to be basically be sold to a US company at, within 45 days. But in 45 days, no money can go to either one of those companies from the United States. And personally, I think this is a very, very good move on the part of the Trump administration.

[00:12:00] Jim Polito: Excellent.

Well, listen. A good move for all of us would be to get more information from Craig Peterson, our tech talker guru. It's a smart move. As Michael Corleone said in godfather one. It's a smart move. Tessio was always smarter. So be Tessio and be smarter. Craig, how can folks get more information from you?

Craig Peterson: Well, the best way is to get on my newsletter list. You'll get all my show notes. You'll find out about this free training, the lives that I'm doing. Just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

Jim Polito: Alright, Craig, look forward to catching up with you, um, next week. And until then, sir, be well, stay safe.

Craig Peterson: All right, take care. And I'll be back, of course, Saturday at 11:00 AM with a little more in-depth stuff. Excellent.

[00:13:00] Jim Polito: Good promo there. Excellent. Excellent promo Craig Peterson, everybody. All right. When we return a final word, you're listening to the Jim Polito show from my kitchen with pops. This is your safe space.

Craig Peterson: I really like that guy, man. And it isn't just because he likes me apparently, but I think we've got some good dynamics. I'm going to be so glad when he gets back into the studio. These delays are a little bit annoying. You probably don't hear them if you're listening to the podcast. Cause I edit them out, but there's like a two, three second roundtrip time here from, uh, from him because he's not in the studio is at, at his home.

Anyways. We made some good progress yesterday. I, uh, I had my video guy in here and we did some more work. Some more practice, shot some with cameras, I've got new, uh, polarizers here, some circular polarizers for my cameras. See if I can get rid of some of the glare coming from my glasses and stuff and the lights.

[00:14:00] And so we're, we're making progress and. I'm really excited about it. So everybody take care and we'll be back tomorrow, as well, by the way. Thanks to Karen. She is getting all, everything caught up after this whole bout that we had. With just a really kind of crazy two months. Anyhow, take care of everybody and thanks for sticking with me.

We'll talk later. Bye. Bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on with Jim Polito this morning and we talked about the Federal government buying data on US citizens that they got from spyware apps. Programmers, assumptions, and flawed logic of Self-driving cars. Also, Chinese spies, Bytedance, Tencent, and Huawei vs the Trump admin. Here we go with Jim.

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

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah. And that's been a trip that the feds have been using for a very long time. Now are basically almost since it became illegal. They go to data aggregators and they buy whatever they can. Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. And that was me on with Mr. Jim Polito. We got into these hundreds of apps and it looks like there is a spy.

Software on them that guess who the number one customer or appears to be? Yes, indeed. The federal guy. So we went into that a little bit. We got into this whole problem now that has been disclosed by AAA with these self-driving driver assist systems that have been steering people at full highway speed into the back of police cars into the back of fire trucks.

[00:01:00] Imagine how bad that is. I've been on an accident scene where someone went full force right into the back of a firetruck before. We also got into the latest on this whole China dispute with we chat and Tik Tok. So here we go with Jim,

Jim Polito: One of the most popular guests on the show. It is our tech talk guru and good friend, Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir.

Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning, Mr. Jim.

Jim Polito: Nice to hear your voice. Okay. I want to get into Tik Tok and, uh, some of the other stuff and self-driving cars, but I want to start with this. Hold on, everybody. All of those apps on my smartphone, are you saying that uncle Sam is watching me through those apps?

Because I got page after page of them.

[00:02:00] Craig Peterson: Well, first of all, the best rule, in general, is to delete apps you're not using right now. Now on your iPhone, it's going to automatically remove the app from your phone if you're not using it and it wants the space. So that's a handy thing, but just rule number one, remove it.

Number two. You know this, I think already, Jim. It's illegal for the federal government to track its citizens unless you're part of the Trump campaign, right?

Jim Polito: Wait a minute. Yeah. Define illegal because you know, like a Carter page and a lot of other people would, uh, would really like to have a talk with you about that.

You're right. Members of the Trump campaign. Uh, not only track but unmasked in large numbers.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. It's a scary thing.  If the federal government comes after you and it's like this ton of weight, right. They only have what, a hundred thousand lawyers who know. And it's just little old you, losing your house.

[00:03:00] Right. So they're not allowed to track you. So what do you think they do?  I spoke about this on my show. I don't remember as long as ten years ago. I had some of these information brokers on my radio show. And what they do is they take what's known as publicly sourced information, also called open source.

So they take stuff that they could find on the internet. They buy things like driver's license records from the state. The many States sell them to make a few extra bucks. I can't remember what the Commonwealth does if they do that or not.

Jim Polito: No, they don't. They don't anymore. They don't anymore. When I used to work in business, I used to be able to buy, uh, public records, license information, address, all that.

I used to be able to buy it. it stopped you couldn't after a while, they said, okay, we won't sell it anymore. But I used to pay dearly to get that information for marketing.

Craig Peterson: Right. It can be really handy. A stage going just North of the new house. I am sure you can off when you go and get registered here car, or driver's license.

[00:04:00] You can say, I don't want you to keep my social security number on file or my photograph on file. So the state doesn't keep it, but most States are not that way. So the government can't track you. So what do they do? They go to these data brokers because it's, he goes for them to buy all the information they want from a data broker.

And that comes to the point right now that we're talking about, and this is a report from the Wall Street Journal. And according to, uh, according to the Journal here, And the report that they released, at least one federal contractor puts in government tracking software in over 500 mobile applications.

[00:05:00] This is a company called Anomaly Six. They are paying application developers, mobile app developers here, to put just this little bit of code into their apps for tracking. So the app developer gets paid a few extra bucks. What the heck Anomaly Six gets all of the information that they possibly can from your phone.

 In some cases, everything on the phone, particularly if you've rooted your phone and then guess who buys it from them.

Jim Polito: Ah, so, so the government can say we didn't do it. Well, we like this guy over here did, and we just bought it from him, but we didn't do it, Jim. Yeah.

We didn't do it to you, but it just so happens. There's this data miner, uh, had code like ours, and what would exactly what we were looking for. And then we bought it from them.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. And that's been a trick that the Feds have been using for a very long time. Now are basically almost since that became illegal. They go to data aggregators. And they buy whatever they can.

[00:06:00] And so the aggregators they'll get information from the phone company and just everywhere you possibly look. So any fact, the federal government is probably by doing this, getting more information on you than if they were tracking you personally. So it's very concerning. Yeah.

Jim Polito: Yeah.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. The Wall Street Journal said that they had this information, they have the reports, they know the company, but the company, of course, isn't talking.

And the wall street journal tried to figure out which apps it was in. They could not. So although the report is, this is going on and it makes a lot of sense that it would. W they're not like a thousand percent certain based on what I read in their article, but it's something that we've again, we've got to pull in some rains.

[00:07:00] Jim Polito: Yeah. But let's do that. Speaking of pulling in range, we're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech talk guru all around. Great guy. So tell me about these self-driving cars. Uh, I've got my self-driving car and it will keep me in the lane and I've had the opportunity to drive some of these vehicles with all these latest technologies.

Um, but if you come across a parked car, You may have a problem. What's this all about?

Craig Peterson: Oh yeah. And the poor occupants of that parked car are going to have even worse problems. There are a number of different systems that are being used for driver-assisted driving or computer-assisted driving right now.

So shelf driving not so much exists, but it's still there. They use the same types of technologies. Initially, they were using radar. To try and find stuff in front of them. A lot of them are using LIDAR, which is a very expensive technology, which again, again, is using lasers kind of like radar figure out where everything is, the distance for things moving, et cetera.

[00:08:00] Right. Um, and then you've got Tesla who says, I don't want any of that offensive stuff. I'm just gonna use cameras. So driving down the road, this is a test that was conducted by the AAA and driving down the road. They had a car parked in the lane. Now it was just a balloon car basically. Okay. Parked right there in the lane.

And every vehicle they tested that had any form of self-driving, rear-ended that just straight, dead on into, without even slowing down.

Jim Polito: Why, how so? We couldn't determine. Yeah. Wow.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. Here's how I'm. I'm sorry. Uh, you here's how here's why. Okay. These, the software again, have to make assumptions and to have written, I don't know, millions of lines of code over the years.

[00:09:00] I couldn't say I've made a lot of assumptions about things, and you're trying to cover all of the possibilities when you're writing this code, but apparently. Everybody seems to make the same mistake, which is if there is something that is fixed, in other words, it's not moving. The question is, is that part of the road?

Is that a sign that actually on the side of the road and the software universally appears to be making the decision that well, if it's not moving, it's part of the roadway and I'm probably getting a bit of a false signal here. So let's barrel on and they do. This is a really concerning thing. They have passed this information onto the national transportation safety board, and they've investigated several failed crashes with Tesla, which you have included crashing into parks, police cars, and fire trucks.

That seems to be a little bit about what spawned this whole AAA in bed investigation you're crashing head-on, into a parked fire truck. Now, as you know, I was in emergency medicine for 10 years. I was at a scene once and it was icy, icy, icy.

[00:10:00] It's the only time I've ever seen. A car went straight on into the back of a firetruck and that actually pushed it forward about 10 feet. Cause the guy was doing 80 miles an hour in a 65 zone. Yeah, this is very, very concerning. Again, everybody, you're supposed to have your hands on the wheel, you're supposed to be paying attention to where you're going because these systems are not mature yet.

Jim Polito: Wow. That's something to keep in mind. All right. Quickly before we go. Any new news on Tik Tok and what's the other one We chat. Is that the other Chinese? Uh,

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's called a We Chat. Yeah. Yeah.

Craig Peterson: So the basic news that many people have probably heard is these two apps or out of China.

One of those companies is owned by Tencent, the WeChat app, Tencent, which I talked about a few months ago, my radio show because they have some of the top video games in the world. People absolutely love these Tencent video games out of China again. Why I was talking about it because Tencent is doing something that frankly you should be well, not yet illegal, but no one should ever do.

[00:11:00] They take complete control of your windows machine. They are running with Kernel level privileges, it lets them. See, okay everything on your machine, every file on your machine. So you install this Tencent video game and all of a sudden, no, your entire machine has the remote control on it.

So President Trump said both the owners of We Chat and. Also Tik Tok, uh, has to be basically be sold to a US company at, within 45 days. But in 45 days, no money can go to either one of those companies from the United States. And personally, I think this is a very, very good move on the part of the Trump administration.

[00:12:00] Jim Polito: Excellent.

Well, listen. A good move for all of us would be to get more information from Craig Peterson, our tech talker guru. It's a smart move. As Michael Corleone said in godfather one. It's a smart move. Tessio was always smarter. So be Tessio and be smarter. Craig, how can folks get more information from you?

Craig Peterson: Well, the best way is to get on my newsletter list. You'll get all my show notes. You'll find out about this free training, the lives that I'm doing. Just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

Jim Polito: Alright, Craig, look forward to catching up with you, um, next week. And until then, sir, be well, stay safe.

Craig Peterson: All right, take care. And I'll be back, of course, Saturday at 11:00 AM with a little more in-depth stuff. Excellent.

[00:13:00] Jim Polito: Good promo there. Excellent. Excellent promo Craig Peterson, everybody. All right. When we return a final word, you're listening to the Jim Polito show from my kitchen with pops. This is your safe space.

Craig Peterson: I really like that guy, man. And it isn't just because he likes me apparently, but I think we've got some good dynamics. I'm going to be so glad when he gets back into the studio. These delays are a little bit annoying. You probably don't hear them if you're listening to the podcast. Cause I edit them out, but there's like a two, three second roundtrip time here from, uh, from him because he's not in the studio is at, at his home.

Anyways. We made some good progress yesterday. I, uh, I had my video guy in here and we did some more work. Some more practice, shot some with cameras, I've got new, uh, polarizers here, some circular polarizers for my cameras. See if I can get rid of some of the glare coming from my glasses and stuff and the lights.

[00:14:00] And so we're, we're making progress and. I'm really excited about it. So everybody take care and we'll be back tomorrow, as well, by the way. Thanks to Karen. She is getting all, everything caught up after this whole bout that we had. With  just a really kind of crazy two months. Anyhow, take care of everybody and thanks for sticking with me.

We'll talk later. Bye. Bye.

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Welcome,

Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning discussing How the logic in self-driving cars can kill. General Motors Car Rental plans and Coronavirus and the Death of Uber. Here we go with Jack.

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit

- CraigPeterson.com

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

2020-08-10-wgir-uber_problems-todays_self_driving_cars_can_kill

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Companies like general motors is betting the bank on not selling cars to individuals, but selling basically renting fleets of cars.

Yeah. If you're like me, I'm really disappointed about this new AAA study and our self-driving cars. Of course, this is Craig Peterson and I was on this morning with Mr. Jack Heath. We got into it this morning and a little bit about the problems we're facing and how some of our US automakers might be going down the completely wrong road.

Jack Heath: All right. Hey, with a tech talk update, we go to our own Craig Peterson, his show airs on the weekend's Tech Talk, Craig joins live on the AutoFair listener lines.

Good morning, Craig.

[00:01:00] Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning, Jack. What do you have? Did you hear the latest? About the parked cars and some of these automatic driving cars. There have been some tests that have been conducted here lately, showing that in recent years, some of these car companies like Tesla, for instance, have these driver assistance systems. The whole idea behind them is to stay in the lane and they have these adaptive cruise controls. More and more companies are starting to come out with them. Well, there's an interesting study that is just happened here. A report from AAA has found that they do not stop or divert themselves for cars parked, even in the lane, in front of them. In other words, if there's a car broken down in front of you on the highway, these self-driving systems, none of them were tested, will avoid the car. They just ran right into it. And it has to do with the logic in the system saying, well, if it's a fixed object, if it's not moving, it's probably off the side of the road, so I don't need to worry about it. So there go my hopes for having a self-driving car in a couple of years.

[00:02:00] Jack Heath: Yeah. It might take a while.

Justin McIssac: It sounds like self-driving cars were designed in Massachusetts.

Jack Heath: Hey, we haven't talked about this in a while, but you know, before the quote-unquote COVID-19 thing, Uber was just coming into more places, more available and places like New Hampshire. How has the whole pandemic and the whole Uber thing? I mean, they, they weren't even profitable, to begin with, but I mean, Where's Uber at? I'm just curious.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. Uber is an interesting problem. They just lost. What was it? Like two, almost 2 billion. It might've been just over $1 billion, right?

Jack Heath: Just a couple of zeros. It's a rounding error.

[00:03:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, exactly. Compared to the US budget. So now they're in really bad shape. I just got from Uber this last week, three rides at 50% off offer. Now I haven't used Uber in probably a year, but they are getting very desperate. Many of these companies like General Motors, is betting the bank on not selling cars to individuals, but basically renting fleets of cars.

So GM would have a car show up when you want it to show up. All automatically. I think all of these guys are going to be completely, really rethinking what they've been doing because frankly, a safe self-driving car, it's just not here. It's not in the near future. So, this is really going to upset all of the manufacturers in cars worldwide.

Jack Heath: Yeah. And, uh, you know, it's, it's just one of these trends, people are not out and about not doing as much business travel and it's just interesting that it's going to all shake out. All right. Thank you, Craig Peterson. I appreciate it. You have a good one tech talk.

Craig Peterson: Thank you, sir.

Hey, take care. I'll be back Saturday at 1130.

Jack Heath: Alright, thanks, Craig.

Craig Peterson: Hey everybody.

[00:04:00] Thanks for so many kind comments here. I got dozens and dozens of them. We've been through a lot. And if you've been listening, you know, I kind of dropped the hint about my having had this whole WuHan virus and the COVID-19 symptoms and how that has knocked me on my but here.

I still have that muscle soreness. I feel like I just finished a big workout, which is kind of crazy. But anyway, that's the only thing left. Apparently, that residual of, I felt like I just worked out like crazy, last weeks or sometimes even months. They're saying. So, I have that to look forward to, I guess as well. But we did get a newsletter out and there's a little note in there from me and Karen helped a little bit with some of that, too. Of course, she put together all of the stuff on the articles that I had selected for this week. So, thanks to her as well for all of her help.

I will be back tomorrow, of course, on with Jim Polito on two powerhouse stations down in Mass that actually cover parts of Vermont and Rhode Island and Connecticut as well.

[00:05:00] I'm still doing all of this stuff. We're still reworking things in the studio. I'm meeting with my video guy this afternoon. Again, we've been getting together multiple times a week sometimes just trying to get together so we can do a lot more training for you guys. So have a great day and. Thanks again, guys, for all of those kind words and well wishes and prayers. I really do appreciate it.

Back tomorrow and visit online of course, as well.

Craig Peterson out.

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More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553