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

Welcome!

Craig discusses the Hack that could cost you your business.

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

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Read More:

How to find Stalkerware on your smartphone

This Simple Hack Could Tank Your Business

7 VPN services left data of millions of users exposed online

Universities Brand ‘Drama Therapy’ And ‘Journalism’ as STEM Majors to Circumvent Immigration Policy

DoJ suggested OANN should call FBI about NPR’s tipline, emails show

Google reportedly peeks into Android data to gain edge over third-party apps

Russia’s GRU hackers hit US government and energy targets

Your next smartphone will be a lot harder to scratch

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Hey, have you been paying attention? And I know you have, 'cause you're the best and brightest, you know about phishing and not to click on links you don't know about. there's another one, and this next one is taking advantage of your knowledge about phishing.

Hey  Craig, Peterson here. Thanks for joining me.

Let's talk a little bit about it. Yes, we've man, we've beaten. I think the phishing horse to death bottom line because phishing has been such a problem for so long, but for those that aren't really up-on it, you've heard the term, a little bit about, don't click on things, phishing.

It has been very effective lately. We have a lot of people working from home. That's going to continue for months and years to come, frankly, a very high percentage of us. It'll just be at home, in a bedroom or in the living room on the couch.

[00:01:00] That's been happening a lot. those of us who are sitting at home.

Are probably not as aware as we should be to all of the problems that are going on out there. Now we have some training for employees. A lot of places have stuff. I really love what we have and we have training for if you're in HIPAA. if you are CMMC I tar D FARs, right? All of these different regulations that are out there, even PCI training that walks people through and gives them questions and reminds them about the training.

If your business does not have this sort of training. Get it right? Whether you get it from me or you get it from someone else, please get that training so that you can keep up on all of these techniques. The bad guys are using phishing is where they are sending out messages, trying to get you to do

[00:02:00] something right.

Trying to get you to react. what kind of reaction are we talking about here? They can be just a link that you click on. The email looks legit, right? I've been getting every week email, supposedly from Amazon telling me that my. Amazon Prime membership has expired. it hasn't the card did. And now because my credit card on file has been expired.

So has my Amazon membership, right? no, none of that's true, but some of these emails you take a second glance. You say, Whoa, wait a minute then. Okay. That looks legit. It's got Amazon's logo. It's worded like Amazon might word it. And then if you click on it, it's going to take you to a site that pretends to be Amazon and asks you for your credit card update.

So you're going to give a credit card number you're going to give. an expiration date, right? You're going to put all of this stuff

[00:03:00] in, cause you don't want to lose your Amazon prime membership. Now I'm just using Amazon prime as an example, this is happening all the way across the board with tons of.

Banks credit unions. Financial institutions are a really great target. I've seen them from supposedly, right? E-bay I've seen them from the IRS law enforcement. All right. All the way across the board, it is a serious problem. So how do we deal with that problem while we care, but what we're clicking on, but I want to talk about a simple hack may not have heard about before that can just destroy your business and what it is done?

What these guys are doing is called Typosquatting papal, squatting, and typos squatting is where you think you're going to google.com, but maybe you ended

[00:04:00] [email protected]. You forgot the E or maybe it's Google with three O's. Instead of google.com or if you have one of these home routers, even if you're a business and you're not using at least pro or hardware, like the Cisco go hardware.

Then you've got an additional problem because what the bad guys have been doing is taking over control of your router. So many of them have never been patched via Rob, have you ever updated your rudder? Have you ever. They did the firmware new router, right? Most people don't and most rodders don't do it automatically, and they only will do it for me, maybe a couple of years, even if they do it automatically, I just had a client.

We were helping out. We were grading them to the prosumer, the Cisco go hardware. And. She said, yeah, I have been, I check every week. That's how diligent she was. So

[00:05:00] she went to the vendor's website, checked what the latest release of firmware was, and then checked her machine to see what release of more she had.

Guess what it was the same release. But it had been two years since the manufacturer had issued any updates to the firmware. So her modem was completely vulnerable. So make sure you do have a modem that is not only up to date, but really, even for home users, you've got to get the prosumer stuff. I recommend the Cisco stuff.

You don't have to get it from me. But Cisco goes something you might want to look at. You can get it online. I think it's even available on Amazon. I've seen it over there before, and it's not that much more expensive if you just buy it and do it yourself. If you want me to do it, obviously we're going to get involved to help configure it and help you install it and everything.

So there are additional charges, but let's get back to typesquatting. That's

[00:06:00] different than the pad guys taking over your router. And when you type in the correct google.com, you're going to two of them. Okay. Okay. Many of these types of domains. Are either purchased for resale. They redirect you to a real offer and it a shady way.

Many times what they're doing is they'll use a coupon if you will code that gives them credit for the sale. So you're, you are actually going to the real Amazon. And what happens is there's a referral. Bounty, if you will, that they are paid by sending you to Amazon, even though they didn't really send you to Amazon.

So there's a lot of stuff that they're doing. And so forth labs found that roughly 2.7% of 15,000 domain names that they looked at. Two and a half, 2.7% were associated with some form of

[00:07:00] cybercrime, including hacking phishing online fraud or spamming. If you think that 2.7% is a small number, remember there's at least 360 million registered domain.

So let's do a little bit of mathematics here. If we say (360) 100-0000. Times 0.027. So that's 2.7%. So that is nine, almost 10 million websites. If those numbers, if you can really just interpolate it across all registered domains. So there's a lot of easy examples of type typo. Squatting. Security research has found a perfect.

Replica of reddit.com, Tom, which is one of the five most visited websites online under

[00:08:00] reddit.co. Which is.co is Columbia's domain by the way. So they had even acquired an SSL certificate for reddit.co. So the majority of the web browsers wouldn't even tell you that there might be a problem. So we gotta be very careful.

We've seen campaigns in the past for Netflix dot O M again, a typo, right? You meant to type.com Citibank dot O M. Which is, by the way, Oman's, domain suffix. Now that doesn't mean that Columbia or Oman are actively involved in this, or even that the people that did this are from Columbia or Amman. It just means it was the domain was registered there.

Registrars are what it's called. Cameroon's other popular one.cm, Hulu, Netflix, 12 million visits over a three month period. That's pretty amazing here. So anyway, let's not do that. Be careful with typos

[00:09:00] squatting, pay close attention. When you're typing in the URLs. I have seen based on my website, just X, a lot of people use Google.

Instead of typing in the direct URL. So pay attention to that. All right. Stick around. When we come back, we've got a mortar cocktail. We're going to get into the whole VPN story this week. I've got a big I told you so pink is the bottom line here and make sure you're on my email list.

You can sign up at Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

Stick around because we'll be right back.

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For questions, call or text:

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Welcome!

Craig finishes his discussion on Stalkerware and then gets into IOS and Android.

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

---

Read More:

How to find Stalkerware on your smartphone

This Simple Hack Could Tank Your Business

7 VPN services left data of millions of users exposed online

Universities Brand ‘Drama Therapy’ And ‘Journalism’ as STEM Majors to Circumvent Immigration Policy

DoJ suggested OANN should call FBI about NPR’s tipline, emails show

Google reportedly peeks into Android data to gain edge over third-party apps

Russia’s GRU hackers hit US government and energy targets

Your next smartphone will be a lot harder to scratch

---

Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. We've been talking about stalkerware. I'm going to finish that up right now. And then we're getting into that simple hack that could tank your business. In fact, all of your retirement and savings as well.

This is Craig Peterson. I'm so glad to have you guys with us today. We are also on [email protected]. You can get my newsletter just by going to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. You'll get all of my show notes every week. The notes that I used for this show, as well as the notes that I'm using for my appearances on various radio stations throughout New England.

And also now I am starting to put together some videos, little training videos that we will be releasing too. So keep an eye out for those. Let's finish up the whole thing about stock aware and iOS. Of course

[00:01:00] Apple's operating system for the iPhone, as well as for the iPad. In the last segment, I told you how to get into the settings to look, to see if your device was managed.

IOS is a difficult one when it comes to stock or where the easiest way for the bad guys to track you is by using mobile device management. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, so that's all well and good, right? But there are ways of hiding software on the Apple device, and it's almost impossible for you to detect it's there.

That's how bad some of this stuff is. And Apple does not make it easy for you to get in and look around unlike Android, that. Pretty darn easy to get in and poke around if you know what you're doing and Apple does that, they restrict it for really good security reasons. The types of reasons that you would hope

[00:02:00] Apple or one of these other companies was actually do it, which is because of course, they don't want.

Bad guys doing bad things on your phone. So the access to this sort of thing is restricted. So that makes it difficult. So you might have to just go on some clues. So what are the clues? In this case, and this is true for Android. The clues are that your phone is running hot. Your phone is getting slow.

You're not sure what's happening. Maybe your data plan is getting eaten up. Those are all pretty bad things to happen to you. And they're all things that might indicate that there is a problem, keyboard, keys if they have a leg. Yeah. Your type. Remember that there are no real keyboards on phones anymore.

It's all touch screen. But if you're typing on that screen and you notice that it takes

[00:03:00] a while. For those, it's a fraction of a second for those characters to come up. Whereas before it was instantaneous, that also could be assigned that there's a key logger on the device. All right. you're running out of space.

That's a dead giveaway because if you're not downloading it a lot of stuff, why would you be running out of space on your phone? So look at all of those things also on iOS at the very top of the screen. There's a little thing that indicates that, right up here on the upper right-hand side, it indicates that their location services are being used.

Now that is legitimate in some cases, but it could be a bad guy monitoring you this stock or where. So again, if you want to look at location services, If they're at least using those legitimately, you can go into your settings, location services, and you can see all of the programs that have requested

[00:04:00] access to your location.

And then the ones that have had it recently, we'll have a little blue arrow next to them to let you know that it's been used recently. And that's going to tell you a whole lot too. Okay. let's see. Let's move on here to our Android friends. I am not a fan, of antivirus software. Cause it's pretty much useless, but there are some things that can do if you're not doing anything to protect yourself.

So on the Android side, there's Kaspersky as well as some others. Now, Apple does not allow anti-virus software. On their Apple app store for good reason, because it gained access to a lot of things that are shouldn't have access to it often can be malicious and in the iOS world as a general rule, it's not going to do any good to for you anyways, but on the.

Android side. If you go to the google play store,

[00:05:00] you'll see a bunch of different antiviruses. Now, Kaspersky is another one that's like antivirus, right? Kaspersky is a Russian company and they have had antivirus software for quite a while. And their antivirus software is actually illegal to use in the federal government.

Now you might ask why is that the case? there are ties alleged to between Kaspersky Labs and the Russian government and maybe even the Russian mafia. That's why? So the federal government has removed Kaspersky, antivirus software from all of their devices. And frankly, you probably should too, but this is one case where again if you're not that worried about it and you like inexpensive and you don't care if the Ruski ruskis again and get access to your information, you might want to look for it for that because of Kaspersky labs.

With their

[00:06:00] antivirus software now has a feature that allows you to check for spyware, which is really cool. So they've really upgraded their antivirus pro, where they upgraded the software last year. And yeah, we'll tell you about stock or wherever. So those jealous partners who want to spy on their ex and lovers.

They can find out. So 2018, I'm looking at some stats right now because ski lab products detected stock or whatever, programmed on 60,000, almost unique mobile devices proving the severity of the threat according to yes Bursky. So have a look at it. It is called their mobile antivirus product and they detected not a virus, colon monitor.

That's what they'll do. Yeah. So I have a look at that. I am looking at their stats. There are a bunch of different pieces of spyware that they've detected. Did, stock to where is real

[00:07:00] don't fool yourself. I will want to get, let you guys know about a couple of things I'm doing right now. We are going to be talking in the next segment about this simple hack that can just total your business.

We're also going to be talking about VPN, but I can't dive into them at the level that I'd like to be able to hear on the radio. And if you're watching this on video, this is again, it's a short video to give you some basic understandings. So if you want more, if you want a step by step walkthrough where I am clicking on it, and you are looking over my shoulder, what I'm doing, you have to attend one of my pieces of training or watch one of the training videos if you've registered.

So there is only one way to do that as well. And that is to go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Now that's going to get you on to my

[00:08:00] newsletter list. Now, the newsletter list, isn't something where I'm just pounding you constantly, right? I really want to help you guys out. And I went through just yesterday.

All of the. Collateral materials that we produced. Do you remember last summer? I did the security summer where we had a different white paper that we had written and distributed every day. And some of these were two pages. Some of them are five or six pages. Plus we've had small business security guides.

You've got the security reboot guide. We've got a whole bunch of stuff. I counted them. There are over 50 of those that we have written and given away. Very important stuff for small businesses, very important stuff for home users as well. And you can always ignore some of that technical detail.

If you're a home user, you're sitting there and say, I'm not that

[00:09:00] technical. I don't know what to do. Okay. But it is very important. And if you're thinking about maybe. Not just getting into a computer security career, but make a few more bucks at the office because now you can say, Hey, I know this about security or better yet.

You've taken some courses that we offer as well as others, but some courses. That you've got a certificate now, and you can get, maybe get that raise that you've been hoping to get forever. So make sure you check it out.

Craig peterson.com/subscribe online, stick around.

We'll be right back. When you talk about the simple hack, what are the bad guys doing right now that mess with us?

---

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:

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Welcome!

Craig discusses Stalkerware and explains why you should be concerned.

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

---

Read More:

How to find Stalkerware on your smartphone

This Simple Hack Could Tank Your Business

7 VPN services left data of millions of users exposed online

Universities Brand ‘Drama Therapy’ And ‘Journalism’ as STEM Majors to Circumvent Immigration Policy

DoJ suggested OANN should call FBI about NPR’s tipline, emails show

Google reportedly peeks into Android data to gain edge over third-party apps

Russia’s GRU hackers hit US government and energy targets

Your next smartphone will be a lot harder to scratch

---

[00:00:00] Hey, there is one simple hack that could ruin your business and ruin your credit and steal all of your money. And they're going after it today, against you.

Craig Peterson, you recognize the voice so glad to be with you. You can find me online at Craig. Peterson.com. We got trainings coming up for people. It's really important to understand what's happening? How you can protect yourself? How you can protect your business? And we're going to be talking a lot about that here today.

We're going to talk about this simple hack that can tank your whole business. We'll talk about VPNs. We have before. And I'm not a fan of, I'll tell you a little bit more about why I had a whole training course on VPNs and the dangers of VPNs. And huge dangers people just started using them.

So we'll get into that a little bit. I love this whole

[00:01:00] drama therapy. Now being branded as STEM science, technology engineering mathematics will tell you why universities are doing that. And the DOJ here telling one America news network that. Maybe they should call the FBI about NPR. So a kid into that Google is peeking into Android data.

Again. Now we've talked about this before. It's absolutely not to a Google gets away with, and it turns out they're doing something that Microsoft did years ago and got sued by every government in the world and lost every government in the world. So what's Google up to there for you. Poor Android users.

Russia's. Hackers they're GRU hackers have hit the U S government. We're going to talk about that one and your next smartphone may be a lot harder to scratch. And of course, we'll get into that one as well. So a whole lot to talk about today. But first, we're going to talk about

[00:02:00] how to find smartware. it is smart, but this is stock they're on your phone.

Now you may not be aware of this, but there are ways to monitor everything that you're doing on your phone and the best way to do it really is installing one of these apps that kind of hide now. This is particularly true for Android. This is true for you. Windows PCs to a slide, the lesser degree. It is true for your max as well.

So with the stocker where what you can do is look at the keystrokes, record them all. Do screen captures, usually grabs a frame if you will. What's on the screen every minute or so, so that it's not chewing up all of your disc space, but you can go all the way up to a live video so that you are tracking everything that's going on while someone's logged into a computer.

[00:03:00] So it's designed specifically because it is stalker where to run in the background of the computer. To make it very hard to see. And most of the antivirus software out there just won't catch it. If you have the advanced malware protection that's available through us and from Cisco then yeah.

You're probably going to be able to detect it, but it is designed to hide. So there's a high degree of probability that it is hiding and it's probably hiding pretty darn it's keeping tabs on. Everything on your phone. So your personal details are going to get leaked out. And we're talking about having access to all of your contacts, all of your applications, knowing what's going on, it may show up as an application on your phone.

It may not show up as an application. Same thing on your windows side. And this is a rich source of information for people,

[00:04:00] because if they can get the stock aware on your computer, they know pretty much everything they might need to know about you. You've gotta be very careful. It can track your location, record your phone calls.

Obviously your text messages steal the passwords to the social media accounts or email account or access that you're logging into through your phone reveal, your contacts, photos. Emails and even end to end encrypted communications, because remember what happens with these things like WhatsApp, et cetera, you have to be able to read that message.

Don't you, it's not good to you. If it shows you a bunch of Google. That is the recorded, encrypted, I should say message that was passed through. You need to see the clear text. So if you can see the clear text on the device, the stocker work and see it as well. Now we've found that in for

[00:05:00] the most part, the stock aware is really aimed at people that.

That, might be involved as activists. For instance, you have a lot of government agencies that do it. you have no activists. Of course, we're talking about socialists countries, right? It's illegal to do it here in the U S but every socialist country out there. Does it to some degree or another, the more socialist you are, the more they do it.

Like China, for instance of courses using stock or where by demand, it's the law. You will go to jail. If you don't have stock go. Where on your smartphone? Venezuela, Brazil. Cuba, some examples of some very socialist countries that are doing all of this, where you don't have the rights that you might want right there.

The typical Marxists socialist countries that are out there. So the average person doesn't have to worry about it too much. Is that what's your thinking? Because in fact, what happened is that the average person, right?

[00:06:00] Can be the target of stocker, where if that person has someone that wants to monitor them.

So who might want to monitor you for instance? obviously, maybe a lover, ex girlfriend, boyfriend, ex lover, maybe a jealous person. Who's just a third. Party, maybe your best friend, right? You we're always hearing about somebody marrying the husband or the brother or sister of someone that they're dating anybody who has physical access to your device could potentially.

Put stock aware on it. And that's where I'm constantly warning people. If you work with China, be very cautious. And if you go to China, the same thing applies because they will go into hotel rooms. They've been caught doing it before and they'll copy all of the contents of your computer. So I'll make sure everything is encrypted.

You probably want to turn off your computer.

[00:07:00] Entirely all the way down so that they can't use some of the techniques that will look into the memory of the computer to try and find the encryption key, because it is kept in the memory. There's some really cool techniques to do that. It's some pretty simple one.

So shut it all the way down. But. These people that want to monitor us. If they have access to it, they can do it. victims of domestic abuse. They're a common, person that could have stock or where the abuser puts it on the phone, because usually abuse is about controlling somebody. And if you're controlling them, you want to see what they're doing, what they're saying online.

It's a very modern concern, but it's a real. Concern. We need to be careful of a motherboard had a really good little article on it recently. Now, one of the things that is happening right now to fight back are the ads for the stocker where ads have been appearing all

[00:08:00] over social media. So you can go to Facebook and see had for stock or where, It's monitors spy on. and so now there's new. Policies that are just going into effect. I think they might go into effect August, but w new policies are going to affect by all these major social media sites that say we will not accept advertising for stocker war, but unfortunately there is a loophole when it comes to advertising for style or where, because that's same software.

Can be advertised as something to monitor your kids online. And we all want to do that. Don't we, while I'm on a monitor or kids and make sure they're not going to bad places and even more, we want to make sure they're not being influenced by a bad influence, maybe bit of a pedophile or something. You just don't want that to happen.

So what do you do? If you are a Mac user, I want you to visit this site right

[00:09:00] now. I want you to write this down. It's called objective C as an S E. So go to objective dash C. Pretty sure that's where it is. Let me just double check here on my note. Yeah, it's subjective-c.com. Now this guy's a security researcher, his name's Patrick Wartell.

He works at damp, J a M F, which is a great company that has all kinds of software for monitoring computers and controlling them. Making sure certain software's installed software is updated. Remote control, everything else. Okay. Jamf, if you want to check that out, we don't use them. We use some software from IBM.

That actually has some real security validation to it, but, he said the best way, easiest way is to just keep your device out of the hands of someone that might be a starker. Okay. So that's obvious. And, that doesn't mean that it's always going to happen. Kaspersky labs have some good

[00:10:00] points here.

they're saying that the industry is messed up. They use a stronger word than that. And everybody providing these services are one of the worst people on this planet. Okay. Not that he has any opinion about the matter, right? For iOS, if you have an iPhone or an I pad, usually what they use is device management.

So go to your settings, general profiles and device management. So go there right now on your phone. This is how to check to see if you might have stock or were installed, go to their settings, general profiles and device management. And. If you don't see the device management in there, it's a reasonable thing, because that means there is no device management.

And so therefore there's almost certainly no stock or where regular stock or where. However, if there is device management, don't panic. Because it might be legitimate. If your phone is a business phone,

[00:11:00] it's probably legitimate, but that's the easiest way to do it. There should be a remove management option in the settings as well.

When we get back, we're going to do a little bit more of a dive here. What if you have windows? What if you have Android? We're going to talk about that.

You're listening to Craig Peterson. Make sure you visit me online right now. Sign up for my email list. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

 I've got some treats for you when you subscribe and you'll get my weekly newsletter and info about some of the trainings I'm doing.

All right, take care. We'll be right back.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

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For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a very good discussion Big Tech Censorship of speech and although it was bit off-script from what I planned to talk about it was an interesting subject. Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN.

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

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: We now have kind of a shadow bureaucracy, if you will. That is in place by the programmers who might be the ones that are really causing many of these problems. We know they are when it comes to Google and the search results not showing results for certain websites like Breitbart.

Craig Peterson: Hey everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome. So glad to have you here. it was a really a fun flashback for me because it reminded me of my years and years of doing kernel programming. I want to know if you have a solution for this. Anyways, here we go with Matt, WGAN morning news.

Matt Gagnon: Seven 36 on the WGAN morning news on Wednesday morning. And it's time to talk to Greg Peterson, our tech guru, Craig, how are you this morning?

[00:01:00] Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning. Doing great, Matt.

Fantastic. We always talk to Craig at this time every week and pleased to have him here. Once again, Craig, we've got a lot of topics to get to, you know that you and I discussed of course before you come on every week, but I must go off-script.

If you don't mind, Craig, come with me down this garden path. Okay. So you saw, I trust the whole thing in front of the Supreme court with the doctors yesterday and then all the brouhaha afterward. Okay. So I'm going to set aside any sort of conversation between you and me about whether or not you should take those doctors seriously, whether or not they're cranks or whether or not they're truth sayers, all that stuff.

Set it aside for me for a moment, let's deal with what the tech companies did though. Because that video was shared, it was a press conference essentially. And it was shared on Facebook. It's on YouTube. It's everywhere. It was taken down everywhere. Tell me a little bit about, I don't know, just your thoughts on exactly where we are as it relates to these tech giants, trying to police truth like that and take down stuff.

[00:02:00] And whether or not even it's effective. I gotta be honest with you, Craig. I feel like them doing that, even if they're right and these people are cranks. Which again, we're not debating right now, even if they are right. It just increases the interest and the, Hey, what are they hiding stuff about this? It makes it more popular. I just don't get what they're doing here.

Yeah. I have to agree with you on that. And it's interesting because I saw the video I saw part of it live when they were doing it. The doctors, because my wife had pointed it out to me, and I had a look at it and I thought, wow, this is really interesting, but they're getting into a lot of detailed stuff and I got the other stuff to do.

I stopped watching it. I figured all this go back to it later. It is. It's really an interesting problem here because I think what's happening. Are these tech giants have the typical hard left-wing mentality of we're smarter than you. Just like Hillary Clinton's the smartest woman that has ever lived and she has to be president so she can tell us what to do.

[00:03:00] That is exactly what these tech giants are doing. No, obviously not everybody had that attitude, but there were plenty that did with Hillary. But when we're talking about these tech companies, they're treating us like they are our parents and we're three-year-olds. That we can evaluate things. I think it's a real problem.

I'm concerned for a couple of reasons, obviously about the information so many people rely on it, et cetera, but what's the recourse here. What's going to happen. Are the feds are going to swoop in? You remember a couple of years ago there was talk about, we need to regulate these companies. Is that going to make it even worse? It's going to depend on what the bureaucrats have to say. So it's very upsetting to me. I've moved, for instance, I moved over to Parler.

Matt Gagnon: Instead of Twitter?

Craig Peterson: Exactly many people have, but I don't know. There are some alternatives, Parler being one of them for Twitter, but it's,

[00:04:00] Matt Gagnon: But let's be honest though, Craig, Parler is great and everything, but it doesn't have the same volume of people and I don't think it ever will. It's basically made up of conservative, homeless people who are just, they're homeless online at least. They're tired of being beaten around by Twitter, but that's not enough to really make up a broad base of users. What matters is what most Americans use. If they're using the stuff and their content is curtailed like that, it's just interesting.

Craig Peterson: It is. It is, but it's the same problem, right? This is what you're pointing out. So you've got this one voice and if you disagree with that voice, Your tweet gets deleted or your account gets deleted as we've been seeing with the whole QAnon thing.

You talked about that before. It's very upsetting to me and I cannot see a good answer to any of this.

Matt Gagnon: Nor can I, Craig, and that's a sad tale. It's just, it's increasingly happening. I saw also another story that showed that Google was no longer producing search results for Breitbart too, which is, stuff like this is very, it's terrifying to me.

[00:05:00] I'm actually going to talk about this issue a little bit more in-depth, a little bit later on. And one of the things I'm going to be talking about is a number of scientists over the years that were dismissed and not taken seriously in their time. And then years after their deaths, they'd be, they became the scientific consensus on something.

They were ahead of their time and blankly dismissed by the people who were their contemporaries. And not that I'm suggesting that you blow in front of the Supreme court where those people, because frankly, I don't think that's true. I think they in many ways have very problematic things about their paths, but regardless the point is when you make yourself the arbiter of truth like that.

And you're the one that's deeming what is, and is not worthy of being heard in a public dialogue. It becomes a terrifying thing for, in my opinion, in this country. And it's attitudes about free speech and its attitudes about mature dialogue between people and everything else. I don't know if a Republican truly stand with this kind of stuff happening wholesale across the country.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, it can. we all know the world is flat and the earth is the center of the universe, et cetera.

[00:06:00] Matt Gagnon: that's my point though, Craig, exactly. I know you're hitting on it, but yeah. if Twitter existed back then in Google existed back then somebody was saying that the earth was round. When everybody thought the earth was flat, Google would remove all websites that pointed the things that say that the earth is round and because it's not part of the currently held scientific consensus on something and therefore is not worthy of being heard.

When I don't know, at least my attitude is you should be able to hear the argument, even if it's crockery. And if it means some people buy into something that's wrong, that's just the price you pay for freedom. In my opinion, it's just what it is.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. There you're absolutely right. And there are alternatives, but there doesn't seem to be a downside for these tech companies really.

Matt Gagnon: Yeah.

[00:07:00] Craig Peterson: You've got so many of these amps advertisers telling Facebook, or we're stopping our advertisements and that is a punishment for Facebook. And although they've held true to some degree about not doing as much censorship as they had been doing, they have started a little bit more censorship, it's getting worse and worse. And that this problem is much more difficult than it ever has been before for one other reason.

And that is the program are involved. I've written a lot of code over the years, programming that I did decades ago helped to build and establish the internet. Some of it's still in use today. And is on our phones and is on our computers.

When you're sitting there and you're working on a program, you have to make certain assumptions.

So you try and cover all of the paths, all the things that could go wrong. But when we're talking about a company like Google or Facebook or Twitter, that really does. Edit it audit your feeds, right? You follow someone. You're not going to see everything that they post.

[00:08:00] In fact, in most cases, you might only see five to 10% of the things that they're posting online, even though you followed them. So we now have kind of a shadow bureaucracy, if you will. That is in place by the programmers, who might be the ones that are really causing many of these problems.

We know they are. When it comes to Google and the search results and not showing results for certain ones, like Breitbart.

Matt Gagnon: Yeah.

Craig Peterson: How do you deal with that? Some guys sitting there eating pizza at 2:00 AM, writing some code that he may or may not have malicious intent that is going to block conservative or free speech.

Matt Gagnon: There's gonna be a lot of dystopian novels written about this stuff. I think coming up in certain years, coming up soon, I really do think that it's just, a Brave New World is immediately at the top of my head for all this stuff.

Craig, I appreciate you going a little off-script here and tossing this around with me here this morning.

Cause I think it's an incredibly important topic and needs to be treated with seriousness. And a lot of people are not doing that right now. So thank you for helping me out a little bit on that.

[00:09:00] Craig Peterson: Indeed. Hey, thanks. And by the way, this weekend, I'm really going to get into this VPN thing. I've warned people before. This is an, I told you. My gosh, if you're using free or cheap VPNs, make sure you tune on Saturday at one, because, they've been lying to you. These VPN companies and we'll get into in some detail.

Matt Gagnon: Great. Thanks a lot, Craig. Appreciate it. As always coming up next. We'll talk a little bit about the ranked-choice voting challenge that I was speaking with Nick about a moment.

Craig Peterson: Hey, does this summer seem to be going incredibly fast for you? I don't know. Many of us, myself included are still in a lockdown mode, but oh my gosh. All right, everybody. Hey, we'll be back on Saturday.

We've been busy last night. I had our, our guy in, JJ who's helping me with the studio. Some of the videos & stuff that we're going to be doing is we're going to produce more training for everybody. And it's really, so I'll get the studio reorganized a little bit. The lighting's better camera position has a better, I fixed color problems that were there on the cameras.

And we got a lot coming up. We're going to teach you, as I mentioned [00:10:00] here about VPNs, but I'm also going to do some live webinar. Stuff with you guys. And not only about VPNs, but about a whole host of things. Our firewalls, what we're doing at home, the prosumer equipment versus just the consumer equipment, and how you just cannot use consumer equipment anymore.

So it's going to be a fun time, a lot of work for me, but that's fine. I got to get this info out and hopefully, a few of you guys are interested in hiring me and my family business here. That's been doing cybersecurity for 20 years. so we've got a couple of my kids in it and as well as a few other people, but, hopefully, if you are interested in hiring us to help you out. Anyways lots of free stuff, lots of great stuff.

Keep your eyes out and make sure you're subscribed. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a very good discussion Big Tech Censorship of speech and although it was bit off-script from what I planned to talk about it was an interesting subject. 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: We now have kind of a shadow bureaucracy, if you will. That is in place by the programmers who might be the ones that are really causing many of these problems. We know they are when it comes to Google and the search results not showing results for certain websites like Breitbart.

Craig Peterson: Hey everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome. So glad to have you here. it was a really a fun flashback for me because it reminded me of my years and years of doing kernel programming. I want to know if you have a solution for this. Anyways, here we go with Matt, WGAN morning news.

Matt Gagnon: Seven 36 on the WGAN morning news on Wednesday morning. And it's time to talk to Greg Peterson, our tech guru, Craig, how are you this morning?

[00:01:00] Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning. Doing great, Matt.

Fantastic. We always talk to Craig at this time every week and pleased to have him here. Once again, Craig, we've got a lot of topics to get to, you know that you and I discussed of course before you come on every week, but I must go off-script.

If you don't mind, Craig, come with me down this garden path. Okay. So you saw, I trust the whole thing in front of the Supreme court with the doctors yesterday and then all the brouhaha afterward. Okay. So I'm going to set aside any sort of conversation between you and me about whether or not you should take those doctors seriously, whether or not they're cranks or whether or not they're truth sayers, all that stuff.

Set it aside for me for a moment, let's deal with what the tech companies did though. Because that video was shared, it was a press conference essentially. And it was shared on Facebook. It's on YouTube. It's everywhere. It was taken down everywhere. Tell me a little bit about, I don't know, just your thoughts on exactly where we are as it relates to these tech giants, trying to police truth like that and take down stuff.

[00:02:00] And whether or not even it's effective. I gotta be honest with you, Craig. I feel like them doing that, even if they're right and these people are cranks. Which again, we're not debating right now, even if they are right. It just increases the interest and the, Hey, what are they hiding stuff about this? It makes it more popular. I just don't get what they're doing here.

Yeah. I have to agree with you on that. And it's interesting because I saw the video I saw part of it live when they were doing it. The doctors, because my wife had pointed it out to me, and I had a look at it and I thought, wow, this is really interesting, but they're getting into a lot of detailed stuff and I got the other stuff to do.

I stopped watching it. I figured all this go back to it later. It is. It's really an interesting problem here because I think what's happening. Are these tech giants have the typical hard left-wing mentality of we're smarter than you. Just like Hillary Clinton's the smartest woman that has ever lived and she has to be president so she can tell us what to do.

[00:03:00] That is exactly what these tech giants are doing. No, obviously not everybody had that attitude, but there were plenty that did with Hillary. But when we're talking about these tech companies, they're treating us like they are our parents and we're three-year-olds. That we can evaluate things. I think it's a real problem.

I'm concerned for a couple of reasons, obviously about the information so many people rely on it, et cetera, but what's the recourse here. What's going to happen. Are the feds are going to swoop in? You remember a couple of years ago there was talk about, we need to regulate these companies. Is that going to make it even worse? It's going to depend on what the bureaucrats have to say. So it's very upsetting to me.  I've moved, for instance, I moved over to Parler.

Matt Gagnon: Instead of Twitter?

Craig Peterson:  Exactly many people have, but I don't know. There are some alternatives, Parler being one of them for Twitter, but it's,

[00:04:00] Matt Gagnon: But let's be honest though, Craig, Parler is great and everything, but it doesn't have the same volume of people and I don't think it ever will. It's basically made up of conservative, homeless people who are just, they're homeless online at least. They're tired of being beaten around by Twitter, but that's not enough to really make up a broad base of users. What matters is what most Americans use. If they're using the stuff and their content is curtailed like that, it's just interesting.

Craig Peterson: It is. It is, but it's the same problem, right? This is what you're pointing out. So you've got this one voice and if you disagree with that voice, Your tweet gets deleted or your account gets deleted as we've been seeing with the whole QAnon thing.

You talked about that before. It's very upsetting to me and I cannot see a good answer to any of this.

Matt Gagnon: Nor can I, Craig, and that's a sad tale. It's just, it's increasingly happening. I saw also another story that showed that Google was no longer producing search results for Breitbart too, which is, stuff like this is very, it's terrifying to me.

[00:05:00] I'm actually going to talk about this issue a little bit more in-depth, a little bit later on. And one of the things I'm going to be talking about is a number of scientists over the years that were dismissed and not taken seriously in their time. And then years after their deaths, they'd be, they became the scientific consensus on something.

They were ahead of their time and blankly dismissed by the people who were their contemporaries. And not that I'm suggesting that you blow in front of the Supreme court where those people, because frankly, I don't think that's true. I think they in many ways have very problematic things about their paths, but regardless the point is when you make yourself the arbiter of truth like that.

And you're the one that's deeming what is, and is not worthy of being heard in a public dialogue. It becomes a terrifying thing for, in my opinion, in this country. And it's attitudes about free speech and its attitudes about mature dialogue between people and everything else. I don't know if a Republican truly stand with this kind of stuff happening wholesale across the country.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, it can. we all know the world is flat and the earth is the center of the universe, et cetera.

[00:06:00] Matt Gagnon: that's my point though, Craig, exactly. I know you're hitting on it, but yeah. if Twitter existed back then in Google existed back then somebody was saying that the earth was round. When everybody thought the earth was flat, Google would remove all websites that pointed the things that say that the earth is round and because it's not part of the currently held scientific consensus on something and therefore is not worthy of being heard.

When I don't know, at least my attitude is you should be able to hear the argument, even if it's crockery. And if it means some people buy into something that's wrong, that's just the price you pay for freedom. In my opinion, it's just what it is.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. There you're absolutely right. And there are alternatives, but there doesn't seem to be a downside for these tech companies really.

Matt Gagnon: Yeah.

[00:07:00] Craig Peterson: You've got so many of these amps advertisers telling Facebook, or we're stopping our advertisements and that is a punishment for Facebook. And although they've held true to some degree about not doing as much censorship as they had been doing, they have started a little bit more censorship, it's getting worse and worse. And that this problem is much more difficult than it ever has been before for one other reason.

And that is the program are involved. I've written a lot of code over the years, programming that I did decades ago helped to build and establish the internet. Some of it's still in use today. And is on our phones and is on our computers.

When you're sitting there and you're working on a program, you have to make certain assumptions.

So you try and cover all of the paths, all the things that could go wrong. But when we're talking about a company like Google or Facebook or Twitter, that really does. Edit it audit your feeds, right? You follow someone. You're not going to see everything that they post.

[00:08:00] In fact, in most cases, you might only see five to 10% of the things that they're posting online, even though you followed them. So we now have kind of a shadow bureaucracy, if you will. That is in place by the programmers, who might be the ones that are really causing many of these problems.

We know they are. When it comes to Google and the search results and not showing results for certain ones, like Breitbart.

Matt Gagnon: Yeah.

Craig Peterson: How do you deal with that? Some guys sitting there eating pizza at 2:00 AM, writing some code that he may or may not have malicious intent that is going to block conservative or free speech.

Matt Gagnon: There's gonna be a lot of dystopian novels written about this stuff. I think coming up in certain years, coming up soon, I really do think that it's just, a Brave New World is immediately at the top of my head for all this stuff.

Craig, I appreciate you going a little off-script here and tossing this around with me here this morning.

Cause I think it's an incredibly important topic and needs to be treated with seriousness. And a lot of people are not doing that right now. So thank you for helping me out a little bit on that.

[00:09:00] Craig Peterson: Indeed. Hey, thanks. And by the way, this weekend, I'm really going to get into this VPN thing. I've warned people before. This is an, I told you. My gosh, if you're using free or cheap VPNs, make sure you tune on Saturday at one, because, they've been lying to you. These VPN companies and we'll get into in some detail.

Matt Gagnon: Great. Thanks a lot, Craig. Appreciate it. As always coming up next. We'll talk a little bit about the ranked-choice voting challenge that I was speaking with Nick about a moment.

Craig Peterson: Hey, does this summer seem to be going incredibly fast for you? I don't know. Many of us, myself included are still in a lockdown mode, but oh my gosh. All right, everybody. Hey, we'll be back on Saturday.

We've been busy last night. I had our, our guy in, JJ who's helping me with the studio. Some of the videos & stuff that we're going to be doing is we're going to produce more training for everybody. And it's really, so I'll get the studio reorganized a little bit. The lighting's better camera position has a better, I fixed color problems that were there on the cameras.

And we got a lot coming up. We're going to teach you, as I mentioned [00:10:00] here about VPNs, but I'm also going to do some live webinar. Stuff with you guys. And not only about VPNs, but about a whole host of things. Our firewalls, what we're doing at home, the prosumer equipment versus just the consumer equipment, and how you just cannot use consumer equipment anymore.

So it's going to be a fun time, a lot of work for me, but that's fine. I got to get this info out and hopefully, a few of you guys are interested in hiring me and my family business here. That's been doing cybersecurity for 20 years. so we've got a couple of my kids in it and as well as a few other people, but, hopefully, if you are interested in hiring us to help you out. Anyways lots of free stuff, lots of great stuff.

Keep your eyes out and make sure you're subscribed. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a very good discussion Big Tech Censorship of speech and although it was bit off-script from what I planned to talk about it was an interesting subject. 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: We now have kind of a shadow bureaucracy, if you will. That is in place by the programmers who might be the ones that are really causing many of these problems. We know they are when it comes to Google and the search results not showing results for certain websites like Breitbart.

Craig Peterson: Hey everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome. So glad to have you here. it was a really a fun flashback for me because it reminded me of my years and years of doing kernel programming. I want to know if you have a solution for this. Anyways, here we go with Matt, WGAN morning news.

Matt Gagnon: Seven 36 on the WGAN morning news on Wednesday morning. And it's time to talk to Greg Peterson, our tech guru, Craig, how are you this morning?

[00:01:00] Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning. Doing great, Matt.

Fantastic. We always talk to Craig at this time every week and pleased to have him here. Once again, Craig, we've got a lot of topics to get to, you know that you and I discussed of course before you come on every week, but I must go off-script.

If you don't mind, Craig, come with me down this garden path. Okay. So you saw, I trust the whole thing in front of the Supreme court with the doctors yesterday and then all the brouhaha afterward. Okay. So I'm going to set aside any sort of conversation between you and me about whether or not you should take those doctors seriously, whether or not they're cranks or whether or not they're truth sayers, all that stuff.

Set it aside for me for a moment, let's deal with what the tech companies did though. Because that video was shared, it was a press conference essentially. And it was shared on Facebook. It's on YouTube. It's everywhere. It was taken down everywhere. Tell me a little bit about, I don't know, just your thoughts on exactly where we are as it relates to these tech giants, trying to police truth like that and take down stuff.

[00:02:00] And whether or not even it's effective. I gotta be honest with you, Craig. I feel like them doing that, even if they're right and these people are cranks. Which again, we're not debating right now, even if they are right. It just increases the interest and the, Hey, what are they hiding stuff about this? It makes it more popular. I just don't get what they're doing here.

Yeah. I have to agree with you on that. And it's interesting because I saw the video I saw part of it live when they were doing it. The doctors, because my wife had pointed it out to me, and I had a look at it and I thought, wow, this is really interesting, but they're getting into a lot of detailed stuff and I got the other stuff to do.

I stopped watching it. I figured all this go back to it later. It is. It's really an interesting problem here because I think what's happening. Are these tech giants have the typical hard left-wing mentality of we're smarter than you. Just like Hillary Clinton's the smartest woman that has ever lived and she has to be president so she can tell us what to do.

[00:03:00] That is exactly what these tech giants are doing. No, obviously not everybody had that attitude, but there were plenty that did with Hillary. But when we're talking about these tech companies, they're treating us like they are our parents and we're three-year-olds. That we can evaluate things. I think it's a real problem.

I'm concerned for a couple of reasons, obviously about the information so many people rely on it, et cetera, but what's the recourse here. What's going to happen. Are the feds are going to swoop in? You remember a couple of years ago there was talk about, we need to regulate these companies. Is that going to make it even worse? It's going to depend on what the bureaucrats have to say. So it's very upsetting to me.  I've moved, for instance, I moved over to Parler.

Matt Gagnon: Instead of Twitter?

Craig Peterson:  Exactly many people have, but I don't know. There are some alternatives, Parler being one of them for Twitter, but it's,

[00:04:00] Matt Gagnon: But let's be honest though, Craig, Parler is great and everything, but it doesn't have the same volume of people and I don't think it ever will. It's basically made up of conservative, homeless people who are just, they're homeless online at least. They're tired of being beaten around by Twitter, but that's not enough to really make up a broad base of users. What matters is what most Americans use. If they're using the stuff and their content is curtailed like that, it's just interesting.

Craig Peterson: It is. It is, but it's the same problem, right? This is what you're pointing out. So you've got this one voice and if you disagree with that voice, Your tweet gets deleted or your account gets deleted as we've been seeing with the whole QAnon thing.

You talked about that before. It's very upsetting to me and I cannot see a good answer to any of this.

Matt Gagnon: Nor can I, Craig, and that's a sad tale. It's just, it's increasingly happening. I saw also another story that showed that Google was no longer producing search results for Breitbart too, which is, stuff like this is very, it's terrifying to me.

[00:05:00] I'm actually going to talk about this issue a little bit more in-depth, a little bit later on. And one of the things I'm going to be talking about is a number of scientists over the years that were dismissed and not taken seriously in their time. And then years after their deaths, they'd be, they became the scientific consensus on something.

They were ahead of their time and blankly dismissed by the people who were their contemporaries. And not that I'm suggesting that you blow in front of the Supreme court where those people, because frankly, I don't think that's true. I think they in many ways have very problematic things about their paths, but regardless the point is when you make yourself the arbiter of truth like that.

And you're the one that's deeming what is, and is not worthy of being heard in a public dialogue. It becomes a terrifying thing for, in my opinion, in this country. And it's attitudes about free speech and its attitudes about mature dialogue between people and everything else. I don't know if a Republican truly stand with this kind of stuff happening wholesale across the country.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, it can. we all know the world is flat and the earth is the center of the universe, et cetera.

[00:06:00] Matt Gagnon: that's my point though, Craig, exactly. I know you're hitting on it, but yeah. if Twitter existed back then in Google existed back then somebody was saying that the earth was round. When everybody thought the earth was flat, Google would remove all websites that pointed the things that say that the earth is round and because it's not part of the currently held scientific consensus on something and therefore is not worthy of being heard.

When I don't know, at least my attitude is you should be able to hear the argument, even if it's crockery. And if it means some people buy into something that's wrong, that's just the price you pay for freedom. In my opinion, it's just what it is.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. There you're absolutely right. And there are alternatives, but there doesn't seem to be a downside for these tech companies really.

Matt Gagnon: Yeah.

[00:07:00] Craig Peterson: You've got so many of these amps advertisers telling Facebook, or we're stopping our advertisements and that is a punishment for Facebook. And although they've held true to some degree about not doing as much censorship as they had been doing, they have started a little bit more censorship, it's getting worse and worse. And that this problem is much more difficult than it ever has been before for one other reason.

And that is the program are involved. I've written a lot of code over the years, programming that I did decades ago helped to build and establish the internet. Some of it's still in use today. And is on our phones and is on our computers.

When you're sitting there and you're working on a program, you have to make certain assumptions.

So you try and cover all of the paths, all the things that could go wrong. But when we're talking about a company like Google or Facebook or Twitter, that really does. Edit it audit your feeds, right? You follow someone. You're not going to see everything that they post.

[00:08:00] In fact, in most cases, you might only see five to 10% of the things that they're posting online, even though you followed them. So we now have kind of a shadow bureaucracy, if you will. That is in place by the programmers, who might be the ones that are really causing many of these problems.

We know they are. When it comes to Google and the search results and not showing results for certain ones, like Breitbart.

Matt Gagnon: Yeah.

Craig Peterson: How do you deal with that? Some guys sitting there eating pizza at 2:00 AM, writing some code that he may or may not have malicious intent that is going to block conservative or free speech.

Matt Gagnon: There's gonna be a lot of dystopian novels written about this stuff. I think coming up in certain years, coming up soon, I really do think that it's just, a Brave New World is immediately at the top of my head for all this stuff.

Craig, I appreciate you going a little off-script here and tossing this around with me here this morning.

Cause I think it's an incredibly important topic and needs to be treated with seriousness. And a lot of people are not doing that right now. So thank you for helping me out a little bit on that.

[00:09:00] Craig Peterson: Indeed. Hey, thanks. And by the way, this weekend, I'm really going to get into this VPN thing. I've warned people before. This is an, I told you. My gosh, if you're using free or cheap VPNs, make sure you tune on Saturday at one, because, they've been lying to you. These VPN companies and we'll get into in some detail.

Matt Gagnon: Great. Thanks a lot, Craig. Appreciate it. As always coming up next. We'll talk a little bit about the ranked-choice voting challenge that I was speaking with Nick about a moment.

Craig Peterson: Hey, does this summer seem to be going incredibly fast for you? I don't know. Many of us, myself included are still in a lockdown mode, but oh my gosh. All right, everybody. Hey, we'll be back on Saturday.

We've been busy last night. I had our, our guy in, JJ who's helping me with the studio. Some of the videos & stuff that we're going to be doing is we're going to produce more training for everybody. And it's really, so I'll get the studio reorganized a little bit. The lighting's better camera position has a better, I fixed color problems that were there on the cameras.

And we got a lot coming up. We're going to teach you, as I mentioned [00:10:00] here about VPNs, but I'm also going to do some live webinar. Stuff with you guys. And not only about VPNs, but about a whole host of things. Our firewalls, what we're doing at home, the prosumer equipment versus just the consumer equipment, and how you just cannot use consumer equipment anymore.

So it's going to be a fun time, a lot of work for me, but that's fine. I got to get this info out and hopefully, a few of you guys are interested in hiring me and my family business here. That's been doing cybersecurity for 20 years. so we've got a couple of my kids in it and as well as a few other people, but, hopefully, if you are interested in hiring us to help you out. Anyways lots of free stuff, lots of great stuff.

Keep your eyes out and make sure you're subscribed. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on with Jim Polito this morning and we talked about the possibility that I got a COVID infection. Then we spoke about what Cell Carriers have done after urging from the FCC and FTC about Spam Calls and Texts. Then I shared an I Told You So... moment with Jim. Here we go with Jim.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: He did, is he came out and said, okay, cell carriers and phone carriers, you got to do something about that. Cause this is just absolutely nuts.

Yes. It looks like I might have had the COVID. Craig Peterson here. we talked about a few different things and make sure you stay to the end because, If you're using VPNs, particularly the free or low-cost VPNs, we got some real bad news for you.

So stick around, because here we go.

Jim Polito: Everybody's tech talk guru and our good friend, Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig.

Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning, Jim.

[00:01:00] Hey, I just saw that they released new symptoms for COVID-19. So this is real. It just goes on and on and on, all these symptoms, but, based on those new releases. I think I had the dreaded COVID, the Wuhan Virus.

Jim Polito: Really.

Whoh, Whoh we had important stuff to talk about, like President Trump and his campaign may be being censored by cell carriers. But hold on and other stuff about VPNs, but wait a minute. what makes you think that Craig.

Craig Peterson: Well, I had really bad chills.

I was well under a heated blanket, I was really cold. My muscles ached like I was at the gym yesterday and had way overdone it. It was me versus "The Rock" and I won. And then the next day, all of my muscles felt like that. So I, anytime I would move, I would experience pain and I have never labeled anything as pain before.

Jim Polito: Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Craig Peterson: Yeah.

[00:02:00] Jim Polito: You were fighting with the rock. Here's the real question. Did you smell what the rock was? Cooking? Because apparently another symptom is not being able to smell or taste.

Craig Peterson: I could smell it. He was kind of sweaty when we were going at it. But, I didn't have any loss of smell. So I was thinking, well, it isn't COVID, but I don't know what it is. It's just nasty. It's dragged on for about three, four weeks. You know, the cold thing when I had the real bad chills was only a couple of days. Muscle soreness and a couple of other symptoms are new symptoms apparently of COVID-19.

Jim Polito: Are you going to get, are you going to get tested, or are you going to check it out? What are you going to do?

Craig Peterson: Well, that's the question, right? I'm past it. I'm pretty much asymptomatic now. So that means I'm not contagious according to the CDC, and the dreaded WHO. So what purpose is there in getting tested, right?

[00:03:00] It's yeah, kind of like taking the flu shot, you know, or am I going to take a flu shot? Am I going to take a WuHan flu shot as well? Yeah, I don't know, but it smells a lot like it based on what I read, yesterday and these new symptoms I definitely had it. It is interesting. Right. I was able to survive and work the whole time.

I was just a normal flu type. I was down for a couple of days, a few days. and that was it. And I am in the risk group kind of, you know,

Jim Polito: Yeah. We're getting up there where we're crossing over into the risk group. We were with some good friends on Sunday and both their son and daughter well wait a minute, their son got it while he was away at school, tested positive for it and you know, it was fine.

Then the daughter though had the high fever, the, you know, all this other stuff. And, and it was a big fever, the chills and all that. Didn't, test positive for it. I mean, she had the fever for three or four days, but nope, nothing.

So you know what Craig. I just don't know. I'm concerned about the way that news is being reported now. But that's a good transition into this.

[00:04:00] So I liked the fact that on my smartphone, I got a call yesterday that said potential spam. And, I didn't pick it up.

When it does that, I don't pick it up. Plus when I get a call from a number I don't recognize I don't pick it up, anyway. But there's a chance that Donald Trump's campaign efforts are being labeled as spam by the cell carriers. Could you explain that to me?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, this is kind of an interesting development because we have had this problem with spam calls and spam text messages for a long time.

And the FCC working with the FTC, have been trying to figure out. What can we do an edge? Ajit Pai has been, has been really into all of this? Over at the federal communications commission. What he did is he came out and said, okay, cell carriers and phone carriers, you gotta do something about this.

[00:05:00] Cause this is just absolutely nuts. We've got to stop all of these spam calls and spam texts. What the cell carriers did is they've come up with a new protocol that goes between their switches. It gets kind of technical. So the idea is if someone's making a lot of calls from the same source or sending a lot of text messages from the same source, then it gets flagged and potentially blocked.

So you probably already noticed the number of these spam calls and the number of the spam text has gone down over the last few weeks. And there've been a few companies that have been very active in this T-Mobile and Sprint are kind of one that's in the lead right now. Last week, President Trump tried to send a text out to supporters and it makes the news because it was apparently blocked.

[00:06:00] Now we're looking at this technology and kind of wondering, right. This is a question that popped in my head. I'm just looking at all of this, reading all these articles. What is that? The reason why, because. At a certain point, a human looks at all of these algorithms and the output of these programs and said, Oh yeah, well, this is obviously wrong.

And we've seen that happen every time. Right? Fake news, you were just talking about with Facebook so that might've been president Trump's campaign.

Jim Polito: We're talking with Craig Peterson our Tech Talk Guru, a great guy. See that's the kind of stuff that bothers me. Okay. Look, I know that Facebook is a liberal organization.

I know it is. I know that something else within companies, you have, people who are not afraid to push their ideology on the company.

[00:07:00] For example, the Cato Institute, which is a kind of a sometimes I say left-leaning, but they are more libertarian organization did a study and they found out that 77% of conservatives are self censor themselves because they're concerned that if they talk about the politics, they might lose their job.

On the other side, extreme liberals as defined by this Cato study. I think it was about 54% of them

take an activist standpoint, they purposefully share their political views. They don't self sensor and they actually act more like an evangelical about their own liberal views. And, you know, within a company, when you get an argument between two people or people making a decision, it seems to me that people are people and they're going to react like they do in this study.

[00:08:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. It's inevitable. Even the programmers are, have those biases. And so when they program this stuff to try and, and stop these spam calls and spam messages. Yeah. That's messages, their biases are actually going to be reflected in the code they write.

Jim Polito: It's just like the media. It's the same thing, Craig.

That's that's bothersome. what about it? Cause I don't wanna, I don't wanna run out of time. What about VPNs? You really have an, I told you so moment here.

Craig Peterson: Oh man. Yeah, we are almost out of time. So I'll make this really quick here. If you've attended any of the training that I've done, I do this free training that they run from about 10 minutes to an hour.

I did training in February and March and April of this year and we covered VPNs. I warned everybody about the problems with VPNs, particularly these commercial VPNs, and even more particularly the free VPNs. The idea behind VPN is it keeps your data safe. The reality is, well, yeah, not really.

[00:09:00] So we've got these VPNs in a mentor report that just came out and they specifically named seven different VPN services. All of these services said "We do not log you, keep your information private. We keep it safe."

Well, it turns out that they left 1.2 terabytes of private user data exposed online, these seven free VPN services.

Now this personal data, Jim, you're going to love this. Not only the user's email, their home addresses passwords in plain text. In other words, there don't bother decrypting them because they're not even encrypted IP addresses and the worst part of this story. Is that in this 1.2 terabytes of data, you might ask, wow, that's a lot of data for just names and email addresses.

[00:10:00] Oh no, no, no, no. All of these, no-log VPNs had been logging everyone's activity and it's now it's been exposed in the online world. So yet another reason not to use the VPNs.

I'm going to do that training again. So, you know, keep an eye on your email. I've got to do this. I got to explain this. What to do and how to do it. Cause it's free VPN purposes.

Jim Polito: You're the product. How, how can folks get more information?

Craig Peterson: Well, get on that email list. So you find out about it, just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Or you can just email me M E at Craig Peterson dot com and we'll let you know.

These are free training. I'm not trying to push anything down your throat. Okay, but it's important stuff.

Jim Polito: Well, we know that. Craig Peterson doesn't try to do that to you. Okay, Craig, excellent segment. We look forward to talking with you next week, sir.

Craig Peterson: Hey take care.

Jim Polito: You take care of yourself too. I hope you remain healthy, sir. Take care.

Craig Peterson: Bye-bye.

[00:11:00] Bye-bye. Alright. When we return a final word, you're listening to the Jim Pollito show from my kitchen with pops. This is your safe space.

---

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 possibility that I got a COVID infection.  Then we spoke about what Cell Carriers have done after urging from the FCC and FTC about Spam Calls and Texts. Then I shared an I Told You So... moment with Jim.  Here we go with Jim.

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

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: He did, is he came out and said, okay, cell carriers and phone carriers, you got to do something about that. Cause this is just absolutely nuts.

Yes. It looks like I might have had the COVID. Craig Peterson here. we talked about a few different things and make sure you stay to the end because, If you're using VPNs, particularly the free or low-cost VPNs, we got some real bad news for you.

So stick around, because here we go.

Jim Polito: Everybody's tech talk guru and our good friend, Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig.

Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning, Jim.

[00:01:00] Hey, I just saw that they released new symptoms for COVID-19. So this is real. It just goes on and on and on, all these symptoms, but, based on those new releases. I think I had the dreaded COVID, the Wuhan  Virus.

Jim Polito: Really.

Whoh, Whoh we had important stuff to talk about, like President Trump and his campaign may be being censored by cell carriers. But hold on and other stuff about VPNs, but wait a minute. what makes you think that Craig.

Craig Peterson: Well, I had really bad chills.

I was well under a heated blanket, I was really cold. My muscles ached like I was at the gym yesterday and had way overdone it. It was me versus "The Rock" and I won. And then the next day, all of my muscles felt like that. So I, anytime I would move, I would experience pain and I have never labeled anything as pain before.

Jim Polito:  Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Craig Peterson: Yeah.

[00:02:00] Jim Polito: You were fighting with the rock. Here's the real question. Did you smell what the rock was? Cooking? Because apparently another symptom is not being able to smell or taste.

Craig Peterson: I could smell it. He was kind of sweaty when we were going at it. But,  I didn't have any loss of smell. So I was thinking, well, it isn't COVID, but I don't know what it is. It's just nasty. It's dragged on for about three, four weeks. You know, the cold thing when I had the real bad chills was only a couple of days.  Muscle soreness and a couple of other symptoms are new symptoms apparently of COVID-19.

Jim Polito: Are you going to get, are you going to get tested, or are you going to check it out? What are you going to do?

Craig Peterson: Well, that's the question, right? I'm past it. I'm pretty much asymptomatic now. So that means I'm not contagious according to the CDC, and the dreaded WHO. So what purpose is there in getting tested, right?

[00:03:00] It's yeah, kind of like taking the flu shot, you know, or am I going to take a flu shot? Am I going to take a WuHan flu shot as well? Yeah, I don't know, but it smells a lot like it based on what I read, yesterday and these new symptoms I definitely had it. It is interesting. Right. I was able to survive and work the whole time.

I was just a normal flu type. I was down for a couple of days, a few days. and that was it. And I am in the risk group kind of, you know,

Jim Polito: Yeah. We're getting up there where we're crossing over into the risk group. We were with some good friends on Sunday and both their son and daughter well wait a minute, their son got it while he was away at school, tested positive for it and you know, it was fine.

Then the daughter though had the high fever, the, you know, all this other stuff. And, and it was a big fever, the chills and all that. Didn't,  test positive for it.  I mean, she had the fever for three or four days, but nope, nothing.

So you know what Craig. I just don't know.  I'm concerned about the way that news is being reported now. But that's a good transition into this.

[00:04:00] So I liked the fact that on my smartphone, I got a call yesterday that said potential spam. And, I didn't pick it up.

When it does that, I don't pick it up. Plus when I get a call from a number I don't recognize I don't pick it up, anyway. But there's a chance that Donald Trump's campaign efforts are being labeled as spam by the cell carriers. Could you explain that to me?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, this is kind of an interesting development because we have had this problem with spam calls and spam text messages for a long time.

And the FCC working with the FTC, have been trying to figure out. What can we do an edge? Ajit Pai has been, has been really into all of this? Over at the federal communications commission. What he did is he came out and said, okay, cell carriers and phone carriers, you gotta do something about this.

[00:05:00] Cause this is just absolutely nuts. We've got to stop all of these spam calls and spam texts. What the cell carriers did is they've come up with a new protocol that goes between their switches. It gets kind of technical. So the idea is if someone's making a lot of calls from the same source or sending a lot of text messages from the same source, then it gets flagged and potentially blocked.

So you probably already noticed the number of these spam calls and the number of the spam text has gone down over the last few weeks. And there've been a few companies that have been very active in this T-Mobile and Sprint are kind of one that's in the lead right now. Last week, President Trump tried to send a text out to supporters and it makes the news because it was apparently blocked.

[00:06:00] Now we're looking at this technology and kind of wondering, right. This is a question that popped in my head. I'm just looking at all of this, reading all these articles. What is that? The reason why, because. At a certain point, a human looks at all of these algorithms and the output of these programs and said, Oh yeah, well, this is obviously wrong.

And we've seen that happen every time. Right? Fake news, you were just talking about with Facebook so that might've been president Trump's campaign.

Jim Polito: We're talking with Craig Peterson our Tech Talk Guru, a great guy. See that's the kind of stuff that bothers me. Okay. Look, I know that Facebook is a liberal organization.

I know it is. I know that something else within companies, you have, people who are not afraid to push their ideology on the company.

[00:07:00] For example, the Cato Institute, which is a kind of a sometimes I say left-leaning, but they are more libertarian organization did a study and they found out that 77% of conservatives are self censor themselves because they're concerned that if they talk about the politics, they might lose their job.

On the other side, extreme liberals as defined by this Cato study. I think it was about 54% of them

take an activist standpoint, they purposefully share their political views. They don't self sensor and they actually act more like an evangelical about their own liberal views. And, you know, within a company, when you get an argument between two people or people making a decision, it seems to me that people are people and they're going to react like they do in this study.

[00:08:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. It's inevitable. Even the programmers are, have those biases. And so when they program this stuff to try and, and stop these spam calls and spam messages. Yeah. That's messages, their biases are actually going to be reflected in the code they write.

Jim Polito: It's just like the media. It's the same thing, Craig.

That's that's bothersome. what about it? Cause I don't wanna, I don't wanna run out of time. What about VPNs? You really have an, I told you so moment here.

Craig Peterson: Oh man. Yeah, we are almost out of time. So I'll make this really quick here. If you've attended any of the training that I've done, I do this free training that they run from about 10 minutes to an hour.

I did training in February and March and April of this year and we covered VPNs.  I warned everybody about the problems with VPNs, particularly these commercial VPNs, and even more particularly the free VPNs. The idea behind VPN is it keeps your data safe. The reality is, well, yeah, not really.

[00:09:00] So we've got these VPNs in a mentor report that just came out and they specifically named seven different VPN services. All of these services said "We do not log you, keep your information private. We keep it safe."

Well, it turns out that they left 1.2 terabytes of private user data exposed online, these seven free VPN services.

Now this personal data, Jim, you're going to love this. Not only the user's email, their home addresses passwords in plain text. In other words, there don't bother decrypting them because they're not even encrypted IP addresses and the worst part of this story. Is that in this 1.2 terabytes of data, you might ask, wow, that's a lot of data for just names and email addresses.

[00:10:00] Oh no, no, no, no. All of these, no-log VPNs had been logging everyone's activity and it's now it's been exposed in the online world. So yet another reason not to use the VPNs.

I'm going to do that training again. So, you know, keep an eye on your email. I've got to do this. I got to explain this. What to do and how to do it. Cause it's free VPN purposes.

Jim Polito: You're the product. How, how can folks get more information?

Craig Peterson: Well, get on that email list. So you find out about it, just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Or you can just email me M E at Craig Peterson dot com and we'll let you know.

These are free training. I'm not trying to push anything down your throat. Okay, but it's important stuff.

Jim Polito: Well, we know that. Craig Peterson doesn't try to do that to you. Okay, Craig, excellent segment. We look forward to talking with you next week, sir.

Craig Peterson: Hey take care.

Jim Polito:  You take care of yourself too. I hope you remain healthy, sir. Take care.

Craig Peterson: Bye-bye.

[00:11:00] Bye-bye. Alright. When we return a final word, you're listening to the Jim Pollito show from my kitchen with pops. This is your safe space.

--- 

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 possibility that I got a COVID infection.  Then we spoke about what Cell Carriers have done after urging from the FCC and FTC about Spam Calls and Texts. Then I shared an I Told You So... moment with Jim.  Here we go with Jim.

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

--- 

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: He did, is he came out and said, okay, cell carriers and phone carriers, you got to do something about that. Cause this is just absolutely nuts.

Yes. It looks like I might have had the COVID. Craig Peterson here. we talked about a few different things and make sure you stay to the end because, If you're using VPNs, particularly the free or low-cost VPNs, we got some real bad news for you.

So stick around, because here we go.

Jim Polito: Everybody's tech talk guru and our good friend, Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig.

Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning, Jim.

[00:01:00] Hey, I just saw that they released new symptoms for COVID-19. So this is real. It just goes on and on and on, all these symptoms, but, based on those new releases. I think I had the dreaded COVID, the Wuhan  Virus.

Jim Polito: Really.

Whoh, Whoh we had important stuff to talk about, like President Trump and his campaign may be being censored by cell carriers. But hold on and other stuff about VPNs, but wait a minute. what makes you think that Craig.

Craig Peterson: Well, I had really bad chills.

I was well under a heated blanket, I was really cold. My muscles ached like I was at the gym yesterday and had way overdone it. It was me versus "The Rock" and I won. And then the next day, all of my muscles felt like that. So I, anytime I would move, I would experience pain and I have never labeled anything as pain before.

Jim Polito:  Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Craig Peterson: Yeah.

[00:02:00] Jim Polito: You were fighting with the rock. Here's the real question. Did you smell what the rock was? Cooking? Because apparently another symptom is not being able to smell or taste.

Craig Peterson: I could smell it. He was kind of sweaty when we were going at it. But,  I didn't have any loss of smell. So I was thinking, well, it isn't COVID, but I don't know what it is. It's just nasty. It's dragged on for about three, four weeks. You know, the cold thing when I had the real bad chills was only a couple of days.  Muscle soreness and a couple of other symptoms are new symptoms apparently of COVID-19.

Jim Polito: Are you going to get, are you going to get tested, or are you going to check it out? What are you going to do?

Craig Peterson: Well, that's the question, right? I'm past it. I'm pretty much asymptomatic now. So that means I'm not contagious according to the CDC, and the dreaded WHO. So what purpose is there in getting tested, right?

[00:03:00] It's yeah, kind of like taking the flu shot, you know, or am I going to take a flu shot? Am I going to take a WuHan flu shot as well? Yeah, I don't know, but it smells a lot like it based on what I read, yesterday and these new symptoms I definitely had it. It is interesting. Right. I was able to survive and work the whole time.

I was just a normal flu type. I was down for a couple of days, a few days. and that was it. And I am in the risk group kind of, you know,

Jim Polito: Yeah. We're getting up there where we're crossing over into the risk group. We were with some good friends on Sunday and both their son and daughter well wait a minute, their son got it while he was away at school, tested positive for it and you know, it was fine.

Then the daughter though had the high fever, the, you know, all this other stuff. And, and it was a big fever, the chills and all that. Didn't,  test positive for it.  I mean, she had the fever for three or four days, but nope, nothing.

So you know what Craig. I just don't know.  I'm concerned about the way that news is being reported now. But that's a good transition into this.

[00:04:00] So I liked the fact that on my smartphone, I got a call yesterday that said potential spam. And, I didn't pick it up.

When it does that, I don't pick it up. Plus when I get a call from a number I don't recognize I don't pick it up, anyway. But there's a chance that Donald Trump's campaign efforts are being labeled as spam by the cell carriers. Could you explain that to me?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, this is kind of an interesting development because we have had this problem with spam calls and spam text messages for a long time.

And the FCC working with the FTC, have been trying to figure out. What can we do an edge? Ajit Pai has been, has been really into all of this? Over at the federal communications commission. What he did is he came out and said, okay, cell carriers and phone carriers, you gotta do something about this.

[00:05:00] Cause this is just absolutely nuts. We've got to stop all of these spam calls and spam texts. What the cell carriers did is they've come up with a new protocol that goes between their switches. It gets kind of technical. So the idea is if someone's making a lot of calls from the same source or sending a lot of text messages from the same source, then it gets flagged and potentially blocked.

So you probably already noticed the number of these spam calls and the number of the spam text has gone down over the last few weeks. And there've been a few companies that have been very active in this T-Mobile and Sprint are kind of one that's in the lead right now. Last week, President Trump tried to send a text out to supporters and it makes the news because it was apparently blocked.

[00:06:00] Now we're looking at this technology and kind of wondering, right. This is a question that popped in my head. I'm just looking at all of this, reading all these articles. What is that? The reason why, because. At a certain point, a human looks at all of these algorithms and the output of these programs and said, Oh yeah, well, this is obviously wrong.

And we've seen that happen every time. Right? Fake news, you were just talking about with Facebook so that might've been president Trump's campaign.

Jim Polito: We're talking with Craig Peterson our Tech Talk Guru, a great guy. See that's the kind of stuff that bothers me. Okay. Look, I know that Facebook is a liberal organization.

I know it is. I know that something else within companies, you have, people who are not afraid to push their ideology on the company.

[00:07:00] For example, the Cato Institute, which is a kind of a sometimes I say left-leaning, but they are more libertarian organization did a study and they found out that 77% of conservatives are self censor themselves because they're concerned that if they talk about the politics, they might lose their job.

On the other side, extreme liberals as defined by this Cato study. I think it was about 54% of them

take an activist standpoint, they purposefully share their political views. They don't self sensor and they actually act more like an evangelical about their own liberal views. And, you know, within a company, when you get an argument between two people or people making a decision, it seems to me that people are people and they're going to react like they do in this study.

[00:08:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. It's inevitable. Even the programmers are, have those biases. And so when they program this stuff to try and, and stop these spam calls and spam messages. Yeah. That's messages, their biases are actually going to be reflected in the code they write.

Jim Polito: It's just like the media. It's the same thing, Craig.

That's that's bothersome. what about it? Cause I don't wanna, I don't wanna run out of time. What about VPNs? You really have an, I told you so moment here.

Craig Peterson: Oh man. Yeah, we are almost out of time. So I'll make this really quick here. If you've attended any of the training that I've done, I do this free training that they run from about 10 minutes to an hour.

I did training in February and March and April of this year and we covered VPNs.  I warned everybody about the problems with VPNs, particularly these commercial VPNs, and even more particularly the free VPNs. The idea behind VPN is it keeps your data safe. The reality is, well, yeah, not really.

[00:09:00] So we've got these VPNs in a mentor report that just came out and they specifically named seven different VPN services. All of these services said "We do not log you, keep your information private. We keep it safe."

Well, it turns out that they left 1.2 terabytes of private user data exposed online, these seven free VPN services.

Now this personal data, Jim, you're going to love this. Not only the user's email, their home addresses passwords in plain text. In other words, there don't bother decrypting them because they're not even encrypted IP addresses and the worst part of this story. Is that in this 1.2 terabytes of data, you might ask, wow, that's a lot of data for just names and email addresses.

[00:10:00] Oh no, no, no, no. All of these, no-log VPNs had been logging everyone's activity and it's now it's been exposed in the online world. So yet another reason not to use the VPNs.

I'm going to do that training again. So, you know, keep an eye on your email. I've got to do this. I got to explain this. What to do and how to do it. Cause it's free VPN purposes.

Jim Polito: You're the product. How, how can folks get more information?

Craig Peterson: Well, get on that email list. So you find out about it, just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Or you can just email me M E at Craig Peterson dot com and we'll let you know.

These are free training. I'm not trying to push anything down your throat. Okay, but it's important stuff.

Jim Polito: Well, we know that. Craig Peterson doesn't try to do that to you. Okay, Craig, excellent segment. We look forward to talking with you next week, sir.

Craig Peterson: Hey take care.

Jim Polito:  You take care of yourself too. I hope you remain healthy, sir. Take care.

Craig Peterson: Bye-bye.

[00:11:00] Bye-bye. Alright. When we return a final word, you're listening to the Jim Pollito show from my kitchen with pops. This is your safe space.

--- 

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:

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Welcome,

Good Monday morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Jack Heath this morning discussing what we learned about VPNs. BTW, if you have been listening to me for a while I have been telling you this -- but now there is Proof in Black and White that I what shared with you is TRUE! Here we go with Jack.

These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: So these VPN services said they did not keep logs of what you were doing online. They were not tracking you. Guess what was in this data that was found online?

Hey, good morning everybody. Craig Peterson here. I can't believe summer's almost half over. Well, that's what. It happens, right? Anyhow, I was on with Jack this morning and they had the most major I told you so, and I hate to say this, but if you're using VPNs, man, listen in because a huge, huge problem came out just last week.

Jack Heath: Craig Peterson, a tech talk guy joins us his show air Saturdays. Here are these iHeart stations on the tech talk side, Craig. Good morning. One of these stories. Locally is more people falling victim to scams?

What else do you have for us?

[00:01:00] Craig Peterson: Oh man. I'm afraid. I have an I told you so, here this morning about VPN's. People have been using virtual private networks and the FBI came out with a warning a few weeks ago. Well, now we have discovered a group of seven of these free VPN apps that left all of their data exposed online. 1.2 terabytes of your personal data. So if you're using one of these free VPN services, which I warn against all of the time, in fact using a VPN service is usually worse than not using a VPN service. It turns out. Not just their email, their home addresses passwords in plain text, IP addresses, but all of these VPN services said they did not keep logs of what you were doing online.

[00:02:00]They were not tracking. You get within this data that was found online. Every place you visited, where you went, your passwords, the whole nine yards. You cannot trust them. These VPN services, particularly the free VPN services. It's not going to make you safer.

Jack Heath: Well, good, a good lesson learned. What about, um, the scam seemed to be going up as people do more virtual stuff.

I'm not surprised people are going to try and take advantage of a bad situation. Is it ending? I mean, the basics don't open something. If you don't recognize it. Don't don't don't don't if a spam call comes through don't call and say, you know, here's my credit information, but is there anything new we should be doing to avoid these any good blockers or anything?

Good. You know the way to kind of knock out the crap coming through, or is it just something that they're always going to get through?

Craig Peterson: Well, we've got some really good news because of what's been happening over at the FCC and the FTC, actually. And that is that most now of the major cell phone carriers are able to block text messages.

[00:03:00] If they look like they are a scam. So for instance, You guys I know are familiar with what happened with President Trump's text here that over the last week. Okay. And that is that his texts, he was sending out to his supporters were blocked. Now that's part of this automatic system, where if it looks like it might be a scam, it might be a spam-sending it out to thousands or millions of people it will be blocked.

So yeah. Good news on that front T-Mobile has really taken a forward front position on this, which also now includes Sprint, but they're all kind of doing this and that is you are not going to be getting these text messages at the volume your before that are scams when you click on them or respond to them, or heaven forbid you callback a number that you don't recognize where they will be billing you $10-$20 for that phone call that number you didn't recognize. Those are all on a down surge right now.

Jack Heath: All right, Craig Peterson. [00:04:00] Thank you very much. Craig Peterson.com. Make it a good Monday. Enjoy the heat.

Craig Peterson: Take care.

Jack Heath: All right. Hey,

Craig Peterson: Were you, one of the people that went to my, one of my trips I did on VPNs, I did a bunch in February this year, not just VPNs, but general pieces of training.

I'm going to do a lot more of them coming up. Probably back to school time in early September, but before then I'm going to be doing a bunch of smaller things and kind of getting my ducks in a row, working on some courses and stuff that we're going to be doing. We've also got some really great hardware done for you packs we're working on, but anyways.

Those pieces of training that I did in February, I told you so, right. Right? How many of you guys dropped your VPN and services because I told you exactly what was going on? Now we have. Proof. Right.

This has nothing to do with the general security problems businesses are [00:05:00] having because of VPNs and the misuse of VPN's.

Anyway, I'm going to have to do that one again, obviously updated, but, O M G this is a very, very big deal.

Take care, everybody. We'll be back tomorrow. Bye-bye.

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