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

Welcome!  

This pandemic has revealed quite a bit about how we view society and government and the part that science and all this advanced online technology can play in our lives.  So sit back and listen in. 

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: Hey everybody. Welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. I am going to talk about something that's going to upset a few people. I'm sure I can hear it now. There was a great article this week, from City Journal and city journal.org is where you'll find it online. CJ is what they call themselves.

[00:00:28] They've got a lot of interesting stuff about really about London, about the UK, but here also in the US, they've got an eye on the news, the politics of fear, talking about economists and what's happening here. it just goes on and on. They've got a lot of very, very, very cool stuff. A bunch of things, Manhattan Institute as well.

[00:00:55] But in this particular case, they're talking about Britain's hard lesson about blind trust in scientific authorities, I have it up on my website as well as you'll find it at city journal, but this is, this is how this article goes.

[00:01:13] It goes on for quite a while, and it goes into a lot of background on this noted epidemiologist by the name of Neil Ferguson. Now, Neil Ferguson and all of these other epidemiologists from around the world actually met last October and they did some planning into pandemics, pandemic planning. What do they need to be concerned about?

[00:01:38] What might happen if there was some sort of a pandemic and what does it all mean? And they went through a whole bunch of stuff. It's called event two a one. There's what it was called. You can look it up online and it's a pandemic tabletop exercise. And they looked at a bunch of different scenario-based on pandemics that might occur, right?

[00:02:06] So you get these guys like Neil Ferguson who go to this planning. planning practices, if you will, like the event two Oh one. And they get up and bloviate and they talk about how, well, I've seen this before. The H1N1, you know, swine flu, bird flu, SARS, MERS, Ebola, and here's what's happened in the past.

[00:02:33] And they try and say, while this was happening in the past, and, it's probably gonna come out along the same lines in the future. No, I'm simplifying this. I get it. Okay. But that's the basics of what they do. So they all sit around and they talk about, well, what might happen? How might it be different?

[00:02:53] How could we have done something better in the past? And I'm glad they do these things. But part of the problem that comes from these is you get people who are all of a sudden elevated and they're elevated without peer review. And now peer review, I think is something that's really important. I'm not talking about P.

[00:03:16] I. E. R. This is nothing to do without in, you know, in the ocean on the docs or the peers. Right? Peer review according to Wikipedia is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work. It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field.

[00:03:44] So in other words, peer review is where you have multiple people who understand. The field, in this case, the epidemiology and can review the work that was done and then say, yes, this is valid. Now many people said, Oh no, this is coming on so fast. We just can't peer review. We have to, we have to go. We have to do, we have to go, we have to do, and I can understand that right up front.

[00:04:14] We didn't really know. Well, all we really knew was China was lying to us, right? We've known that for a long time, although that seems to be news to CNN and various other organizations like the world health organization that is controlled by China. But when that's about the only thing we knew. So we said, okay, let's try and protect everybody.

[00:04:36] Everybody stays home. And of course, it totally crashed the economy worldwide. Very, very, very bad. The very high impact here. Now, Neil Ferguson came up with this report titled the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce COVID-19 mortality in healthcare demand.

[00:05:02] And he used some computational models that he had put together 13 years ago that had not been, you guessed it, peer-reviewed. We'll tell you a little bit more about his code here in a few minutes. But he used these comp computational models that he had put together to predict that absence, social distancing, and other mitigation measures.

[00:05:29] Britain would suffer a half a million deaths from the Coronavirus and the US would suffer 2.2 million deaths. And he also said that even with mitigation measures in place. The epidemic would still likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems, most notably intensive care units being overwhelmed many times over.

[00:05:55] So that freaked out. Parliament in the UK freaked out. Prime minister Boris Johnson. And he ended up imposing a national corn team. And of course, the US did the same. We stopped flights from China except for us citizens who could be repatriated. The same thing's true with those holding green cards. You could come back into the US as well.

[00:06:18] Well, at the time, everything looked to be pretty solid. And, now we're hearing things a lot different. So here's the bottom line. You're the UK scientific advisory group for emergencies. This is the guys that were tasked with handling the Coronavirus crisis so that the model was implemented in thousands of lines of undocumented code written in C.

[00:06:47] Which is a language you never write this kind of code in. It's what I spent decades writing Colonel level code in. Okay. It is not for researchers. See, as for professional programmers, they also said that he refused to publish the original source code. And the Imperial college has refused freedom of information act requesting the original source code.

[00:07:18] And the Imperial college says, yeah, well, you know, the public interest is not sufficiently compelling. Yeah. Yeah. We only crashed the whole world economy, so Ferguson himself even admits that the code was written 13 years ago to model an influenza pandemic. So it raises a bunch of questions here. Other than Ferguson's reputation, what did the UK government have in front of them to assess the model and the implementation?

[00:07:49] They certainly didn't have peer review. How did they validate the model? What safeguards were implemented to ensure it was correctly applied? This code is apparently a tangled mess of undocumented steps with no discernible overall structure. That's according to people that have seen it. Even experienced developers would have to make a serious effort to understand it, and it would not pass a cursory review by a Ph.D. committee in computational epidemiology.

[00:08:25] In other words. It's a total farce, a total farce. And this article is written by the way, by a virologist. And part of what he does every day is modeling complex processes. So his opinion, which is what I just read to you here, is, are have some weight behind it, frankly. So apparently the Imperial college in Ferguson.

[00:08:54] Just used what's called the incumbency effect. Wow. The Imperial College has a good reputation and Ferguson has a decent reputation. Therefore, we're going to accept this one. In fact, they should never have accepted any of this stuff. Ferguson Imperial college completely refused to examine all of the taxpayer-funded code, any of the taxpayer-funded code.

[00:09:19] None of the taxpayer-funded code. Well, this is completely contrary to the, frankly, even the UK, certainly to the United States who also followed along. This is what dr fouled chief followed, right? These are the things he was saying. At the same time, Fowchee was saying them. This is just incredible. And I, I really like here how the Manhattan Institute for policy research calls Ferguson's arguments only a little better than the dog ate my homework.

[00:09:55] Oh. And by the way, Ferguson resigned from the Imperial college task force because he apparently had a tryst with a married woman and did not follow. Social distancing requirements in the UK and the social distance scene guidelines that he had published and presented to her Majesty's government. So there you go.

[00:10:25] Whole thing. Total farce. Absolute forest. Now obviously, we have people dying and that's never good, but we have it every year. And you know what has really put the icing on the cake for me personally, they started saying, Hey, don't pay attention to the comparisons of a normal flu season to Corona because I didn't have this. These are my words.

We've been lying about the number of flu deaths every year. Yes, yes, indeed. They have, you know, these tens of thousands of flu deaths that they've been counting every year. Apparently a bad flu year is only about 1500 actual flu deaths. So now they're saying. ignore the flu death statistics.

[00:11:18] We've been publishing for a few decades because we've been lying to you, but we're not going to say that. And. Well, you know, look at the COVID-19 deaths, which are also not COVID-19 deaths. They are, they have not been doing autopsies to check to see if they actually died of COVID-19. There are examples of this, including, the one child under the age of 18 that had died in this one city.

[00:11:48] Turned out. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. COVID-19 yeah. No, but it was reported as a COVID-19 I don't know if we'll ever figure this mess out. Anyhow, have a great week. Stay out of trouble. I'll be back next Saturday at 1:00 PM I'll be on with Matt Gagnon. On Wednesday morning at seven 34 make sure you join every morning for the morning drive show, and I will be back, as I said, Monday one to three armies, Saturday one to three also visit me online, Craig peterson.com have a great week guys.

---

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!  

This pandemic has revealed quite a bit about how we view society and government and the part that science and all this advanced online technology can play in our lives.  So sit back and listen in. 

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: Hey everybody. Welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. I am going to talk about something that's going to upset a few people. I'm sure I can hear it now. There was a great article this week, from City Journal and city journal.org is where you'll find it online. CJ is what they call themselves.

[00:00:28] They've got a lot of interesting stuff about really about London, about the UK, but here also in the US, they've got an eye on the news, the politics of fear, talking about economists and what's happening here. it just goes on and on. They've got a lot of very, very, very cool stuff. A bunch of things, Manhattan Institute as well.

[00:00:55] But in this particular case, they're talking about Britain's hard lesson about blind trust in scientific authorities, I have it up on my website as well as you'll find it at city journal, but this is, this is how this article goes.

[00:01:13] It goes on for quite a while, and it goes into a lot of background on this noted epidemiologist by the name of Neil Ferguson. Now, Neil Ferguson and all of these other epidemiologists from around the world actually met last October and they did some planning into pandemics, pandemic planning. What do they need to be concerned about?

[00:01:38] What might happen if there was some sort of a pandemic and what does it all mean? And they went through a whole bunch of stuff. It's called event two a one. There's what it was called. You can look it up online and it's a pandemic tabletop exercise. And they looked at a bunch of different scenario-based on pandemics that might occur, right?

[00:02:06] So you get these guys like Neil Ferguson who go to this planning. planning practices, if you will, like the event two Oh one. And they get up and bloviate and they talk about how, well, I've seen this before. The H1N1, you know, swine flu, bird flu, SARS, MERS, Ebola, and here's what's happened in the past.

[00:02:33] And they try and say, while this was happening in the past, and, it's probably gonna come out along the same lines in the future. No, I'm simplifying this. I get it. Okay. But that's the basics of what they do. So they all sit around and they talk about, well, what might happen? How might it be different?

[00:02:53] How could we have done something better in the past? And I'm glad they do these things. But part of the problem that comes from these is you get people who are all of a sudden elevated and they're elevated without peer review. And now peer review, I think is something that's really important. I'm not talking about P.

[00:03:16] I. E. R. This is nothing to do without in, you know, in the ocean on the docs or the peers. Right? Peer review according to Wikipedia is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work. It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field.

[00:03:44] So in other words, peer review is where you have multiple people who understand. The field, in this case, the epidemiology and can review the work that was done and then say, yes, this is valid. Now many people said, Oh no, this is coming on so fast. We just can't peer review. We have to, we have to go. We have to do, we have to go, we have to do, and I can understand that right up front.

[00:04:14] We didn't really know. Well, all we really knew was China was lying to us, right? We've known that for a long time, although that seems to be news to CNN and various other organizations like the world health organization that is controlled by China. But when that's about the only thing we knew. So we said, okay, let's try and protect everybody.

[00:04:36] Everybody stays home. And of course, it totally crashed the economy worldwide. Very, very, very bad. The very high impact here. Now, Neil Ferguson came up with this report titled the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce COVID-19 mortality in healthcare demand.

[00:05:02] And he used some computational models that he had put together 13 years ago that had not been, you guessed it, peer-reviewed. We'll tell you a little bit more about his code here in a few minutes. But he used these comp computational models that he had put together to predict that absence, social distancing, and other mitigation measures.

[00:05:29] Britain would suffer a half a million deaths from the Coronavirus and the US would suffer 2.2 million deaths. And he also said that even with mitigation measures in place. The epidemic would still likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems, most notably intensive care units being overwhelmed many times over.

[00:05:55] So that freaked out. Parliament in the UK freaked out. Prime minister Boris Johnson. And he ended up imposing a national corn team. And of course, the US did the same. We stopped flights from China except for us citizens who could be repatriated. The same thing's true with those holding green cards. You could come back into the US as well.

[00:06:18] Well, at the time, everything looked to be pretty solid. And, now we're hearing things a lot different. So here's the bottom line. You're the UK scientific advisory group for emergencies. This is the guys that were tasked with handling the Coronavirus crisis so that the model was implemented in thousands of lines of undocumented code written in C.

[00:06:47] Which is a language you never write this kind of code in. It's what I spent decades writing Colonel level code in. Okay. It is not for researchers. See, as for professional programmers, they also said that he refused to publish the original source code. And the Imperial college has refused freedom of information act requesting the original source code.

[00:07:18] And the Imperial college says, yeah, well, you know, the public interest is not sufficiently compelling. Yeah. Yeah. We only crashed the whole world economy, so Ferguson himself even admits that the code was written 13 years ago to model an influenza pandemic. So it raises a bunch of questions here. Other than Ferguson's reputation, what did the UK government have in front of them to assess the model and the implementation?

[00:07:49] They certainly didn't have peer review. How did they validate the model? What safeguards were implemented to ensure it was correctly applied? This code is apparently a tangled mess of undocumented steps with no discernible overall structure. That's according to people that have seen it. Even experienced developers would have to make a serious effort to understand it, and it would not pass a cursory review by a Ph.D. committee in computational epidemiology.

[00:08:25] In other words. It's a total farce, a total farce. And this article is written by the way, by a virologist. And part of what he does every day is modeling complex processes. So his opinion, which is what I just read to you here, is, are have some weight behind it, frankly. So apparently the Imperial college in Ferguson.

[00:08:54] Just used what's called the incumbency effect. Wow. The Imperial College has a good reputation and Ferguson has a decent reputation. Therefore, we're going to accept this one. In fact, they should never have accepted any of this stuff. Ferguson Imperial college completely refused to examine all of the taxpayer-funded code, any of the taxpayer-funded code.

[00:09:19] None of the taxpayer-funded code. Well, this is completely contrary to the, frankly, even the UK, certainly to the United States who also followed along. This is what dr fouled chief followed, right? These are the things he was saying. At the same time, Fowchee was saying them. This is just incredible. And I, I really like here how the Manhattan Institute for policy research calls Ferguson's arguments only a little better than the dog ate my homework.

[00:09:55] Oh. And by the way, Ferguson resigned from the Imperial college task force because he apparently had a tryst with a married woman and did not follow. Social distancing requirements in the UK and the social distance scene guidelines that he had published and presented to her Majesty's government. So there you go.

[00:10:25] Whole thing. Total farce. Absolute forest. Now obviously, we have people dying and that's never good, but we have it every year. And you know what has really put the icing on the cake for me personally, they started saying, Hey, don't pay attention to the comparisons of a normal flu season to Corona because I didn't have this. These are my words.

We've been lying about the number of flu deaths every year. Yes, yes, indeed. They have, you know, these tens of thousands of flu deaths that they've been counting every year. Apparently a bad flu year is only about 1500 actual flu deaths. So now they're saying. ignore the flu death statistics.

[00:11:18] We've been publishing for a few decades because we've been lying to you, but we're not going to say that. And. Well, you know, look at the COVID-19 deaths, which are also not COVID-19 deaths. They are, they have not been doing autopsies to check to see if they actually died of COVID-19. There are examples of this, including, the one child under the age of 18 that had died in this one city.

[00:11:48] Turned out. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. COVID-19 yeah. No, but it was reported as a COVID-19 I don't know if we'll ever figure this mess out. Anyhow, have a great week. Stay out of trouble. I'll be back next Saturday at 1:00 PM I'll be on with Matt Gagnon. On Wednesday morning at seven 34 make sure you join every morning for the morning drive show, and I will be back, as I said, Monday one to three armies, Saturday one to three also visit me online, Craig peterson.com have a great week guys.

---

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!

This pandemic has revealed quite a bit about how we view society and government and the part that science and all this advanced online technology can play in our lives. So sit back and listen in.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: Hey everybody. Welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. I am going to talk about something that's going to upset a few people. I'm sure I can hear it now. There was a great article this week, from City Journal and city journal.org is where you'll find it online. CJ is what they call themselves.

[00:00:28] They've got a lot of interesting stuff about really about London, about the UK, but here also in the US, they've got an eye on the news, the politics of fear, talking about economists and what's happening here. it just goes on and on. They've got a lot of very, very, very cool stuff. A bunch of things, Manhattan Institute as well.

[00:00:55] But in this particular case, they're talking about Britain's hard lesson about blind trust in scientific authorities, I have it up on my website as well as you'll find it at city journal, but this is, this is how this article goes.

[00:01:13] It goes on for quite a while, and it goes into a lot of background on this noted epidemiologist by the name of Neil Ferguson. Now, Neil Ferguson and all of these other epidemiologists from around the world actually met last October and they did some planning into pandemics, pandemic planning. What do they need to be concerned about?

[00:01:38] What might happen if there was some sort of a pandemic and what does it all mean? And they went through a whole bunch of stuff. It's called event two a one. There's what it was called. You can look it up online and it's a pandemic tabletop exercise. And they looked at a bunch of different scenario-based on pandemics that might occur, right?

[00:02:06] So you get these guys like Neil Ferguson who go to this planning. planning practices, if you will, like the event two Oh one. And they get up and bloviate and they talk about how, well, I've seen this before. The H1N1, you know, swine flu, bird flu, SARS, MERS, Ebola, and here's what's happened in the past.

[00:02:33] And they try and say, while this was happening in the past, and, it's probably gonna come out along the same lines in the future. No, I'm simplifying this. I get it. Okay. But that's the basics of what they do. So they all sit around and they talk about, well, what might happen? How might it be different?

[00:02:53] How could we have done something better in the past? And I'm glad they do these things. But part of the problem that comes from these is you get people who are all of a sudden elevated and they're elevated without peer review. And now peer review, I think is something that's really important. I'm not talking about P.

[00:03:16] I. E. R. This is nothing to do without in, you know, in the ocean on the docs or the peers. Right? Peer review according to Wikipedia is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work. It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field.

[00:03:44] So in other words, peer review is where you have multiple people who understand. The field, in this case, the epidemiology and can review the work that was done and then say, yes, this is valid. Now many people said, Oh no, this is coming on so fast. We just can't peer review. We have to, we have to go. We have to do, we have to go, we have to do, and I can understand that right up front.

[00:04:14] We didn't really know. Well, all we really knew was China was lying to us, right? We've known that for a long time, although that seems to be news to CNN and various other organizations like the world health organization that is controlled by China. But when that's about the only thing we knew. So we said, okay, let's try and protect everybody.

[00:04:36] Everybody stays home. And of course, it totally crashed the economy worldwide. Very, very, very bad. The very high impact here. Now, Neil Ferguson came up with this report titled the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce COVID-19 mortality in healthcare demand.

[00:05:02] And he used some computational models that he had put together 13 years ago that had not been, you guessed it, peer-reviewed. We'll tell you a little bit more about his code here in a few minutes. But he used these comp computational models that he had put together to predict that absence, social distancing, and other mitigation measures.

[00:05:29] Britain would suffer a half a million deaths from the Coronavirus and the US would suffer 2.2 million deaths. And he also said that even with mitigation measures in place. The epidemic would still likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems, most notably intensive care units being overwhelmed many times over.

[00:05:55] So that freaked out. Parliament in the UK freaked out. Prime minister Boris Johnson. And he ended up imposing a national corn team. And of course, the US did the same. We stopped flights from China except for us citizens who could be repatriated. The same thing's true with those holding green cards. You could come back into the US as well.

[00:06:18] Well, at the time, everything looked to be pretty solid. And, now we're hearing things a lot different. So here's the bottom line. You're the UK scientific advisory group for emergencies. This is the guys that were tasked with handling the Coronavirus crisis so that the model was implemented in thousands of lines of undocumented code written in C.

[00:06:47] Which is a language you never write this kind of code in. It's what I spent decades writing Colonel level code in. Okay. It is not for researchers. See, as for professional programmers, they also said that he refused to publish the original source code. And the Imperial college has refused freedom of information act requesting the original source code.

[00:07:18] And the Imperial college says, yeah, well, you know, the public interest is not sufficiently compelling. Yeah. Yeah. We only crashed the whole world economy, so Ferguson himself even admits that the code was written 13 years ago to model an influenza pandemic. So it raises a bunch of questions here. Other than Ferguson's reputation, what did the UK government have in front of them to assess the model and the implementation?

[00:07:49] They certainly didn't have peer review. How did they validate the model? What safeguards were implemented to ensure it was correctly applied? This code is apparently a tangled mess of undocumented steps with no discernible overall structure. That's according to people that have seen it. Even experienced developers would have to make a serious effort to understand it, and it would not pass a cursory review by a Ph.D. committee in computational epidemiology.

[00:08:25] In other words. It's a total farce, a total farce. And this article is written by the way, by a virologist. And part of what he does every day is modeling complex processes. So his opinion, which is what I just read to you here, is, are have some weight behind it, frankly. So apparently the Imperial college in Ferguson.

[00:08:54] Just used what's called the incumbency effect. Wow. The Imperial College has a good reputation and Ferguson has a decent reputation. Therefore, we're going to accept this one. In fact, they should never have accepted any of this stuff. Ferguson Imperial college completely refused to examine all of the taxpayer-funded code, any of the taxpayer-funded code.

[00:09:19] None of the taxpayer-funded code. Well, this is completely contrary to the, frankly, even the UK, certainly to the United States who also followed along. This is what dr fouled chief followed, right? These are the things he was saying. At the same time, Fowchee was saying them. This is just incredible. And I, I really like here how the Manhattan Institute for policy research calls Ferguson's arguments only a little better than the dog ate my homework.

[00:09:55] Oh. And by the way, Ferguson resigned from the Imperial college task force because he apparently had a tryst with a married woman and did not follow. Social distancing requirements in the UK and the social distance scene guidelines that he had published and presented to her Majesty's government. So there you go.

[00:10:25] Whole thing. Total farce. Absolute forest. Now obviously, we have people dying and that's never good, but we have it every year. And you know what has really put the icing on the cake for me personally, they started saying, Hey, don't pay attention to the comparisons of a normal flu season to Corona because I didn't have this. These are my words.

We've been lying about the number of flu deaths every year. Yes, yes, indeed. They have, you know, these tens of thousands of flu deaths that they've been counting every year. Apparently a bad flu year is only about 1500 actual flu deaths. So now they're saying. ignore the flu death statistics.

[00:11:18] We've been publishing for a few decades because we've been lying to you, but we're not going to say that. And. Well, you know, look at the COVID-19 deaths, which are also not COVID-19 deaths. They are, they have not been doing autopsies to check to see if they actually died of COVID-19. There are examples of this, including, the one child under the age of 18 that had died in this one city.

[00:11:48] Turned out. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. COVID-19 yeah. No, but it was reported as a COVID-19 I don't know if we'll ever figure this mess out. Anyhow, have a great week. Stay out of trouble. I'll be back next Saturday at 1:00 PM I'll be on with Matt Gagnon. On Wednesday morning at seven 34 make sure you join every morning for the morning drive show, and I will be back, as I said, Monday one to three armies, Saturday one to three also visit me online, Craig peterson.com have a great week guys.

---

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!  

While we have all been locked down Cybercriminals have been hard at work developing and perfecting tools that will leach your CPU resources, bandwidth, and electricity. Google Chrome users won't be bothered by these soon when they release a new feature that neuters these abusive crypto-jacking ads that covertly leach your CPU resources, bandwidth, and electricity.  I will tell you all about it and more.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig, Peterson here. We've had a busy hour this afternoon as we've been running through some of the top stories of this last week we talked about website attacks, how they've become more persistent, more prevalent, and even quieter than they were before. What you should be doing as a business owner.

[00:00:26] If you have a website, and by the way, the answer is patch, patch, patch, and use a really good credit card processing service. I tend to like Stripe. They are certainly the best out there. PayPal is pretty good. Square's pretty good. We also talked about the identity-related breaches. They are certainly hitting us as consumers, but it turns out companies are having problems with this as well.

[00:00:54] And of course we were just talking about the coming disruption to college. What I think is going to happen and what the experts are saying as well. So hopefully you were able to follow along, if not. Visit me online, Craig peterson.com if you look at this, excuse me, this morning's newsletter. You'll see links to all of these segments for today, including the ones that are coming up.

[00:01:21] We're going to be talking about your Chrome browser right now. Some challenges with VPNs. It's time to relaunch a remote team. What should you be doing? We've got some phishing templates. What are the bad guys doing? What are phishing templates? Britain's hard-lesson about blind trust when it comes to "science." Okay, so Chrome's going to soon block these resource-draining ads. Now, if you've attended some of my training courses, you know, I've talked many times about how to block some of these ads now. The people who run the websites that are based on ad revenue or, Hey, I get it right, these, these poor people, they need the ad revenue.

[00:02:10] On the other side, there are so many ads and so many of them are heavy graphics and even worse, so many of them are videos that it's substantially slowing down our web browsing experience. And I showed in one of my pieces of training here that something as simple as Ublock origin installed on your browser can double, triple, quadruple the speed of a page load.

[00:02:37] Now, that's particularly important if you're on a DSL line or maybe you're on a phone on LTE or four or five G or whatever it is you're using, it makes a big difference. It's a noticeable difference. I mean like noticeable. Your page-load goes to about a second down from about 10 to 20 seconds for all of the elements to load.

[00:03:00] So many of us are turning it off because frankly, they've gone overboard. With the ads. Maybe they should be charging more for the ads and have fewer of them, I don't know. But there are too many ads. They are too intrusive and they are just chewing up way too much of our bandwidth and that gets to be a huge, huge problem.

[00:03:23] Now, Google had some ad blockers available through the Google store, the Google Chrome store. They were never really happy about that cause that's how Google makes its money, is selling your information. So having ads up that they are serving from their webs on different websites makes them money.

[00:03:45] So if you go to a website. And you see an ad, that ad can be coming from a whole bunch of different networks. And frankly, Google could be behind one or more of those networks as well. So, you know, you've got to understand that that's where they're coming from. Right? So for a while, Google completely blocked.

[00:04:10] All of these ad blockers. Now they've decided they're going to do something a little bit different, and instead of blocking all of the ads that are out there, all of these ads that are on a webpage, Google says, okay, here's what we're going to do. There is a problem, although it's not like a huge problem, there is a problem with some ads using far too much CPU and memory and in fact what the referring to are these Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency miners.

[00:04:48] So here's how this works. In the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency world, you have people who are mining. They're using these huge prime numbers in order to solve a mathematical formula, and when they can solve that mathematical formula, it results in this big number. And that big number cannot be reproduced by other people.

[00:05:12] Theoretically. it can't be hacked. They can't figure out what it is, particularly once you found it and you put it into your wallet, so now you have in your wallet, you can spend it, you can spend fractions of it, et cetera, et cetera. So that takes a lot of CPU. In fact. I've heard numbers that the value of a Bitcoin is actually lower.

[00:05:40] And then what it costs you and electricity and the computing power to mine that Bitcoin, and there've been companies who have been in business specifically just to mine Bitcoin. There are companies that make devices specifically to mine, Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies. And it's gotten to the point now where even those companies, as efficient as they are using specialized hardware.

[00:06:08] Have found that they just can't do it. They can't mind effectively and make money. So what are the bad guys doing while the bad guys are sneaking stuff into ads? So they'll buy an ad on one of these advertisement networks, and once you've got an ad on one of those advertising networks and the ad plays on that person's computer.

[00:06:33] They are actually delivering some, I guess you could call it malware, right? But they're delivering some software's part of this ad that now uses your electricity, your computing power, all of your competing resources to mind for the cryptocurrency. Because if they can use your browser. To mine for cryptocurrency.

[00:06:59] That's free, right? That doesn't cost them anything. Now we're just going to cost you a lot. It's going to obviously slow down your computer. In the case of these Android phones out there, there have been cases of them not only getting hot because they're so busy trying to mine the cryptocurrencies for the bad guys, but they actually have caught fire as well, so this is a difficult thing.

[00:07:26]for you as a user, cause you, how do you know this? You can't really block it. And to conceal the scam, the bad guys are obfuscating this code. They're making it look like legitimate code is legitimate ad everything's just fine. And the only thing you notice is all of a sudden all of the fans on your computer has gone to full bore.

[00:07:48] Right? Or if you're on a laptop or a smartphone. Your batteries are shot, they just burn right through them. And also, if you're really paying attention, you're going to see that your network resources also get overloaded. So in a post published on Thursday. this last week of the Chrome project manager's name is Marshall Vale said that while the percentage of these abusive ads is extremely low, somewhere around a half a percent, they account.

[00:08:22] For 28% of CPU usage in 27% of network data. I'm looking at a graph that's published here over on ARS Technica looking at all of these numbers and he says, we've recently discovered that a fraction of a percent of ads, consumer disproportionate share device resources such as battery network data without the user.

[00:08:47] Knowing about it. So to kind of put an end to this, you can do a few things. You can do what I've suggested in my, in some of the webinars I've done, the free webinars, I'm going to try and start doing some Facebook lives as well, or we talk about this, but Chrome is limiting the resources a display ad can consume before user interacts with it.

[00:09:13] So the idea is you've got an ad frame, and if it starts all-of-sudden chewing up a lot of resources, Google Chrome is going to show a thing that says the ad was removed. Because it's using a lot of resources and you haven't even clicked on it yet, so then I think that's going to be a very good thing.

[00:09:36] They've tried to figure out what's the right threshold here for disabling an ad because again, some of them are downloading video, some of them are, are actually drawing. Things on your screen. A little thing of animation, like a Disney film, they're drawing this on your screen that requires a lot of CPU and they're drawing it specifically for you based on what they know about you.

[00:09:59] Maybe they put your name into it or some product that you really like, but Google is saying that ads that use more CPU resources or network data, then the average of other ads. In fact, it's not just the average. It's ads that use more than 99.9% more than other ads. It's going to get shut off. So that means more than four megabytes of network data or 15 seconds of CPU usage.

[00:10:30] So we'll see what happens here. Chrome developers are going to have to kind of play with the limits over the next few months. If you're developing ads that are going to be showing up on Chrome, you got to kind of be careful of this. They're doing kind of a slow delayed rollout so that ad creators and tool providers that are, that are really trying to be good guys here aren't nailed.

[00:10:53] Now I've got this ad. I've got this article up on my website and you can find it there. You can find it on ARS Technica. There's an article by Dan Gooden over there, but also in Craig peterson.com, there's a flag that you can turn on if you want to start doing this immediately. So the flag is called enable dash heavy dash intervention. If you have a recent version of Chrome, it's going to work. Now, Firefox last year. Added a mechanism for blocking crypto-jacking, and it's doing it based on the known crypto-jacking domain. So it's pretty useful, but this is kind of a whack-a-mole approach.

[00:11:43] They've got to know about it in order to shut it down. That's one of the reasons, by the way, I love the way Cisco does it. Security, like those systems I mentioned earlier, to help restaurants to expand. Into the parking lot and keep their patrons safe online. They gather information over a billion points a day in order to track what's going on.

[00:12:07] But anyhow, so that's what's going on with Chrome. Stick around at the top of the hour a week, come back. We're going to talk about four challenges. With the existing VPNs, what you need to know, what you should do. This could be a problem for a lot of people out there, frankly, but we'll get into that when we get back.

[00:12:25] Also, in the next hour, we'll be talking about launching a remote team, some themed phishing templates, how the bad guys are doing it in this day and age, and Britain's hard lesson about trust in the so-called scientific approach. You're listening to Craig Peterson.  stick around cause we'll be right back.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!  

While we have all been locked down Cybercriminals have been hard at work developing and perfecting tools that will leach your CPU resources, bandwidth, and electricity. Google Chrome users won't be bothered by these soon when they release a new feature that neuters these abusive crypto-jacking ads that covertly leach your CPU resources, bandwidth, and electricity.  I will tell you all about it and more.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig, Peterson here. We've had a busy hour this afternoon as we've been running through some of the top stories of this last week we talked about website attacks, how they've become more persistent, more prevalent, and even quieter than they were before. What you should be doing as a business owner.

[00:00:26] If you have a website, and by the way, the answer is patch, patch, patch, and use a really good credit card processing service. I tend to like Stripe. They are certainly the best out there. PayPal is pretty good. Square's pretty good. We also talked about the identity-related breaches. They are certainly hitting us as consumers, but it turns out companies are having problems with this as well.

[00:00:54] And of course we were just talking about the coming disruption to college. What I think is going to happen and what the experts are saying as well. So hopefully you were able to follow along, if not. Visit me online, Craig peterson.com if you look at this, excuse me, this morning's newsletter. You'll see links to all of these segments for today, including the ones that are coming up.

[00:01:21] We're going to be talking about your Chrome browser right now. Some challenges with VPNs. It's time to relaunch a remote team. What should you be doing? We've got some phishing templates. What are the bad guys doing? What are phishing templates? Britain's hard-lesson about blind trust when it comes to "science." Okay, so Chrome's going to soon block these resource-draining ads. Now, if you've attended some of my training courses, you know, I've talked many times about how to block some of these ads now. The people who run the websites that are based on ad revenue or, Hey, I get it right, these, these poor people, they need the ad revenue.

[00:02:10] On the other side, there are so many ads and so many of them are heavy graphics and even worse, so many of them are videos that it's substantially slowing down our web browsing experience. And I showed in one of my pieces of training here that something as simple as Ublock origin installed on your browser can double, triple, quadruple the speed of a page load.

[00:02:37] Now, that's particularly important if you're on a DSL line or maybe you're on a phone on LTE or four or five G or whatever it is you're using, it makes a big difference. It's a noticeable difference. I mean like noticeable. Your page-load goes to about a second down from about 10 to 20 seconds for all of the elements to load.

[00:03:00] So many of us are turning it off because frankly, they've gone overboard. With the ads. Maybe they should be charging more for the ads and have fewer of them, I don't know. But there are too many ads. They are too intrusive and they are just chewing up way too much of our bandwidth and that gets to be a huge, huge problem.

[00:03:23] Now, Google had some ad blockers available through the Google store, the Google Chrome store. They were never really happy about that cause that's how Google makes its money, is selling your information. So having ads up that they are serving from their webs on different websites makes them money.

[00:03:45] So if you go to a website. And you see an ad, that ad can be coming from a whole bunch of different networks. And frankly, Google could be behind one or more of those networks as well. So, you know, you've got to understand that that's where they're coming from. Right? So for a while, Google completely blocked.

[00:04:10] All of these ad blockers. Now they've decided they're going to do something a little bit different, and instead of blocking all of the ads that are out there, all of these ads that are on a webpage, Google says, okay, here's what we're going to do. There is a problem, although it's not like a huge problem, there is a problem with some ads using far too much CPU and memory and in fact what the referring to are these Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency miners.

[00:04:48] So here's how this works. In the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency world, you have people who are mining. They're using these huge prime numbers in order to solve a mathematical formula, and when they can solve that mathematical formula, it results in this big number. And that big number cannot be reproduced by other people.

[00:05:12] Theoretically. it can't be hacked. They can't figure out what it is, particularly once you found it and you put it into your wallet, so now you have in your wallet, you can spend it, you can spend fractions of it, et cetera, et cetera. So that takes a lot of CPU. In fact. I've heard numbers that the value of a Bitcoin is actually lower.

[00:05:40] And then what it costs you and electricity and the computing power to mine that Bitcoin, and there've been companies who have been in business specifically just to mine Bitcoin. There are companies that make devices specifically to mine, Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies. And it's gotten to the point now where even those companies, as efficient as they are using specialized hardware.

[00:06:08] Have found that they just can't do it. They can't mind effectively and make money. So what are the bad guys doing while the bad guys are sneaking stuff into ads? So they'll buy an ad on one of these advertisement networks, and once you've got an ad on one of those advertising networks and the ad plays on that person's computer.

[00:06:33] They are actually delivering some, I guess you could call it malware, right? But they're delivering some software's part of this ad that now uses your electricity, your computing power, all of your competing resources to mind for the cryptocurrency. Because if they can use your browser. To mine for cryptocurrency.

[00:06:59] That's free, right? That doesn't cost them anything. Now we're just going to cost you a lot. It's going to obviously slow down your computer. In the case of these Android phones out there, there have been cases of them not only getting hot because they're so busy trying to mine the cryptocurrencies for the bad guys, but they actually have caught fire as well, so this is a difficult thing.

[00:07:26]for you as a user, cause you, how do you know this? You can't really block it. And to conceal the scam, the bad guys are obfuscating this code. They're making it look like legitimate code is legitimate ad everything's just fine. And the only thing you notice is all of a sudden all of the fans on your computer has gone to full bore.

[00:07:48] Right? Or if you're on a laptop or a smartphone. Your batteries are shot, they just burn right through them. And also, if you're really paying attention, you're going to see that your network resources also get overloaded. So in a post published on Thursday. this last week of the Chrome project manager's name is Marshall Vale said that while the percentage of these abusive ads is extremely low, somewhere around a half a percent, they account.

[00:08:22] For 28% of CPU usage in 27% of network data. I'm looking at a graph that's published here over on ARS Technica looking at all of these numbers and he says, we've recently discovered that a fraction of a percent of ads, consumer disproportionate share device resources such as battery network data without the user.

[00:08:47] Knowing about it. So to kind of put an end to this, you can do a few things. You can do what I've suggested in my, in some of the webinars I've done, the free webinars, I'm going to try and start doing some Facebook lives as well, or we talk about this, but Chrome is limiting the resources a display ad can consume before user interacts with it.

[00:09:13] So the idea is you've got an ad frame, and if it starts all-of-sudden chewing up a lot of resources, Google Chrome is going to show a thing that says the ad was removed. Because it's using a lot of resources and you haven't even clicked on it yet, so then I think that's going to be a very good thing.

[00:09:36] They've tried to figure out what's the right threshold here for disabling an ad because again, some of them are downloading video, some of them are, are actually drawing. Things on your screen. A little thing of animation, like a Disney film, they're drawing this on your screen that requires a lot of CPU and they're drawing it specifically for you based on what they know about you.

[00:09:59] Maybe they put your name into it or some product that you really like, but Google is saying that ads that use more CPU resources or network data, then the average of other ads. In fact, it's not just the average. It's ads that use more than 99.9% more than other ads. It's going to get shut off. So that means more than four megabytes of network data or 15 seconds of CPU usage.

[00:10:30] So we'll see what happens here. Chrome developers are going to have to kind of play with the limits over the next few months. If you're developing ads that are going to be showing up on Chrome, you got to kind of be careful of this. They're doing kind of a slow delayed rollout so that ad creators and tool providers that are, that are really trying to be good guys here aren't nailed.

[00:10:53] Now I've got this ad. I've got this article up on my website and you can find it there. You can find it on ARS Technica. There's an article by Dan Gooden over there, but also in Craig peterson.com, there's a flag that you can turn on if you want to start doing this immediately. So the flag is called enable dash heavy dash intervention. If you have a recent version of Chrome, it's going to work. Now, Firefox last year. Added a mechanism for blocking crypto-jacking, and it's doing it based on the known crypto-jacking domain. So it's pretty useful, but this is kind of a whack-a-mole approach.

[00:11:43] They've got to know about it in order to shut it down. That's one of the reasons, by the way, I love the way Cisco does it. Security, like those systems I mentioned earlier, to help restaurants to expand. Into the parking lot and keep their patrons safe online. They gather information over a billion points a day in order to track what's going on.

[00:12:07] But anyhow, so that's what's going on with Chrome. Stick around at the top of the hour a week, come back. We're going to talk about four challenges. With the existing VPNs, what you need to know, what you should do. This could be a problem for a lot of people out there, frankly, but we'll get into that when we get back.

[00:12:25] Also, in the next hour, we'll be talking about launching a remote team, some themed phishing templates, how the bad guys are doing it in this day and age, and Britain's hard lesson about trust in the so-called scientific approach. You're listening to Craig Peterson.  stick around cause we'll be right back.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

While we have all been locked down Cybercriminals have been hard at work developing and perfecting tools that will leach your CPU resources, bandwidth, and electricity. Google Chrome users won't be bothered by these soon when they release a new feature that neuters these abusive crypto-jacking ads that covertly leach your CPU resources, bandwidth, and electricity. I will tell you all about it and more.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig, Peterson here. We've had a busy hour this afternoon as we've been running through some of the top stories of this last week we talked about website attacks, how they've become more persistent, more prevalent, and even quieter than they were before. What you should be doing as a business owner.

[00:00:26] If you have a website, and by the way, the answer is patch, patch, patch, and use a really good credit card processing service. I tend to like Stripe. They are certainly the best out there. PayPal is pretty good. Square's pretty good. We also talked about the identity-related breaches. They are certainly hitting us as consumers, but it turns out companies are having problems with this as well.

[00:00:54] And of course we were just talking about the coming disruption to college. What I think is going to happen and what the experts are saying as well. So hopefully you were able to follow along, if not. Visit me online, Craig peterson.com if you look at this, excuse me, this morning's newsletter. You'll see links to all of these segments for today, including the ones that are coming up.

[00:01:21] We're going to be talking about your Chrome browser right now. Some challenges with VPNs. It's time to relaunch a remote team. What should you be doing? We've got some phishing templates. What are the bad guys doing? What are phishing templates? Britain's hard-lesson about blind trust when it comes to "science." Okay, so Chrome's going to soon block these resource-draining ads. Now, if you've attended some of my training courses, you know, I've talked many times about how to block some of these ads now. The people who run the websites that are based on ad revenue or, Hey, I get it right, these, these poor people, they need the ad revenue.

[00:02:10] On the other side, there are so many ads and so many of them are heavy graphics and even worse, so many of them are videos that it's substantially slowing down our web browsing experience. And I showed in one of my pieces of training here that something as simple as Ublock origin installed on your browser can double, triple, quadruple the speed of a page load.

[00:02:37] Now, that's particularly important if you're on a DSL line or maybe you're on a phone on LTE or four or five G or whatever it is you're using, it makes a big difference. It's a noticeable difference. I mean like noticeable. Your page-load goes to about a second down from about 10 to 20 seconds for all of the elements to load.

[00:03:00] So many of us are turning it off because frankly, they've gone overboard. With the ads. Maybe they should be charging more for the ads and have fewer of them, I don't know. But there are too many ads. They are too intrusive and they are just chewing up way too much of our bandwidth and that gets to be a huge, huge problem.

[00:03:23] Now, Google had some ad blockers available through the Google store, the Google Chrome store. They were never really happy about that cause that's how Google makes its money, is selling your information. So having ads up that they are serving from their webs on different websites makes them money.

[00:03:45] So if you go to a website. And you see an ad, that ad can be coming from a whole bunch of different networks. And frankly, Google could be behind one or more of those networks as well. So, you know, you've got to understand that that's where they're coming from. Right? So for a while, Google completely blocked.

[00:04:10] All of these ad blockers. Now they've decided they're going to do something a little bit different, and instead of blocking all of the ads that are out there, all of these ads that are on a webpage, Google says, okay, here's what we're going to do. There is a problem, although it's not like a huge problem, there is a problem with some ads using far too much CPU and memory and in fact what the referring to are these Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency miners.

[00:04:48] So here's how this works. In the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency world, you have people who are mining. They're using these huge prime numbers in order to solve a mathematical formula, and when they can solve that mathematical formula, it results in this big number. And that big number cannot be reproduced by other people.

[00:05:12] Theoretically. it can't be hacked. They can't figure out what it is, particularly once you found it and you put it into your wallet, so now you have in your wallet, you can spend it, you can spend fractions of it, et cetera, et cetera. So that takes a lot of CPU. In fact. I've heard numbers that the value of a Bitcoin is actually lower.

[00:05:40] And then what it costs you and electricity and the computing power to mine that Bitcoin, and there've been companies who have been in business specifically just to mine Bitcoin. There are companies that make devices specifically to mine, Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies. And it's gotten to the point now where even those companies, as efficient as they are using specialized hardware.

[00:06:08] Have found that they just can't do it. They can't mind effectively and make money. So what are the bad guys doing while the bad guys are sneaking stuff into ads? So they'll buy an ad on one of these advertisement networks, and once you've got an ad on one of those advertising networks and the ad plays on that person's computer.

[00:06:33] They are actually delivering some, I guess you could call it malware, right? But they're delivering some software's part of this ad that now uses your electricity, your computing power, all of your competing resources to mind for the cryptocurrency. Because if they can use your browser. To mine for cryptocurrency.

[00:06:59] That's free, right? That doesn't cost them anything. Now we're just going to cost you a lot. It's going to obviously slow down your computer. In the case of these Android phones out there, there have been cases of them not only getting hot because they're so busy trying to mine the cryptocurrencies for the bad guys, but they actually have caught fire as well, so this is a difficult thing.

[00:07:26]for you as a user, cause you, how do you know this? You can't really block it. And to conceal the scam, the bad guys are obfuscating this code. They're making it look like legitimate code is legitimate ad everything's just fine. And the only thing you notice is all of a sudden all of the fans on your computer has gone to full bore.

[00:07:48] Right? Or if you're on a laptop or a smartphone. Your batteries are shot, they just burn right through them. And also, if you're really paying attention, you're going to see that your network resources also get overloaded. So in a post published on Thursday. this last week of the Chrome project manager's name is Marshall Vale said that while the percentage of these abusive ads is extremely low, somewhere around a half a percent, they account.

[00:08:22] For 28% of CPU usage in 27% of network data. I'm looking at a graph that's published here over on ARS Technica looking at all of these numbers and he says, we've recently discovered that a fraction of a percent of ads, consumer disproportionate share device resources such as battery network data without the user.

[00:08:47] Knowing about it. So to kind of put an end to this, you can do a few things. You can do what I've suggested in my, in some of the webinars I've done, the free webinars, I'm going to try and start doing some Facebook lives as well, or we talk about this, but Chrome is limiting the resources a display ad can consume before user interacts with it.

[00:09:13] So the idea is you've got an ad frame, and if it starts all-of-sudden chewing up a lot of resources, Google Chrome is going to show a thing that says the ad was removed. Because it's using a lot of resources and you haven't even clicked on it yet, so then I think that's going to be a very good thing.

[00:09:36] They've tried to figure out what's the right threshold here for disabling an ad because again, some of them are downloading video, some of them are, are actually drawing. Things on your screen. A little thing of animation, like a Disney film, they're drawing this on your screen that requires a lot of CPU and they're drawing it specifically for you based on what they know about you.

[00:09:59] Maybe they put your name into it or some product that you really like, but Google is saying that ads that use more CPU resources or network data, then the average of other ads. In fact, it's not just the average. It's ads that use more than 99.9% more than other ads. It's going to get shut off. So that means more than four megabytes of network data or 15 seconds of CPU usage.

[00:10:30] So we'll see what happens here. Chrome developers are going to have to kind of play with the limits over the next few months. If you're developing ads that are going to be showing up on Chrome, you got to kind of be careful of this. They're doing kind of a slow delayed rollout so that ad creators and tool providers that are, that are really trying to be good guys here aren't nailed.

[00:10:53] Now I've got this ad. I've got this article up on my website and you can find it there. You can find it on ARS Technica. There's an article by Dan Gooden over there, but also in Craig peterson.com, there's a flag that you can turn on if you want to start doing this immediately. So the flag is called enable dash heavy dash intervention. If you have a recent version of Chrome, it's going to work. Now, Firefox last year. Added a mechanism for blocking crypto-jacking, and it's doing it based on the known crypto-jacking domain. So it's pretty useful, but this is kind of a whack-a-mole approach.

[00:11:43] They've got to know about it in order to shut it down. That's one of the reasons, by the way, I love the way Cisco does it. Security, like those systems I mentioned earlier, to help restaurants to expand. Into the parking lot and keep their patrons safe online. They gather information over a billion points a day in order to track what's going on.

[00:12:07] But anyhow, so that's what's going on with Chrome. Stick around at the top of the hour a week, come back. We're going to talk about four challenges. With the existing VPNs, what you need to know, what you should do. This could be a problem for a lot of people out there, frankly, but we'll get into that when we get back.

[00:12:25] Also, in the next hour, we'll be talking about launching a remote team, some themed phishing templates, how the bad guys are doing it in this day and age, and Britain's hard lesson about trust in the so-called scientific approach. You're listening to Craig Peterson. stick around cause we'll be right back.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!  

Finally, the lockdown is starting to abide. With more and more people working from home there has been a run on VPNs but they are not all they are cracked up to be --  So sit back enjoy the fresh air and listen in. 

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: Hey everybody. Hello. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

[00:00:10] Hey, if you missed the first hour,  you can catch it online. I podcast this whole show every week on your favorite podcasting application or website. Just look for me, Craig Peterson, or visit Craig peterson.com cause I have them all there as well.

[00:00:30] And you did miss a lot of, you missed that first hour because we talked about the new website attacks that are underway that are hurting you and me as well as businesses that are just set up websites recently. It is a bad state of affairs. We talked about company identity-related breaches that are happening, the coming disruption to college and what Google Chrome is doing to stop some of these.

[00:00:57] Resource draining. Ads that are actually rather, well, I wouldn't say the malicious, but they are stealing from you. They're using your computer to mine for Bitcoin. For them. I suspect this is actually going to get a lot worse. Maybe that's why Google's finally taking action with the Chrome browser, but the reason I think that this is really going to start taking off is that the Bitcoin value is about to be halved.

[00:01:26] And what happens at that point? Normally in the marketplace, if a stock's worth, let's say a hundred dollars and they have it, so it's worth $50 there's a lot of pressure for that stock value to increase back up to the pre-split amount. So back up to the hundred dollars point. And it will work its way back up there usually.

[00:01:47] Well, what the problem is when it comes to these cryptocurrencies is yes, indeed, they can go ahead and split it and say it's worth half of what it used to be worth. But now the people that are mining for the Bitcoins are in for a whole different world. And the different world is, Hey, I can barely break even right now.

[00:02:09] In fact, in most places, like here in the Northeast, electricity is so expensive that it costs you more to mine for Bitcoin, cost you more than electricity. Then the Bitcoin is worth it. So once they have the value, now all of a sudden it's just not worth mining anymore. So that's going to be an interest rate trusting result.

[00:02:30] And that's another really interesting analysis too, of Bitcoin this week and this kind of view shaped factor that had, has based on the key sizes. And that's a little too geeky to get into here. This is not a Bitcoin show. But it is a show about your security, what you can do, and what you should do. Just this week, we installed some network equipment, a whole new set of network equipment for a lady named Sue down in mass, and we were talking with Sue about it.

[00:03:03] We had. Preconfigured everything, shipped it out, helped her with it. She was having some problems trying to figure out, okay, so what plugs into what? I think next time maybe we'll just make sure everything's all plugged in before we ship it out, but we had one of our guys go by, he only lives about 20 minutes away from SU there and he went in five minutes later, everything was done.

[00:03:25] And, you know, it gets kind of confusing. But while he was there installing this whole new network for Sue's company, there was an interesting conversation that ensued because Sue told him that I was anti VPN. As well as a couple of other things that I was against. And the truth is, yeah, I, I'm anti these commercial VPN services that they keep trying to sell.

[00:03:53] You and I read a summary this week from a respected place, and they must have people writing articles now that don't know what they're doing. I've certainly seen that, you know, people in third world countries, second world countries that don't know what they're doing, but they're cheap for, to hire as a writer.

[00:04:12] And so they hire them as writers and off they go with their cheapness, not really understanding things. And this article said, Hey, yeah, you should use a VPN because it's going to keep your data safe. It keeps it encrypted. It's great. Great, great. And. I, of course, just rolled my eyes and lost respect for them.

[00:04:30] VPNs have a use, but it's a very limited use and that's what Sue had caught on when she attended one of my webinars. Talking about VPNs and how you can best use them because they are useful. They were invented. They came about in order to help businesses. With their data and keep their data safe, connect offices together, et cetera.

[00:04:55] They are not great for just going to your bank website. In fact, you could be in more of a security problem area if you use a VPN for your bank than if you don't use a VPN for your bank. So I'll just, you know, keep that all straight. And I figured. Now's a good time to talk about this. And there's a great article in dark reading this week that I put up on my website as well.

[00:05:20] You can find it there. And this article is talking about challenges that exist with VPNs. And this is really kind of a big deal. You know, a VPN can be a step in the right direction, and if someone's trying to use a VPN, they're probably trying to do the right thing, but it's really not a be-all and end-all All. And when it comes to security, not only does it fall short in many ways, but as I've explained in my webinars, and it takes a lot longer to explain, well, actually to show you that it does, that I have time for right now than it does just quickly say. That if you want to catch a criminal, you go to where the criminals are.

[00:06:02] If you want to find people that are trying to keep their information secret or quiet, you go to where the VPN exit points are. And that's exactly what's been happening. And it just, it isn't just the five eyes or the nine eyes or the 14 eyes, it's organized crime. It's just all over the place. So. Be very, very careful.

[00:06:23] But in March of 2020, all of a sudden everything changed. Everything shifted. We saw a huge shift in people starting to work from home. Some of these businesses had to stay open. They didn't necessarily have to have the employees right there in the office and according to a Gardner survey that just happened here with Chief financial officers, Gardner's reporting that 74% of organizations will move at least 5% of their previously onsite workforce to permanently remote positions following the pandemic. That is pretty good, right? Three-quarters of all businesses. Are going to move, you know, give or take one 20th of their onsite workers to offsite.

[00:07:10] Now it's going to have a major impact on everything on real estate and obviously the technology side too. But let's talk a little bit about VPNs right now and, and what are they good for? What are they not good for? So point number one. VPNs. Now, remember I said the great for businesses point to point, they replaced the leased lines.

[00:07:33] That's what they were invented for initially. But typical traditional VPNs have a device that's at the business office. And that piece, that device, that piece of hardware can usually only handle a certain number of users. That's also true with the data line that's coming into your office. If you don't have enough bandwidth to support all of these.

[00:07:59] People accessing their desktops, or in some cases, I know businesses that have a database running at the main office, and then there are clients there. There's software on people's remote workstations that make hundreds if not thousands of requests against this database. That's not the best way to do it, by the way, and if you're interested, maybe we can talk about that sometime.

[00:08:25] I'll put something up in a, in one of the webinars, but. Here's, here's the problem with that. The VPN and the data lines can only handle just so much data and many businesses came up with the specs for their VPN appliances.  Pre-COVID 19 right. Pre pandemic and how many people were actually using it. Then, for instance, we have a client, an auto dealer, and the only time they use the VPN was when the comptroller was out of training or something.

[00:09:02] That might happen during the weekend and one of the supervisors would have to hop on. Well, that's a lot different than once a pandemic starts. And now there are all of a sudden focused on their websites and their online sales and everything else that's going on. So it's a huge, huge difference. So that surge and teleworking that occurred really made these VPNs fail.

[00:09:26] And companies struggling to figure out how to scale to support so many users. So that's part of what had been helping him, helping businesses with the, you know, there's a lot of creative approaches going on, such as limiting VPN use to certain workers. There have been businesses that have been taking the shifts and kind of moving them around.

[00:09:47] So there's a shift that starts at eight and another one that starts at 10 and another one that starts at noon, so that there are fewer people on the VPN, and maybe they're only on the VPN for a certain number of hours, but frankly, those are not longterm viable. Strategies. VPNs are also failing to balance productivity and security because many tell you productivity and security has been.

[00:10:14] Had at loggerheads with each other for a very long time. And VPNs don't fix this problem. In fact, they make it worse because now not only are you overloading the VPN, all of the gateways and the firewalls, which is slowing down everybody's productivity, but these home users on their home networks with home computers that are infected are now connecting to the network.

[00:10:41] And that infection's getting transferred. And unfortunately, that transfer is to the main office. Hey, a VPN ain't gonna help with that. Mobile devices, you know, the VPNs are encrypted. Then the encryption that they use is very, very complex and it causes problems on our devices. Our mobile devices just were not made to handle that, and they have to.

[00:11:11] Continually update their, their keys. They're sharing the public keys and their session keys, it, they just can't handle it. And frankly, VPNs are not built for the modern workforce, and there are so many ways this really should be done and unfortunately is not being done so. VPNs. They are not a panacea. When we come back, let's talk about our remote teams.

[00:11:38] We've had months, time to relaunch. You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN and [email protected]. Stick around. I'll be right back.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!  

Finally, the lockdown is starting to abide. With more and more people working from home there has been a run on VPNs but they are not all they are cracked up to be --  So sit back enjoy the fresh air and listen in. 

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: Hey everybody. Hello. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

[00:00:10] Hey, if you missed the first hour,  you can catch it online. I podcast this whole show every week on your favorite podcasting application or website. Just look for me, Craig Peterson, or visit Craig peterson.com cause I have them all there as well.

[00:00:30] And you did miss a lot of, you missed that first hour because we talked about the new website attacks that are underway that are hurting you and me as well as businesses that are just set up websites recently. It is a bad state of affairs. We talked about company identity-related breaches that are happening, the coming disruption to college and what Google Chrome is doing to stop some of these.

[00:00:57] Resource draining. Ads that are actually rather, well, I wouldn't say the malicious, but they are stealing from you. They're using your computer to mine for Bitcoin. For them. I suspect this is actually going to get a lot worse. Maybe that's why Google's finally taking action with the Chrome browser, but the reason I think that this is really going to start taking off is that the Bitcoin value is about to be halved.

[00:01:26] And what happens at that point? Normally in the marketplace, if a stock's worth, let's say a hundred dollars and they have it, so it's worth $50 there's a lot of pressure for that stock value to increase back up to the pre-split amount. So back up to the hundred dollars point. And it will work its way back up there usually.

[00:01:47] Well, what the problem is when it comes to these cryptocurrencies is yes, indeed, they can go ahead and split it and say it's worth half of what it used to be worth. But now the people that are mining for the Bitcoins are in for a whole different world. And the different world is, Hey, I can barely break even right now.

[00:02:09] In fact, in most places, like here in the Northeast, electricity is so expensive that it costs you more to mine for Bitcoin, cost you more than electricity. Then the Bitcoin is worth it. So once they have the value, now all of a sudden it's just not worth mining anymore. So that's going to be an interest rate trusting result.

[00:02:30] And that's another really interesting analysis too, of Bitcoin this week and this kind of view shaped factor that had, has based on the key sizes. And that's a little too geeky to get into here. This is not a Bitcoin show. But it is a show about your security, what you can do, and what you should do. Just this week, we installed some network equipment, a whole new set of network equipment for a lady named Sue down in mass, and we were talking with Sue about it.

[00:03:03] We had. Preconfigured everything, shipped it out, helped her with it. She was having some problems trying to figure out, okay, so what plugs into what? I think next time maybe we'll just make sure everything's all plugged in before we ship it out, but we had one of our guys go by, he only lives about 20 minutes away from SU there and he went in five minutes later, everything was done.

[00:03:25] And, you know, it gets kind of confusing. But while he was there installing this whole new network for Sue's company, there was an interesting conversation that ensued because Sue told him that I was anti VPN. As well as a couple of other things that I was against. And the truth is, yeah, I, I'm anti these commercial VPN services that they keep trying to sell.

[00:03:53] You and I read a summary this week from a respected place, and they must have people writing articles now that don't know what they're doing. I've certainly seen that, you know, people in third world countries, second world countries that don't know what they're doing, but they're cheap for, to hire as a writer.

[00:04:12] And so they hire them as writers and off they go with their cheapness, not really understanding things. And this article said, Hey, yeah, you should use a VPN because it's going to keep your data safe. It keeps it encrypted. It's great. Great, great. And. I, of course, just rolled my eyes and lost respect for them.

[00:04:30] VPNs have a use, but it's a very limited use and that's what Sue had caught on when she attended one of my webinars. Talking about VPNs and how you can best use them because they are useful. They were invented. They came about in order to help businesses. With their data and keep their data safe, connect offices together, et cetera.

[00:04:55] They are not great for just going to your bank website. In fact, you could be in more of a security problem area if you use a VPN for your bank than if you don't use a VPN for your bank. So I'll just, you know, keep that all straight. And I figured. Now's a good time to talk about this. And there's a great article in dark reading this week that I put up on my website as well.

[00:05:20] You can find it there. And this article is talking about challenges that exist with VPNs. And this is really kind of a big deal. You know, a VPN can be a step in the right direction, and if someone's trying to use a VPN, they're probably trying to do the right thing, but it's really not a be-all and end-all All. And when it comes to security, not only does it fall short in many ways, but as I've explained in my webinars, and it takes a lot longer to explain, well, actually to show you that it does, that I have time for right now than it does just quickly say. That if you want to catch a criminal, you go to where the criminals are.

[00:06:02] If you want to find people that are trying to keep their information secret or quiet, you go to where the VPN exit points are. And that's exactly what's been happening. And it just, it isn't just the five eyes or the nine eyes or the 14 eyes, it's organized crime. It's just all over the place. So. Be very, very careful.

[00:06:23] But in March of 2020, all of a sudden everything changed. Everything shifted. We saw a huge shift in people starting to work from home. Some of these businesses had to stay open. They didn't necessarily have to have the employees right there in the office and according to a Gardner survey that just happened here with Chief financial officers, Gardner's reporting that 74% of organizations will move at least 5% of their previously onsite workforce to permanently remote positions following the pandemic. That is pretty good, right? Three-quarters of all businesses. Are going to move, you know, give or take one 20th of their onsite workers to offsite.

[00:07:10] Now it's going to have a major impact on everything on real estate and obviously the technology side too. But let's talk a little bit about VPNs right now and, and what are they good for? What are they not good for? So point number one. VPNs. Now, remember I said the great for businesses point to point, they replaced the leased lines.

[00:07:33] That's what they were invented for initially. But typical traditional VPNs have a device that's at the business office. And that piece, that device, that piece of hardware can usually only handle a certain number of users. That's also true with the data line that's coming into your office. If you don't have enough bandwidth to support all of these.

[00:07:59] People accessing their desktops, or in some cases, I know businesses that have a database running at the main office, and then there are clients there. There's software on people's remote workstations that make hundreds if not thousands of requests against this database. That's not the best way to do it, by the way, and if you're interested, maybe we can talk about that sometime.

[00:08:25] I'll put something up in a, in one of the webinars, but. Here's, here's the problem with that. The VPN and the data lines can only handle just so much data and many businesses came up with the specs for their VPN appliances.  Pre-COVID 19 right. Pre pandemic and how many people were actually using it. Then, for instance, we have a client, an auto dealer, and the only time they use the VPN was when the comptroller was out of training or something.

[00:09:02] That might happen during the weekend and one of the supervisors would have to hop on. Well, that's a lot different than once a pandemic starts. And now there are all of a sudden focused on their websites and their online sales and everything else that's going on. So it's a huge, huge difference. So that surge and teleworking that occurred really made these VPNs fail.

[00:09:26] And companies struggling to figure out how to scale to support so many users. So that's part of what had been helping him, helping businesses with the, you know, there's a lot of creative approaches going on, such as limiting VPN use to certain workers. There have been businesses that have been taking the shifts and kind of moving them around.

[00:09:47] So there's a shift that starts at eight and another one that starts at 10 and another one that starts at noon, so that there are fewer people on the VPN, and maybe they're only on the VPN for a certain number of hours, but frankly, those are not longterm viable. Strategies. VPNs are also failing to balance productivity and security because many tell you productivity and security has been.

[00:10:14] Had at loggerheads with each other for a very long time. And VPNs don't fix this problem. In fact, they make it worse because now not only are you overloading the VPN, all of the gateways and the firewalls, which is slowing down everybody's productivity, but these home users on their home networks with home computers that are infected are now connecting to the network.

[00:10:41] And that infection's getting transferred. And unfortunately, that transfer is to the main office. Hey, a VPN ain't gonna help with that. Mobile devices, you know, the VPNs are encrypted. Then the encryption that they use is very, very complex and it causes problems on our devices. Our mobile devices just were not made to handle that, and they have to.

[00:11:11] Continually update their, their keys. They're sharing the public keys and their session keys, it, they just can't handle it. And frankly, VPNs are not built for the modern workforce, and there are so many ways this really should be done and unfortunately is not being done so. VPNs. They are not a panacea. When we come back, let's talk about our remote teams.

[00:11:38] We've had months, time to relaunch. You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN and [email protected]. Stick around. I'll be right back.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!

Finally, the lockdown is starting to abide. With more and more people working from home there has been a run on VPNs but they are not all they are cracked up to be -- So sit back enjoy the fresh air and listen in.

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: Hey everybody. Hello. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

[00:00:10] Hey, if you missed the first hour, you can catch it online. I podcast this whole show every week on your favorite podcasting application or website. Just look for me, Craig Peterson, or visit Craig peterson.com cause I have them all there as well.

[00:00:30] And you did miss a lot of, you missed that first hour because we talked about the new website attacks that are underway that are hurting you and me as well as businesses that are just set up websites recently. It is a bad state of affairs. We talked about company identity-related breaches that are happening, the coming disruption to college and what Google Chrome is doing to stop some of these.

[00:00:57] Resource draining. Ads that are actually rather, well, I wouldn't say the malicious, but they are stealing from you. They're using your computer to mine for Bitcoin. For them. I suspect this is actually going to get a lot worse. Maybe that's why Google's finally taking action with the Chrome browser, but the reason I think that this is really going to start taking off is that the Bitcoin value is about to be halved.

[00:01:26] And what happens at that point? Normally in the marketplace, if a stock's worth, let's say a hundred dollars and they have it, so it's worth $50 there's a lot of pressure for that stock value to increase back up to the pre-split amount. So back up to the hundred dollars point. And it will work its way back up there usually.

[00:01:47] Well, what the problem is when it comes to these cryptocurrencies is yes, indeed, they can go ahead and split it and say it's worth half of what it used to be worth. But now the people that are mining for the Bitcoins are in for a whole different world. And the different world is, Hey, I can barely break even right now.

[00:02:09] In fact, in most places, like here in the Northeast, electricity is so expensive that it costs you more to mine for Bitcoin, cost you more than electricity. Then the Bitcoin is worth it. So once they have the value, now all of a sudden it's just not worth mining anymore. So that's going to be an interest rate trusting result.

[00:02:30] And that's another really interesting analysis too, of Bitcoin this week and this kind of view shaped factor that had, has based on the key sizes. And that's a little too geeky to get into here. This is not a Bitcoin show. But it is a show about your security, what you can do, and what you should do. Just this week, we installed some network equipment, a whole new set of network equipment for a lady named Sue down in mass, and we were talking with Sue about it.

[00:03:03] We had. Preconfigured everything, shipped it out, helped her with it. She was having some problems trying to figure out, okay, so what plugs into what? I think next time maybe we'll just make sure everything's all plugged in before we ship it out, but we had one of our guys go by, he only lives about 20 minutes away from SU there and he went in five minutes later, everything was done.

[00:03:25] And, you know, it gets kind of confusing. But while he was there installing this whole new network for Sue's company, there was an interesting conversation that ensued because Sue told him that I was anti VPN. As well as a couple of other things that I was against. And the truth is, yeah, I, I'm anti these commercial VPN services that they keep trying to sell.

[00:03:53] You and I read a summary this week from a respected place, and they must have people writing articles now that don't know what they're doing. I've certainly seen that, you know, people in third world countries, second world countries that don't know what they're doing, but they're cheap for, to hire as a writer.

[00:04:12] And so they hire them as writers and off they go with their cheapness, not really understanding things. And this article said, Hey, yeah, you should use a VPN because it's going to keep your data safe. It keeps it encrypted. It's great. Great, great. And. I, of course, just rolled my eyes and lost respect for them.

[00:04:30] VPNs have a use, but it's a very limited use and that's what Sue had caught on when she attended one of my webinars. Talking about VPNs and how you can best use them because they are useful. They were invented. They came about in order to help businesses. With their data and keep their data safe, connect offices together, et cetera.

[00:04:55] They are not great for just going to your bank website. In fact, you could be in more of a security problem area if you use a VPN for your bank than if you don't use a VPN for your bank. So I'll just, you know, keep that all straight. And I figured. Now's a good time to talk about this. And there's a great article in dark reading this week that I put up on my website as well.

[00:05:20] You can find it there. And this article is talking about challenges that exist with VPNs. And this is really kind of a big deal. You know, a VPN can be a step in the right direction, and if someone's trying to use a VPN, they're probably trying to do the right thing, but it's really not a be-all and end-all All. And when it comes to security, not only does it fall short in many ways, but as I've explained in my webinars, and it takes a lot longer to explain, well, actually to show you that it does, that I have time for right now than it does just quickly say. That if you want to catch a criminal, you go to where the criminals are.

[00:06:02] If you want to find people that are trying to keep their information secret or quiet, you go to where the VPN exit points are. And that's exactly what's been happening. And it just, it isn't just the five eyes or the nine eyes or the 14 eyes, it's organized crime. It's just all over the place. So. Be very, very careful.

[00:06:23] But in March of 2020, all of a sudden everything changed. Everything shifted. We saw a huge shift in people starting to work from home. Some of these businesses had to stay open. They didn't necessarily have to have the employees right there in the office and according to a Gardner survey that just happened here with Chief financial officers, Gardner's reporting that 74% of organizations will move at least 5% of their previously onsite workforce to permanently remote positions following the pandemic. That is pretty good, right? Three-quarters of all businesses. Are going to move, you know, give or take one 20th of their onsite workers to offsite.

[00:07:10] Now it's going to have a major impact on everything on real estate and obviously the technology side too. But let's talk a little bit about VPNs right now and, and what are they good for? What are they not good for? So point number one. VPNs. Now, remember I said the great for businesses point to point, they replaced the leased lines.

[00:07:33] That's what they were invented for initially. But typical traditional VPNs have a device that's at the business office. And that piece, that device, that piece of hardware can usually only handle a certain number of users. That's also true with the data line that's coming into your office. If you don't have enough bandwidth to support all of these.

[00:07:59] People accessing their desktops, or in some cases, I know businesses that have a database running at the main office, and then there are clients there. There's software on people's remote workstations that make hundreds if not thousands of requests against this database. That's not the best way to do it, by the way, and if you're interested, maybe we can talk about that sometime.

[00:08:25] I'll put something up in a, in one of the webinars, but. Here's, here's the problem with that. The VPN and the data lines can only handle just so much data and many businesses came up with the specs for their VPN appliances. Pre-COVID 19 right. Pre pandemic and how many people were actually using it. Then, for instance, we have a client, an auto dealer, and the only time they use the VPN was when the comptroller was out of training or something.

[00:09:02] That might happen during the weekend and one of the supervisors would have to hop on. Well, that's a lot different than once a pandemic starts. And now there are all of a sudden focused on their websites and their online sales and everything else that's going on. So it's a huge, huge difference. So that surge and teleworking that occurred really made these VPNs fail.

[00:09:26] And companies struggling to figure out how to scale to support so many users. So that's part of what had been helping him, helping businesses with the, you know, there's a lot of creative approaches going on, such as limiting VPN use to certain workers. There have been businesses that have been taking the shifts and kind of moving them around.

[00:09:47] So there's a shift that starts at eight and another one that starts at 10 and another one that starts at noon, so that there are fewer people on the VPN, and maybe they're only on the VPN for a certain number of hours, but frankly, those are not longterm viable. Strategies. VPNs are also failing to balance productivity and security because many tell you productivity and security has been.

[00:10:14] Had at loggerheads with each other for a very long time. And VPNs don't fix this problem. In fact, they make it worse because now not only are you overloading the VPN, all of the gateways and the firewalls, which is slowing down everybody's productivity, but these home users on their home networks with home computers that are infected are now connecting to the network.

[00:10:41] And that infection's getting transferred. And unfortunately, that transfer is to the main office. Hey, a VPN ain't gonna help with that. Mobile devices, you know, the VPNs are encrypted. Then the encryption that they use is very, very complex and it causes problems on our devices. Our mobile devices just were not made to handle that, and they have to.

[00:11:11] Continually update their, their keys. They're sharing the public keys and their session keys, it, they just can't handle it. And frankly, VPNs are not built for the modern workforce, and there are so many ways this really should be done and unfortunately is not being done so. VPNs. They are not a panacea. When we come back, let's talk about our remote teams.

[00:11:38] We've had months, time to relaunch. You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN and [email protected]. Stick around. I'll be right back.

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

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

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553

Welcome!  

Our pandemic lockdown appears to be beginning to end and that means that we need to re-launch our teams and that is what I will cover in this segment. So sit back and listen in. 

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

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: Hey everybody, welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online,  of course, at CraigPeterson.com. Do you have any questions? You can always email me, ME at CraigPeterson.com. Always glad to help out

[00:00:19] Craig Peterson: Plus, if you get on my email list, you'll find out about what I'm doing this week, what the pros and cons of everything are, and I will be sure to keep you up.

[00:00:29] To date and we've got some very cool stuff coming up. We're making some, I think fantastic changes that are all for the better for you guys. Get more information out and doing it in a timely fashion. I mentioned before the break your remote team and I told you to kind of brace yourselves here. There is a great article that was in the Harvard business review this last week.

[00:00:54] And it's talking about relaunching your remote team. Many of us have remote teams and the remote teams are good and they're bad, right? But in just a few short weeks meeting tools like zoom, Microsoft teams, we've got WebEx teams, Google chat, Slack, they've gone from. Kind of a supplement where we might use them for remote workers.

[00:01:21] We might use them for the team to just keep, some notes to each other. It's moved from that point to where it is really. The primary way of doing business internally, those new goals, new tools to us, right? Many of us are really replacing the bubbler, the meetings, the emails, even frankly, you know, our, our workspaces in our offices before sometimes we had open plans, which are.

[00:01:51] Many of us are really replacing the bubbler, the meetings, the emails, even frankly, you know, our, our workspaces in our offices before sometimes we had open plans, which are are now being pretty heavily frowned upon. cubes, which a lot of places are going back to. So people have individual spaces or offices, which the latest studies are showing. Having an office actually increases your productivity pretty substantially. And we've now gone to our bedrooms, the kid's old bedroom before they moved out, home offices, kitchen tables.

[00:02:19] I'm on every week with Jim Polito. He is the morning drive host on two of the biggest stations in Massachusetts and Jim is running the show from his kitchen table with his dog occasionally barking there in the background. It has changed for everyone, and I was at a webinar, well, yeah, I guess it was a webinar.

[00:02:45] It was a. Three-day conference. It was held on the web, last weekend, and they're calling this the great reset and it's a term I've heard other people use as well. But the great reset means a whole different world when it comes to working from home. As we're trying to relaunch our teams reorient based on the new realities that are out there.

[00:03:09] There. So let's go through what Harvard has to say that we really need to be paying attention to. Number one, they say, revisit your shared purpose. When we have all of these team members and they're all different, a little, hopefully, they are, and different people with different. Ways of thinking, bring different things to the business, and it's all of these different interaction styles, like the NBTI styles that really help to make our organization strong.

[00:03:43] But now that we're all kinda at home, and many of us will continue to be at home, do the team members understand what they're supposed to be doing? I mean, clear and specific goals. Does everybody on a team understand what that team is supposed to be able to accomplish? What the goals are for the team?

[00:04:08] Because again, we pulled the trigger so fast on this. Many of us just didn't get it all together, right? So, well, we're relaunching. Management has to discuss how we can get these teams going here. Let them know clearly what the business goals are. Let them know clearly what the strategy is. Because most businesses have changed because of the pandemic.

[00:04:34] You know, small businesses like mine, when something like this happens to tend to go out of business. But they come back in a completely different way. You know, some of the same people, the same owners, but now a much different angle than what they had before. Big businesses. They can't pivot that quickly, and so they're struggling trying to figure out what they should do.

[00:04:56] So they go for cost-cutting measures. That's usually the first thing that they end up doing. Does your team, do your teams. No, what they should be doing and have the team members themselves express their perspectives here on how the organization and the team's purpose might have changed. Second, here, reassess your available resources.

[00:05:23] In the last segment we talked about VPNs, the pros and cons of VPNs. What's really going on here while this relaunch here is the time to reexamine. In the resource column, that means what information or data do you have? What kind of budgets do have, what kind of equipment, software networks do you have that's going to help the teams advance their goals?

[00:05:52] You don't really have to have a detailed list of everything that's necessary, but. We need to reach a general consensus about what the team needs, what are the resources, and how do we access them? And everybody needs to be on the same page about, how the pandemic has affected the team's budget and also the partnerships.

[00:06:13] Because you remember, we all have vendors we buy from and we all have customers or clients that we work with and we're selling to do. We understand how their organizations have changed because of the pandemic. We have to next understand our team members' constraints. Many of us are working from home with our family around for the very first time.

[00:06:40] Our kids are not in school and most school districts are not reopening until the fall of 2020 how do you deal with that? You know it, it was one thing when the kids stayed with grandma and grandpa during the summer. But we're talking about a lot of months now. Does that make sense? Can we even handle that?

[00:06:59] So some of our team members may need a little bit of assistance here in figuring out how can they juggle their family responsibilities, new family responsibilities they haven't had before. With their new work responsibility and the need to be available at certain times of the day, and in many cases, the answer to that from businesses is we're going to be flexible.

[00:07:27] We're going to allow flex hours, kind of like who used to talk about mother's hours, but now the kids are home all day long, so we've got to help them with this manage deadline expectations, and also maybe rebalance some of the workloads between all of the people. Within the workgroups, we've got to reestablish norms.

[00:07:50] We're talking about how people conduct themselves in meetings, et cetera. You know, it's really easy to be on something like Slack and make some snarky comment or in email or on a conference call that can really be hurtful and that can really cause disharmony within a team. So we've got to figure out what the norms are.

[00:08:14] It's okay to wear pajama bottoms, but you gotta be dressed, professional, head pop cause that's what the game was going to get. Right. If that's what you want. That's great. Do that. We should also be discussing how often team members should connect virtually during the week and what digital tools they should be using.

[00:08:33] Things like email can be great for delayed communication, but many people just drop everything into WebEx teams and expect other people too, you know, snap to, whether it's WebEx teams or Slack or whatever it might be. Okay. So when you're choosing which tools are best for discussion, we need to be very sensitive to the fact that real-time video chat.

[00:08:59] It Is not the same as face to face interaction because if you were to walk by their cubicle or their workspace, you'd see they were busy and you're not going to interrupt them right there. They're in a flow or the, maybe they're in a meeting. Dropping in on him, I'm going to be very, very bad when now you disrupted them because you've popped up a zoom meeting in front of them.

[00:09:24] And this zoom fatigue is real. So think about all of these tips and tricks and techniques. You'll find more about it on my [email protected] Harvard business school had this article. It is great, and if you're trying to manage some teams, make sure you read it. Craig peterson.com. I'm right here on WGAN and I'll be back also Wednesday morning at seven 34 with Matt.

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