Podcasts about azerbaijanis

This week we discussed an excellent study of migrant workers in the Soviet Union which focused on Uzbeks, Tajiks, Georgians, Azerbaijanis who came to Leningrad and Moscow in toward the end of Union's existence.Sahadeo, Jeff. 2019. Voices From the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow.Send us a Text Message.Support the Show.

Reports have emerged in recent weeks that a grave humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Nagorno-Karabakh, a contested region in present-day Azerbaijan that contains a large majority of Armenian residents. A prominent international lawyer, Luis Moreno Ocampo, in fact, maintains that “a Genocide is being committed” by Azerbaijani forces against Armenian residents. This episode of “Then & Now” features UCLA historian Sebouh Aslanian, who offers a rich account of the history of the region and the century-long conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. He situates the tension against the backdrop of the rise and fall of empire—and analyzes the two wars that have engulfed the contested region since 1988 and that have led to the current dire crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh.  Sebouh Aslanian is professor of history and holds the Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair of Modern Armenian History at the UCLA History Department, and is the inaugural director of the Armenian Studies Center at the Promise Armenian Institute.  He is an acknowledged expert in world history, Armenian history, Indian Ocean history, and early modern social and economic history. He is the author of the award-winning  From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), and has published widely on early modern world and Armenian history, including his most recent book, Early Modernity and Mobility Port Cities and Printers across the Armenian Diaspora, 1512-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023).  

Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey indicted on federal bribery chargesSummary: New Jersey Democratic Senator Robert Menendez and his wife have been indicted for bribery, the US Justice Department announced late last week, on charges that they accepted stacks of cash, bars of gold, and other assets in exchange for nudging government policy to benefit the Egyptian government.Context: This is a rapidly evolving story, but basically this senator has allegedly been abusing his position as a senator and as the head of the Foreign Relations Committee to enrich himself and his wife, netting hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold, paychecks for made-up jobs, and a luxury vehicle, by helping to facilitate military sales and financing for the Egyptian government, in one case helping them attain hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from the US despite human rights concerns; Menendez has also been accused of trying to disrupt federal investigations of his allies and attempting to get people sympathetic to his goals into office; Menendez was charged with corruption in 2017, but the jury was deadlocked and he won reelection the following year; this case is far bigger, a lot more colorful, with gobs of photographic evidence of the bribes in question, and will be conducted in New York instead of New Jersey, all of which could mean a steeper, uphill legal battle for Menendez and his wife; some Democratic lawmakers have publicly demanded Menendez resign, but he has thus far claimed to be innocent and has said he doesn't plan to step down. —The Washington PostOne Sentence News is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Hundreds of ethnic Armenians flee Nagorno-Karabakh to ArmeniaSummary: Days after the Azerbaijani military seized control of the disputed, breakaway territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, thousands of ethnic Armenians have fled across the border into Armenia, fearing ethnic cleansing.Context: This is another rapidly evolving story, and in essence this region is highly contested, internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, but governed by the Republic of Artsakh since 1994; in 2020, Azerbaijan reclaimed most of the territory surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh, alongside a third of Nagorno-Karabakh itself, and on September 19th the Azerbaijani government launched a large-scale offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh, ultimately disarming the Republic of Artsakh military, and that, in turn, has worried Armenians in the region that local Azerbaijanis might feel emboldened to kill them, and that has triggered this growing exodus to the west, across the Armenian border; this region has long been war-torn, ethnic animus at times being tempered by negotiations moderated by Russia, but now that Russia is distracted by its invasion of Ukraine, these two governments have generally had to deal with each other more directly, with middling success.—Al JazeeraAmazon to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic as AI arms race escalatesSummary: Amazon has announced that it will invest up to $4 billion in AI company Anthropic, the latter using Amazon-made custom chips while the former incorporates Anthropic's AI technology into its suite of business tools.Context: This is just the most recent agreement between a major tech behemoth and a rapidly growing AI-focused startup, the first of which was Microsoft's deal with OpenAI, but pretty much everyone is getting involved in this emerging dynamic at this point, the AI companies needing a lot of money and the entrenched tech-titans wanting to get a foot in the door in a segment of the tech industry they might otherwise miss out on, falling behind their rivals; Anthropic is best known for its AI chat assistant, Claude, which directly competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT offering, and the company has also seen recent investments from Google and Salesforce, while Amazon has indicated it's open to investing in other AI startups, as well.—The Wall Street JournalLake Prespa in North Macedonia is one of Europe's oldest lakes and is foundational to the country's ecosystems, but over the past few months the lake's water level has been dropping precipitously, amplifying a decades-long trend that has seen its surface area decrease by 7% since 1984, which has worried locals, impacted other nearby lakes (which are interconnected), put a slew of native wildlife at risk, and has made survival for human residents in the area more tenuous.—Reuters2,180Number of climate-related legal cases being tracked, globally, as of the end of 2022.That's double the number tallied in 2017, and the majority of them are based in the US, brought by US citizens and organizations against polluters, governments, and the like (which makes sense, as the US is highly litigious in part because a lot of change occurs as a result of the incentives provided by the legal system).—VoxTrust Click Get full access to One Sentence News at onesentencenews.substack.com/subscribe

Officials in Ethiopia's Tigray region have reported that more than 1,400 have died of starvation since international food aid was suspended a few months ago. Deliveries were halted after reports of widespread theft and corruption, but the impact has been catastrophic for many people living there. BBC Tigrinya's Girmay Gebru tells us what he's seen in displaced people's camps in the region, where people are forced to beg to survive. ‘With my own eyes': witnessing historic moments in Azerbaijan A new BBC Azerbaijani series hears from people who witnessed key moments in the country's history. Presenter Vusal Hamzayev tells us about one guest, Alexey Manvelyan, who's BBC Azerbaijani's correspondent in the Armenian capital Yerevan. Alexey recalls the era when Azerbaijan and Armenia were part of the Soviet Union. He, like many Armenians, lived in Azerbaijan, and many Azerbaijanis lived in Armenia. Then war broke out over the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh. Africa's first English slave fort An archaeological dig in Ghana has discovered what is thought to be the first English slave fort in Africa. Parts of the foundations of Fort Kormantine, as well as 17th century artefacts, were discovered beneath the existing Fort Amsterdam, ending decades of speculation. BBC Africa's Favour Nunoo visited the site and met those making the discoveries. Ecuador votes against oil extraction in the Amazon The Yasuni National Park in Ecuador is one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world and home to the country's last remaining uncontacted tribes. But the discovery of oil there 20 years ago divided Ecuadorians, with some wanting the park to remain untouched, and others arguing that this oil was vital for economic development. Now a referendum has decided to ban oil extraction. BBC Mundo's Ana Maria Roura explains why this area and this decision are so unique. Jakarta tops the list of polluted cities Earlier this month, Jakarta was ranked the world's most polluted city. The government has instructed civil servants to work from home, blaming vehicle emissions and global warming, but some experts claim that the power plants which surround the city are to blame. BBC Indonesian's Trisha Husada has been following one of the, literally, hottest topics in the country. (Photo: Tigrayan woman and her children in an IDP camp in Shire. Credit: BBC)

Armenia and Azerbaijan have some "history" together...and not in a good way. As the Ukraine War ramps up and stress is added to the Russian system, will we see the Armenians and Azerbaijanis creating some new history? Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/ask-peter-will-azerbaijan-try-to-take-nagorno-karabakh-from-armenia

Tigran Grigoryan, a political analyst and head of the Regional Centre for Democracy and Security, joins Robin Fabbro to talk about the establishment of an Azerbaijani checkpoint at the start of the Lachin Corridor and what it might mean for the future of Nagorno-Karabakh. Lala Darchinova from the Imagine Centre for Conflict Transformation discusses Azerbaijani narratives around the conflict and the role of peacebuilding in achieving reconciliation between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Read more: Azerbaijan closes Lachin Corridor to install checkpoint PACE rapporteur seeks to visit Lachin corridor Become a supporter at oc-media.org/support_us, or on Patreon.

Mark Youngman, the executive director of Threatologist and a senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, sheds light on the latest insurgent attacks in Ingushetia and Chechnya.  Read more: Three police officers killed in latest battle with gunmen in Ingushetia Ismi Aghayev talks about the latest clashes between on the Azerbaijan–Armenia border and the reactions to the Tuesday's clash and the conflict among Azerbaijanis. Read more: Deadly clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan near Lachin Corridor Become a supporter at oc-media.org/support_us, or on Patreon.

In EVN Report's news roundup for the week of April 7: 27 civilians, trying to return home to Artsakh with the assistance of Russian peacekeepers are prevented entry by Azerbaijanis; Azerbaijan continues to violate the ceasefire on the Line of Contact with Artsakh; Russia moves to ban imports of Armenian dairy products and more.

In EVN Report's news roundup for the week of April 7: 27 civilians, trying to return home to Artsakh with the assistance of Russian peacekeepers are prevented entry by Azerbaijanis; Azerbaijan continues to violate the ceasefire on the Line of Contact with Artsakh; Russia moves to ban imports of Armenian dairy products and more. The post Ep. 229: The Week in Review (07.04.23) appeared first on EVN Report.

Nodar Rukhadze, the co-founder of the liberal activist Shame movement, discusses the participation of millennials and Gen Z in the foreign agent protests of 7–8 March in Tbilisi, and the future political prospects of Georgia's youth. Read more: In pictures | Tear gas and water cannons: Georgia's foreign agent protests In pictures | Georgians defeat the foreign agent law Bashir Kitachayev, an independent journalist from Azerbaijan, phones in to discuss his opinion piece about the closure of the Lachin Corridor by Azerbaijanis claiming to be eco-activists. Read more: Opinion | Greenwashing a blockade Become a supporter at oc-media.org/support_us, or on Patreon.

In EVN Report's news roundup for the week of January 20: Fifteen soldiers are killed when a fire erupts in a military barrack in Armenia's Gegharkunik region; Azerbaijan's blockade of the Lachin Corridor is now in its second month; Armenian children returning to Nagorno-Karabakh accompanied by Russian peacekeepers are harassed by masked Azerbaijanis and more.

In EVN Report's news roundup for the week of January 20: Fifteen soldiers are killed when a fire erupts in a military barrack in Armenia's Gegharkunik region; Azerbaijan's blockade of the Lachin Corridor is now in its second month; Armenian children returning to Nagorno-Karabakh accompanied by Russian peacekeepers are harassed by masked Azerbaijanis and more. The post Ep. 218: The Week in Review (20.01.23) appeared first on EVN Report.

This week Turkey held joint military exercises with Azerbaijan on Iran's border, as its Baku warns Tehran it will not be intimated. With anti-government protests continuing in Iran, Tehran is being accused of escalating regional tensions. Iran is faces growing accusations from its neighbors that it's deliberately raising regional tensions. Tehran has recently carried out military exercises on Azerbaijan's border and warned Baku not to incite Iran's significant Azeri minority.  "Iran tries to shift the attention of the Iranian population towards foreign policy, towards conflicts on the border and towards a polemic with its neighbor countries, said Zaur Gasimov, an expert in the region at Bonn University. "The (Iranian) military drills were conducted not only on the border with the Republic of Azerbaijan in the north but also with Iraq and Turkey. So, they are like messages to the region, but they are addressed much more to the local audience." But Baku is pushing back against Tehran, carrying out its own military exercises this month on Iran's border with its close ally Turkey.  Spying accusations Meanwhile, last month, Azerbaijani security forces detained 19 people and accused them of working for Iranian intelligence.   Huseyin Bagci, head of the Ankara-based Foreign Policy Institute, argues Baku is emboldened by its support from Turkey, enshrined in the Shusha joint defence agreement. "Turkey and Azerbaijan [are] brothers, friends. And they have this Shusha agreement, which is not binding but important," said Bagci. "If Azerbaijan is under attack or in danger, Turkey will come unconditionally to the help of Azerbaijan," added Bagci. "Iran is trying to extend its influence, but Turkey is like a barrier stopping Iran's influence in Azerbaijan. " Turkey's Erdogan cosies up to Italy's far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni Turkish military support was vital to Azerbaijan in 2020 when it decisively defeated Armenian-backed forces in a conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.  This month's joint military exercise with Azerbaijan underlines Ankara's support to Baku and a warning to Tehran. "Iran they do many military exercises and power show around the Azerbaijan border," said Turkish Presidential advisor Mesut Casin of Istanbul's Yeditepe University. "This is giving to is a kind of signal against Iran, stop, and you have to take care about Azerbaijan's independence and their sovereignty." Condemnation In a sign of an increasingly assertive Baku, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev condemned Tehran last month. "For all these years, a situation similar to today's never occurred. A hateful and threatening statement was never made against Azerbaijan," Aliyev said in a television address. "Iran conducted two military exercises on our border in a few months. Therefore, we had to conduct military exercises on the Iranian border to show that we are not afraid of them," added Aliyev.  "We will do our best to protect the secular lifestyle of Azerbaijan and Azerbaijanis around the world, including Azerbaijanis in Iran. They are part of our people." Debate on religious headscarves returns to the heart of Turkish politics Aliyev's robust comments is seen as a marked change in relations between Azerbaijan and Iran. Until now, Baku rarely spoke of its large Azeri population in Iran, mindful of Tehran's sensibilities and suspicions of it minority.  "The last three decades, Baku was very cautious in its relationship to the very large Azeri-speaking community in northern Iran," observes Gasimov. "But we have seen the conduct of the military drills on the border to Iran as the reaction to the Iranian military drills by the Azeri side. And in the same time, new discourse in Baku about the Azeri speakers in Iran were two gestures addressed to the Iranian political class, saying that something has changed in the region." In a move analysts say will further anger Tehran, Baku opened an embassy in Israel. The two countries already have close military ties, despite Tehran's warnings. For now, Ankara has refrained from commenting on the turmoil in Iran, but some analysts warn that silence will be tested if Tehran ratchets up tensions with Baku. 

In EVN Report's news roundup for the week of December 9: A group of Azerbaijanis in civilian clothes block only highway linking Armenia and Artsakh for several hours citing “illegal exploitation of minerals”; Armenia's Parliament approves the Government's 2023 budget and adopts number of new laws including the establishment of a Foreign Intelligence Service; airlines registered in Armenia to remain on the EU black list and more.

In EVN Report's news roundup for the week of December 9: A group of Azerbaijanis in civilian clothes block only highway linking Armenia and Artsakh for several hours citing “illegal exploitation of minerals”; Armenia's Parliament approves the Government's 2023 budget and adopts number of new laws including the establishment of a Foreign Intelligence Service; airlines registered in Armenia to remain on the EU black list and more. The post Ep. 214: The Week in Review (09.12.22) appeared first on EVN Report.

Photographer Rena Effendi's father, a Soviet entomologist, collected 90,000 butterflies in his lifetime. But there was one species he couldn't capture—Satyrus effendi. Effendi takes on the quest to track down the endangered butterfly named after her father, but to do so, she must navigate its home territory, a conflict zone in Azerbaijan. For more information on this episode, visit natgeo.com/overheard. Want more? To see Rena Effendi's photography, take a look at her portfolio. Also explore. We only briefly touched on the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which you can read more about in Rena Effendi's article. Through words and photos, she followed the half a million Azerbaijanis who lost their homes in the conflict. Plus, learn more about how the COVID-19 pandemic had a big effect on Armenians and Azerbaijanis already struggling with the conflict. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pope Francis, the spiritual leader of Catholic Christianity and head of Vatican City, made the last stage of his South Caucasus visits to Azerbaijan. His 10-hour visit to Azerbaijan was the shortest of the three visits to the South Caucasus countries. In the previous commentary the expectations of the people of Azerbaijan from Pope Francis were analyzed. Below we can look how these expectations were met. Firstly, Azerbaijanis monitored Pope Francis's visit to see if he continued to overlook the historical suffering of Muslim people at the hands Christian people. They specifically wanted to see if the Pope would mention the Khojaly Massacre committed by Armenian groups during the Karabakh War. Unfortunately, he did not. He did not call for the Armenians in Armenia to come to terms with the crimes committed against Azerbaijanis. What is even more perplexing is that Pope Francis did not even bother to allude to the Khojaly Massacre ... Link : https://avim.org.tr/en/Yorum/POPE-FRANCIS-IN-AZERBAIJAN Web page: https://avim.org.tr/en Telegram Channel: https://t.me/s/avimorgtr Twitter: https://avim.org.tr/en Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/avimorgtr/ VKontakte: https://vk.com/public202374482 Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcIfEGNM3308QoLbCDJIFuw Dailmotion: https://www.dailymotion.com/dm_0ea263f63bb5aee7d8770d1ec13cfe8b Instgram: https://www.instagram.com/avimorgtr/IntroductionIntroduction

Lexman Artificial interviews author Steven Pressfield about his seminal work, "The Phenomenal Touch". They discuss the importance of phenomenalism within the book and its relevance to modern life. They also look at the concept of zoomorphisms, the shuttlecock, and the Azerbaijanis. In the end, they get into a bit of a scandal.

Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of the C++ programming language, talks about his experience as a phlebotomist in Azerbaijan and his work on the 700-page specification for the new version of the language, C++20. He also shares his thoughts on the state of C++ development and the future of the language.

How much have the effects of Russia's invasion of Ukraine reverberated across other warzones? Moscow is involved in several of the world's conflicts, and the breakdown of relations between Russia and the West could endanger peacemaking elsewhere. In Nagorno-Karabakh, for example, Russian peacekeepers monitor a ceasefire brokered by Moscow between Armenia and Azerbaijan after the 2020 war. Moscow is also co-chair, along with France and the U.S., of the Minsk Group, the main format for peace talks over Nagorno-Karabakh. In Libya, the Kremlin backs military commander Khalifa Haftar, who leads forces in Libya's east. Moscow is the only capital in the world to recognise as Libya's prime minister Fathi Bashagha, who heads a rival cabinet to the internationally recognised government in Tripoli.This week on Hold Your Fire! Richard Atwood is joined by Crisis Group's teams on Nagorno-Karabakh and Libya respectively to discuss the Ukraine war's impact on these crises and diplomatic efforts to resolve them. First, he talks to South Caucasus experts Olesya Vartanyan and Zaur Shiriyev about the role of Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh, how their presence is perceived by Armenians and Azerbaijanis in light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and how diplomacy around the conflict is evolving. After that, he speaks with Claudia Gazzini, Crisis Group's Libya expert, about Russian involvement in Libya, the role of Russian private contractors from the Wagner Group and what motivated the Kremlin's recognition of Bashagha. They also discuss how the Ukraine war has changed prospects for international diplomacy, given Russian involvement in previous talks aimed at helping resolve the conflict. For more on these crises, check out Crisis Group's extensive analysis on our Caucasus regional page and our Libya country page. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Though Armenians and Azerbaijanis were often friends and neighbours during the Soviet period, since independence – and the two Karabakh wars – contact between the two peoples has been sadly lacking. And that has made it easy for each side to dehumanize and demonize the other. Whether online or in person, contact and discussion between everyday Azerbaijanis and Armenians could help to slowly reverse this process and bring about the conditions needed for lasting peace. That's the philosophy behind Bright Garden Voices, whose co-founder, Arnold Alahverdian, joins Mark on this edition of the Caspian Podcast.

In the west, we see much concern trolling about “pro-Democracy dissidents” who are allegedly “mistreated” in countries Russia and Iran. However, we hear little about the country that lies in between Russia and Iran, which not unlike Lithuania, is being run by a single family: The Aliyevs. Today,We have Mammad Azizov, a former political prisoner from Azerbaijan and current editor at Ishchinin Sesi (Worker's Voice) platform talk to us about the 200 year history of his country. Show Notes00:00:30 - The Basics about Azerbaijan00:01:55 - The Height of Azerbaijan’s President and how he is the tallest leader in the world. 00:02:30 - Azerbaijan under the Tsar00:08:48 - The Baku Massacre and the Valentine’s day vow of love between Azerbaijanis, Armenians and Georgians 00:12:40 - Otkober revolution in Baku and the British attempted coup00:20:20 - How the British and Americans tried to restore feudalism00:36:00 - The Baku Industrial Music Concert in 192200:40:25 - Why Hitler wanted Baku? World War 2 in Azerbaijan and how the worker’s helped defeat Hitler. 00:50:17 - Why Krushchev was mistaken on his co-existence with Capitalism. How life would be different if JFK was not shot.00:55:00 - Fall of the USSR, the Shock Doctrine and Capitalism1:02:00 - The Dutch Disease and Oil1:05:30 - The Conflict with Armenia and who is behind it?1:12:00 - Impoverishment, deindustrialization and corruption1:25:00 - What it to be done and what is to be learned?Mammad Azizov on twitter Get full access to Historic.ly at historicly.substack.com/subscribe

Photo: No known restrictions on publication.The New John Batchelor ShowCBS Audio Network@Batchelorshow1/2:  "Iran is more than Persia." @ProfBShaffer @FDDhttps://www.fdd.org/analysis/2021/04/28/iran-is-more-than-persia/ Introduction: Why Ethnicity in Iran Is Important For most of the Soviet period, the West tended to refer to Soviet citizens as the “Russians” and assumed that the regime’s efforts to Russify non-Russian citizens across the Soviet Union were successful. Not until the mid-1980s, when protests emerged during Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, did it become clear that ethno-nationalism was a politically potent force in the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and 15 new countries emerged, there was no denying that the Russification of the Soviet ethnic minorities had been a myth. Several times in recent decades, policymakers have had to play catch-up when central governments have weakened and ethnic and other communal cleavages took center stage. This was true amid the Soviet breakup, the Yugoslav Wars, and the Syrian civil war. There may be a similar blind spot regarding Iran’s multiethnic composition and regime stability. Iran is a multiethnic country; Persians comprise less than half of Iran’s population. Overwhelming majorities of non-Persian groups inhabit most of Iran’s border provinces, in contrast to Iran’s Persian-dominated center. Moreover, over 40 percent of the population of Iran lacks fluency in the Persian language. Ethnic cleavages and dissatisfaction pose growing challenges to the rule of the regime in Iran. When they overlap with poverty and lower levels of government services and infrastructure, these challenges become more severe. Iran’s ethnic minorities inhabit the state’s poorest provinces. The country’s growing environmental challenges, including widening water shortages, hit the ethnic minority provinces harder than the Persian center. The growing importance of the border provinces in anti-regime activity was evident during the last major round of anti-regime protests in Iran, which began in December 2017 and surged again in late 2019. The demonstrations started in the country’s provincial cities and were more intense in the minority-heavy provinces than in the Persian heartland. Technological changes, including widespread access to foreign television and social media in minority languages, have strengthened identity trends in Iran. Large percentages of Iran’s ethnic minorities regularly watch foreign television broadcasts in their native languages instead of regime television, which often depicts ethnic minorities with derogatory stereotypes. Ethnic groups in Iran are also exposed via social media to the wave of identity politics in the United States and Europe. This, too, may contribute to increased opposition to the regime, particularly among Iran’s youth. Previous generations in Iran had, by and large, submitted to the notion that ethnic minorities are inferior to the great Persian nation. But Iran’s minorities increasingly reject this idea, while Persian nationalism appears to be growing among Persians dissatisfied with the religious calling of the Islamic Republic. Since late 2017, the anti-regime activity of several ethnic groups entered a new stage, featuring increased armed attacks on army, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and government installations. Among Iran’s minorities, the Kurds, Ahwaz, and Baluch have active paramilitary groups. Most of the violent anti-regime activity in Iran takes place in their home regions: Sistan-Baluchistan, Khuzestan, Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and West Azerbaijan. Iran’s border areas populated by Kurds and the Baluch endure regular threats to the regime’s forces. Ahwazi groups periodically conduct anti-regime attacks in Khuzestan but do not run a constant insurgency like the Kurds and Baluch do. A critical variable in assessing the potential ethnic threat to the regime is the attitude of Iran’s Azerbaijanis, because of their large numbers, wealth, and perceived status as a mainstay of the regime. A major turning point for this group took place last autumn in response to Iran’s support for Yerevan during Armenia’s war with Azerbaijan. Iranian Azerbaijanis observed Iranian trucks moving Russian arms and supplies to Armenia. The Iranian government arrested dozens of Azerbaijanis for protesting Tehran’s support for Armenia. Amidst rising Azerbaijani opposition, the regime’s policy of backing Armenia may no longer be sustainable. But the Azerbaijani challenge is not the only one. Ethnic minorities form a majority in several strategic locations in Iran. For instance, Khuzestan province, which is the center of Iran’s oil production and home to several important ports and a major road juncture, has a majority-Ahwaz population. Khuzestan is an unstable province, and sustained anti-regime activity there could affect Iran’s ability to produce, export, and transit oil and natural gas. In addition, Iran’s strategic Chabahar Port is located in Sistan-Baluchistan, a perennially unstable province populated almost entirely by Baluch. India invested heavily in Chabahar Port, which represents New Delhi’s attempt to counter China’s infrastructure projects in neighboring Pakistan. The shared non-Persian ethnic groups that straddle much of Iran’s borders, especially Baluch, Kurds, and Azerbaijanis, strongly impact Iran’s foreign policy with most neighboring states. These ethnic groups are a major challenge in the volatile security situation on Iran’s borders with Iraq, Turkey, and Pakistan. In recent years, Iran’s ethnic minorities have shown organizational ability on the ground. In an all-out regime crisis, revolts in several minority provinces in Iran could mount a significant challenge to the central government.

Photo: Some Iranians are not Persians. Mar Elias (Eliya), the Nestorian bishop of the Urmia [home of John Batchelor's ancestors] plain village of Geogtapa, c. 1831.The New John Batchelor ShowCBS Audio Network@Batchelorshow2/2:  "Iran is more than Persia." @ProfBShaffer @FDDhttps://www.fdd.org/analysis/2021/04/28/iran-is-more-than-persia/ Introduction: Why Ethnicity in Iran Is Important For most of the Soviet period, the West tended to refer to Soviet citizens as the “Russians” and assumed that the regime’s efforts to Russify non-Russian citizens across the Soviet Union were successful. Not until the mid-1980s, when protests emerged during Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, did it become clear that ethno-nationalism was a politically potent force in the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and 15 new countries emerged, there was no denying that the Russification of the Soviet ethnic minorities had been a myth. Several times in recent decades, policymakers have had to play catch-up when central governments have weakened and ethnic and other communal cleavages took center stage. This was true amid the Soviet breakup, the Yugoslav Wars, and the Syrian civil war. There may be a similar blind spot regarding Iran’s multiethnic composition and regime stability. Iran is a multiethnic country; Persians comprise less than half of Iran’s population. Overwhelming majorities of non-Persian groups inhabit most of Iran’s border provinces, in contrast to Iran’s Persian-dominated center. Moreover, over 40 percent of the population of Iran lacks fluency in the Persian language. Ethnic cleavages and dissatisfaction pose growing challenges to the rule of the regime in Iran. When they overlap with poverty and lower levels of government services and infrastructure, these challenges become more severe. Iran’s ethnic minorities inhabit the state’s poorest provinces. The country’s growing environmental challenges, including widening water shortages, hit the ethnic minority provinces harder than the Persian center. The growing importance of the border provinces in anti-regime activity was evident during the last major round of anti-regime protests in Iran, which began in December 2017 and surged again in late 2019. The demonstrations started in the country’s provincial cities and were more intense in the minority-heavy provinces than in the Persian heartland. Technological changes, including widespread access to foreign television and social media in minority languages, have strengthened identity trends in Iran. Large percentages of Iran’s ethnic minorities regularly watch foreign television broadcasts in their native languages instead of regime television, which often depicts ethnic minorities with derogatory stereotypes. Ethnic groups in Iran are also exposed via social media to the wave of identity politics in the United States and Europe. This, too, may contribute to increased opposition to the regime, particularly among Iran’s youth. Previous generations in Iran had, by and large, submitted to the notion that ethnic minorities are inferior to the great Persian nation. But Iran’s minorities increasingly reject this idea, while Persian nationalism appears to be growing among Persians dissatisfied with the religious calling of the Islamic Republic. Since late 2017, the anti-regime activity of several ethnic groups entered a new stage, featuring increased armed attacks on army, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and government installations. Among Iran’s minorities, the Kurds, Ahwaz, and Baluch have active paramilitary groups. Most of the violent anti-regime activity in Iran takes place in their home regions: Sistan-Baluchistan, Khuzestan, Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and West Azerbaijan. Iran’s border areas populated by Kurds and the Baluch endure regular threats to the regime’s forces. Ahwazi groups periodically conduct anti-regime attacks in Khuzestan but do not run a constant insurgency like the Kurds and Baluch do. A critical variable in assessing the potential ethnic threat to the regime is the attitude of Iran’s Azerbaijanis, because of their large numbers, wealth, and perceived status as a mainstay of the regime. A major turning point for this group took place last autumn in response to Iran’s support for Yerevan during Armenia’s war with Azerbaijan. Iranian Azerbaijanis observed Iranian trucks moving Russian arms and supplies to Armenia. The Iranian government arrested dozens of Azerbaijanis for protesting Tehran’s support for Armenia. Amidst rising Azerbaijani opposition, the regime’s policy of backing Armenia may no longer be sustainable. But the Azerbaijani challenge is not the only one. Ethnic minorities form a majority in several strategic locations in Iran. For instance, Khuzestan province, which is the center of Iran’s oil production and home to several important ports and a major road juncture, has a majority-Ahwaz population. Khuzestan is an unstable province, and sustained anti-regime activity there could affect Iran’s ability to produce, export, and transit oil and natural gas. In addition, Iran’s strategic Chabahar Port is located in Sistan-Baluchistan, a perennially unstable province populated almost entirely by Baluch. India invested heavily in Chabahar Port, which represents New Delhi’s attempt to counter China’s infrastructure projects in neighboring Pakistan. The shared non-Persian ethnic groups that straddle much of Iran’s borders, especially Baluch, Kurds, and Azerbaijanis, strongly impact Iran’s foreign policy with most neighboring states. These ethnic groups are a major challenge in the volatile security situation on Iran’s borders with Iraq, Turkey, and Pakistan. In recent years, Iran’s ethnic minorities have shown organizational ability on the ground. In an all-out regime crisis, revolts in several minority provinces in Iran could mount a significant challenge to the central government.

Welcome!   I am sure that most of you know about the problems Texas experienced with its energy infrastructure well there is more bad news for our nations' infrastructure and that comes from a vulnerability in the programmable logic controllers that many of these large infrastructure providers use to control the flow of product. (i.e., water, electricity, natural gas, etc.). Also this week Google Chromebooks outsold Apple but that is not the whole story.  We also dug into processors and the importance of them and how it affects what you do daily. Then we discuss Clubhouse and why it may not be the best platform to get on and there is more so be sure to Listen in. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read: Embracing a Zero Trust Security Model Turns out Most Manufacturing, Water Supply, and Power Companies Use Controllers with a Security Severity Score of 10 out of 10 Chromebooks outsold Macs worldwide in 2020, cutting into Windows market share Clubhouse is the New Up-and-Comer but  Security and Privacy Lag Behind Its Explosive Growth New York sues to shut down 'fraudulent' Coinseed crypto platform Former SolarWinds CEO blames intern for 'solarwinds123' password leak WhatsApp will basically stop working if you don't accept the new privacy policy TikTok breaching users’ rights “on a massive scale”, says European Consumer Group --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Apple just got passed by Google's Chromebook. We'll tell you more about that. Clubhouse the app everybody seems to want, and it's invite-only. Sound familiar? That's happened before has got some serious privacy problems. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me today. There are a lot of things to talk about and I'm going to start with this article from ARS Technica, talking about programmable logic controllers. Now I can see you sitting there saying, what are you talking about, Craig? Who cares? Here's, what's going on. You heard about the solar winds hack? It's been something we've talked about pretty much every week here for the last Oh a month or so since it really happened. And we found out some more stuff about it this week, by the way, we know who the group is that actually did the hack very professional group. This means, of course, nation-state, but. They were going after different types of companies, that help the different types of companies, as well as government organizations. In other words, they were targeting MSPs managed services providers. And unfortunately, most of them failed because it's rare, very rare to find an MSP that actually takes care of security. And I'm not going to blame them. I'm not going to blame you for using one of these MSPs that got compromised. Because ultimately, security is a long tail thing. It is an industry in and of itself. It's hard to keep up. It's hard to keep moving forward. But I brought this up because I wanted to tie it into something we also talked about a bit for the last two weeks, and that is that water plant in Florida. This water plant in Florida had the amount of lye added to water, turned up 100 fold. Not 100%, a hundred times more lye in the water and somebody noticed and all well and good. Who did it? We don't really know, but here's the problem I want to talk about today. And that is the SCADAs systems, these PLCs, in other words, The computers that are controlling the valves in these various businesses and government agencies, the water plants, the electric plants, et cetera. You had valves. Those were these tubes. Remember that, and then transistors for a little while. Anyhow. This is something that's a very real problem because Rockwell automation you've heard of Rockwell before. I am sure of that because Rockwell has been a government contractor forever. They've done a whole lot of stuff in the military space and they do a ton also in the civilian space. Rockwell makes hardware that's used to control equipment in factories, a lot of equipment in a lot of factories, as well as all of these other places out there. And it is what's called generically a "programmable logic controller." They're selling them under this logix brand. You'll see them everywhere. They control everything you can think of out there. Some of them are very small. There might be a, like a toaster that you'd have on the countertop for instance, or something as big as one of those little pizza ovens you can put on the counter, but then they can be a whole lot bigger than that. But they help control equipment. And. Oh, the manufacturing and the processes on assembly lines and other manufacturing environments. You might remember what happened in Iran, where they had these PLCs, programmable logic controllers, that were part of this whole SCADAs system. It's all together. And in Iran, they were using them to control centrifuges and those centrifuges were being used to refine nuclear material eventually to make nuclear bombs. At least that's what we said. That's what the UN said, et cetera, et cetera. And then it makes sense, right? They have to refine the yellowcake. So that's what they were doing. And what did we do? Apparently, we got together with this country called Israel. It's over there in that same neck of the woods. And with them, we came up with some software to break into the computers at the Iran facility. Now, these computers were what we call air-gapped. They were not directly connected to the internet. So how did we hack it? We hacked the old-fashioned way. No, we didn't use a little honey bait. What happened with rep Swalwellout in California, who I don't understand how he's still sitting on the number one top secret committee in Congress, even though he spent years with this Chinese spy who obviously would have been feeding all of this information that he got back to China. I don't understand Nancy Pelosi. Sometimes this is just crazy. What's going on in Congress? It wasn't that? Okay. It wasn't a honey trap. It was a honey trap. I guess what they did is they developed this piece of malware, knew that they had to get it on to the machines that controlled the manufacturing process there in the plant that did the refining in order to make the nuclear bombs. How can you get it in if it's air-gapped, how can you get it in if those machines are not connected to the internet? But it doesn't matter if you break into the firewall because they're not behind the firewall. They're not on a network that is accessible from the outside. However, they were networked and they have to be networked inside the building so that you can have one computer that's monitoring the spin rates of all of these different centrifuges and just kind of keeping tabs on everything. So they went ahead and they put this little virus onto a thumb drive. And then, in fact, they made dozens of these thumb drives. They found out where the engineers who worked at the plant went for coffee, where they went for lunch and they scattered these around. And then a coffee spot at the lunch spot. And so now all of this stuff is scattered around these little thumb drives people, pick them up, Oh, a free thumb drive and they take them into the office. And this particular piece of malware was specifically crafted for this programmable logic controller. So if you plugged it into your computer as an accounting puter computer, it would say, Oh, wait a minute this is an accounting computer. I don't care. But these guys brought it back into their manufacturing facility and it did work there and it took over control of the machine that controlled all of these centrifuges. And fuges, it keeps saying fuses, centrifuges and it spun them out of control. And while it was spinning them out of control, it was showing a perfectly Greenlight status to the people who were trying to monitor it. They resist, it was a stroke of brilliant, but that is the type of system that we're concerned about. That's what we're talking about right now. These kinds of logic controllers that are used all over the place you can use them for almost anything you used on ships. They're used in government facilities. They're used everywhere. There was a vulnerability found and it was a, "I can't believe you did this" vulnerability. Now with solar winds, we found out it was a, I can't believe you did this vulnerability because apparently, solar winds had a password of solar winds one, two, three. Who wouldn't guess that perfectly good password? And man, we see these types of passwords all of the time. That's why I use a password manager. That's why you generate passwords or you come up with key phrases. Three or four words strung together with maybe a digit or something else in the middle somewhere and some upper lowercase characters. Right? That's how you generate a password. It's not supposed to be solar winds one, two, three. So that's problem. Number one, that's a big problem. This particular vulnerability has a severity score of 10 out of 10. Why? Why is this the worst level it could possibly be? Number one, it requires a very low skill level to be able to exploit it. Now that's interesting. Why is that? It turns out that these program, programmable logic controllers have a hard-coded key built into them. In other words, whoever programmed these things, and I'm looking at this list, there are a lot of them. Logix is the name of the company, the name of the product, and you'll see Logix in their names. And it is a whole bunch of compact Logix control, Logix drive, Logix a guard, Logix, guard on me. Now that wasn't supposed to provide cybersecurity support. All of those, okay. Then they have a hard-coded password. What that means is built right into the software is a back door with a password that can not be changed. Now, even if you bought one of those cheap firewalls from the big box retail store, you are going to be safer. Because at least it lets you change the password and you should be changing the password on your firewall. And in some cases, it also lets you change the username and you should change the username as well. But no. These Rockwell devices have a hard-coded password and Rockwell apparently is not going to issue a patch that directly addresses the problems that come from having a hard, coded key. So instead of that, they're saying, Oh, use these mitigation techniques. Isn't that what Iran did, isn't that? Why they had themselves? Nice little air gap network that was still breached? Oh, man. Oh, man. So it's a problem. It's a very big problem and they're just not paying much attention to it. Hey, stick around.  We're going to talk about Chromebooks versus Mac and Windows right here. It looks like the Wintel monopoly continues to die on the vine because of what Apple's been doing, what Google has been doing. In fact, Google is really stepping up their game here, getting rid of Intel. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me. We know that Intel's been around for a long time. You probably remember Intel used to brag about it. There were ads where Intel would kick in a couple of bucks if all they'd said was Intel inside. In fact, they are still doing it on machines. You buy a machine it'll probably have a little sticker if it has an Intel processor saying Intel inside. Intel had a problem, they made components that people didn't buy. Well, they bought them, but they bought them as part of something else. They did not buy an Intel processor for the fact it's an Intel processor. Makes sense. Some of them did. I certainly looked at them. I bought AMD and some others instead,. Some of the power PC stuff from IBM, just absolutely incredible, as well as others. I have done a whole lot over the years when it comes to processors, you've heard already I helped develop operating systems and implement them and the internet protocol. I've got a lot of experience with processors, no doubt about it. A lot of machine coding and assembly work over the years. I wrote C, which is a programming language used largely for a high-speed stuff like operating systems. I did a lot of that. I look at this processor from Intel as a massive failure. Marketing-wise. In the industry, it's been really great, but when I get into it from the prospect, or from the side of being an architect, of operating systems, and an architect of user interfaces. I cannot believe Intel. It's just been terrible. Part of the problem with the Intel processors and their instruction sets. The way they do the memory access and the way they do all of their IO to other devices has to do with their legacy code. They've tried to remain compatible with all kinds of older processors over the years. I can understand that I can see why they might want to do that. They're afraid that people might leave them. They started out as a memory company and through. I was going to say no fault of their own, but no luck of their own or anything else. I don't know. Another company came to them and said, Hey, can you make a cheap processor? Remember IBM looking for a cheap processor to put into this PC right. A personal computer that they didn't think would sell very many, certainly wouldn't be a great business thing. They went and said, okay what are the cheap processors we can get and put into here? Intel, 8080. That's what we'll do. All of a sudden is born the XT and the PC XT and the PC AT came. Some of these others over the years on the 8286 and the other chipsets. Anyhow, I'm getting awfully geeky on ya. Started really falling behind.  One of the ways they fell behind was in 64-bit design. In fact, Intel is AMD compatible. Now, if you can believe that. Talk about falling behind.  I don't think it's the engineers, there's some brilliant people there. It's entirely business decisions that drove them to the point they're at. They continued to increase the price of the processors. They were getting a little faster, but they still had the corner on the market because people bought Wintel they bought Windows. If they're going to get Windows, they're going to get Intel. Make sense. There were some others over the years that competed including AMD, which is Intel-compatible for the most part. They really managed to keep people out of the marketplace so they could jack-up the cost. The price structure, just keep jacking up, jacking up, jacking up. Many companies got fed up with it, including some companies that had the ability to do something about it. One of those companies is Apple. I mentioned in my newsletter last week, I had an article talking about how Apple is now apparently about to make 6G chips. 6G at the next generation of wireless and Apple's getting rid of Qualcomm and gonna make in themselves.  A company like Apple, when they want a million parts, they want them to arrive. They want them to be there on the day they ask for them and they want them to do what they asked for. Qualcomm has fallen down on that. They have not been able to meet Apple's demand. Intel has fallen flat on that. They have not been able to meet some of Apple's demands that have to do with the amount of energy they use the temperature they give off of course cause they want them on mobile devices. What did Apple do a decade ago? They said fine, forget about it. We're going to not use your Intel processors in our iPhone. They started using some other processors, some arm processors. Apple joined this community like an open-source manufacturing alliance that came up with a chip design that they could use as a basis.  Apple took that and ran with it. Today it has run so far with it that Apple has an amazing chip. Now you can see these amazing chips in your newest I-phones and your newest iPad. That's what they have in them these new Apple processors, but Apple also now has their new M series processors, which are effectively the same things they've been using in the iPhone, iPad, but beefed up in order to handle the load you'd expect to have on a laptop or a desktop with a Mac mini. I'm just so impressed with these. I was playing with both of those. One of our clients wanted them. We had them ordered and shipped to our place.  We put them on benches and we loaded them up and got them all running.  We played with them a little bit just to see what they were like. Very impressive machines.  They don't have Intel processors. Apple has switched processors a few times over the years, it went from the Intel or the Motorola over to the power PC then to the Intel, and now to its own chip design. It looks like completely new chipsets for the iPhone 13 hopefully, maybe the 14, hopefully, when that comes out. That'll probably be later this year. By the way, the 13 is just going to be an incremental update to the iPhone 12. They're saying is probably going to be like an iPhone 12S, really. Processors.  Apple doesn't need to pay the Intel tax on these processors out there.  I'm going to look right now, purchase price, Intel, a laptop CPU, just to get an idea.  I'm on there right now and I see coming right up, here's an Intel core i9 $400. Just for the CPU and that's from B&H photo and B&H has a lot of this sort of thing. Most of these Intel CPUs that are on laptops cost over $400. They're branded as core this, that, or the other things. The real expense of one, just start getting into the Xeons. Those Xeon processors can be just through the roof. Here's one here right now an Intel Xeon platinum, 8180 $11,000 while actually, it's 10,995. If Apple can make its own processor, do you think they can do it for less than 400 bucks? Of course, they can, and that's going to save them a lot of money in making some of these devices. We're going to get into those devices, like the laptops. What do you need in a laptop? Why would you go with Windows, maybe one of these other operating systems, including Mac iOS? We'll talk about that. That's going to lead us into the conversation about Chrome. Why is Chrome OS becoming so popular? Why has it surpassed now market share of Apple and where did that market share come from? People have been buying PCs, but what's going on? Stick around, you're listening to Craig Peterson and you can find me online. Craig peterson.com. We're talking about chips. Yeah we're getting maybe slightly technical, but chips matter nowadays in a way that they haven't before and yet they matter even less. I'm going to explain that. Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here.  I just said something that might've sounded confusing. Cause I said, CPU's matter more than ever. Yet they matter less than ever. Here's why. If you're looking at an Apple computer, you are looking at either an Intel processor, at least for the next couple of years or the Apple processor. If you're looking at a Windows machine for a little while Microsoft was really on a bit of a kick, trying to get Windows running on multiple platforms. In fact, it actually did.  There were some amazing things they were able to do, but really if you're getting Windows, you are going to be on an Intel platform. How about your phone? Do you have a clue as to what kind of processors in your phone? Now, you guys are the best and brightest. So yeah, you, you might, okay. You might know the exact model number and CPU clock rate and everything else about your phone, but the vast majority of people have no idea and you don't need to know. You don't need to know because it is now like a utility. You don't really know how that electron is delivered to your house. Where that came from? How that was produced? You just turn on that light switch and hope it works, right? Unlike when there's big wind storms and your power goes out, that's what you're hoping for. That's what's happening now, you buy a phone, you don't care if there's Intel inside. The same thing's true with tablets. You buy a tablet, if it's an Apple tablet guaranteed it doesn't have an Intel CPU. If you buy a Surface tablet, you can get them with Intel or without Intel. A lot of times you can tell just based on the price of the tablet now. As we move forward, we're starting to see more and more devices powered by arm chips and others. You see the idea behind Unix, which is this operating system that's underneath all of them. Unix lives underneath MacOS. Unix lives underneath Android. It lives underneath pretty much every cell phone and every device programmable device that exists today has Unix underlayment, which is the main operating system. It's fantastic. The whole goal behind that when it was designed by At&T was to make it so that this one operating system could run on anything and it did. Universities adopted it because it would run on anything and universities were getting equipment donated to them from everybody. That was anything, right? This mini-computer, that mainframe, all of these pieces of equipment got donated. They standardized on this Unix platform and the whole thing worked out quite well.  Linux is a type of Unix for those who are wondering.  The whole idea behind it is that the processor doesn't really matter because there's a version of Unix that will run on really pretty much any processor that's made today or has been made for the last 40, 50 years. Now, when you start getting into the useful computers that you and I use every day. What's underneath it? If you run a Mac, I don't think you really care. If you're on a Windows computer, I don't think you really care. What you care about is can I do that task at hand? Can I go ahead and open word, document editor. Even then you don't even care if it's Word for the most part. Word, you're going to get around it a little bit easier, but if you are over on a Mac, you could use pages. It doesn't have to be word and it doesn't have to be Windows and it doesn't have to have Intel inside. I am not giving stock advice, but I can tell you, I would not be out there buying Intel right about now. Hopefully, they got some other stuff going on. I know they're looking at some new chip designs that they can provide to people that make it pretty darn simple. Now there is another big player we haven't talked about yet and that is Google. Google's got Android, which is underneath again, a Unix operating system.  It has also on top of that, this big Java virtual machine, which has been the source of many headaches, a lot of chagrin here for developers. The beauty of it is again, Java was designed so that you can write your program once and run it on anything. You see where I'm going. We're getting to the point where the competition is going to be crazy. When it comes to the devices we use to get online or the devices that we are using for work, and it's going to get cheaper and cheaper.  I'm not talking about the cloud. The cloud is not cheaper. In most cases, the cloud can present all kinds of additional problems. We just got an email from a listener Danny today. In fact, he bought one of the little packages that we'd put together for the listeners. About 18 months ago of a special, it was a little Cisco firewall and Wi-Fi switch with security built into them, something you can't buy off the shelf. It had the firepower basic stuff in it. Anyhow. So Danny was asking because he uses G suite. How does he do a three, two, one backup? You can't with Google's G Suite.  With office three 65 or Microsoft three 65, in both cases, they have lost their client's data. So Danny was asking, so what do I do? How do I do a three, two, one backup, like you advise we do? Basically what we said is you've got to download all of your data from those cloud services, back them up properly at that point, and do it all in a format so it can be restored. So if it has to go back to the cloud, it can. It keeps your data safe. All of that stuff is, again, just it's everywhere. It's cheap. There are pros and cons to different ways of doing it. Dan is not there thinking I'm using G suite or I'm using Microsoft three 65. What processors behind it, right? You don't care. Google has said here's what we're going to do. We make a phone now, the Google smartphone isn't well adopted. It's more of an example of here's a way you can implement the Android operating system. It's a proof of concept for them. It's not a bad phone. They've tied in with some other carriers in order to provide cell phone service. They are coming out with a system on a chip. You used to have this big motherboard and if you go way back, I have a very big motherboard with all kinds of discrete components. Nowadays, all of that gets squeezed into one chip and Google has decided that they are going to make their own chip. They call it the white chapel. That's the name of the whole program.  It was reportedly made using Samsung's nine millimeter process technology. In other words, it's going to be fast. It's going to be power efficient, and initially, they are going to be putting it into their smartphones. That's not a bad idea. In their pixel smartphone sometime late this year. We haven't quite made it yet to Chromebooks, but I promise we'll get to that in just a couple of minutes. I wanted to make sure everybody had a decent understanding so that you can make the right decision for yourself and your business when it comes to what kind of computing to use. Stick around. So what kind of computer should you get? What's gonna work for you? Should you worry about the chip that's inside of it? What do you do? It just gets so confusing sometimes. That's what we're going to get into finally right now. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me today. Now, there are options when you are looking at a computer and I know some people don't even have a regular computer anymore, so let's start there. Really quickly many people are just using their iPad and that's what the goal was behind the iPad. I think that's what Steve Jobs had in mind. Apple always wanted it to be a replacement for your computer. It is not as flexible as a computer is by any stretch. Frankly, it's gotten a lot better, especially the iPad pro because of the faster CPU and it has a few more capabilities.  It's a good little unit.  That's what I use by the way is the iPad pro. If you are just going online and you're doing a little browsing, maybe editing a few documents, getting on a zoom call or a WebEx call, whatever it might be, doing all kinds of the regular stuff that iPad's going to work for you.  If you have an iPhone, you can link your iPad to the iPhone.  If someone calls you on FaceTime, you can actually answer, take the call on your iPad. If someone calls you on with a regular phone number, if someone does that anymore you can take that as well, right there on your iPad. iPads are inherently very safe. They have done a great job in trying to keep things pretty tight from the cybersecurity standpoint on the iPad. If you need to use Windows applications, then that's where the surface tablet might come in for you. I know some people who like their surface tablets and I know people who really don't like their surface tablets. Personally, I don't think I would buy one. There's not a huge win, but again, some people like them. They're more portable than some laptops. Now, you can get laptops in the Windows world that are as small and lightweight as an Apple laptop. Now, which would I get the Apple laptop versus a Windows? I would absolutely without a doubt, no question get the Apple. The main reason for that is that it's cheaper. Yes. I said it was cheaper.  It's cheaper because that Apple laptop is designed using high-quality components and is manufactured using high-quality stuff versus that PC. You might find a laptop PC laptop for maybe 350 bucks, and you look at the Apple laptops and they start at just under a thousand dollars. They're small the Apple ones and they are very functional and they will last. If you get the same component in your windows laptop, the same quality, the same speed, the same buses, IO, everything else, same display. You are going to pay more in the Windows world than you would on a Mac. If all you can afford or all you want is something inexpensive then I've got an option and it isn't Windows. Okay. Unless you have to have Windows, if there's a specific program you have to use that only runs on Windows while you're stuck aren't you. There is another option out there and it is called a Chromebook. It has been doing very well. 2020 was the first year that these Chromebooks outsold Apple Macintoshes. Now, that's a big deal because Apple's always been a kind of a minor player, seven to 10% of the marketplace. To see Chromebooks actually beat Apple is impressive. Now, part of the reason they're beating the Apple is what I just explained to you. They are inexpensive. Many kids are at home, right? They're going to school from home virtually and the schools need them to have a computer. What do they say? Get a Chromebook. Here's a $300 Chromebook. Go ahead and get this for your kid or here's $300 and or $300 Chromebook. In some cases, the school just buys it for the kid. Great for that. Now, remember it's Google, you're storing most of your documents up in Google's cloud. Depends on how you feel about Google and having Google with full access to all of your information. I have a big concern with Google having access to my kids' information, but that's a wholly different story out there. No question about that. Chrome is an operating system again, that is based on Unix. It's actually Linux, which is again, a version. It is something that you just won't see. The odds of you directly interacting with the operating system just keeps going down and down. Now, Windows, you still got a muck around sometimes you got to get into the registry editor. You got to do weird-ass stuff. With your Chromebook or with your Mac, you're not going to have to do that. It's not an antiquated design. It is a very modern design. Very easy to use. Now, I started the segment out by saying that CPUs matter more than ever, and yet they matter the least they've ever mattered. Here's why I said that the manufacturers now are able to choose the CPU they want to use. Unless, of course it's a Windows target, but for anything else for Chromebooks, they can use any CPU from any manufacturer. They might have to do some porting and do some work involved in that, but it's moderately minor. You can't say the same thing for Windows. Windows is locked into a couple of different architectures and you can bet Microsoft is pretty busy trying to make it so that it will run across even more CPU architectures.  It matters more to the manufacturers and matters more to you what CPU they're using, because it keeps costs under control. It gives you longer battery life. It lets them put a smaller battery in and still have longer battery life. Lots of good things. It doesn't matter at all anymore because you only care about the web browser. You only care about the text editor, right? What is it that you care about? It isn't, what's underneath all of this. Chromebooks, you can find for 150 bucks at a big box retail store and you get what you're paying for. That hardware is not going to be stellar that's for sure. But it's going to work and is going to do a decent job for you.  If you don't have any money, really, but you can afford to crack 150 bucks, look at a Chromebook. Chromebooks go all the way up into the $2,000 range. Those higher-end ones have more local storage. They're faster. There's a bunch of different benefits to them. Now, you've got the options. Apple is going to almost certainly stay with its own chipsets. It lets them keep control over the entire investment. Now,  you might say that's bad. I don't want to get locked into Apple. Well is not really going to matter that much, but you are going to get locked into Apple. The reason it's not such a bad deal is looking at the marketplace, Apple has a few dozen different designs. They have to maintain the operating system for all of their software, their device drivers, everything has to work across a few different, a few dozen models. Think about it. You've got how far back your iPhones', I know they still put out some patches for iPhone fives and sixes, they might have even older ones. So there you go. Then they had the larger versions of some of the iPhones and they had the ASCE versions. Look at that. Compare that to the Android space. Where you have hundreds of manufacturers using Android and building smartphones with it. Thousands of different models of phones each with their own device drivers and all kinds of little things. Some of these manufacturers will  go ahead and grab whatever's in the parts bin today and throw that in. Okay. This is true too, not just to the smartphone manufacturers, but if some of these PC manufacturers. Dell has been known to do this. Where it's okay, we're making a laptop today. Okay, we promise them this CPU, but this USB controller that we normally put in, we don't have it right now. I'm going to put this other one in there. It gets very confusing when you're trying to repair these things each one of those USB controllers has a different driver for Windows. So Apple, the part of the beauty of this is they only have to worry about the security and reliability of just a few dozen different designs versus Google having to worry about again, thousands and thousands of them. That's why also with Android you do not get the patches when they come out. If they come out, it can take an easy six months for a patch that's issued by Google to show up available for your phone. It typically takes Apple a matter of a week or so. It's just there. There's no comparison. That means your cybersecurity is going to be better when you can get patches. If you have an Android phone, that's more than two years old, forget about it. You're not going to get patches.  If you really are insistent, like some people I know in fact, Danny were just talking about it. He really likes his Android. Don't first of all, always buy the top model. It should probably be as Samsung.  It should be never any more than two years old. You got to trade it in every one to two years so that you're pretty sure you're going to be getting security updates in a timely fashion. There you go. That's the explanation of it. I love my Microsoft stuff for specific Microsoft apps. I really love my Mac for all the graphics and everything. It just works. It doesn't crash. The applications all just work. I use my iPad for some just general basic stuff, and Chromebooks are probably the way to go for most home users.  As we just talked about for schools as well. Hey, visit me online, CraigPeterson.com. You'll find all kinds of great information there. Craig peterson.com, Look for my podcasts. I guess this is a little bit of good news. If you're a home user, not a business or some other organization, like a state or County or city office, but we've got some breach numbers that have just come out for 2020. We're going to talk about right now. Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining me.  Of course, you can always go to my website. Yeah. Pick up all of the podcasts in case you missed something today or another week, you'll find them right there@craigpeterson.com. You can also sign up for my email list and we're going to be doing a couple of different things here. I think in the near future, we're going to be sending out some reports that we made as part of the security summer thing I did a couple of years ago, and each one of these reports and there's 30 something of them. Some of them are like five to seven pages long, but it's a checklist of all the security things you should be worrying about. Now, if you are a home user, you'll find a lot of these to be interesting. But if you're a business person, you work in an office, you help to run an office. You own a business. You need to make sure you get all of them. So make sure you are signed up Craig peterson.com and we'll be glad to get those out too. Plus we're also going to start something new every week. I usually have six to eight, sometimes as many as 10 articles in the week. I spend hours going through finding what I think are the most important things that interest me as well, but that I think will interest you guys. I put them in an email, it is it's not very long, but it's just a few sentences from each one of the stories and I have a link to the story as well, right there.  I'm going to start sending that out as well to everybody cause some people want my actual show notes. We're going to have the newsletter once a week. Then we're also planning on having a little video training as well. So it might just be straight, like straight audio. That's part of a video, but it'll be training on a specific security task or problem that's out there.  Then the course improving windows security. It's been taking us a long time. Blame it, mostly on me. Karen's also busy with babysitting grandkids at least a couple of days a week, and I'm trying to run a company as well. So it's, forgive us, but it is taking some time, but you're going to love this. I think it's turning out really well. I am about halfway done with the final edits. So I'm recording them. We go back and forth. They ended up recording them twice so that we get all of the points I wanted to cover into them. Karen's come up with a whole bunch of great screenshots and other pictures to go in with it so it's not one of these death by PowerPoint things. And we've got 21 different talks, if you will, on locking down windows and I go into the why's as well as the hows. I think that's really important, because if you don't understand why you're doing something. You're much less likely to do it. I picked that up from Mr. Tony Robbins, none other, the Anthony Robbins man. It's been over 20 years. Karen and I went to an event he had down in Boston and this was one of  his firewalk or events.  We actually got to walk on hot coals it was the weirdest thing ever. Karen was totally freaking out and I was just, wow, this is going to be weird, but we both did it. It was phenomenal. Cause it of gave you an idea of, even if you have this mental block that you can't do something you probably can. We actually did and nobody's feet were burned or anything. It was real coals. It was really hot. They were really red. It was really something that at the very end they had grass, a little square . Grass, maybe two, three feet by three feet and they had a hose running onto it. So you'd walk over it all. Then you'd just walk in on the grass and the idea there being if you had any hot coals stuck to your foot. You probably didn't want those just to stay on your foot. You'd probably want those, they get put out and taken off, so that's where that did. Anyhow. One of the things I learned from Tony was you need to have a strong reason why. We see this all of the time, Stephen Covey, if you read his stuff, you know it as well, you got to know why you're doing something. When it comes to computers and technology and security, you need to understand the why. Because it isn't just a rote thing. There are so many variations on what to do, but if you understand the why you're doing it, then I think it opens up a whole new world. You can explain it to your friends. You can help them understand it because finally you will understand it.  You'll be more motivated to do the things that you should be doing because you know why you're doing them, what it involves, what it's going to solve for you. This should be a really great course. And I spent some time in it going through the whys, give you some examples of problems people have had and what that solves. It's available hopefully here within a couple of weeks, man. I thought I'd be done by the end of January and here it's looking like it'll be the end of February. But be that as it may, keep your eyes out. If you've already emailed me to let me know, you're interested. That's great. I've got you on a list. I'll have to try and send out an email this week or sometime soon to let you guys know it that we've got it ready for you?  We will have it already for you, hopefully with the next couple of weeks. So that's that I'm told the different way of doing things that's me. I like explaining things I've been told I'm good at it. So let's I think a good thing too. I started out the segment by talking about this probably good news for end users. Because in 2020 breaches were down by 19% while the impact of those breaches fell by nearly two-thirds when we're measuring it by the number of people affected. Now, of course, if a company is breached and an organization is breached, it's counted as one. One person, if you will affect, obviously it can affect hundreds of thousands, millions of people, depending on what happens like a breach of Equifax. Are you counting that as one or you counting that as 300 million? Because that's how many records were stolen? I'm not sure it doesn't say it doesn't go into that much detail, but because the number of data breaches went down and the number of individuals affected by the data breach plummets. It's telling us something, then that is okay. That these hackers have moved away from collecting massive amounts of information and are targeting user credentials as a way to get into corporate networks to install ransomware. We've got even more news out this week about the solar winds hack. We talked about this before, and this is a company that makes software that's supposed to help manage networks, which means it's supposed to help make those networks safer. No, as it turns out, they weren't making it safer and it looks like maybe four years bad guys were in these networks. We're being managed by solar winds, not with software, right? It's not as though solar winds was managing the network is solar winds sold software services so that you could manage your own networks or in many of these cases, they were actually managing networks of third-party businesses. I do work as well for high valued in value individuals, people who have a high profile that needs to keep all of their data safe and they are constantly being gone after. They're trying to hack them all the time and the way they're trying to do it. And I talked about this really the first hour today is by this password stuffing thing. So they're trying to get in and they were successful and now it looks like it wasn't just Russia. Apparently, China knew about this hack potential knew about this bug and was using it. And apparently, it also was not. Just solar wind software. Now they're blaming some of this stuff on Microsoft office. If you have an office three 65 subscriptions, apparently they were using that to get in. So the bad guys are getting very selective. They want to go against companies and organizations like government agencies that have information there's really going to help them out. That is absolutely phenomenal. So these are stats from the identity theft resource center. And I was thumbing through as I was talking here. So it's saying that more than 300 million individuals were affected by data breaches in 2020, which means they must be counting the people whose. Information was stolen, not just the people that were hacked but it is a huge drop of 66% over 2019. And the number of reported data breaches dropped to about 1100, which is about. 20% less than 2019. So it's good. It's bad. I think the mass data collection thing is over with now. They're not as interested in it, but they are very interested in strategic attacks as opposed to just these blankets. Let's grab as much data as we can because they want to get it into these government networks, which now we've, we know they've gotten into. And then you've got this double extortion thing going on with the ransomware, where again, the going after businesses and people who they know can pay. So that's good news for the rest of us, right? The home users. It's not good news so much for some of my clients, that's what we take care of. That's why we get paid the big bucks. Now how that works. Downright stick around. When we get back, we're going to be talking more about the news this week in particular, of course, security, Facebook, and their Supreme court. Stick around. The United States has a Supreme court. Our States each have their own Supreme courts. In fact, there's probably Supreme courts all over the world. But did you know that Facebook now has something that people are calling a Supreme court? This is interesting. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me. People have been complaining about Facebook and what they've been doing for years. One of the things people have really been complaining about lately is how Facebook has been censoring people, particularly according to them anyways, conservatives.  I've certainly seen evidence of that. No question don't get me wrong, but there's also left-wingers who are complaining about being censored. Facebook decided it needed to have its kind of its own version of the Supreme court. You see what happened? Bins are you have a post on Facebook that is questioned. And usually what has to happen is somebody reports it to Facebook as being off-color or whatever it is, the reporting it as. And if two or three people report it, then it goes to the moderators. That same thing is true for some of the artificial intelligence. Some of it's reviewed by moderators as well. Here's your problem. Particularly when it comes to conservatives because you post something conservative on Facebook. And if you are noticed by some of these liberal hacks that are watching Facebook accounts, they will gang up on you. And they use these bots to pretend that there is an incredible rage that there are hundreds of people who are very upset by what you just had on Facebook. When in reality, no, one's upset and they're just trying to shut you down. And there might only be two or three people who actually know about it, but they'll use these kinds of artificial intelligence, bots to flood Facebook with complaints. And they're doing that on Twitter. The left is doing it all over the place. So what happens next? The big challenge for Facebook is there are 2.7 billion users. Can you even wrap your head around a number like that? That is just massive. So they've got 2.7 billion users, and now, obviously, not everybody's on every day. But some percentage of them. And I've seen it's in the hundreds of millions of posts every day on Facebook and they log in and look around. Facebook only has 15,000 moderators. So for 2.7 billion people, 15,000 moderators just isn't a lot. And the other problem is that the moderators are suing Facebook. And they came up. This was about a year ago. With a $52 million settlement with moderators and the moderators are saying, Hey, first of all, we're crazy overworked. And then secondarily, we've got PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder. And they're saying that they have this because of the stuff that they've had to see, they alleged that reviewing violent and graphic images, sometimes stuff. My gosh, I might've gotten mentioned here on the air, but they had to view these. For Facebook. And they said, this just led us to PTSD. I can see that particularly since they have to have so many every day. So many of these different posts that they have to look at. And they are clocked and they are third-party contractors. They're just, all this stuff adds up. Doesn't it? Moderators who worked in California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida from 2015 until last year, every moderator will receive a minimum of a thousand dollars as well as additional funds if they are diagnosed with PTSD or related conditions. So they're saying there's about 11,000 moderators that were eligible for this compensation. But this is a very big deal. It's difficult. How do you deal with that? They've got now 15,000 moderators who are reviewing the posts of these 2.7 billion users. There is a little bit of an escalation procedure, although it's a very difficult and because there are so many people who are. Complaining and trying to take care of everything. It is a very tough situation, really for everybody involved. So they've decided what Facebook needs Facebook's decided this themselves is they've got to moderate themselves a little bit better, and the way they are going to do all of this moderation is they're going to have this kind of Supreme court that supervises. All of the moderation going on within Facebook. So they call him the new to an oversight board and. Obviously with just one board, without very many people on it, it is only going to be able to handle a small number of cases. So they have been paying attention to some of the cases. And they're trying to set precedents that will be followed by the moderators and millions of other cases. It's basically the same thing that the U S Supreme court does, where they review cases that come up from the federal district court. They can have cases that are coming up from individual States as well. And then they set standards and, without going into all of the detail of disputes between district courts, et cetera, we'll see what happens in Facebook, but lower courts are treating these us Supreme court. Rulings and dicta as binding precedents for everything in the future. So it's not easy to do in our courts. We're certainly not great at it. And there are a lot of complex procedures. And even if you're talking about moderation where you bring a moderator in. And there are some standards for that in disputes between businesses where you'll pull in a neutral third party. And they'll just usually split things down the middle. But those are going to be difficult for Facebook to put in how they reviewed five decisions. These are pretty substantive. Sixth case apparently became moot after the user deleted the post. We have an uprising and Miramar right now. You might've seen it on TV. If you're paying attention. I know a couple of channels have been talking about it. But this is an interesting problem because the military has overthrown the potentially properly democratically elected government. What do you do if there is massive cheating going on in the election? We faced that question here ourselves. In Miramar, they went ahead and the military took over and imprisoned the president. There was a post talking about that and talking about Muslims in France and China. Another one about Azerbaijanis. I don't know if you've seen what happened with Armenia and Azerbaijan and lots of history going back there with the Soviets and they created this whole problem because they didn't like the Armenians, but anyways, of all of these five, they disagreed with the lower moderators opinions and they overturned them. I think it's really good. I looked at these cases and I was shocked. I think they're doing the right thing here. Isn't that weird? Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson. Visit me online Craig peterson.com. Hey, did you know, there is a war, if you will, between Facebook and Apple? It is getting nasty. What's going on over there. That's what we're going to talk about right now. Your privacy, Facebook, Apple, and Android. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me. My golly. You know what I think about Facebook when it comes to privacy, right? Facebook and Google. I think Facebook is worse than Google, frankly. They just don't respect your privacy. They will go ahead and look at anything that they can get their hands on. We'll at that point, just go ahead and pull it together and sell it to anybody that's willing to pay. I am not fond of that. And I think you can probably guess why, and I doubt your fond of that at as well. You're not fond of that either. Apple did something. If that has really upset. Facebook and Zuckerberg have been making a lot of noise about this, but Apple announced plans about a week ago to finally roll out a change that they were putting into place in iOS 14, which is the operating system for the iPhones and iPads that Apple has. They had announced that they were going to add it the late last year. And there was huge pushback from Facebook and a few others as well. What's going on here? Bottom line is that Apple is trying to force. Apps to be transparent. What privacy do you have? What data are they taking? And in the case of iOS, as well as Android and windows, and Macs, there has been the ability for certain applications to be able to look at other apps that are on the device. And by doing that, it can get data from it. They can figure out who you are. They can give a unique fingerprint based on what apps you have and what versions they are. They're pretty clever about what they've been doing in order to harvest your information. Now you might have noticed if you go in. To the app store that there's been actually a big change already. This is the Apple app store. If you go in there and you pull up an app, any app, so let's pull up Facebook and then in the app store, and then you click, obviously on Facebook, you scroll down the app store page about Facebook. And partway down, it already has privacy information. You want to click on more info project early if it's Facebook because it doesn't fit on that homepage for the Facebook app. And it will tell you everything. Everything that Facebook wants access to. Now, some of it's self-reported by the app developers. Some of it is the stuff that happened. Figure it out either electronically or by getting people involved. I would like to think that when it comes to something as big as Facebook, they really are going that extra mile. And making sure that yes, indeed, this information is valid, it is what it is. They may not, and I'm not quite sure, but look at all of the stuff Facebook is gaining access to with you. So that was a bit of a hit people were pretty excited. Oh, wow. This is great. And although Google doesn't do what we're talking about here quite yet, I'm sure they will be not in the way that Apple is doing it, but because remember Google makes money off of you and your information, Facebook makes money off of you and your information. So if you want privacy, you cannot use Google products like Android or. Chrome. And if you want privacy, you can't use Facebook. So it's as simple as that. Of course, the big question, and we talked about this earlier in the show is how much privacy can you expect? How much do you want? What's legitimate, right? All of those types of questions. So what Apple's doing now is they said that in early spring of 2021, they are going to release this new version of iOS. And here's what happens. They've added something and this is according to a white paper and Q and a that Apple sent out. They added something called app tracking transparency, and this is going to require apps to get the user's permission before tracking their data across apps or websites owned by other companies. Under settings users will be able to see which apps have requested permission to track so they can make changes. As they see fit. You might have noticed that already under settings as you can look at the microphone settings, it'll tell you. Okay. Here's the apps that I have asked about the microphone and you can turn them off. Here's the apps that have asked about the camera. You can turn them off. So they're adding more functionality. They also, in the FAQ, they said that app developers will not be able to require users to allow tracking in order for those users to gain access to the full capabilities of the app. Now, you know how I've talked before extensively about how, if it's free your, the product. So what Apple is doing is they're saying, Hey guys if the user says, no, you can't try it. Track me across apps. No, you can't get it. This privacy information, which Apple's letting you do, they cannot Labatt automize. The app is what it comes right down to. So it was in September last year that they first said they were going to do that. Then they delayed the implementation of this tracking policy. So the businesses and app developers could get more time to figure this out. One of the things that I think is fascinating here is what Facebook's doing with fighting back. Oh, and by the way, Apple has not just gotten complaints from Facebook. There are other marketers and tech companies that frankly it makes Apple more vulnerable to some of these antitrust investigations that have been. Started really against some of these big tech companies. Although, I don't really expect much to happen under the current administration in Washington because frankly, big companies love big regulations. Because they can afford to comply with them, but startup little companies who are competitors of theirs cannot afford the lawyers for the paperwork and everything out. I look at the CMMC, we do a lot of work for the DOD, department of defense contractors, where we secure their networks. We secure their computers, we secure everything. We put it all together. And we also, for some of them there's guys, there's a 50, $50,000 upcharge for this. And that's because we're cheap. Believe it or not, it is a lot higher for other companies to do it, but we do all of the paperwork, putting together all of the policies, all of the procedures, what they have and. Auditing everything for them. And we're talking about a case and a half of paper thinking of the big cases of paper, right? 500 sheets and the ream and how many reams in a box? 10 20. I'm not even sure, but literally cases. And we. Printed it up, we wrote it all up, printed it all up, delivered it to a client just a few weeks ago. And it was a huge box of three-inch ring binders. It was all in and they didn't all fit in there. They're the big guys in the department of defense probably love this because they pay a million bucks to the people, the generate the paperwork for them internally. And they know the little guys can't afford to have full-time paper pushers. And so that's why, even though we're talking about months worth of work, why we charge 50 grand, which is a heck of a lot cheaper, believe it or not. And it's a huge discount for us. So I don't expect that the fed you're going to come up with a solution. That's truly going to help the little guy here, but Apple's announcement praised by privacy advocate nonprofits as well. And Facebook apparently has been buying full-page newspaper ads claiming it's going to hurt small businesses in a way it will cause it can make advertising. Just a little bit harder. And apparently, also Facebook has decided to rewrite its apps. So no longer even requests to access, cross-app access to your personal information. We're going to wrap up, talk a little bit about Comcast data cap, and some of these SolarWinds hack victims that didn't use SolarWinds, and ransomware payoffs have surged, even though the number of people affected has gone down. Make sure you get on my email list so that you get all of the important news. You're going to get some of this little training I'm doing and the courses that we've developed. The only way to do that is to go to Craig Peterson.com/subscribe. That's how you get on those lists and I'm not sitting there and pounding you or anything else, but I want to keep you informed. So there you go. We're probably going to increase our volume from one email a week to three so that we can provide you with a little bit more training. I want to keep these down to something that just takes you a few minutes to go through, but could save you millions of your business and tens of thousands, your retirement, if you are a home user. So make sure you are on that list. Craigpeterson.com/subscribe. Comcast. I know many of us have Comcast, I certainly do, is imposing data caps on many people in many parts of the country. That includes people to the South here, Massachusetts residents. What do you think they're doing down there? The state lawmakers have proposed a ban on data caps, a ban on new fees, and a ban on price increases for home internet services. The idea from their standpoint is we have a lot of people who are working at home because of a lockdown. What are they supposed to be doing? I'll take my daughter, one of my daughters, as an example, she's working at home. She used to work in a call center she'd go to every day. Now she's working at home. Are they paying a wage differential for her? Are they paying for the electric bill? They're not even paying for the phone bill or the phone. She has to provide her own phone. She takes inbound calls for a call center. Can you believe that? It's just amazing what's happened. The company is saving just a ton of money because people don't have to go into work. You can bet they're going to dispose of some of this space that they've been. What's happening here, we are using more bandwidth than we've ever used because more people are at home and it isn't all business related many are watching Netflix or you've got Netflix on in the background while you're working on stuff. It's just so common to do that. What data caps are doing is they say you can only use so much data a month. Then there's usually a penalty of some sort. In Comcast's case, they said for the first quarter of 2021, I believe is what they had come up with. We'll just warn you that you go over your data cap then they'll charge extra. I have a friend who has Comcast and he said, I think it took him like three days before he went over the data cap. That's not long.  It's because they're streaming TV. They've got kids working from home. Then you've got meetings that they're going to, that are now streaming. So I can see this, but from Comcast side, they now have to handle more data than they've ever had to handle before. Because we are using it, like for my daughter, she actually has a cell phone, but all of the calls are routed over the internet. Cause her cell phone hooks up to the wifi in the house and the calls come in and go out via that wifi.  It goes through the internet, it goes to her phone carrier's network. Then it goes to the call centers network. So there you go. What does that need? That needs to make sure there's no jitter. You don't want voice packets to be dropped because then it sounds terrible. It's very obvious when audio is dropped. I don't know if you've noticed if you're streaming something from one of these online streaming video services, but sometimes. It will hiccup a little bit, but have you noticed that with the smaller hiccups, the audio is fine and the problem is in the video. Now they do that for a couple of reasons, obviously video uses more bandwidth than audio uses, but the other reason is people tend to get more annoyed by audio fallout and audio problems. Comcast is saying, Hey guys, look at what we have to do with our networks. We have to expand them. We have to increase them. Now I've got to bring up again the Biden administration because of what they're planning on doing with this fairness doctrine on the internet. What they're planning on doing is saying, Hey, Comcast, just because this person uses five terabytes of data a month, you should not be charging them more than grandma that uses 10 gigabytes a month. Thousands of times more bandwidth requirements, you're not allowed to bill them differently. Cause a bit is a bit which is absolutely insane. I don't know how they can justify this sort of thing. So what's going to happen is you get companies like Comcast or other internet providers who are going to say. We are not going to invest any money into expanding our capacity because we can't charge for it. Doesn't that make sense to you? It makes perfect sense to me. By getting the FCC involved, it's just going to be crazy. Ajit Pi resigned when President Trump was leaving, he used to be the chairman. He actually had a head on his shoulders, but these new people President Biden put in there, it's insanity what they're trying to do with our networks. It's going to make it much worse. Comcast is putting data caps in. You hit the data cap it, they're just going to slow you way down. That happens too, with a lot of our cell phones, our cell phone carriers, if you use more data than they've allotted to you, they'll drop you back. So most people have 4g. Yeah. Okay. Your phone's 5g, but really guess what? You're not getting 5g. It's very rare unless you are on the T-Mobile slash Sprint plan. T-Mobile more specifically because nobody else has the coverage that T-Mobile has for 5g. So you're using 4g LTE, you hit your data cap. They're going to drop you back to 3g, which is really slow comparing the two together, all the three of them, frankly, but it's very slow compared to a 4g LTE. In mass, by the way, I should mention Verizon files and RCN. Do not impose the data caps. It's just our friends at Comcast that are doing that Vargas and Rogers. They let a group of 71 different Massachusetts lawmakers urged Comcast to halt the enforcement. By the way, the data cap is 1.2 terabytes per month, which is actually quite a bit of data. You'd have to spend a lot of time streaming TV. The cap does hurt low-income people is no question about it. If you are being forced to work from home because of the lockdown, the government's forcing you to work from home. They put their fingers in anything, and that just never seems to work out anyhow. We'll see what happens down in mass with Comcast and these guys.

Welcome!   It is another busy week on the technology front.  We delve into the Military's use of drones and AI.  We will discuss why Facebook thinks Apple has declared war.  Ransomware is up. It turns out that many of those who were victims of the SolarWinds hack did not use their software. They were breached because they had misconfiguration. Well, just a taste of today's topics, and there is even more, so be sure to Listen in. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read: Drone Swarms Are Getting Too Fast For Humans To Fight, U.S. General Warns Building Your Personal Privacy Risk Tolerance Profile Breach Data Highlights a Pivot to Orgs Over Individuals Facebook “Supreme Court” overrules company in 4 of its first 5 decisions State reps try to ban Comcast data cap and price hikes until pandemic is over Every crazy thing that happened in Apple and Facebook’s privacy feud today 30% of “SolarWinds hack” victims didn’t actually use SolarWinds Ransomware Payoffs Surge by 311% to Nearly $350 Million --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hi everybody. Of course, Craig Peterson here. We're going to talk today about these drone swarms, your personal privacy risk tolerance breach highlights here over org's not individuals. What's going on? Ransomware is way up. As usual, a lot to talk about. Hey, if you miss part of my show, you can always go online to Craig peterson.com. You'll find it there if you're a YouTube fan CraigPeterson.com/youtube. This is really an interesting time to be alive. Is that a good way to put it right? There used to be a curse "May you live in interesting times" Least that was the rumor. One of the listeners pointed this out, there was a TV show that was on about five years ago, apparently, and it used this as a premise. I also saw a great movie that used this as a premise, and it was where the President was under attack. He was under attack by drones. The Biden administration has a policy now where they're calling for research into artificial intelligence, think the Terminator, where you can have these fighting machines. These things should be outlawed, but I also understand the other side where if we don't have that tech and our enemies end up having that tech, we are left at a major disadvantage. Don't get me wrong here. I just don't like the idea of anybody doing Terminators, Skynet type of technology. They have called for it to be investigated. What we're talking about right now are the drone swarms. Have you seen some of these really cool drones that these people called influencers? Man, the term always bothers me. So many people don't know what they're doing. They just make these silly videos that people watch, and then they make millions, tens of millions. I guess it's not silly after all. These influencers make these videos. There are drones that they can use if they're out hiking, you might've noticed, or mountain biking or climbing. They have drones now that will follow them around automatically. They are on camera. It's following them. It focuses on their face. They can make the drone get a little closer or further away. As long as the sky is clear, there's no tree branches or anything in the way that drone is going to be able to follow them, see what they're doing and just really do some amazing shots. I've been just stunned by how good they are. Those drones are using a form of artificial intelligence, and I'm not going to really get into it right now, but there are differences between machine learning and artificial intelligence, but at the very least here, it's able to track their faces. Now, this is where I start getting really concerned. That's one thing. But they are apparently, right now, training. When I say they, the Chinese and probably us, too, are designing drones that not only have cameras on them but are military drones.  They have without them having to have a central computer system controlling them or figuring out targets. They're able to figure out where there's a human and take them out. These small drones, they're not going to take them out by firing a 50 caliber round at them. These drones can't carry that kind of firepower. It's just too heavy, the barrels and everything else -- it's a part of that type of a firearm.  We're talking about small drones again. So obviously, they're not going to have a missile on them either. What they do is they put a small amount, just a fraction of an ounce, of high explosives on the drone.  The idea is if that drone crashes into you and sets off its explosives, you're dead, particularly if it crashes into and sets off explosives right there by your head. Now that's pretty bad when you get down to it. I don't like the whole Skynet Terminator part of this, which is that the drones are able to find that human and then kill them. Think of a simple scenario where there is, let's say there's a war going on. Let's use the worst-case scenario and, enemy troops are located approximately here. You send the drones out, and the drone has, of course, GPS built into it, or some other inertial guidance system or something in case GPS gets jammed. That drone then goes to that area. It can recognize humans, and it says, Oh, there's a human, and it goes and kills the human. Now that human might be an innocent person. Look at all of the problems we've had with our aerial drones, the manually controlled ones, just the ones that we've been using in the last 10 years where we say, okay, there's a terrorist here. Now they fly it in from. They've got somebody controlling it in Nevada or wherever it might be, and they get their strike orders and their kill orders. They go in, and they'd take it out. There are collateral damages. Now that's always been true. Every war. Look at Jimmy Stewart. For example, younger kids probably don't know who it is. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was one of his movies.  He had some great Christmas movies and stuff too. Anyhow, Jimmy Stewart was a bomber. I think he was a pilot actually in World War II.  He flew combat missions over Germany. Think of what we did in Germany, in Japan, where we killed thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds, probably of thousands of civilians. We now think, Oh, we're much better than that. We don't do that anymore. We're careful about civilian casualties. Sometimes to the point where some of our people end up getting in harm's way and killed.  For the most part, we try and keep it down. A drone like this that goes into an area, even if it's a confined area, and we say, kill any humans in this area, there are going to be innocent casualties.  It might even be "friendly fire." You might even be taking out some of your own people. They've said, okay, we've got a way around this. What we're going to do is we're going to use artificial intelligence. The drone doesn't just pick out, Oh, this is a human. I'm going to attack that person. It looks at the uniform. It looks at the helmet.  It determines which side they're on.  If they're wearing an American or Chinese uniform, whatever, it might be programmed for it again. It goes into the area, it finds a human and identifies them as the enemy. Then it goes in and hits them and blows up, killing that person. That's one way that they are looking to use drones. The other way is pretty scary. It's, you can defend yourself against a drone, like that. You've got a drone coming. You're probably going to be able to hear it. Obviously, it depends. That drone gets close. I don't know if you've ever had the kids playing with drones, flying them around you, or you've done the same thing. You can always hit it out of the air, can't you? If you're military and you have a rifle in your arm, you can just use the rifle and play a little baseball with that drone. There's some interesting stories of people who've been doing that already. What happens if we're not talking about a drone, we're talking about a drone swarm. I don't know that you could defend against something like that. There have been studies that have been done. So think, you think there nobody's really working this suit? No, they sure are. What's going to happen? Well, the Indian army is one that has admitted to doing tests, and they had a swarm of 75 drones. If you have 75 drones coming after you, let's say you're a high-value target. There is no way you're going to be able to defend yourself against them unless you can duck and cover, and they can't get anywhere near you with their high explosives. The Indian army had these Kamikaze-attack drones. They don't necessarily have to even have high explosives on them. This is a new interpretation under Joseph Biden. Mr. President of the Pentagon's rules of use of autonomous weapons. We've always had to have "meaningful human control." That's the wording that the Pentagon uses meaningful human control over any lethal system. Now that could be in a supervisory role rather than direct control. So they call it "human on the loop" rather than "human in the loop." But this is very difficult to fight against. The US army is spending now billions of dollars on new air defense vehicles. These air defense vehicles have cannons, two types of missiles, jammers.  They're also looking at lasers and interceptor drones, so they can use the right weapon against the right target at the right time. That's going to be absolutely vital here because it's so cheap to use a drone. Look what happened. What was a year plus ago now? I'm trying to remember, Central America, Venezuela, somewhere in there where El Presidente for life was up giving a speech. I'm sorry. I didn't mean that to be insulting, but that often is what ends up happening. A drone comes up, and everybody's thinking: Oh, it's a camera drone, wave to the camera thing. It got very close to the President and then blew up. On purpose, right? They were trying to murder the president. That's a bad thing. He was okay. I guess some of the people got minor injuries, relatively speaking. When we're looking at having large numbers of incoming threats, not just one drone, but many drones, many of those drones may be decoys. How cheap is it to buy one of these drones? Just like the ones that were used in China over the Olympic stadium, where they were all controlled by a computer. You just have these things, decoys. All you need is a few of them that can blow up and kill the people you want to kill very concerning if you ask me. We're paying attention to this, as are other countries as they're going forward. We're going to talk about building your privacy risk tolerance profile because if you're going to defend yourself, you have to know what you're going to defend against and how much defense do you need? Hey, we take risks every day. We take risks when we're going online. But we're still getting out of bed. We're still going into the bathroom. We're still driving cars. How about your online privacy risk tolerance? What is it? Hi everybody. Thanks for joining me. We all take risks, and it's just part of life. You breathe in air, which you need. You're taking the risk of catching a cold or the flu, or maybe of having some toxic material inhaled. We just don't know, do we? Well, on any given day, when we go online, we're also facing risks. And the biggest question I have with clients when I'm bringing businesses on or high-value individuals who need to protect themselves and their information is: okay... what information do you have that you want to try and protect? And what is your personal privacy risk tolerance? So we build a bit of her profile from that, and you guys are going to get the advantage of doing that right now without having to pay me, my team. How's that for simple? First of all, we got to understand that nothing is ever completely safe. When you're going online, you are facing real risks, and no matter what people tell you, there is no way to be a hundred percent sure that your data is going to be safe online or that your individual personal, private information is going to be safe while you're online. And there's a few reasons for this. The most obvious one, and the one we think about, I think the most has to do with advertising. There are a lot of marketers out there that want to send a message to us at exactly the right time. The right message, too, obviously? So how can they do that? They do that by tracking you via Google. So Google that's their whole business model to know everything they can about you and then sell that information. Facebook, same thing. Both of those companies are trying to gather your information. They're doing it when you are not just on their sites, but when you are on other people's sites. Third-party sites are tracking you. In fact, if you go to my website @ craigpeterson.com, you'll see that I do set a Facebook cookie. So I know that you're on Facebook and you visited my site, and you might be interested in this or that. Now I'm not a good marketer. Because I'm not using that information for anything, at least not right now, hopefully in the future, we'll start to do some stuff. But that's what they're doing. And the reason why I don't think it's a terrible thing don't know about you. I don't think it's bad that they know that I'm trying to go ahead and buy a car right now. Because if I'm trying to buy a car, I want advertisements about cars and I don't want to advertisements about the latest Bugatti or Ferrari, whatever it might be. I want a Ford truck, right? Just simple something I can haul stuff around. You already know I have a small farm, and I need a truck because you need one. I'd love to have a front loader and everything too. Those costs money, and I ain't got it. So that makes sense to me. And now there's the other side, which is the criminal side. And then there's really a third side, which is the government side. So let's go with the government side here. In the United States, our government is not supposed to track us. Now I say "supposed to," because we have found out through Edward Snowden and many other means that they have been tracking us against the law. And then they put in some laws to let them do some of it, but our government has been tracking us. And one of the ways it tracks us is through the "five eyes" program, and now that's been expanded and then expanded again. But the five eyes program is where the United States asks the United Kingdom. Hey, listen. Hey bro. Hey, we can't, and we're not allowed to track our citizens, but you not us.  How about we have you track Trump and his team? Yeah, that's what we'll do. So there's an example of what evidence is showing has happened. So they go to a third-party country that's part of this agreement,d where all of these countries have gotten together, how signed papers and said, yeah, we'll track each other citizens for each other. And that way, the United States could say, Hey, we're not tracking you. And yet they're tracking because they're going to a third-party country. And the United States, if you are going out of the country, then again, they can track you. Any communications are going out of the country. So that's the government side. And then, of course, there's governments that track everything. You look at China and how they control all of the media. They control all of the social networking sites. They basically control everything out there. We have to be careful with all of that stuff because it can and will be used. And we've seen it has been used to really not just harass people, but do things like throwing them in prison disappear them. Look at what just happened in China, with the head of China's biggest company, basically the Amazon competitor over there. And he disappeared for months and then came back, just praising the Chinese Communist government and how great it is to have all of these people over there. Just telling them what to do and how to do it. We obviously don't live in China. We obviously, I think, have oligarchs nowadays. We have people who are rich, who are running the country. They're giving money to campaigns. They get the ear. You have seen all of the bribery allegations against the Biden crime family, or his brother, his son, other members, himself as well, based on a hundred Biden's laptop. So I don't trust the government for those very reasons. The hackers, let's get into the hackers here. When it comes to hackers, there are, again, a few different types. You've got hackers that are working for governments. And what they're doing is in the case of a small government, like North Korea, they're trying to get their hands on foreign currencies so that they can use those currencies to buy grain, to buy oil, coal, whatever it is they might need to buy. You have governments like China and Russia that are trying to basically run World War three. And they're out there with their hacking teams and groups and trying to figure out how do we get into the critical infrastructure in the United States? Okay. So this is how we get in. Okay. We're in over there. So if we ever want to shut down all of the power to New York City, this is what we do. Now, remember, that's what happened back in, in when was that 2004, I guess that was, yeah. I remember I was down in, I was heading actually to New York City and then all of a sudden, all of the power went out. That apparently was an accident, but it didn't need to be an accident. There are all kinds of allegations about what actually happened there. But that's why China and Russia are trying to get into our systems. And then they obviously want to play havoc. Look at the havoc that was caused in the US economy by this China virus that came obviously from China for Huan. If they wanted to shut down our economy, they now have proof that's all it takes. And they are working on the genetics of some of these viruses over there in China. And they're trying to modify the genes, and they are running experiments on their troops to enhance them, to make these super soldiers that maybe, need less sleep or less food are stronger or et cetera, et cetera, they are doing that. So China is a real threat in just a number of different ways. What would it be like if they could shut down our banking system or make it, so we don't trust it anymore? Okay. That's part one of your Personal Privacy Risk Tolerance Profile. Stick around because we're going to talk more about this and what you can do to help you have privacy. What is your online personal privacy risk tolerance? It's going to vary. I help high-value individuals. I help businesses with this, and now I'm helping you as well. So let's get into part two. Craig Peterson here. When people ask me, what should I do? That is a very nuanced question. At least it's very nuanced to answer because you could say something like: if you want to be private, use Signal for messaging and use Tor for web browsing, that's fine. And it works in some ways and not in others. For instance, Tor is a web browser that is like a super VPN.  It is set up so that you're not just coming from one exit point, you're coming from a whole bunch of different points on the internet. So it's hard to track you down. The problem, however, with Tor is the same problem that you have with VPN services. And I talk about this all the time. VPN services do not make your data secure. It does not keep it private. And in the case of VPN services that you might get for free or even buy, and also the case with Tor. Using those VPN services that can make you less secure again. Why did Sutton rob banks? He robbed banks because that's where the money was, where he is a bad guy going to go. If they want easy and quick access to lots of peoples. Private information? They're going to hack a VPN server aren't they? Yeah. And if they can't hack the VPN server, why not just have server space in the same data center that VPN provider is renting their space from and then hack it from there, try and get in from there. Or maybe get into the service; the data centers will logs or the VPN servers logs, because even when they say they don't log, they all log, they have to log, they have to have your information otherwise, how can they bill you? And the ones that say we don't log, which are those people are "lieing" by the way. But those guys that have these VPN servers and they're trying not to log, they're trying not to log where you're going. They get fooled all of the time as well. Because their servers have logs, even if they're deleted and disappear. So I just wanted to make it clear that you, I, if you have a low risk tolerance, when it comes to your privacy, Tor is not going to do it for you. VPN services are not going to do it for you. You have to look at all of the individual things you're doing online and then decide based on those. What is it that is the most. Beneficial for you in that particular case. Okay. So Signal, I brought it up. So let's talk about it for a minute. Signal is the messaging app to use bar none. Signal is encrypted and do, and it is known to be highly secure, which again, Doesn't mean it's a hundred percent, but with Signal, you can talk to people on other platforms. You can have a Mac and talk to somebody on a, on an Android or a windows device. But another consideration is who are you talking to? If you're talking to other people that have Macs and you don't want your information to get out, but you're not horrifically worried about it, right? You want it to be private. You want end to end encryption. You're better off using iMessage on your Mac. If you're on Windows or Android, there are not any great built-in messaging apps. WhatsApp. If you listened last week and I've got it up on my website, WhatsApp is not great. They claim it's not horrible, but why would you use it if there's a question use Signal instead. All right. So there's just a lot to consider when we're talking about it, but here is your big bang for the buck thing. That you can do. And that is use password manager. Now we talked about how Google Chromium Google's Chrome and of course now Microsoft edge. Actually it was the other way around Microsoft edge came up with it first and now Google's adding it. But Edge has this password manager built-in. That's all well and good, but I don't know, trust those. I use a third party password manager that is designed for password management and that's all the company does. They're focused on the security behind it, which is why I recommend 1Password and lLastPass. 1Password being my absolute favorite. Use those password managers. That's the biggest bang for your buck if you have a low tolerance for your information, getting out. All right? Now that will help to enforce good password habits. It will generate passwords for you, both of those, and it'll generate good passwords and it'll keep them for you, which is really great. If you don't want to be tracked while you're browsing online, you can use an ad blocker. I have a couple of webinars I've done on that. If you want a video of one of those webinars to go through that talks about these different blockers ad blockers and others. I'd be glad to send you a link to one of them, but you're going to have to email Me@craigpeterson.com. And I will send you a link to one of those webinars I did on that stuff. No problem. But some websites are going to break when you use an ad blocker. So sometimes you have to turn it off and you have to turn it back on. The ones I tell you  how to use and how to configure, I actually show you a step-by-step we walked through it. Those allow you to turn off that particular ad blocker on an individual site that was broken because of the ad blocker. So pretty straightforward. You don't have to remember to turn it all on and all off. All right. Now studies are showing that people are concerned about their privacy. In fact, I believe last I saw said that I think it was about 70% of Americans believe that their smart phones are being tracked by advertisers, and the tech companies provide them with the information.  May, 2020 Pew research report talked about this, but 85% of consumers worry, they can trust corporations with their data. So what do you do? Because. Most people don't have the support or the tools. They don't have. I have the money, they didn't get a big inheritance. They're not a high value individual that needs my help and can afford it -- where we go through everything that they do and make sure they have the best solution for each thing, including banking, including going online and trading stocks, all of that stuff. You gotta be very careful with all of that stuff.  I'm really sad that I have to say this here, but there are no online privacy solutions that will work for everybody. And there are no solutions that work in every situation either. So what you need to do is understand what you care the most about. And I think for all of us, what we should care the most about is our financial situation and anything associated with that: our intellectual property, if we're businesses, our bank accounts, all of that sort of stuff is stuff we really should be concerned about. And that means you need to watch it. Make sure you're not sharing stuff that you really don't want to share. Okay? So even privacy experts like myself, don't lock everything down. We locked most of it down. Particularly since we have department of defense clients, we have to maintain a very high standard. All right. Stick around and visit me online. CraigPeterson.com. Make sure you sign up for my newsletter. You'll get all of the latest news and the tips I send out every week. I don't want to leave you hanging. We're going to get into a few more things to consider here, because obviously we are going to share some of our personal information. So I'm going to tell you how I share my personal information and it might be a bit of a surprise. Hello everybody. Thanks for listening. We all enjoy products and services, and that's what I'm saying. When when I talk about security experts, we don't lock everything down. I've used 23 in me. I did that thing, of course, I'm sending in my DNA. That's been an issue in some cases, but that's what I did. I use these online map programs. I use Google maps. I use weighs more than Google maps. I use Apple maps cause I'm trying to figure out how do I get to where I want to go in a reasonable amount of time. But what I do is I lie about the answer to the security questions. Okay. I don't want them to know my dad's name. My mother's maiden name, the street. I was, I grew up on my first school, my first car, none of their business. Because it's a lot of that information is actually publicly available. How many of us on LinkedIn have right there in our profile? Yeah I went to McGill university or I w I grew up here's pictures of my childhood home, and that picture has GPS coordinates in it. So if we use the real information. We are giving away way too much. I use a little phrase I coined here, which is lie to your bank. And you might remember. I did a show on that sometime ago. And the idea here is in your line to the bank about your financial situation, it's nothing like that. You're lying to your bank about this personal information. They don't need to know these personal questions. They give you for their security questions. It's really important to understand all of this stuff. Okay. For instance, this is Jennifer Granick, she's at the ACL, you and she said her dad died recently. And the accountant said it's really important to report the death to credit companies because the answers to many of the security questions are on the public death certificate. So answers to security questions really can be a nightmare, but that doesn't mean you have to give them the right answers. So for instance, I found a site online. I should try and dig that up again, but it generated fake identities. And I had a generate like 5,000 of them for me thinking, okay, they might go at some point and it even generated fake social security numbers, fake phone numbers, names, addresses, everything, everything you'd need for a fake identity. And the idea here isn't to cheat anybody out of anything. The idea is, Hey, Mr. Website, you don't know, you don't need to know who I really am. So on some websites, I'm female some websites I've, I'm only 30 years old on other websites. I'm 80 years old. It doesn't matter. You can call it a lie if you want. But in reality, you're just trying to keep your information straight not and another advantage. Of these password managers. Cause you're trying to keep your information straight, right? It's hard to remember a lie and you have to tell a lie to enforce a lie. You're not, all that stuff your mother told you. And she's right about that too, by the way. But if you're using a password manager, what I do is I create a unique email address. In fact, my email addresses are extremely unique, so I'll use a plus sign as part of my email address and my mail server knows. Oh, okay. That's just Craig trying to track who is using. That email address. So I'll have Craig plus YouTube for instance, or@mainstreamdotnetorcraigpeterson.com. I actually have a whole bunch of domains that I use as well. And if you want a secure email service have look at proton mail. They're actually very good from a security standpoint. So there's nothing illegal about giving them this information. Yeah. You're lying to them, but you gotta keep your lies straight. Another reason to use a password manager because I have the password manager generate my. My password I put in the email, which is unique for every website I go to, I never use that same email address twice if I can avoid it. And then I, and I use aliases too in my email server. And then I go and in my notes section for that website in my password manager, I put in the answers to the security questions and I just make stuff up nonsensical stuff. So it's asking what my first car, it might be a transformational snooze. There you go. I just made something up. So I'll put those notes into my notes in my password manager and save them. So if I ever have to do some sort of a recovery with those guys, it's going to be simple. Because I just look in my password manager, I got to go in there anyways to get my password right. And my email address or username to login. And there it is, there's my security questions. And then the password manager, cause I'm using one password. It has a little database, it keeps and everything in there is encrypted. And the only way to decrypted is with my password, my one password, that's it. You only have to remember one password and that's the password to one password so that you can decrypt that little vault of a database of all of your information. So I have, I bought a, I think it's a 30 plus character password I use for one password because yeah, I'm a little bit paranoid about all that sort of stuff. So that's a really good way to be able to keep your information safe. I talked last week about a friend of mine. Whose wife went on Facebook to get some help, some tips on selling her investments investment anyways, and the disaster. That was okay. So a lot of people have regrets about what they've posted on Facebook, and there's a really cool thing out of CMU. Carnegie Mellon university, where these, how many, it's six guys and gals. They put together this special report. I regretted the minute I pressed share a qualitative study of regrets on Facebook. Very interesting. So they looked at all of this stuff as best they possibly could. And what did they find? Some examples, just think for yourself what regrets you might have. I know friends of mine in the grads that they have had. But there are a lot, so they go through privacy risk. I can send you a copy of this article if you're interested. It talks about their methodology. They analyze comments on the New York times website and others Craig's list to regroup people. They, so they've got all of the stuff. Here you go sensitive content. Number one. So alcohol and illegal drug use. Think about that. Think about your employer, your next employer or the police. They got a report on you. Oh my, this is a bad person. So they go onto your Facebook page and they find. Oh, photos posted from a party with some very non unflattering photos in it. And even maybe mentioning a illegal drug use, what it thinks is going to happen. How about if you get stopped at the border coming back from Canada, Mexico, Europe. And they decide to do a little deeper look into you and they find this stuff online. The next one sexual content, you can imagine what that is. Think of a Congressman from New York, in fact, religion and politics apparently is one of the things people have regretted posting online, profanity and obscenities, personal and family issues. Working company here, negative or offensive comments it's arguments, lies and secrets, venting frustration, good intentions intended purposes. I didn't think about it. Hot. State. Yeah. Oh, my this thing just goes on and on, but keep all of this in mind, when you are trying to keep your information private, whether you are a business or an individual, you have to have eternal vigilant watch when your emotions are high, right. It's like drunk dialing. Don't do it. Or your emotions are high. Something's been going on. Don't put it online. So that's I think a real good bottom line about your. Personal privacy, risk tolerance profile. Okay. Be very careful. , don't put stuff that you don't want other people to see. It's not true that once it's out on the internet, it's there forever. It's not true that once you've posted it, it's there for anyone to discover. None of that's true. Not at all. Okay. But be very careful cover up your laptop cameras. In fact, in the improving windows security course, I go into this in quite a bit of detail, what you can do, what kind of cameras you can and should use, what sort of microphones you can or should use. Many people just cover up the laptop cameras with the sticky note. When they're not using it disable automatic image loading in your mail program. That's important. I do that as well, because that image that's in the email is usually being used to track you. It's really that simple. You've got new privacy laws in many States and in Europe, they are really not going to work or help you with your privacy, except with the really big companies out there. So keep all of that in mind. All right, everybody.  I want to encourage you go to Craig peterson.com. You'll see all kinds of great information there. You're going to be able to also listen to my whole show, pick up all the little training tips and even find out about the courses that I'm offering. Craig peterson.com I guess this is a little bit of good news. If you're a home user, not a business or some other organization, like a state or County or city office, but we've got some breach numbers that have just come out for 2020. We're going to talk about right now. Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining me.  Of course you can always go to my website. Yeah. Pick up all of the podcast in case you missed something today or another week, you'll find them right there@craigpeterson.com. You can also sign up for my email list and we're going to be doing a couple of different things here. I think in the near future, we're going to be sending out some reports that we made as part of the security summer thing I did a couple of years ago and each one of these reports and there's 30 something of them. Some of them are like five to seven pages long, but it's checklists of all the security things you should be worrying about. Now, if you are home user, you'll find a lot of these to be interesting. But if you're a business person, you work in an office, you help to run an office. You own a business. You need to make sure you get all of them. So make sure you are signed up Craig peterson.com and we'll be glad to get those out too. Plus we're also going to start something new every week. I usually have six to eight, sometimes as many as 10 articles in the week. I spend hours going through finding what I think are the most important things that interest me as well, but that I think will interest you guys. I put them in an email, it is it's not very long, but it's just a few sentences from each one of the stories and I have a link to the story as well, right there.  I'm going to start sending that out as well to everybody cause some people want my actual show notes. We're going to have the newsletter once a week. Then we're also planning on having a little video training as well. So it might just be straight, like straight audio. That's part of a video, but it'll be training on a specific security task or problem that's out there.  Then the course improving windows security. It's been taking us a long time. Blame it, mostly on me. Karen's also busy with babysitting grandkids at least a couple of days a week, and I'm trying to run a company as well. So it's, forgive us, but it is taking some time, but you're going to love this. I think it's turning out really well. I am about halfway done with the final edits. So I'm recording them. We go back and forth. They ended up recording them twice so that we get all of the points I wanted to cover into them. Karen's come up with a whole bunch of great screenshots and other pictures to go in with it so it's not one of these death by PowerPoint things. And we've got 21 different talks, if you will, on locking down windows and I go into the why's as well as the hows. I think that's really important, because if you don't understand why you're doing something. You're much less likely to do it. I picked that up from Mr. Tony Robbins, none other, the Anthony Robbins man. It's been over 20 years. Karen and I went to an event he had down in Boston and this was one of his firewalk or events.  We actually got to walk on hot coals it was the weirdess thing ever. Karen was totally freaking out and I was just, wow, this is going to be weird, but we both did it. It was phenomenal. Cause it of gave you an idea of, even if you have this mental block that you can't do something you probably can. We actually did and nobody's feet were burned or anything. It was real coals. It was real hot. They were really red. It was really something that at the very end they had a grass, a little square. Grass, maybe two, three feet by three feet and they had a hose running onto it. So you'd walk over it all. Then you'd just walk in on the grass and the idea there being, if you had any hot coals stuck to your foot. You probably didn't want those just stay on your foot. You'd probably want those, they get put out and taken off, so that's where that did. Anyhow. One of the things I learned from Tony was you need to have a strong reason why. We see this all of the time, Stephen Covey, if you read his stuff, you know it as well, you got to know why you're doing something. When it comes to computers and technology and security, you need to understand the why. Because it isn't just a rote thing. There are so many variations on what to do, but if you understand the why you're doing it, then I think it opens up a whole new world. You can explain it to your friends. You can help them understand it because finally you will understand it.  You'll be more motivated to do the things that you should be doing because you know why you're doing them, what it involves, what it's going to solve for you. This should be a really great course. And I spent some time in it going through the whys, give you some examples of problems people have had and what that solves. It's available hopefully here within a couple of weeks, man. I thought I'd be done by the end of January and here it's looking like it'll be the end of February. But be that as it may, keep your eyes out. If you've already emailed me to let me know, you're interested. That's great. I've got you on a list. I'll have to try and send out an email this week or sometime soon to let you guys know about it that we've got it ready for you?  We will have already for you, hopefully with the next couple of weeks. So that's that I'm told different way of doing things that's me. I like explaining things I've been told I'm good at it. So let's I think a good thing too. I started out the segment by talking about this probably good news for end users. Because in 2020 breaches were down by 19% while the impact of those breaches fell by nearly two thirds when we're measuring it by the number of people affected. Now, of course, if a company is breached and organization is breached, it's counted as one. One person, if you will affected, obviously it can affect a hundreds of thousands, millions of people, depending on what happens like a breach of Equifax. Are you counting that as one or you counting that as 300 million? Because that's how many records were stolen? I'm not sure it doesn't say it doesn't go into that much detail, but because the number of data breaches went down and the number of individuals affected by the data breach is plummeted. It's telling us something, then that is okay. That these hackers have moved away from collecting massive amounts of information and are targeting user credentials as a way to get into corporate networks to install ransomware. We've got even more news out this week about the solar winds hack. We talked about this before, and this is a company that makes software that's supposed to help manage networks, which means it's supposed to help make those networks safer. No, as it turns out, they weren't making it safer and it looks like maybe four years bad guys were in these networks that. We're being managed by solar winds, not with software, right? It's not as though solar winds was managing the network is solar winds sold software services so that you could manage your own networks or in many of these cases, they were actually managing networks of third-party businesses. I do work as well for high valued in value individuals, people who have a high profile that need to keep all of their data safe and they are constantly being gone after. They're trying to hack them all the time and the way they're trying to do it. And I talked about this really the first hour today is by this password stuffing thing. So they're trying to get in and they were successful and now it looks like it wasn't just Russia. Apparently China knew about this hack potential knew about this bug and was using it. And apparently it also was not. Just solar wind software. Now they're blaming some of this stuff on Microsoft office. If you have an office three 65 subscription, apparently they were using that to get in. So the bad guys are getting very selective. They want to go against companies and organizations like government agencies that have information there's really going to help them out. That is absolutely phenomenal. So these are stats from the identity theft resource center. And I was thumbing through as I was talking here. So it's saying that more than 300 million individuals were affected by data breaches in 2020, which means they must be counting the people whose. Information was stolen, not just the people that were hacked but it is a huge drop 66% over 2019. And the number of reported data breaches dropped to about 1100, which is about. 20% less than 2019. So it's good. It's bad. I think the mass data collection thing is over with now. They're not as interested in it, but they are very interested in strategic attacks as opposed to just these blanket. Let's grab as much data as we can because they want to get it into these government networks, which now we've, we know they've gotten into. And then you've got this double extortion thing going on with the ransomware, where again, the going after businesses and people who they know can pay. So that's good news for the rest of us, right? The home users. It's not good news so much for some of my clients, that's what we take care of. That's why we get paid the big bucks. Now how that works. Downright stick around. When we get back, we're going to be talking more about the news this week in particular, of course, security, Facebook and their Supreme court stick around. We'll be right back. The United States has a Supreme court. Our States each have their own Supreme courts. In fact, there's probably Supreme courts all over the world. But did you know that Facebook now has something that people are calling a Supreme court. This is interesting. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me. I'm not sure if you've seen this or not, it's very small and it's designed to go into your car and then it will hook up like Bluetooth to your car. It'll use your phone for data. So the data is going back and forth from your phone over to them. They're a little device and that way you can talk to it and you can play music, whatever you'd like to listen to right there from your Alexa. People have been complaining about Facebook and what they've been doing for years. One of the things people have really been complaining about lately is how Facebook has been censoring people, particularly according to them anyways, conservatives.  I've certainly seen evidence of that. No question don't get me wrong, but there's also left-wingers who are complaining about being censored. Facebook decided it needed to have its kind of its own version of Supreme court. You see what happened? Bins is you have a post on Facebook that is questioned. And usually what has to happen is somebody reports it to Facebook as being off color or whatever it is, the reporting it as. And if two or three people report it, then it goes to the moderators. That same thing is true for some of the artificial intelligence. Some of it's reviewed by moderators as well. Here's your problem. Particularly when it comes to conservatives because you post something conservative on Facebook. And if you are noticed by some of these liberal hacks that are watching Facebook accounts, they will gang up on you. And they use these bots to pretend that there is incredible. Rage that there are hundreds of people who are very upset by what you just had on Facebook. When in reality, no, one's upset and they're just trying to shut you down. And there might only be two or three people who actually know about it, but they'll use these kind of artificial intelligence, bots to flood Facebook with complaints. And they're doing that on Twitter. The left is doing it all over the place. So what happens next? The big challenge for Facebook is there are 2.7 billion users. Can you even wrap your head around a number like that? That is just massive. So they've got 2.7 billion users, and now, obviously not everybody's on every day. But some percentage of them. And I've seen it's in the hundreds of millions posts every day on Facebook and they log in and look around. Facebook only has 15,000 moderators. So for 2.7 billion people, 15,000 moderators just isn't a lot. And the other problem is that the moderators are suing Facebook. And they came up. This was about a year ago. With a $52 million settlement with moderators and the moderators are saying, Hey, first of all, we're crazy overworked. And then secondarily, we've got PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder. And they're saying that they have this because of the stuff that they've had to see, they alleged that reviewing violent and graphic images, sometimes stuff. My gosh, I might've gotten mentioned here on the air, but they had to view these. For Facebook. And they said, this just led us to PTSD. I can see that particularly since they have to have so many every day. So many of these different posts that they have to look at. And they are clocked and they are third-party contractors. They're just, all this stuff adds up. Doesn't it? Moderators who worked in California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida from 2015 until last year, every moderator will receive a minimum of a thousand dollars as well as additional funds if they are diagnosed with PTSD or related conditions. So they're saying there's about 11,000 moderators that were eligible for this compensation. But this is a very big deal. It's difficult. How do you deal with that? They've got now 15,000 moderators who are reviewing the posts of these 2.7 billion users. There is a little bit of an escalation procedure, although it's a very difficult and because there are so many people who are. Complaining and trying to take care of everything. It is a very tough situation, really for everybody involved. So they've decided what Facebook needs Facebook's decided this themselves is they've got to moderate themselves a little bit better, and the way they are going to do all of this moderation is they're going to have this kind of Supreme court that supervises. All of the moderation going on within Facebook. So they call him the new to an oversight board and. Obviously with just one board, without very many people on it, it is only going to be able to handle a small number of cases. So they have been paying attention to some of the cases. And they're trying to set precedents that will be followed by the moderators and millions of other cases. It's basically the same thing that the U S Supreme court does, where they review cases that come up from the federal district court. They can have cases that are coming up from individual States as well. And then they set standards and, without going into all of the detail of disputes between district courts, et cetera, we'll see what happens in Facebook, but lower courts are treating these us Supreme court. Rulings and dicta as binding precedents for everything in the future. So it's not easy to do in our courts. We're certainly not great at it. And there are a lot of complex procedures. And even if you're talking about moderation where you bring a moderator in. And there are some standards for that in disputes between businesses where you'll pull in a neutral third party. And they'll just usually split things down the middle. But those are going to be difficult for Facebook to put in how they reviewed five decisions. These are pretty substantive. Sixth case apparently became moot after the user deleted the post. We have an uprising and Miramar right now. You might've seen it on TV. If you're paying attention. I know a couple of channels have been talking about it. But this is an interesting problem because the military has overthrown the potentially properly democratically elected government. What do you do if there is massive cheating going on in the election? We faced that question here ourselves. In Miramar, they went ahead and the military took over and imprisoned the president. There was a post talking about that and talking about Muslims in France and China. Another one about Azerbaijanis. I don't know if you've seen what happened with Armenia and Azerbaijan and lots of history going back there with the Soviets and they created this whole problem because they didn't like the Armenians, but anyways, of all of these five, they disagreed with the lower moderators opinions and they overturned them. I think it's really good. I looked at these cases and I was shocked. I think they're doing the right thing here. Isn't that weird? Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson right here on news radio. Visit me online craig peterson.com. Hey, did you know, there is a war, if you will, between Facebook and Apple? It is getting nasty. What's going on over there. That's what we're going to talk about right now. Your privacy, Facebook, Apple, and Android. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me. My golly. You know what I think about Facebook when it comes to privacy, right? Facebook and Google. I think Facebook is worse than Google, frankly. They just don't respect your privacy. They will go ahead and look at anything that they can get their hands on. We'll at that point, just go ahead and pull it together and sell it to anybody that's willing to pay. I am not fond of that. And I think you can probably guess why, and I doubt your fond of that at as well. You're not fond of that either. Apple did something. If that has really upset. Facebook and Zuckerberg has been making a lot of noise about this, but Apple announced plans about a week ago to finally roll out a change that they were putting into place in iOS 14, which is the operating system for the iPhones and iPads that Apple has. They had announced that they were going to add it the late last year. And there was huge pushback from Facebook and a few others as well. What's going on here? Bottom line is that Apple is trying to force. Apps to be transparent. What privacy do you have? What data are they taking? And in the case of iOS, as well as Android and windows and Macs, there has been the ability for certain applications to be able to look at other apps that are on the device. And by doing that, it can get data from it. They can figure out who you are. They can give a unique fingerprint based on what apps you have and what versions they are. They're pretty clever what they've been doing in order to harvest your information. Now you might have noticed if you go in. To the app store that there's been actually a big change already. This is the Apple app store. If you go in there and you pull up an app, any app, so let's pull up Facebook and then in the app store, and then you click, obviously on Facebook, you scroll down the app store page about Facebook. And partway down, it already has privacy information. You want to click on more info project early if it's Facebook, because it doesn't fit on that homepage for the Facebook app. And it will tell you everything. Everything that Facebook wants access to. Now, some of it's self-reported by the app developers. Some of it is stuff that happened. Figure it out either electronically or by getting people involved. I would like to think that when it comes to something as big as Facebook, they really are going that extra mile. And making sure that yes, indeed, this information is valid, it is what it is. They may not, and I'm not quite sure, but look at all of the stuff Facebook is gaining access to with you. So that was a bit of a hit people were pretty excited. Oh, wow. This is great. And although Google doesn't do what we're talking about here quite yet, I'm sure they will be not in the way that Apple is doing it, but because remember Google makes money off of you and your information, Facebook makes money off of you and your information. So if you want privacy, you cannot use Google products like Android or. Chrome. And if you want privacy, you can't use Facebook. So it's as simple as that. Of course, the big question, and we talked about this earlier in the show is how much privacy can you expect? How much do you want? What's legitimate, right? All of those types of questions. So what Apple's doing now is they said that in early spring of 2021, they are going to release this new version of iOS. And here's what happens. They've added something and this is according to a white paper and Q and a that Apple sent out. They added something called app tracking transparency, and this is going to require apps to get the user's permission before tracking their data across apps or websites owned by other companies. Under settings user will be able to see which apps have requested permission to track so they can make changes. As they see fit. You might have noticed that already under settings, like you can look at the microphone settings, it'll tell you. Okay. Here's the apps that I have asked about microphone and you can turn them off. Here's the apps that have asked about the camera. You can turn them off. So they're adding more functionality. They also, in the FAQ, they said that app developers will not be able to require users to allow tracking in order for those users to gain access to the full capabilities of the app. Now, you know how I've talked before extensively about how, if it's free your, the product. So what Apple is doing is they're saying, Hey guys if the user says, no, you can't try it. Track me across apps. No, you can't get it. This privacy information, which Apple's letting you do, they cannot Labatt automize. The app is what it comes right down to. So it was in September last year that they first said they were going to do that. Then they delayed the implementation of this tracking policy. So the businesses and app developers could get more time to figure this out. One of the things that I think is fascinating here is what Facebook's doing with fighting back. Oh, and by the way, Apple has not just gotten complaints from Facebook. There are other marketers and tech companies that frankly it makes Apple more vulnerable to some of these antitrust investigations that have been. Started really against some of these big tech companies. Although, I don't really expect much to happen under the current administration in Washington because frankly, big companies love big regulations. Because they can afford to comply with them, but startup little companies who are competitors of theirs cannot afford the lawyers for the paperwork and everything out. I look at the CMMC, we do a lot of work for DOD department of defense contractors, where we secure their networks. We secure their computers, we secure everything. We put it all together. And we also, for some of them there's guys, there's a 50, $50,000 upcharge for this. And that's because we're cheap. Believe it or not, it is a lot higher for other companies do it, but we do all of the paperwork, putting together all of the policies, all of the procedures, what they have and. Auditing everything for them. And we're talking about a case and a half of paper thinking of the big cases of paper, right? 500 sheets and the ream and how many reams in a box? 10 20. I'm not even sure, but literally cases. And we. Printed it up, we wrote it all up, printed it all up, delivered it to a client just a few weeks ago. And it was a huge box of three inch ring binders. It was all in and they didn't all fit in there. They're the big guys in the department of defense probably love this because they, they pay a million million bucks to the people, the generate the paperwork for them internally. And they know the little guys can't afford to have full-time paper pushers. And so that's why, even though we're talking about months worth of work, why we charge 50 grand, which is a heck of a lot cheaper, believe it or not. And it's a huge discount for us. So I don't expect that the fed you're going to come up with a solution. That's truly going to help the little guy here, but Apple's announcement praised by privacy advocate nonprofits as well. And Facebook apparently has been buying full page newspaper ads claiming it's going to hurt small businesses in a way it will cause it can make advertising. Just a little bit harder. And apparently also Facebook has decided to rewrite its apps. So no longer even requests to access, cross app access to your personal information. Welcome back. We're going to wrap up, talk a little bit about Comcast data cap, and some of these SolarWinds hack victims that didn't use SolarWinds, and ransomware payoffs have surged, even though the number of people affected has gone down. Make sure you get on my email list so that you get all of the important news. You're going to get some of this little training I'm doing and the courses that we've developed. The only way to do that is to go to Craig Peterson.com/subscribe. That's how you get on those lists and I'm not sitting there and pounding you or anything else, but I want to keep you informed. So there you go. We're probably going to increase our volume from one email a week to three, so that we can provide you with a little bit more training. I want to keep these down to something that just takes you a few minutes to go through, but could save you millions of your business and tens of thousands, your retirement, if you are a home user. So make sure you are on that list. Craigpeterson.com/subscribe. Comcast. I know many of us have Comcast, I certainly do, is imposing data caps on many people in many parts of the country. That includes people to the South here, Massachusetts residents. What do you think they're doing down there? The state lawmakers have proposed a ban on data caps, a ban on new fees, and a ban on price increases for home internet services. The idea from their standpoint is we have a lot of people who are working at home because of a lockdown. What are they supposed to be doing? I'll take my daughter, one of my daughters, as an example, she's working at home. She used to work in a call center she'd go in every day. Now she's working at home. Are they paying a wage differential for her? Are they paying for electric bill? They're not even paying for the phone bill or the phone. She has to provide her own phone. She takes inbound calls for a call center. Can you believe that? It's just amazing what's happened. The company is saving just a ton of money because people don't have to go into work. You can bet they're going to dispose of some of this space that they've been. What's happening here, we are using more bandwidth than we've ever used because more people are at home and it isn't all business related many are watching Netflix or you've got Netflix on in the background while you're working on stuff. It's just so common to do that. What data caps are doing is they say you can only use so much data a month. Then there's usually a penalty of some sort. In Comcast case, they said for the first quarter of 2021, I believe is what they had come up with. We'll just warn you that you go over your data cap then they'll charge extra. I have a friend who has Comcast and he said, I think it took him like three days before he went over the data cap. That's not long.  It's because they're streaming TV. They've got kids working from home. Then you've got meetings that they're going to, that are now streaming. So I can see this, but from Comcast side, they now have to handle more data than they've ever had to handle before. Because we are using it, like for my daughter, she actually has a cell phone, but all of the calls are routed over the internet. Cause her cell phone hooks up to the wifi in the house and the calls come in and go out via that wifi.  It goes through the internet, it goes to her phone carriers network. Then it goes to the call centers network. So there you go. What does that need? That needs to make sure there's no jitter. You don't want voice packets to be dropped because then it sounds terrible. It's very obvious when audio is dropped. I don't know if you've noticed if you're streaming something from one of these online streaming video services, but sometimes. It will hiccup a little bit, but have you noticed that with the smaller hiccups, the audio is fine and the problem is in the video. Now they do that for a couple of reasons, obviously video uses more bandwidth than audio uses, but the other reason is people tend to get more annoyed by audio fallout and audio problems. Comcast is saying, Hey guys, look at what we have to do with our networks. We have to expand them. We have to increase them. Now I've got to bring up again the Biden administration because of what they're planning on doing with this fairness doctrine on the internet. What they're planning on doing is saying, Hey, Comcast, just because this person uses five terabytes of data a month, you should not be charging them more than grandma that uses 10 gigabytes a month. Thousands of times more bandwidth requirement, you're not allowed to bill them differently. Cause a bit is a bit which is absolutely insane. I don't know how they can justify this sort of thing. So what's going to happen is you get companies like Comcast or other internet providers who are going to say. We are not going to invest any money into expanding our capacity because we can't charge for it. Doesn't that make sense to you? It makes perfect sense to me. By getting the FCC involved, it's just going to be crazy. Ajit Pi resigned when President Trump was leaving, he used to be the chairman. He actually had a head on his shoulders, but these new people President Biden put in there, it's insanity what they're trying to do with our networks. It's going to make it much worse. Comcast is putting data caps in. You hit the data cap it, they're just going to slow you way down. That happens too, with a lot of our cell phones, our cell phone carriers, if you use more data than they've allotted to you, they'll drop you back. So most people have 4g. Yeah. Okay. Your phone's 5g, but really guess what? You're not getting 5g. It's very rare unless you are on on the T-Mobile slash Sprint plan. T-Mobile more specifically because nobody else has the coverage that T-Mobile has for 5g. So you're using 4g LTE, you hit your data cap. They're going to drop you back to 3g, which is really slow comparing the two together, all the three of them, frankly, but it's very slow compared to a 4g LTE. In mass, by the way, I should mention Verizon files and RCN. Do not impose the data caps. It's just our friends at Comcast that are doing that Vargas and Rogers. They let a group of 71 different Massachusetts lawmakers who urged Comcast to halt the

The third and final interview in the Azerbaijanis series. Hope you enjoy!

We listen to Haji talk about the history of his nation!

Trump is weg. Laat de oorlogen maar beginnen. Oorlog tegen de Azerbaijanis, oorlog tegen de sportvrouwtjes, oorlog tegen iedereen die geen democraat is, oorlog tegen de economie, oorlog tegen Antifa, oorlog tegen verdeeldheid, oorlog tegen Churchill, enz, etc. Dus gelukkig gaat alles nu goed komen.

In this episode we hear from Kamal about what he thinks of the founding of Azerbaijan.

Known as ‘the pearl’ of Nagorno-Karabakh, Shusha had long been one of the main administrative, economic and cultural centers of Azerbaijan since its establishment by indigenous Azerbaijanis. But it was under Armenian occupation for almost three decades, until last month. Hyder Abbasi looks back at the city’s history and its significance for Azerbaijan.

Larisa Melkumyan used to be a music teacher in Shusha — or Shushi, as it’s known by Armenians — a mountaintop city in Nagorno-Karabakh. But as fighting broke out in the contested region this past fall, her family was forced to leave."We stayed in the basement for four days and then fled at night as the road was being bombed."Larisa Melkumyan, Armenian"We stayed in the basement for four days and then fled at night as the road was being bombed." Melkumyan pointed to her feet. "These are lucky shoes!"Related: Armenians say goodbye to Kelbajar region given to AzerisThe battle for Shusha was one of the six-week war’s bloodiest — and pieces of missile and shreds of military uniform still litter the roadside by the turnoff to the city. Shusha was captured by Azerbaijan last month, and now, Melkumyan and other Armenians are unable to return to the city.For now, Melkumyan’s family is being hosted for free in a modest wooden house outside of Yerevan, but they aren’t sure for how long the owner’s generosity can last. And after that, it’s hard to say where they might land.Although thousands of displaced people have started returning to the contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh since an armistice was signed on Nov. 10, many are stuck where they — mostly in Yerevan and some parts of Armenia. Business slowly restarts in the market of Stepanakert, the de facto capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, after being shelled during the war.  Credit: Andrew Connelly/The World  That’s because of the ongoing disruption to education, health care and other services in the region, according to Grigor Yeritsyan, president of the Armenian Progressive Youth, a nongovernmental organization that is helping provide food and supplies to displaced people now in the Armenian capital of Yerevan.Related: Armenians mobilize to support troops in Karabakh war, as ceasefires failAlthough rebuilding has started here, for some, too much has been lost.“We also had instances when kids are facing some psychological problems and also have some panic attacks related to constant fear, so I don’t think these families would think to go back in the near future because of all the trauma they have been exposed to.”Grigor Yeritsyan, Armenian Progressive Youth“We also had instances when kids are facing some psychological problems and also have some panic attacks related to constant fear, so I don’t think these families would think to go back in the near future because of all the trauma they have been exposed to,” Yeritsyan said.Both Armenia and Azerbaijan lost more than 2,500 soldiers in just 44 days of fighting, the government says. Azerbaijan was the clear military winner but people living here will now have to rely on Russia to keep the peace for years to come.According to the Russia-brokered peace agreement, Moscow will deploy its troops in Nagorno-Karabakh to prevent clashes between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Armenian troops were ordered to leave several regions surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh by the end of December.Now, the enclave’s sole connection to Armenia is a long dusty road that weaves through mountains and plunging gorges.Until a new one is built, Armenians and Azerbaijanis will have to share this road under the watchful eye of Russian peacekeepers who have set up numerous checkpoints here.In Stepanakert, the de facto capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, there are already some signs of life starting to get back to normal.Stepanakert was shelled on a daily basis throughout the war — electricity and gas supplies are still interrupted but most of the city is intact.Related: Nagorno-Karabakh fighting rages as US hosts talksOn an early November morning in the city, chickens rattled their cages, a butcher laid out cows’ heads on a table, and crates of pomegranates, peppers and potatoes lined the street. During the war, a rocket attack destroyed a clothes stall here. It’s little more than a burned shell with shards of glass and wood and ripped fabric spilling out into the street.Next door, Rima Arushanyan, 58, was doing a brisk trade in fresh eggs and homemade vodka. She says that several hundred people are returning to the city every day, and business is picking up. Rima Arushanyan, 58, sells eggs and homemade vodka in the Stepanakert market. Stepanakert is the de facto capital of Nagorno-Karabakh.  Credit: Andrew Connelly/The World  “Thank God nobody was here at the time when the missile hit. The owner is still on the front line, and now his business is gone but at least nobody died. Everything that is destroyed can be rebuilt.”Rima Arushanyan, market vendor, Stepanakert, Nagorno-Karabakh “Thank God nobody was here at the time when the missile hit. The owner is still on the front line, and now his business is gone but at least nobody died,” Arushanyan explained. “Everything that is destroyed can be rebuilt.”But in frontline towns like Martuni, it’s a different story.Levitan Danielyan, 68, plucked some juicy persimmons from the trees in his garden and washed them under the tap. They still have a layer of dust from when a missile exploded outside the pensioner’s house — the same night the peace agreement was signed. Levitan Danielyan, 68, picks some persimmons from his garden in the Armenian town Martuni around the wreckage from a nearby shelling. Credit: Andrew Connelly/The World  “They hit us with everything they had,” Danielyan said. “All night long, they shelled the whole neighborhood but thankfully everyone on this street is OK.”It wasn’t always this way. Under the Soviet Union, Armenians and Azerbaijanis lived right alongside each other but Danielyan says it wasn’t perfect, even then.“The Soviet government didn’t let anyone do anything nationalistic,” he said. “Thanks to that, we lived together. But not really as friends, more like dogs and cats.”Azerbaijan shelled his house in the ’90s.“When the war ended in 1994, I asked the Armenian government for some assistance. Years later, they finally decided to give me some building supplies and they arrived on Sept. 26, the day before the second war.”The region has a lot of healing to do — but Melkumyan, the music teacher who fled Shusha, says she's determined not to dwell on painful memories.“But the past is for forgetting and we should live in the future,” she said. “We miss our Shushi, but we can’t get it back.” 

The crushing defeat suffered by the Armenian forces in Nagorno-Karabakh at the hands of the Azerbaijani military backed by Turkey and an assortment of Syrian and Libyan mercenaries has caused a cascade of political, diplomatic, security and humanitarian crises in Armenia and in Nagorno-Karabakh. Literally overnight, tables were turned and Armenians, who had emerged victorious in the 1990s, during the First Karabakh War, had to accept a humiliating ceasefire to cut their losses. (Canadian-Armenian journalist Raffi Elliott is pictured in this photo taken on Nov. 2 in the Armenian village of David Bek, which had been repeatedly shelled by the Azerbaijani military during the latest war. Photo courtesy of Raffi Elliott) Radio Canada International spoke about the challenges facing Armenia and what remains of the Armenian-populated breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, now protected by about 2,000 Russian peacekeepers, with Raffi Elliott. He is a Canadian-Armenian journalist and entrepreneur based in Yerevan, Armenia. We also spoke about the prospects of peace between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Duration: 34 minutes 8 seconds https://www.rcinet.ca/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/11/NK_PODCAST_EP5_ED1_9648728_2020-11-27T16-41-25.081.mp3

A Russian-brokered ceasefire signed on Nov. 9 ended six weeks of ferocious fighting between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces in the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region. Russia has already deployed about 2,000 peacekeepers to the region to separate the combattants and guarantee the implementation of the agreement signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Radio Canada International spoke with Olesya Vartanyan of the International Crisis Group about the origins of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the oldest and the bloodiest ethnic conflict on the territory of the former Soviet Union, the reasons behind the failures of the various peace plans developed over a quarter century of negotiations, and the thorny and uncertain road to peace between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. (Photo courtesy of the International Crisis Group) Vartanyan is a senior analyst with the Crisis Group who specializes in regional security issues in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, with a particular focus on breakaway regions in the South Caucasus – Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia. Duration: 44 minutes 38 seconds https://www.rcinet.ca/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/11/NK_PODCAST-EP-1-ED2-8db_9635325_2020-11-20T17-26-39.132.mp3

*) Azerbaijan extends Armenian pullout deadline from Kalbajar Citing humanitarian grounds, Azerbaijan has agreed to extend the deadline for Armenian forces and illegal settlers to withdraw from Kalbajar until November 25. Both sides reached a deal earlier this month to end weeks of hostilities with Armenia to return Kalbajar and other districts under its illegal occupation. Kalbajar was exclusively populated by ethnic Azerbaijanis before they were forced out by Armenians in the war that followed the end of the Soviet Union. *) Ethiopia’s Tigray leader confirms firing missiles at Eritrea The leader of Ethiopia’s Tigray region Debretsion Gebremichael has confirmed his forces fired missiles at neighbouring Eritrea’s capital. The strikes mark the expansion of the deadly conflict, between the Ethiopian federal government and forces loyal to the northern Tigray region, across an international border. The offensive against Eritrea came on the same day the ruling party in Tigray, claimed rocket attacks on two airports in a separate region of Ethiopia. *) Israel advances plans in east Jerusalem settlement Israel's Housing Ministry opened up tenders for thousands of new homes in the Givat Hamatos area of Jerusalem. International law recognises the West Bank and East Jerusalem as "occupied territories" and considers all Jewish settlement-building activities there illegal. The move may test ties with the US President-elect Joe Biden, who could take a firmer tack against Israel’s illegal settlements. *) Peru's Interim President Merino resigns Peru's interim president Manuel Merino has resigned after violence during crackdown on protests. Merino stepped down immediately after the Peruvian congress asked him to resign in an emergency Congress session. Thousands of people staged days-long protests against Merino following the impeachment and ouster of his predecessor Martin Vizcarra on corruption allegations. And finally… *) Hamilton takes seventh F1 title with a win in Turkey Britain's Lewis Hamilton has won the Turkish Grand Prix with Mercedes to earn a record- equalling seventh Formula 1 world championship. Ferrari great Michael Schumacher is the only other driver with seven titles to his name. Turkey was hosting a Grand Prix for the first time since 2011 with the 14th round of the 2020 F1 season held in Istanbul.

In this episode of The Open Door, Jim Hanink, Mario Ramos-Reyes, and Christopher Zehnder focus on the deadly Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict with Prof. Siobhan Nash-Marshall, Professor of Philosophy at Manhattanville College. The Sins of the Fathers is her first book-length treatment of genocide and genocide negationism. After the outbreak of war in Syria, Nash-Marshall and some friends founded CINF, the Christians In Need Foundation, through which they help ancient Christian cultures of the world that are now in peril. Our questions for Prof. Nash-Marshall include the following. Feel free to suggest your own!1. Could you give us a history lesson? What led to the seemingly intractable conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan?2. Reports on the current phase of the conflict say that both sides have attacked targets in a way that endangers civilian non-combatants. Is this true? If so, how has it come about?3. What countries are supplying the weapons, including drones, in this conflict? What do you make of the report that Azerbaijan has spent billions on arms in recent years?4. Armenia is a Christian nation, indeed, the first Christian nation. Azerbaijan is largely Muslim. Is the conflict fueled by this religious difference?5. What position has the United States taken on the increasingly deadly dispute in South Caucasus?6. A number of Armenians in the diaspora have travelled to Armenia to support the war effort. Is this a mark of bravery or of bravado? Or perhaps a measure of both?7. It's said that truth is the first casualty of war. How can our listeners stay informed on developments in the conflict?8. Would you explain the origin of the Christians In Need Foundation? How is the outbreak of hostilities affecting its work?9. When did you last visit Armenia and how did you find everyday life there?10. Will you be writing on this recent and tragic chapter of Armenian history?She recommends the following links for keeping informed about the Armenian Azerbaijan conflict.Artsakh Press: [https://artsakhpress.am/eng/]Araik Harutyunyan, Artsakh President: https://www.facebook.com/ArayikHarutyunian/ and https://twitter.com/Pres_Artsakh]Artak Beglaryan, Artsakh Ombudsman: https://www.facebook.com/ArtsakhOmbuds and https://twitter.com/Artak_BeglaryanSiobhan Nash-Marshall: https://theimaginativeconservative.org/author/siobhan-nash-marshallArmenian News - http://www.PanARMENIAN.net

The battlefields of Nagorno-Karabakh lie hundreds of miles away from Yerevan, the Armenian capital, but the intense mobilization to support the war effort against Azerbaijan seeps into every facet of society. In the last month, Azerbaijani forces have captured several Armenian territories and bombarded Nagorno-Karabakh. With three failed ceasefire agreements, many Armenians are volunteering to help the troops and attending protests to demand answers. Related: Armenia, Azerbaijan report attacks despite ceasefire dealOn a Saturday morning in a downtown school in Yerevan, a classroom has been transformed into a military accessory workshop. Teams of women of all ages weave together camouflage nets to drape over troops, tanks and the cars of volunteers who ferry up supplies to the front line.  Women volunteers construct camouflage nets to be used on the Nagorno-Karabakh frontlines.  Credit: Andrew Connelly/The World  Mariam Margaryan lost her job as a tour guide when the clashes began in late September but immediately offered to volunteer. In Armenia, with fewer than 3 million people, the war touches most people directly. Margaryan already lost a friend to the conflict, and her brother is serving in the Armenian military.“Now, everyone is united, we are together. ...We share grief and hug people we have never met [before].”Mariam Margaryan, tour guide, Yerevan, Armenia“Now, everyone is united, we are together,” Margaryan says. “We share grief and hug people we have never met [before].”Nagorno-Karabakh officials say that 1,166 troops and 39 civilians have been killed since Sept. 27, when the recent clashes began. Azerbaijani authorities have reported 90 civilian deaths while military losses are not disclosed. Related: Nagorno-Karabakh fighting rages as US hosts talksNagorno-Karabakh is widely considered under international law to lie within Azerbaijan. But ethnic Armenians who govern the area have rejected Azeri rule since 1994, following a previous war between the two countries. By the end of that conflict, which left over 30,000 dead, Armenia had also captured several Azerbaijani territories around Nagorno-Karabakh, which act as a buffer zone, but remain contested. Related: Nagorno-Karabakh conflict could spiral into regional warIn the Yerevan classroom, the tiny chairs and brightly colored paintings combined with the busy assembling of material to be used in war creates a jarring scene. Some children also assist in the tying together of the camouflage ribbons. Irina Minasyan, a local parent, says that it’s impossible to shield young ones from the harsh realities of war.“They have friends that have passed away,” Minasyan explains. “It’s not easy to speak about, but we had a student who graduated a year ago and last week was his funeral. All of us have brothers and friends [on the battlefields]. It affects everyone.” A government-run transit center on the outskirts of Armenian capital Yerevan accommodates refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh.  Credit: Andrew Connelly/The World  The Azerbaijani bombardment of towns and villages in the de facto independent state of Nagorno-Karabakh has forced tens of thousands of mainly women, children and elderly people to flee into Armenia, while the many men stay behind to fight. Many of the displaced arrive at a Soviet-era community center on the outskirts of Yerevan to register for accommodation. Hayk Muradyan, from Armenia’s Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, manages the operation.“Some of them have had their houses destroyed by the bombs, and some still have trauma from the explosions but all of them are sure they will be back as soon as we win the war,” Muradyan explains, staring earnestly over his face mask, adding, “and we will definitely win.”Inside the shelter, exhausted mothers and old villagers with walking sticks slump on rows of camp beds. Henrik Hakopyan, 80, dressed in a denim jacket and camouflage baseball cap, told The World that he recently escaped the province of Hadrut, which days later would be captured by Azerbaijani forces.  "I was at the doctor’s [office] when our forces told us to evacuate, there wasn’t even time to go back home. Everything I collected over the years I had to leave behind as well as money, clothes, my passport even. Thousands have been killed and displaced...so why does the world stay silent?”Henrik Hakopyan, 80, is a displaced person from Hadrut province, captured by Azerbaijani forces“I was at the doctor’s [office] when our forces told us to evacuate, there wasn’t even time to go back home. Everything I collected over the years I had to leave behind as well as money, clothes, my passport even. Thousands have been killed and displaced,” Hakopyan holds out his arms, “so why does the world stay silent?” Armenians rally in capital Yerevan demanding action from the international community.  Credit: Andrew Connelly/The World Anger is brewing in Armenia over the perceived lack of attention being paid to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh by the international community. Last week, thousands marched through Yerevan’s Republic Square to the United Nations headquarters to demand answers. "Destinies are being ruined. ... These soldiers are 19-, 20-year-old boys and they had dreams, but they are dying. It’s not that they chose to be soldiers, they have to protect and defend.”Protester Seda Manasyan, 30, attends a protest in Yerevan, ArmeniaProtester Seda Manasyan, 30, works in the hotel sector but was too distracted to stay in the office. “Destinies are being ruined,” she said angrily. “These soldiers are 19-, 20-year-old boys and they had dreams, but they are dying. It’s not that they chose to be soldiers, they have to protect and defend.”For some Armenians, this isn’t their first brush with bloodshed. Elena Dadayan-Romanova was born in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku during the Soviet Union during times when both nationalities lived in each other’s countries. But by the late 1980s, the majority in Nagorno-Karabakh started voting to be united with Armenia, sparking ethnic cleansing and pogroms between Armenians and Azerbaijanis that caused Elena’s family to flee. Three weeks ago, she escaped the shelling of Stepanakert, the de facto capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, and is displaced again. Now she rents an apartment in Yerevan with her daughter, elderly father-in-law and five grandchildren.“When I heard the first explosions … early in the morning, we thought it might be military training,” Dadayan-Romanova recalls. “But then we went out on the balcony and saw the smoke rising [and] we headed for the basement.” In the following days, volunteers from Yerevan came to the border to help evacuate civilians. Initially, Elena’s daughter didn’t want to leave. “I told her that I have seen this before, I know how it goes and I forced her to come. We don’t know how long we’ll be here and we can’t make plans. All of our thoughts are with our husbands and brothers.” Despite heavy military losses and devastated civilian areas, there seems no sign of war fatigue on either side. But with an emerging refugee crisis and a resurgence in COVID-19 cases, Armenia is about to enter a long and troubled winter.  

Today on TruNews we discuss the desperate attempt by the Likud Party Zionists to lockdown the country and start a war with Iran, in order to delay the inevitable arrest of indicted PM Benjamin Netanyahu. We also address the spiraling conflict between the Armenian Christians and the Muslim, Israeli-armed, Azerbaijanis, and how that conflict could be setting a showdown for a world war between the Western World Order and the rising East. Rick Wiles, Doc Burkhart, Edward Szall. Airdate 09/29/2020

Today on TruNews we discuss the desperate attempt by the Likud Party Zionists to lockdown the country and start a war with Iran, in order to delay the inevitable arrest of indicted PM Benjamin Netanyahu. We also address the spiraling conflict between the Armenian Christians and the Muslim, Israeli-armed, Azerbaijanis, and how that conflict could be setting a showdown for a world war between the Western World Order and the rising East. Rick Wiles, Doc Burkhart, Edward Szall. Airdate 09/29/2020

The dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh is the longest-running conflict that accompanied the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. War over the territory broke out in 1992 between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. While a ceasefire in 1994 ended the fighting, decades of negotiations have failed to resolve the conflict.  Our guest this week is Olesya Vartanyan, Crisis Group’s Analyst for Europe’s Eastern Neighbourhood. She explains that grievances and tensions had existed long before the conflict erupted, and that recent calm only papers over years of stalemate that have entrenched positions and isolated Armenians and Azerbaijanis from one another. But could there be a way out of the current deadlock? Have a listen to find out.  For more information on this conflict, see our recent report: Digging out of Deadlock in Nagorno-Karabakh and our Visual Explainer, which maps developments since 2015. 

I met Grace...ahem...Maral the first summer after I moved to DC. We realized we had a unique connection. Like my father, her mom immigrated here from Iran. And her dad’s family, well part of them have roots back in Kentucky, just like my mom’s family.  We’ve stayed in touch over the years, playing on the same Saturday morning soccer team, and keeping in contact even when she moved to Istanbul. Now that she’s back in the DC area, and leaning on that friendship, I reached out to Maral earlier this spring to gauge her interest in jumping on the podcast.  One of the main reasons I wanted Maral to join this project was because she’s Azerbaijani. And all the others are Persian. I wanted to jump into how that affected her growing up. Because I knew there were some very real tensions that existed between Persians and Azerbaijanis.

"This surely is going to be the longest war we ever had. It surely has been some bloody fighting but I think the Germans is getting licked every day..." In his thirteenth letter home from Camp Lee, Virginia, dated April 22, 1918, PFC Charles “Dutch” Riggle, a WWI soldier from Wheeling, WV, tells his brother James “Abe” Riggle that he's been at Camp Lee for seven months yesterday, and it feels like he might never leave. He thought sure he'd be in France by now. He was at the supply company with Tib Meriner to see Les [Lester Scott] and hear some music. Les had a borrowed fiddle that Tib could play some. He saw Bill Wallace, who is in the infantry. Dutch wants to know if Chas Gellings has been called yet. He saw where Chas Milliken was. The camp is full of rookies. They walk the fifteen miles to Dutch Gap, rain or shine. It rained so hard last time the fellows' shoes were full of water. Yes, Dutch knew Jesse Bond Hewitt [a Marshall County boy who died of pneumonia at sea on March 19, 1918 after training at Camp Lee]. He was "a pretty good fellow" and Dutch's good old friend. The people of Marshall County sent down a powerful bunch of tobacco. Dutch got twenty packs. There are about 100 Marshall County boys in the regiment. Dutch wants to know if James has broken the colts and started farming this spring. Dutch sent home a shell so James could see how those guns jar a fellow. Dutch thinks this will be the longest war we ever had, even though the Germans are getting licked. Elsewhere on the same day Baron Goto was appointed Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (ethnic Armenians, Georgians and Azerbaijanis) declared independence and went to war with the Ottoman Empire. Future Major League Baseball star Mickey Vernon was born. Charles “Dutch” Riggle was drafted into the US Army in 1917 and trained at Camp Lee, Virginia, where so many Wheeling draftees and volunteers—including his sister-in-law Minnie Riggle’s brother, Lester Scott—were trained. Dutch Riggle was a Private First Class in Battery F of the 314th Field Artillery Supply Company, in France. Riggle was a farm boy with little formal education who grew up in the hills of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He spelled many of his words phonetically. His letters have been transcribed exactly as they were written. This is his thirteenth letter from Camp Lee, dated 100 years ago today, April 22, 1918. Digital scans and a transcript of Charles Riggle's April 22, 1918 letter can be viewed at: www.archivingwheeling.org/blog/from-camp-lee-to-the-great-war-april-22-1918-podcast Credits: "From Camp Lee to the Great War: The letters of Lester Scott and Charles Riggle" is brought to you by archivingwheeling.org in partnership with the Ohio County Public Library (www.ohiocountylibrary.org) and the WALS Foundation (walswheeling.com). Vince Marshall is the voice of Charles Riggle. The letters of Lester Scott and Charles Riggle were transcribed by Jon-Erik Gilot. This podcast was edited and written by Sean Duffy, audio edited by Erin Rothenbuehler. Music: "Hail Columbia ; Star Spangled Banner," 1914, courtesy Library of Congress: www.loc.gov/item/ihas.100010368/ Many thanks to Marjorie Richey for sharing family letters and the stories of her uncles, Lester Scott and Charles “Dutch” Riggle, WWI soldiers from West Virginia.

Azerbaijanis, Somalis, Hausas, Malays, Acenhnese, Burmese of Houston; Kurds, Eritreans, Ewe in Dallas-Ft. Worth, City Vision,