Podcasts about generically

From motivation to inspiration How you motivate someone depends on the someone. If the person is in desperation either financially, emotionally or in their relationship, the idea of motivating them with anything but rules, regulations and laws is foolhardy. You are far wiser to acknowledge where a person is at in their life before you consider how to motivate them. Generically, you motivate people by giving them the impression that something good will happen if they do what you ask. Of course, a person in desperation might not even believe that so, you motivate them by saying some- thing bad won't happen if they do what you ask. This is a very primal level of motivation. More sophisticated levels of motivation can be achieved if the individuals in question believe they have some choice. In other words they are not working out of fear or desperation. These more conscious people would react badly to the lower levels of motivation and are more likely to be “turned on” by values. That means they would become highly invested in what- ever they were doing as long as they thought their values were being met. Like goodness to humanity, kindness to children, ethical prod- ucts, environmental legitimacy. This is still fairly primal, and requires signifi- cant structure in a company. The individuals in this circumstance would be motivate

From motivation to inspiration How you motivate someone depends on the someone. If the person is in desperation either financially, emotionally or in their relationship, the idea of motivating them with anything but rules, regulations and laws is foolhardy. You are far wiser to acknowledge where a person is at in their life before you consider how to motivate them. Generically, you motivate people by giving them the impression that something good will happen if they do what you ask. Of course, a person in desperation might not even believe that so, you motivate them by saying some- thing bad won't happen if they do what you ask. This is a very primal level of motivation. More sophisticated levels of motivation can be achieved if the individuals in question believe they have some choice. In other words they are not working out of fear or desperation. These more conscious people would react badly to the lower levels of motivation and are more likely to be “turned on” by values. That means they would become highly invested in what- ever they were doing as long as they thought their values were being met. Like goodness to humanity, kindness to children, ethical prod- ucts, environmental legitimacy. This is still fairly primal, and requires signifi- cant structure in a company. The individuals in this circumstance would be motivated.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Understanding Positional Features in Layer 0 SAEs, published by bilalchughtai on July 30, 2024 on LessWrong. This is an informal research note. It is the result of a few-day exploration into positional SAE features conducted as part of Neel Nanda's training phase of the ML Alignment & Theory Scholars Program - Summer 2024 cohort. Thanks to Andy Arditi, Arthur Conmy and Stefan Heimersheim for helpful feedback. Thanks to Joseph Bloom for training this SAE. Summary We investigate positional SAE features learned by layer 0 residual stream SAEs trained on gpt2-small. In particular, we study the activation blocks.0.hook_resid_pre, which is the sum of the token embeddings and positional embeddings. Importantly gpt2-small uses absolute learned positional embeddings - that is, the positional embeddings are a trainable parameter (learned) and are injected into the residual stream (absolute). We find that this SAE learns a set of positional features. We investigate some of the properties of these features, finding Positional and semantic features are entirely disjoint at layer 0. Note that we do not expect this to continue holding in later layers as attention mixes semantic and positional information. In layer 0, we should expect the SAE to disentangle positional and semantic features as there is a natural notion of ground truth positional and semantic features that interact purely additively. Generically, each positional feature spans a range of positions, except for the first few positions which each get dedicated (and sometimes, several) features. We can attribute degradation of SAE performance beyond the SAE training context length to (lack of) these positional features, and to the absolute nature of positional embeddings used by this model. Set Up We study pretrained gpt2-small SAEs trained on blocks.0.hook_resid_pre. This is particularly clean, as we can generate the entire input distribution to the SAE by summing each of the d_vocab token embeddings with each of the n_ctx positional embeddings, obtaining a tensor all_resid_pres: Float[Tensor, "d_vocab n_ctx d_model"] By passing this tensor through the SAE, we can grab all of the pre/post activation function feature activations all_feature_acts: Float[Tensor, "d_vocab n_ctx d_sae"] In this post, d_model = 768 and d_sae = 24576. Importantly the SAE we study in this post has context_size=128. The SAE context size corresponds is the maximal length of input sequence used to generate activations for training of the SAE. Finding features The activation space of study can be thought of as the direct sum of the token embedding space and the positional embedding space. As such, we hypothesize that semantic and positional features learned by the SAE should be distinct. That is, we hypothesize that the feature activations for some feature i can be written in the form where for each i, either gi=0 or hi=0 identically for all inputs in their domain and x is a d_model dimensional vector. To investigate this we hold tok or pos fixed in all_feature_acts and vary the other input. We first restrict to pos < sae.cfg.context_size. Positional features We first replicate Figure 1f of Gurnee et al. (2024), which finds instances of sinusoidal positional neurons in MLP layers. To do so, we assign each feature a positional score. We first compute the mean activation of each feature at each position by averaging over all possible input tokens. The position score is the max value of this over all positions, i.e. where fi(tok,pos) is the feature activation for feature i for the given input. We find positional scores drop off rapidly. There seem to only be ~50 positional features (of 24k total features) in this SAE. Inspecting the features, we find 1. Many positional features, each with small standard deviation over input tokens (shown in lower opacit...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Understanding Positional Features in Layer 0 SAEs, published by bilalchughtai on July 30, 2024 on LessWrong. This is an informal research note. It is the result of a few-day exploration into positional SAE features conducted as part of Neel Nanda's training phase of the ML Alignment & Theory Scholars Program - Summer 2024 cohort. Thanks to Andy Arditi, Arthur Conmy and Stefan Heimersheim for helpful feedback. Thanks to Joseph Bloom for training this SAE. Summary We investigate positional SAE features learned by layer 0 residual stream SAEs trained on gpt2-small. In particular, we study the activation blocks.0.hook_resid_pre, which is the sum of the token embeddings and positional embeddings. Importantly gpt2-small uses absolute learned positional embeddings - that is, the positional embeddings are a trainable parameter (learned) and are injected into the residual stream (absolute). We find that this SAE learns a set of positional features. We investigate some of the properties of these features, finding Positional and semantic features are entirely disjoint at layer 0. Note that we do not expect this to continue holding in later layers as attention mixes semantic and positional information. In layer 0, we should expect the SAE to disentangle positional and semantic features as there is a natural notion of ground truth positional and semantic features that interact purely additively. Generically, each positional feature spans a range of positions, except for the first few positions which each get dedicated (and sometimes, several) features. We can attribute degradation of SAE performance beyond the SAE training context length to (lack of) these positional features, and to the absolute nature of positional embeddings used by this model. Set Up We study pretrained gpt2-small SAEs trained on blocks.0.hook_resid_pre. This is particularly clean, as we can generate the entire input distribution to the SAE by summing each of the d_vocab token embeddings with each of the n_ctx positional embeddings, obtaining a tensor all_resid_pres: Float[Tensor, "d_vocab n_ctx d_model"] By passing this tensor through the SAE, we can grab all of the pre/post activation function feature activations all_feature_acts: Float[Tensor, "d_vocab n_ctx d_sae"] In this post, d_model = 768 and d_sae = 24576. Importantly the SAE we study in this post has context_size=128. The SAE context size corresponds is the maximal length of input sequence used to generate activations for training of the SAE. Finding features The activation space of study can be thought of as the direct sum of the token embedding space and the positional embedding space. As such, we hypothesize that semantic and positional features learned by the SAE should be distinct. That is, we hypothesize that the feature activations for some feature i can be written in the form where for each i, either gi=0 or hi=0 identically for all inputs in their domain and x is a d_model dimensional vector. To investigate this we hold tok or pos fixed in all_feature_acts and vary the other input. We first restrict to pos < sae.cfg.context_size. Positional features We first replicate Figure 1f of Gurnee et al. (2024), which finds instances of sinusoidal positional neurons in MLP layers. To do so, we assign each feature a positional score. We first compute the mean activation of each feature at each position by averaging over all possible input tokens. The position score is the max value of this over all positions, i.e. where fi(tok,pos) is the feature activation for feature i for the given input. We find positional scores drop off rapidly. There seem to only be ~50 positional features (of 24k total features) in this SAE. Inspecting the features, we find 1. Many positional features, each with small standard deviation over input tokens (shown in lower opacit...

An American, a Canadian and an Israeli Jewish educator walk into a….well a discussion. About the Israel-Hamas war, the state of Gaza and state of mind of Israelis, no less. So, this conversation is really no joke. Huge thanks to Yair Alon, Adam Levi and Zev Dever for this sometimes hard, always thoughtful, and very nuanced and compassionate conversation, and the healing and shared understanding they are working to reach.  You may remember my baby brother Zev from Season 1, when he taught us about how much of modern Western Judaism formed into what we see in places like the U.S. today. He's recently back from Israel, and he and his colleagues Adam and Yair squeezed in a late night podcast recording with me while in D.C. on a listening and discussion tour for their NGO Hechalutz, exploring what American Jewish communities are experiencing in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack. They bring us clear-eyed assessments of what Israelis and American Jews alike are experiencing, and how those might create challenges or hopes for a peaceful resolution to the war. Listen in to hear what Israel was like in the immediate aftermath of October 7, how Israelis are feeling now, and the implications of coping--or not--with the destruction of some of their most basic concepts of safety and security. This was a long conversation, and cutting too much would have damaged the depth of the discussion, so we've divided it into 2 parts. Please be sure to come back for part 2, where we'll get a deep dive into the huge differences in the discourse for American and Israeli Jews, and hear about the individual, and yet sadly universal, experiences of these three on October 7, and how they personally are working to process all that has happened and all that remains to be faced. GLOSSARY:Kibbutz: traditionally agrarian, these communal living settlements now take various forms around an "intentional", voluntary social contract. Aaliya: from the Hebrew word meaning "to rise" or "to go up", this is the term for becoming a citizen of Israel. "Olim" is the plural noun for people who have done this, like Zev.Diaspora: a general term for peoples living outside their homeland. Generically often refers to Jews living outside Israel.Habonim D'ror: MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: Ezra Klein Show: She polled Gazans on Oct. 6. Here's what she found.Effects of the war on Israeli and Palestinian economies.Hostage families protest the Israeli governmentIsrael's far right on resettling GazaLearn about the Rise of the Israeli Right and Hamas from one of the very best in the biz, NPR's Throughline.  Support the showLike the show? Support it! Or don't, that's cool too. Just glad you're here! https://www.buzzsprout.com/2196108/supporters/new

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What do staff at CEA believe? (Evidence from a rough cause prio survey from April), published by Lizka on October 2, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. In April, I ran a small and fully anonymous cause prioritization survey of CEA staff members at a CEA strategy retreat. I got 31 responses (out of around 40 people), and I'm summarizing the results here, as it seems that people sometimes have incorrect beliefs about "what CEA believes." (I don't think the results are very surprising, though.) Important notes and caveats: I put this survey together pretty quickly, and I wasn't aiming to use it for a public writeup like this (but rather to check how comfortable staff are talking about cause prioritization, start conversations among staff, and test some personal theories). (I also analyzed it quickly.) In many cases, I regret how questions were set up, but I was in a rush and am going with what I have in order to share something - please treat these conclusions as quite rough. For many questions, I let people select multiple answers. This sometimes produced slightly unintuitive or hard-to-parse results; numbers often don't add up unless you take this into account. (Generally, I think the answers aren't self-contradictory once this is taken into account.) Sometimes people could also input their own answers. People's views might have changed since April, and the team composition has changed. I didn't ask for any demographic information (including stuff like "Which team are you on?"). I also asked some free-response questions, but haven't included them here. Rough summary of the results: Approach to cause prioritization: Most people at CEA care about doing some of their own cause prioritization, although most don't try to build up the bulk of their cause prioritization on their own. Approach to morality: About a third of respondents said that they're "very consequentialist," many said that they "lean consequentialist for decisions like what their projects should work on, but have a more mundane approach to daily life." Many also said that they're "big fans of moral uncertainty." Which causes should be "key priorities for EA": people generally selected many causes (median was 5), and most people selected a fairly broad range of causes. Two (of 30) respondents didn't choose any causes not commonly classified as "longtermist/x-risk-focused" (everyone else did choose at least one, though). The top selections were Mitigating existential risk, broadly (27), AI existential security (26), Biosecurity (global catastrophic risk focus) (25), Farmed animal welfare (22), Global health (21), Other existential or global catastrophic risk (15), Wild animal welfare (11), and Generically preparing for pandemics (8). (Other options on the list were Mental health, Climate change, Raising the sanity waterline / un-targeted improving institutional decision-making, Economic growth, and Electoral reform.) Some highlights from more granular questions: Most people selected "I think reducing extinction risks should be a key priority (of EA/CEA)" (27). Many selected "I think improving how the long-run future goes should be a key priority (of EA/CEA)" (17), and "I think future generations matter morally, but it's hard to affect them." (13) Most people selected "I think AI existential risk reduction should be a top priority for EA/CEA" (23) and many selected "I want to learn more in order to form my views and/or stop deferring as much" (17) and "I think AI is the single biggest issue humanity is facing right now" (13). (Some people also selected answers like "I'm worried about misuse of AI (bad people/governments, etc.), but misalignment etc. seems mostly unrealistic" and "I feel like it's important, but transformative developments / x-risk are decades away.") Most people (22) selected at least one o...

hello! welcome and salutations all! In today's episode we talk about the wheel of time. And yeah... no thats it, we talk about the wheel of time. It's a SPOILER FREE (mostly) EPISODE!!! there is a banner in the episode for when there are spoilers, for like 5 minutes. We are joined by Nathaniel from Generic Entertainment! We wanted to ask him about his latest video, his thoughts on the books and the TV show, and BOY DID HE DELIVER! Go check out his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@UC2kwy7zx2SBQVrPWyb4PMeQ  Did we miss anything in the show? Comment below and let us know!! et 10% off of Dubby Energy by using code BTP or this link: https://www.dubby.gg/discount/BTP The Crystal Barista: https://www.crystalbarista.com The Great Blight: https://www.thegreatblight.com New Creations by Jen: https://www.newcreationsbyjen.com Want more Black Tower Podcast stuff? Check out our linktree for links to our Website, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and others! Linktree: https://linktr.ee/blacktowerpodcast Come on over to our Discord to join in more of the tainty fun! https://discord.gg/YsnqZSxtwV Enjoy what we do and want to help support us (while getting some dope benefits at the same time)? Our Patreon is pretty cool! https://www.patreon.com/Blacktowerpod Intro Music - Black Tower Podcast by Slylock  https://soundcloud.com/theslylock Outro Music - The Black Tower by Androl-Bard of Time https://www.youtube.com/c/AndrolBardoftime Intro & Outro Videos by Lauren/Unraveling the Pattern https://www.youtube.com/unravelingthepattern

North Korea-linked APT37 exploits Internet Explorer zero-day flaw Firewalls of several major vendors bypassed with generic attack method New 'Zombinder' platform binds Android malware with legitimate apps Thanks to today's episode sponsor, PlexTrac The best pentesting teams trust PlexTrac. PlexTrac can improve efficiency and effectiveness at every phase of your proactive assessments. By centralizing the data from all your automation tools, cataloging important reusable content for easy access, and promoting communication and visibility at every phase of an assessment, PlexTrac cuts reporting time in half and adds value between reports.  Check out PlexTrac.com/CISOSeries to learn why PlexTrac is the premier pentest reporting and collaboration platform. For the stories behind the headlines, head to CISOseries.com.

Download a PDF of the sermon recap “Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, and to those who feel secure on the mountain of Samaria, the notable men of the first of the nations, to whom the house of Israel comes! (Amos 6:1) Big Idea: We must repent of complacency because (v. 8). . . Judgment is Coming (vv. 9-14) While it is not the highest motivation for following the Lord, impending judgment is a good reason to repent! Even at the height of God’s anger, he reasons with his people. Since sin (even the sin of complacency) is irrational, God graciously annunciates the logic for returning to him in order to gain a soft heart of compassion for those for whom he is burdened. The first reason is that he is God and we are not. That means that if God says we are in danger of judgment if we do not conform our lives to his priorities of generosity toward the poor and disenfranchised, then we must pay attention. Secondly, he tells the complacent that they must understand that their neglect of his burdens for the poor and unjustly treated is ultimately self-destructive. Thirdly, God threatens his church with exile. Remember Israel was a unique combination of church and government, a theocracy. So when he says that he will deport his people, he is saying that he is going to shut their church down as much as he is promising to overthrow their government. God Hates Pride (vv. 1-7) If anything makes God more angry than complacency, it is pride. The Israelites’ smugness over their supposed accomplishments exacerbated God’s anger and hastened the threat of his judgment. The leaders of Israel considered themselves to be the supreme leaders of the preeminent nation on earth. There are three verbs which vividly describe how incensed God is when he finds ungrateful pride among his people. Generically, he “abhors” their self-confidence. Specifically, he “detests” (cm. 5:15, 21) their trust in fortresses (cf. Dt. 28:52). They supposed that these strong places protected them from military threat and would protect the treasure they had taken by violence and usury from the poor. They represent any man-made plan that deludes someone into thinking he does not need to trust God. The third verb describes what God will do to those who insist that something is more trustworthy than he is, even to the point of using that fortress to shield them from his judgment and free them to take advantage of others. Discussion Questions: Have you ever considered that lack of concern and care for others is actually self-detrimental? Why might this be counterintuitive? How does gospel logic prove this to be the case? What might you tend to put your trust in besides God? What is one way you might consider cutting back so that you have more to give? Even in his words of judgment, how does God show himself to be gracious in this passage?

When mindfulness, creativity, and innovation come together, the result is powerful leadership and impactful inventions that can change the world.   Faisal Hoque is the founder of SHADOKA, NextChapter, and other companies that focus on enabling sustainable and transformational changes. Throughout his career, he has developed over 20 commercial business and technology platforms and worked with public and private sector giants.   His bestselling book, Everything Connects: Cultivating Mindfulness, Creativity, & Innovation for Long-Term Value (Fast Company), is currently #2 on Wall Street Journal and USA Today.   Faisal grew up in Bangladesh and his world travel has inspired him to write several books with a focus on individual and organizational leadership, creating long-term value, and resilience.   Deep, daily mindfulness about our intentions and actions is essential. Faisal highlights the example of Leonardo DaVinci — he was constantly striving to determine who he was as an artist, sculptor, engineer, and entrepreneur, and then apply it to his real life. Mindfulness about your value-add is absolutely essential as you work to make meaningful contributions in the world.   Generically, mindfulness applies to awareness of where our mind lands, but more specifically it applies to our self-awareness and acting intentionally rather than merely in reaction to external forces. Mindfulness impacts not only you but every relationship you are in.   Faisal calls empathy the foundation of transformational leadership. Leaders are self-aware, they are influential, and they are looking for ways to recognize and utilize the talents of others. Without effective mindfulness of the self, leaders can't expect to be effective in leading or inspiring others.   Interview Links: Faisal Hoque   Resources: 20,000 Scaleups Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube Recruiter.com Short List (use code scaleup)   Scaling Up is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and our team for Scaling Up Coaches (formerly Gazelles). We share how the fastest-growing companies succeed where so many others fail.   Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of the show, is an international business coach who works with C-Suite leaders to achieve breakthrough growth.   We help leadership teams with the biggest decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth. Scaling Up is based on Verne's original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits.   Did you enjoy today's episode? If so, then please leave a review! Help other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they, too, can benefit from the ideas shared in these podcasts.  

How Does Big Government Collaboration With Big Tech Raise the Costs of Everything? We're going to talk about the Senate bill that has big tech scared, really scared. I'll talk about a new job site problem for a number of different industries because of hackers, the cloud, the cost and reliability. [Following is an automated transcript]  This tech bill. It has the Senate really scared. He is frankly, quite a big deal for those of you who are watching over on of course, rumble or YouTube. I'm pulling this up on this screen. This is an article. ARS Technica and they got it originally from wired it's it was out in wired earlier in the month. And it's pointing out a real big problem that this isn't just a problem. This is a problem for both the legislature. In this case, we're going to talk about the Senate and a problem for our friend. In big tech. So let us define the first problem as the big tech problem. [00:01:00] You're Amazon. You are Google. Those are the two big targets here of this particular bill. We're going to talk about, or maybe your Facebook or one of these other Facebook properties, et cetera. If you are a small company that wants to compete with any of these big guys, What can you do? Obviously you can do what everyone's been telling us. Oh, you don't like the censorship, just make your own platform. And there've been a lot of places and people that are put a lot of money into trying to make their own platform. And some of them have had some mild successes. So for instance, I'm on. You can watch my videos there. And there have been some successes that rumble has had and making it into kind of the competition to YouTube. But YouTube is still the 800 pound gorilla. Everybody wants to be where the cool kids are. So for most people. That YouTube. They look at YouTube as being the [00:02:00] popular place. Thus, we should be, we are obviously saw the whole thing with Elon Musk and Twitter, and the goings on there. And Twitter really is the public square, although it's died down a lot because of this censorship on Twitter. Interesting. So as time goes forward, these various big companies are worried about potential competition. So how do they deal with that? This is where the real problems start coming in because we saw Amazon, for instance, in support of an internet sales tax. You remember that whole big deal. The internet had been set aside saying, Hey, no states can tax the internet and that's going to keep the internet open. That's going to help keep it free. And people can start buying online. And that worked out fairly well. A lot of people are out there, why would Amazon support a sales tax on the internet? They are the biggest merchant on the internet, probably the biggest [00:03:00] merchant period when it comes to not just consumer goods, but a lot of goods, like a staples might carry for business. So they'd have to deal with what they're 9,000 different tax jurisdictions in the United States. And then of course all these other countries, we're not going to talk about them right now, but the United States 9,000 tax jurisdictions. So why would Amazon support an internet sales tax when there's 5,000 tax jurisdictions? The reason is it makes life easier for them when it comes to competition. So if you are a little. And do you want to sell your widgets or your service? Whatever it might be online. You now have to deal with 9,000 tax jurisdictions. It's bad enough in the Northeast. If you are in New Hampshire, if you live in New Hampshire and you spend more than, I think [00:04:00] it's 15% of your time south of the border and mass, then mass wants you to pay income tax for that 15% that you are spending your time there. Now they do that with the. Baseball teams with football teams, hockey, you name it, right? So the big football team comes into town. The Patriots are paying the New York jets or whatever it might be. The Patriots have to pay New York state taxes, income tax now because they stepped foot in New York heaven forbid that they try and do business there and help New York state out. And they now have to pay income tax. Now they only have to pay income tax for, or for the amount of time. They're more New York. Various states have various weirdnesses, but if you're only playing 1, 2, 3 dozen games a year, It isn't like your normal work here, which is 2080 hours. We're talking about their plane to New York and they're only spending maybe 10 hours working in New York, but that [00:05:00] represents what percentage, 10, 20, 30% of their income, depending on how many games they play and how they're paying. And so they got to keep track of all that and figure it out. Okay. We played in New York, we played in New Jersey. We're in mass. We were they weren't in New Hampshire, certainly the Patriots plane, but they got to figure it all out. Guess what? Those big pay. Football players, hockey, baseball. They can afford to have a tax accountant, figure it all out and then battle with them. I had a booth one time at a trade show down in Connecticut. Didn't say. Thing it was terrible trade shows, man. They aren't what they used to be. And they haven't been for a long time. This is probably a decade plus ago, maybe even 20 years ago. So I had a little booth, we were selling our services for cybersecurity and of course, nobody wanted to bother pain for cybersecurity who needs it. I haven't been hacked yet. [00:06:00] Although there's an interesting article. We'll talk about next week based on a study that shows. Small businesses are going out of business at a huge rate because of the hacks because of ransomware. And if you're worried about ransomware, I've got a really great little guide that you can get. Just email me, me@craigpeterson.com. I'll send it off to you, right? It's a free thing. Real information, not this cruddy stuff that you get from so many marketers, cause I'm an engineer. They'll go out of business. So they figured I haven't got a business yet, not a big deal. And so no body. There's big trade show. And I was so disappointed with the number of people that even showed up for this silly thing. So what happens next while I get back to the office and about a month to two months later, I get this notice from the state of Connecticut they're tax people saying that I haven't paid my Connecticut taxes yet. [00:07:00] And because I was in connected. I should be paying my income tax for that day that I spent and wasted in Connecticut. Oh. And plus every company in Connecticut that I'm doing business with now, I need to collect their taxes and pay them the taxes that I'm collecting for those Connecticut businesses are resident. I didn't sell a thing. You know what it took almost, I think it was three or maybe four years to get the state of Connecticut to finally stop sending me all of these threatening notices because I didn't get a dime from anybody in Connecticut. So I'd love the internet from that standpoint saying you don't have to collect taxes in certain cases, certain states, et cetera, unless you have a legal nexus or a legal presence there in the state. So back to Amazon, Amazon loves the idea of having everything on the internet packs. They love the fact that there's 9,000 plus [00:08:00] tax jurisdictions. When you get right down to city, state county Lilian, either local taxes, or you look at those poor residents of New York state, or they're poor residents out in Washington state that have to worry about that, right? There's county taxes, state sales tax. City sales tax, and income taxes are much the same, the, all of these crazy cities and states around the country. Yeah. The ones that are in serious trouble right now, they are those same ones. Those particular jurisdictions are hard to deal with. So from Amazon standpoint is just like the Patriots football players. We've got plenty of money. We've got teams of lawyers. We have all kinds of accountant. We can handle this and you know why Amazon really loves it because it provides another obstacle for any competitors who want to enter the business. That's the [00:09:00] real reason, so many big businesses don't go ahead and charge you serious money so that they can use that money against you. Okay. You see where I'm going with this? Because if you want to start a business that competes with Amazon, if you want to have a doilies, you're making doilies. My grandmother used to make them all the time and she had them on the toilet paper in the bathroom, little doily holders. Doilies everywhere. And then of course, the seashells shells on top of the toilet paper holders. If you want to do that and sell it, how are you going to deal online with 9,000 tax jurisdictions? All what you're going to do is you're going to go to Etsy, or you may be going to go to Amazon marketplace and sell your product there. An Amazon marketplace. So Amazon is taking its cut out of it at is taking it's cut off. And you still ultimately have some of that tax liable. [00:10:00] Amazon loves it. It's the same reason you see these groups forums, right? Barbers saying, oh, we've got to be regulated. Really you need to have a regulation in place for barbers. You need to have licensing for barbers. Why do they do that? They do that. Not just barbers, right? It's all of these licensures and various states. They do that really to keep people. To keep their prices high. That's why they do it because someone can't just put up a sign and say, Hey, I am now a barber. Come get a haircut. And if you don't like the barber, if they do a lousy job, you go elsewhere. We don't need all of the bureaucracy on top of this to enforce licensure. Anyways, when we get back, let's talk about that Senate. It's a big deal. And I am coming down in the middle of this thing. Hey, visit me online. Sign up right now. Craig peterson.com and get my special report on passwords.[00:11:00] We just talked about how big business uses its advantages to crush potential competition. Crush them. And it's a shame and it's happened to me and many people I know, and now the Senate's getting involved and making things worse.  This is a huge problem. This happened to me a number of years ago, and I will never forget it. It was a really big lesson for me. I had designed and written a computer system that would take the code that it was written for a much older system. And run it for much less money. So bottom line here, this was a system called Cade computer assisted data entry that was made by Sperry way back in the day. Yeah. I've been in there for that long and they had little programs, so they would not punch cards, but punch right on two tapes, those big [00:12:00] nine track tapes and that information would then be used for processing later on then. People, big businesses grocery stores, you name it. We're using that Sperry system. And I designed a system that would take their COBOL is what it was. It was a form of COBOL code from this cage system. And you could use my code to compile it and run it on a Unix system. So the cost involved here was that it would be cheaper to buy a whole new Unix computer and buy new terminals and do some slight training changes. But the key punch operators would be exactly the same keystrokes as they were already used to. Okay. So you know how fast they were, so it wouldn't slow than none at all. And their cost would be. Then just the maintenance contract on the old Sperry cage. Very [00:13:00] cool stuff. And I worked really well. Then I worked with a couple of sales guys at spirit because Barry had a Unix tower system. It was a mini computer that was Unix space. And I had one, I had saved up my money. We bought this thing. It was a lot of money nowadays. It'd be about a hundred thousand dollars I spent on that system and it was really great. Cool. So some grocery stores started using it. They used it to build the space shuttle to design it and send it into space. RCA, Astro space used it, my system, which is all really cool. So Sperry was interested in it saying, okay let's do this. Now. I had flown myself across the country too, because I was in California at the time to do some of this work for. The for RCA Astro space for the space program and help make sure it was working and get it installed, help them configure it and everything else. So [00:14:00] I had a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of effort into this. It was a big venture. So Sperry invited me down to their headquarters down in blue bell, Pennsylvania to talk about this. And I was so excited because their sales guys wanted to sell it. They gave me some free space in a booth in Las Vegas. So I was in the Sperry booth with them and, say, yeah, you can buy this. And you're using the Sperry, the new Sperry hardware. And I went down there and talked with them. They never did anything with me, or, here's a huge investment young guy. And all of this stuff just worked and they had proof of concept. They had a couple of customers already using the system and it never materialized. And then about a year and a half later, I found out Sperry had tried to duplicate my system and had messed it up terribly. It [00:15:00] wasn't keystroke compatible. So anyone using the new Sperry system, they had to learn. Okay. So I got to hit this and I got to go over here and I got to click on this. Are you kidding me using a mouse? Aren't you not? These are data entry operators. They just go all day long, just typing and. They had stolen my ideas. They messed it up. They didn't do as good a job as I did, which turns out it's pretty common. And they had stolen it. They stolen years of my life. So I've seen that before with me. I've seen Microsoft do that with friends of mine, and I've seen apple do it with various products that they've decided to release. They all do it. Why do you think these businesses can not spend money on research and development, and yet at the same time, stay in business as technology's continuing to move forward? Why? The reason is. They don't have to do, or why [00:16:00] would we do T wait a minute. Now, all we have to do is either buy the company or steal the product just re-engineer. Oh. And if we want to buy the company, we can do what Microsoft has been accused of doing again and again, which is. We'll just Microsoft. Let's see here. I like that database is pretty darn cool. So here's what we're going to do. So Microsoft announces, Hey, we're going to have a competitor to that in coming out soon. And then they sit there and they wait and they say, okay, how many people are going to ask about, oh wow. A lot of people asking for it. In the meantime, that company that had that great little database soft. Trying to sell it. And people are saying, wait, Microsoft is going to come up with a version of this. I'm just, I'm going to wait. We can wait a few months. Let's see what Microsoft. So that poor company is now seriously struggling because this big company came out and made the announcement that they're going to do something like this. And then that small company gets a [00:17:00] knock on the door. Hey, we're Microsoft or company X. And we like your product. Wow. Okay. So we're going to do a buyout. We're going to we're just, oh, this is going to be fantastic. I might have to sign what a two year contract non-compete and help them manage it. Okay. We can deal with this. And then they find out that company X says Your company is not worth that much anymore. Your sales look at their sales here, man. They've gone way down. Okay. So let me see let's do a nickel on every dollar evaluation you had a year ago. This happens every day, worldwide in America, it should never happen to anyone. And as you can tell, it upsets me. So what are Klobuchar and Grassley doing here? Amy, when she was running for president, she made this big deal. I'm going to pull us up on my screen. Those of you who are watching [00:18:00] on rumble or YouTube. And you can find all of that in my website, Craig peterson.com can see here. So they are trying to protect the American consumer, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's it. They're gonna protect us. And so what they're doing is saying that. Would a rule ruin Google search results because that's what Google says. Is it going to bar apple from offering new features, useful ones on the iPhone? How about Facebook? Will it stop them from moderating content? So the legislation's core idea is we will just. The marketplace take care of things. We're not going to let Amazon put their products in the product listings before third parties, but how are you possibly going to be able to regulate that stuff you can't, you can regulate it [00:19:00] talking about a bureaucracy. You'd probably need one about as big as the federal government is right now. And the federal government needs to be cut back in a major way. There's this two months. How about the 150 million Americans? This article brings that up to that are currently using Amazon prime, even though the price one hump. And they have it free to prime members. It's this is a big deal. The bill doesn't mention prime. Doesn't mention Google by name, Amazon. But this is going to be a nightmare to enforce the bill is not specific enough. It should be voted down. And between you and me, I don't know what can be done about this other than to have additional marketplaces show up online. And you know what the conservative social media sites are starting to win. So maybe there's hope. We've got two things we're going to talk about right now. One of them [00:20:00] is tech jobs. And man, is there a lot of scamming going on there as you might expect in the second is cloud, are you looking at cloud services? Hey, a home or business.  You can see this. I'm going to pull this up on my screen for those watching on rumble or on YouTube, but this is a big problem. And we've seen this again and again right now, they're going after certain workers in the chemical. The sector, but it isn't just the chemical sector. What we've seen is the bad guys going after anyone that's applying for a job. So let me give you a few tips here. First of all, you should not be pain to apply for a job. We see that all of the time when it comes to the head hunting firms, what. Is, they will charge the business who is looking to hire someone [00:21:00] that makes sense to you. They'll hire they'll charge the business. So oftentimes it's a percentage of the annual salary committee where from usually 20% up to a hundred percent or more, depending on the position. And boy can, they make a lot of money, but they don't necessarily place. People, but you know how it is right now, there, there can be quite a few. So people have been applying for jobs to make a lot of money and not realizing that fee that supposedly they have to pay is illegitimate. So remember that. Okay. The second thing has to do with this particular scam, because what they're trying to do is. Into some of these companies. So they will send a thing out saying, Hey, on my head hunter, I'm here for you. We're going to get you this job you need to apply. Are you interested in a new job now? I've seen some stats online saying [00:22:00] that somewhere around 30 plus percent of people are looking or at least open to. Take getting a new job, which means a lot more are looking for jobs. Now I have to add to that, that the people who have jumped ship over the lockdown period really are not happy. The majority of them wish they had stayed where they were at. So keep that in mind too. But what they'll do is they'll say, Hey, listen. Oh, there's this new feature on LinkedIn. By the way, you can say y'all are, I'm interested in looking for a job. I forget exactly what it says, but it goes around your picture and I have it up there because I'm a contractor, I go to businesses and I'm. To harden their cybersecurity. And we usually start slowly, especially with some of these startups we're doing work with right now where they won't, they go from a completely flat network and [00:23:00] it's all engineers and I don't want anything hindering anything. And so you got to work with them and it's just, we had a time sort of a thing. Okay. I just had this one thing this week. And then move on to one thing next week as well. So that's what I do for a living. And a lot of people are looking on LinkedIn and other places to find people who can be a chief information security officer. So I'm what you call a fractional chief information security officer. I do this under contract and I've been doing contracts and contract work for. I don't know if I shouldn't be on the air, but my gosh it's been now I guess it's 40 years right now. So I've been doing this for a long time. So I'm familiar with some of these scams, so they didn't take my word on some of this stuff. So what they do is they say, Hey, we've got a potential job opening. Are you in interested now? When we talk about 30 plus percent of people polled [00:24:00] say that they're looking interested in a new job, the numbers are probably a little higher. Not that everyone's going to jump ship. Some people will, but there are a lot of people that if they get this email, they're going to open it up. And so what'll happen now is this group out of North Korea called the Lazarus group? And we've talked about them before. We'll go ahead and say yeah, the here's, what's going to happen here. Let's just send you this thing. You can open it up. You can look at it and see if it's really a fit for you. I love this graphic that they have. This is from dark reading. I have it up on the screen again. Rumble and YouTube. What should we do now? Should I open this up? Should I not open it up? It turns out that what's happening is that Symantec and Broadcom, both have noticed this and stated in an advisory a couple of weeks ago. Be very careful [00:25:00] because what it's going to do is install a Trojan horse on your computer. So let's think about this. You're talking about the chemicals. You have a lot of people who are very technical. And if a company wants to get some new technology, we talked about this earlier in the show, what did they do? Do they just go and say, oh, okay, let's get some R and D going here. Let me research and development. Let's hire some scientists and do some pure science here, which are almost never happens anymore. No, what they do is they either buy a company, they steal a company's idea. If you are like the communist, you try and steal the technology directly. And that's exactly what these guys are doing. They put a Trojan on your machine because you open that file and that Trojan then gives you. Oh, excuse me, gives them access to your machine. Now this particular Trobe Trojan is a malicious [00:26:00] web file. Disguises. This job offer and your machine gets comparable. They attempt to compromise it, right? It's not always successful. They're not as many zero days out there for these lower level actors like North Korea, but they've been able. Now, they're not just going after chemical sectors, they're going after it service providers. So companies like mine that provide managed security services for businesses, they are being attacked. So that's a problem too, isn't it? Because if you can compromise. A nine company and we've seen this all the time. It's getting reported like crazy. You now have access to all of their customers because the it service company has passwords, et cetera. And they're probably using. Industry is number one or number two products for managing the customer's computers, neither of which are secure. [00:27:00] And that's the biggest problem that we've had. We use some of these things before, I'm not going to name them right now because it wouldn't mean anything to you anyways, but we had to get. We worked with our, it people inside the software companies that make the software that are used by the managed services providers. And we'd talked with their developers and said, Hey, listen, this is a serious problem. That's a serious problem. You've got to change this. You got to change that. And what ended up happening? We left them because they weren't doing what they were supposed to be doing a very big deal. So they're targeting defense, contractors, engineering firms of any sort. They want to steal IP, intellectual property, pharmaceutical companies. Yeah. Very big deal. These third hunting teams, including Cisco's, which are the guys that we use. Tallow sets again, an example of a big company buying a smaller company called telos that does threat intelligence and it looks at stuff. They're all reporting to this. [00:28:00] So high level jobs in an industry or what you have to watch out. It'd be very careful. Now, earlier this year, Lazarus group, again, North Korea went after some of these jobs people 250 that were identified working in the news media, software vendors, internet infrastructure providers, using job offers that appeared to come from. Disney, Google Oracle by the way, that was according to Google who tracked the campaign. They know what their employees are doing, where they're going, what emails coming in. It's crazy. We're looking a lot of stuff. Okay. So I want to move on to the next topic here. Last one, this hour, but I'm gonna pull this up right now on my screen. You can have a look at it there. Of course, if you are at home. You can or you really can't on the road. You can see this on rumble and also see this on the YouTube [00:29:00] site. At least for the time being until I get kicked off right. Kicked off again. That seems to be the word of the hour, but cost reliability are raising concerns in. Again, this is a dark reading article, came out a couple of weeks back here, but the biggest concerns about cloud computing to what is cloud computing. Let's talk about that first for a minute. Cloud computing is going online using something like salesforce.com. People don't think of that as cloud computing. But you have in Salesforce, all the communications with all of your customers, et cetera, that's an example of a platform as a service, basically. So they're providing you with everything and it's up in the cloud, nothing to worry about here, folks, but of course you have the same potential problems. You do outs where people use what's it called now? Microsoft 365. Which Microsoft disclaimed [00:30:00] any liability for any problems they cause for anything customers it's really crazy, but again, what are the problems there? Reliability slash performance, 50% of the people, 50% applaud on the screen. Again here worried about reliability and performance, because if your business is relying on cloud computing, What, how is the security any good? That you could use something, as I mentioned Salesforce, and just picking them out of a hat and not, they haven't been like a terrible provider by any stretch. But how about if you're going to Azure and you're using a workstation news here? How about if you're going to some other place, right? It could be Amazon web services. Google also has data processing services. Security's huge issue. Cost is a huge issue, reliability, performance, all of those. We're issues with more than 50% of the it [00:31:00] professionals. I'm surprised that this next one, which is our staff skillset on dealing with cog computing 26%. The reason I'm surprised by that is hardly anybody knows enough about cloud computing. Do we really confident about it? I'm serious about that. There's some companies right now, we're talking with a company called Wiz and they audit Azure configuration. So be very careful if you're using. Particularly if you're a business, it may not work out well for you. Hey, make sure you go online right now. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Sign up. You'll get my newsletters. You'll get all kinds of great information. Absolutely free Craig peterson.com including my special report on passwords. Now, if you have any questions, just email me M e@craigpeterson.com. [00:32:00] There is a whole bunch going on when it comes to Russia, of course, invasion of Ukraine. We're going to talk about that. And what is I can, how does this domain system work and why are people calling to have dot R U deleted? This is really a big deal. And if you're watching from home, I'm going to go full screen on this article. This is an article from ARS Technica, and I've been talking about it all week, which is that I can won't revoke Russian in Jeanette domains, says the effect. Devastating. This is frankly pretty darn fascinating to me because I can, as this international organization, it was put together in order to help make the internet international. And I'm not talking about the data international, but control of it. A lot of countries work. Because of [00:33:00] course the internet was created in that states. It was created by us tax payers, money for the DOD. And it was designed to be very resilient, in fact, so resilient that there could be a nuclear blast and that nuclear blast and. Causing problems, but yeah. Yeah, the internet is still going to work. And the whole idea behind it was you could have multiple routers. They're all talking to each other nowadays. They're talking BGP four and they can say, how can I get from here? To there. And so the idea behind BGP is they all share this information once the least cost way. What's the easiest way to post way. If you will, for me to get from point a to point B and it changes all the time. So you might be on a phone conversation. You might be listening to me right now, online streaming or watching the video you might be doing, who knows what [00:34:00] out there with digital communications. But the communications channel that you think you're using, where the data is going from, let's say my microphone, ultimately to your device, your ears, that data path, once it becomes dated. Can be changing multiple times a second. Now it actually changes quite a bit. Initially as these internet backbone routers, send the least cost, routing information back and forth to, and fro a very good thing, frankly, because it helps to speed everything up. And there's other tricks that we're using you. Might've seen. For instance, Akamai and some of the URLs before have sites that you've gone to, and that's called a content delivery network and that helps get the content to be closer to you. So if you're on a website in California and you're in New Hampshire, that website video, that website graphic, et cetera, is going to be coming from [00:35:00] a server local to me here in New Hampshire. All right. That's how that all is supposed to work. So we have names you guys know about that internet, domain names and those domain names. You already know those are turned into internet addresses, and those addresses are then used by the routers to figure out where to go, how to get the data. The problem that we're having right now, of course, is Russia seems to be substantially abusing the intranet Putin, put a kill switch on to the Russian internet sometime ago. And the idea behind the skills, which was, Hey, listen, if we don't want the world to be talking to us, we'll just cut it. Now he's tested it a couple of times, but what he has not done is shut it down and he hasn't shut it down. As part of this Ukraine, more, what they did is they passed laws saying, Hey, if you publish something that [00:36:00] disagrees with what we're saying, you get 15 years. And even these people who've been protesting on the streets, they're getting a bound 60 days, 30 to 60 days in jail, just for protesting what's going on. So a lot of people have been saying why don't we just, we turn off the Russian internet now we're not going to use Putin's kill switch in order to shut it all off. We're not going to do a well, a few things. She decided not to do, denial of service attacks, et cetera. Although there are hackers doing that and we are going to talk about that today, but they're saying what? Let's just go ahead and let's kill their dot R E. The country domain. And I can, the guy who heads it up said, Hey, listen our mission is just to make sure that the internet works. So shutting off the dot R U domain so that no one can go ahead and. We send right. A [00:37:00] request out to the domain name servers and get a resolution to an IP address. So if you try and go to Kremlin dot REU or something, you will get blocked and you will get blocked. Not blocked. No, I like the great firewall of China or of Russia. Now they've got one going pretty good. Yeah. Thank you. You ain't using us technology. It's crazy. What we've. But what it does is it says, oh, I hide dot, are you, I don't know. What are you talking about? So there have been a lot of people who have been pushing for it. And you'll see, on my screen here, that Ukraine is requested to cut Russia off from some of these core parts of the internet. And I can, which is the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers. I couldn't remember what that was earlier said that I can must remain neutral and their mission they say is not to take punitive actions. It's to make sure the internet works. So are they really taking punitive actions [00:38:00] of the cat Russia off? It's really interesting to me because look at what has been going on. You've got companies like Facebook as the great example who has gone ahead and just shut off people. They didn't like what they were saying. My goodness. At one point of you said you should wear a mask during this pandemic. You would be cut off from Facebook. And then of course, if you said, no, you don't, you shouldn't don't need you, you shouldn't wear a mask that at that point you would be cut off, because science right. Sciences, we know exactly what we're doing now. It goes on and on. If you said that it came from a lab in China, you would have your account suspended. Now of course their whole tune has changed and yeah probably came from a lab in China. It's crazy what these people have been doing. So we have arbiters of truth, who are some contractors sitting in their home or wherever it is the contractors for Facebook [00:39:00] that are going through posts that people are flagging as Incorrect as fake news. So what happens is people say fake news and then that goes off to their team that then looks at it and says okay. Yeah, fake news because we disagree with it. It just blows my mind. We have to have free and fair and open discussions. Don't we. You have that line at Facebook and Google does some of the same. A lot of these sites do a lot of the same. You get our major media outlets that are all deciding what they want to report on and what they want to label as fake and fake news. I'm just shaking my head because it's hard. It's hard to believe. What about. Russia is putting out fake news, as I've said many times before the first casualty in war, this isn't my quote. The first casualty in war is what, it's the truth. So if [00:40:00] truth is the first casualty, then that means we've got a lot of propaganda going on. We had propaganda coming out of Ukraine. We've caught some of those, like the, what was it? The. Chat goes, fighter, pilot, whatever it was who had killed, what was it? Five Soviet or Russian jets, Soviet era using silver deer, techno era technology on the part of the Ukrainian turns out well. Okay, that, that was false news. That was fake news. The whole thing about snake island, where you had that Russian military. I know what it was a frigging but anyways boat sitting there saying we are a Russia. Warship, you will surrender or, whatever. Do you remember that snake on just the small place, 13 guys and supposedly they shelled it and they killed all 13 turns out that was probably fake news as well. So that's from the Ukrainian side and on the Russian side they hardly reported I as to how many.[00:41:00] The we're in fact, initially for quite a while, they were saying there are no desks. Then at the same time, the Ukrainians are saying they're 2,500 Russians dead. And that number keeps going up, who knows what it is today. It gets really crazy in the time of war. So if Facebook is going to stop someone from saying don't wear masks or do wear masks, depending on what day of the week it is basically right. Wednesday. It's okay to say that Thursday is not okay to say that we're back. No it's not. Or then why can't that type of censorship? Move on to the next. I that's a big question I have now. Should we be shutting it off? I'll pull this back up on the screen again. And it, this article from ARS, Technica is saying that experts have warned, whoever they are that shutting down the dot R U domain. Is going to cause just incredible problems [00:42:00] for Russians, which man would it ever talking about a major blow to the economy. And it would also cause problems for people who are trying to find out more truth about. Russia cause you couldn't get to their site. Now we've seen some amazing things in Russia. We had the Russian, one of the Russian news agencies T, which is broadcasting and here in the U S that their entire staff just walked out saying, forget about it. We're not going to promote this fake news, but this is a little bit different question. Me personally. I don't think anybody should be censoring any. For almost anything. Yo, there are some limits, but they're pretty extreme in my book. I'd rather know someone is an idiot because they're allowed to say stupid things, and counter, counter it, counter their arguments. You've got to have discussions anyways, stick around. We'll be [00:43:00] right back. Microsoft. Yeah, they've been around a long time. They've been helping us. They've had lots of cybersecurity problems. People use Microsoft software on their desktop. Some people use it for servers, which is crazy, but listen to what they're doing now. This is a little concerning. I'm going to pull this article up on the screen. For those of you who are watching a long, either on rumble or YouTube ARS, Technica article, they have some really great articles. This particular one is about our friends at Microsoft. This is cool. Microsoft announced today? This was like a week or so ago that Microsoft would be suspending all new sales of Microsoft products and services in Russia. Following the countries, unjustified, unprovoked, and unlawful invasion of. Now Microsoft [00:44:00] didn't give any specifics about the products, but it really is likely to be a blanket ban of all of the Microsoft products. This is very cool because Microsoft has taken an approach I've never seen them do before, which is okay. When. Gets hacked. You get our friends at apple, putting together patches and getting them out. They get them up pretty quick. Microsoft had been doing much the same. The problem was some months there were patches every day that you had to apply. That's how bad this software is. And they decided that man, let's be like politicians here. Let's release some very damning news Friday. At about 4:30 PM before a long weekend. So no one will notice. Yeah. Y'all are friends of politicians do that all the time. What Microsoft decided they do is, Hey, wait a minute. We know we're going to have patches. [00:45:00] It's not going to slow down. And because our code is terrible. So what we're going to do, let me see here. How about we just release all of them at once and we'll just call it patch Tuesday, right? Because people were complaining about how much work it was, how much effort was effort. It was to try. They hate them. These machines apply these patches every day. Huge problem for everybody from home users to big companies out there. So Microsoft has said, okay let's do that. Let's burry it. So nobody will notice okay that's what Microsoft does. And now we've gotten used to that. Now we have. We remember two guys, right? Bill gates followed by Steve Ballmer. Steve Bohmer was a nut job. Bill gates was a bad man. I think he's just been trying extra hard to compensate for all of the evil he did over the years. But what we're looking at now is new management and that he's been in [00:46:00] there now for a few years, doing a great job, cleaning up Microsoft, making it a very competitive company. He has done some amazing things. One of the things that he has decided to do, that's been very effective is how about this? How about we go ahead. And we work with various governments to help stop these Russian hackers. And I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, what was happening and the Microsoft had reached out to the white house and said, Hey, listen. What we have been looking at the hacks that have been coming from the Russian hackers, and we've been preparing fixes for some of those hacks. How about we work directly with some of these other countries? This reminds me a whole lot of the lend lease program in world war two. You might remember this thing, but the [00:47:00] us of course, initially was not involved in the war and they decided, okay we've got to help the United Kingdom. How are we going to help them? The UK doesn't have the money to buy ships, to have us make weapons, bullets know. What they did is they had people donate the rifles, the guns ammo from home. Plus they made them the government, instead of selling them to the UK, they lent them to the UK because the UK could not afford everything that it needed in order to fight a war against the national socialist in Germany. So what did they do? We just shipped the stuff over there and called it a lend slash lease. I think that's a great idea. And what Microsoft is doing is also great idea. They have been decoding, reverse compiling, if you will, and interpreting the code, looking at what some of the ransomware and other malicious code the Russia has [00:48:00] been using against Ukraine, and they have been providing. All kinds of insight information to these other countries. Now, this is a great idea for a few reasons, one of the reasons, and I think maybe the biggest reason is that the ransomware, the viruses, all of this malware that they're producing is. Not particularly discriminating. Do you guys remember maybe I dunno, what was it? Six months ago, I taught, told you how to avoid getting most of this Russian ransomware. And it was as easy as just installing. Yeah, installing a keyboard on your computer windows or Mac, windows. Those are the machines are always getting attacked quite successfully most of the time, but the windows keyboard. Russian language. Now you didn't even have to use it. [00:49:00] You don't have to have a keyboard, right? This isn't a Russian keyboard that I'm holding up here on camera. This is just a regular us keyboard. You can just install a virtual, Russian keyboard. And once that keyboard was installed, you're pretty safe. Why? Because Vladimir poop. Dictator for life of Russia decided he would just go ahead and stop anybody that was trying to hack Russian. Companies businesses, government agencies and what's the best way for the hackers to do that. Cause they didn't want to end up in Siberia for the rest of their lives because of a hack. Now they went ahead and said, okay if there's a Russian Cyrillic keyboard on the machine, we're not going to activate. So if the software, the malware on your computer, all you need to do is have a Russian keyboard. Yeah, that's it pretty simple. I told you that months ago, now what we're seeing is these indiscriminant [00:50:00] types of software that are being used in Ukraine. Why doesn't the keyboard trick work while some of Ukrainians peak Russian, we could go in. To the background on that of the massacre, the starvation purposeful starvation of Ukrainians by the Soviet union over many years ago. And how they then gave their property, their homes to Russians to move into in order to occupy Ukraine. So there's people in Ukraine who are Russian speaking of course. Now we're talking two or three generations, four, maybe down the road from when the Soviet union killed all of those millions of people. But there are some fights that to say, there's Russians, Russian speaking people there. Let me put it that way. Perfectly. In Southeastern Ukraine anyways I'm going on and on I, this is not an education on war or history. This we're talking about [00:51:00] cyber security. So the, they have, they been, Microsoft found many cases of Russians putting destructive. And disruptive or even more than that data wiping malware onto computers, it spreads indiscriminately. So Microsoft looking at what's happening, you crane, trying to get patches together for all of us, letting other countries know about what's going on is going to be. Amazing because this malware, which is wiping computers, primarily, it's not really just straight up ransomware give us money and we'll give you your data back. This is just showing your data, that malware is going to leak outside of Ukraine. Yeah. Cause us all kinds of book tension, probably. When we get back, I want to talk about this here. This is our friend Ilan Musk, and we've been following [00:52:00] along with some of the stuff been going on with his new satellite system in Ukraine. Stick around. The whole concept of these satellites and circling the earth, providing us with internet, just regular guides. It's going to be in our smartphones is changing everything. We're going to talk about Elon Musk and what's happened over in Ukraine.  Our friend Elon Musk has done a lot of things over the years. He has really helped us for frankly, the Tesla and what's been happening there. SpaceX, his main concern being let's get off of a single planet on to multiple planets, right? The movement to Mars, NASA's working on a serious moon base. I reminded him of space 1999. You guys remember that show, but yeah, we're going to have a moon base by then [00:53:00] and it makes a lot of sense. So who's going to go to these well, there's some interesting lotteries people have to apply and everything else, but he's done so much, right? He's got the boring company you'd already know about Tesla and boring company in case you didn't know makes underground tunnels. He has also. A few other things has got a huge battery manufacturing facility. They're working on new battery technologies to make all of our lives a little bit better, particularly if we have an electric house or electric car, because this is what good is it to have electricity that you can't use. And that's really what they're trying to do is make it so that electricity is available 24 7 for you. And. Those space X, which is what I mentioned as well as what we're going to talk about right now. I'm going to pull this up on my screen. For those of you who are watching over on rumble, or of course, YouTube, this is fascinating. He [00:54:00] said there's a high probability of Russian attacks on Starlink in Ukraine. Now that is fascinating because what he's done is he has sent over truckloads. I'm showing a picture of a truck. In fact, with these Starling terminals in it, that's from ARS Technica. Just double-checking it here, but this is very cool. This is posted by the vice prime minister over there in Ukraine. And they are talking about these terminals. Now a terminal in this case is something that allows your devices to talk to the Starlink satellites, or there's going to be a huge constellation. They've got 2000 satellites up and they're putting another 12,000. These types of satellites are much different than what we've been used to over the years. We were typically, we've had these massive things sitting up in space. [00:55:00] I worked with RCA Astro space many years ago and I saw. They're testing facilities, which are just incredible. They had this huge vacuum chamber that they brought me in to see as we were working on space shuttle software. Yeah. I wrote software that they used to put the space shuttle together yeah. Way back in the day. So that was a pretty proud moment. Anyways. It's we're not talking about these huge satellites, like they used to launch, we're talking about very small cell. And they're not just sitting way, way up there. These are in basically in low orbit around the earth and they're geostationary. In other words, they stay in one spot. I believe this is the way they've got these things set up. So these satellites then allow because they're so close to the earth, allow them to use less power. And also the other advantage to that is.[00:56:00] The delay, right? The delay between having to send it all the way up and back down, because electricity takes time, right? Yeah. Travels at the speed of light. But nowadays you might've noticed it can take your quarter second, half a second. When you're talking to someone, when I'm on the radio with some of these radio stations or the delay can be absolutely incredible. Like I half second to a second sometimes. And that's just because they're being cheap. This type of technology where you have these constellations and it isn't just Elon Musk. It isn't just Starling, but constellations with will ultimately we'll have tens of thousands of satellites up there. Not, there's all kinds of other potential problems not getting into that right now. But what it does mean is yes. Can communicate and we've never had this sort of thing before we had the us military, the Navy in fact, put together a communication system that [00:57:00] lives on top of the internet and called nowadays. Generically the dark web. And it was set up to allow our military, our state department to be able to communicate with people in countries that are back in the day under Soviet control, all kinds of potential problems. So whenever those problems existed, they just went ahead and used this onion network, which is a part of the dark web, et cetera, et cetera. So let's say we had before. Now what happens if you're a country like Ukraine, where 100% of your internet comes from Russia, Russia obviously can sit there and listen in. Hopefully your encryptions. Good. A lot of Russians have been using telegram and already get real news about what's happening in their country and other places. And Della Graham is not that secure, frankly. WhatsApp pretty secure signal is the [00:58:00] one you want to pay close. Attention to signal is considered to be the most secure of all of these secure communications apps. But there's a level above all of that, because if they can tell that you're communicating, even that is enough to give them some information. So they might not know what was in that transmission, but if the transmission is all of a sudden, a tons of activity coming over, lots of data, lots of messages going back and forth, they can say maybe there's something about to happen. That came out. You might remember the old orange book for security way back in the eighties, I think is when it came out. But part of what you had to do was cover up your. Actual real communication. So it's one thing to have the communications encrypted, but you wanted to always have about the same amount of communications going back and forth. So people couldn't figure out what you're doing now with these types of devices. That [00:59:00] kind of problem still exists. And this is part of what Elon Musk is warning about here. Pull it up on my screen again, for those people who are watching Elon Musk is urging users of his satellite system to put their Starlink antennas as far as. From people as possible. Now, why would he be doing that? Because frankly, that terminal is transmitting to the satellite as well as receiving from the satellite. And it is entirely possible that there could be some evil software that is listening in for the satellite transmissions and sends a little missile your way. Also, of course the Russians have satellites in space that can look down on the ground. Now it's something as small as a terminal four Starlink, little hard to see, but Elon Musk is saying, Hey, listen guys, [01:00:00] go ahead and camouflage it. You might want to spray paint. It just don't use metallic paint so that they can't see it and place it as far away from where people are as post. So you can still use it and only use it when you need to use it. Don't keep it up and running all the time. But this is the start of something great. Something where you can't easily block people's communication. So Russia has tried to do. And they have been jamming the Starlink satellites. So what did must do? He delivered all of his engineers to working on how can we get around the Russian Jack? And according to Elon Musk, they have gotten around it and they now have their satellite systems completely jammed free from the Russians. I think that's fascinating. They're probably using some good spread spectrum technology that was actually known about it and world war II. And then we can talk [01:01:00] about that for a long time. Heady, you might remember her anyways, skip that for now. Stick her out. We got more when we. A whole bunch of pandemonium out there because of what Russia's been doing in Ukraine and how it's flowing over to us as well. Hey, this is not great news. Pandemonium is the name of the game over there in Russia. And they are being very successful. We're going to talk about what happened in Bella ruse. We'll talk a little bit about what happened in Ukraine with cybersecurity and what's happening right here right now.  I'd also like to invite you guys to listen to me on all kinds of apps out there, including the tune-in app and many others. Let me get my screen set up because now you can also catch me on. And on YouTube, this is almost [01:02:00] a complete, let me pull this up for you. There we go. Complete ARS Technica today. They've got some great articles this week, looking into the Russians. What are they doing? What kind of problems is that causing us? But we are seeing some interesting attacks back on. And back in very big way. Russia has been going after you crane in the cyberspace for a long time, we spoke a few years ago about what Russia had been doing with the tax software for Ukraine. We don't do this in the us or in Canada, but my number of European countries do you, where you have to have. The old official tax preparation software put together by the government for your business or for your person, depending on the country you're living in [01:03:00] France is a great example of this. And Ukraine is another one. So Ukraine says, Hey guys, you got to go ahead and use our software. That means every business in Ukraine is using their software. To manage their tax payments and their accounts, frankly. And that wonderful little piece of software was hijacked by our friends in Russia. So they grabbed a hold of it. They in. Did some code into it that added rent somewhere to the software. So now all of the businesses in Ukraine are pretty much guaranteed to be using this hacked software. We have a client who has offices over in France, and we found a really interesting problem with them because. The French software that was being used for taxes for French businesses had an extra little [01:04:00] problem. And that extra problem was, it was insecure as can be whoever wrote this, must've taken a Microsoft programming course and had no idea DIA about the consequences of what they were. So it was very insecure. The, it was using a version of SSL, which is an encryption that's based on another type of increase. I don't want to get too wonky here, but that was just one of its many problems and bad keys, et cetera, et cetera. And keys by the way, was using keys that had been revoked, which you should never do. Bottom line. Oh my gosh. Hey, if you want more information on this, just drop me a note. me@craigpetersohndotcomandyoucanalsogetmynewsletterwithallkindsofgreatlittletipsmeatcraigpeterson.com. Just let me know. So in this case, we had to help that company in [01:05:00] France. Ignore the security restrictions that were on their systems so they could use the French tax system. So anyways, I told you that, so I could tell you that the same thing happened to Ukraine. In a different way, their software was pre infected. So when they downloaded it, ta-da. They got that piece of ransomware that virus had spread. It was just a nightmare. And of course it robbed. If you will, Ukraine, government of funds, that would have been. So we had now a bit of a shift. I'm going to pull this up on the screen again, this article, because what this shift has shown is that the hackers are now operating on the side of you. Crazy. Which is just fascinating. So the group called anonymous, you might be familiar with them. Of course, they've been doing a lot of hacking for a [01:06:00] lot of years, releasing private information, government and information. All of that sort of stuff. And they have a mast what they're calling a volunteer. It. And this it army has been going and doing what well hacking Russian sites apparently. So this article is just absolutely fascinating and they pulled some of from wired as well, but the Russian space research Institute, their website was hacked, leaked files that were stolen from the Russian space agency, made it all the way on to the. The space agency was hacked in their website said, leave Ukraine alone, Alto anonymous. Will you up even more? They also did. What's called a D O S. Which is a distributed denial of service attack. Those can be [01:07:00] very difficult to protect against unless you're set up in advance to help protect yourself. And that pretty much destroyed Russia's dot are you top level domain? So we've talked about how domain services work, right? So Doug are, you is like.com except dot R U is for running. And so the domain name servers that handled our, you were knocked off the air because no one could really get to them. They used amplifying attacks and stuff without getting into all of the details. So basically they were trying to cut off access and they did for a lot of people to any. That ended in, are you? It's great. These are just some of the latest in this surge of hacktivism. That's been going on one of the ones I mentioned a couple of weeks ago with the Belarusians deciding they were going to hack the Belarus railroad, which was being used. To bring Russian [01:08:00] troops, supplies, tanks, et cetera, all on rail, right on down right to the border of Ukraine. So that was hacked so that they couldn't use it in order to go after. Of course Russia was able to get to Ukraine, but there's also been protests around the world. 48 Russian cities raise millions of dollars through cryptocurrency donations. Now, I'm not a big cryptocurrency guy and I'm not a big crypto currency guy because while. Cryptocurrency is likely to be outlawed by most, if not all governments. And they certainly could shut it down and it is not anonymous. All right. So using cryptocurrency does not mean it does not equate to completely anonymous. They have done a lot of donations. They're big companies including, we [01:09:00] just talked earlier about Microsoft, but also apple shell, BP, a McDonald's Starbucks. And these hacktivists have really joined in. And w we talked about a couple of other things, so this is messy. Because even more than in peace time, these active combat that are really hacking happening right now, rendering, hacktivism, any effectual and largely just distracting because we are now in a hot war right now. Maybe we don't have our. Eric planes bombing Russian movements or other things, but there is a kinetic war going on over there. There are bullets, et cetera, mean exchanged. So the hacktivist efforts have been, visible. There's no question about that. But what have they done? See, [01:10:00] that's an advantage to being a country like Russia, or like the Ukraine, or excuse me, Ukraine, because both of those countries there, their industrial base, the military industrial base is not heavily automated unlike ours. What could you do? What can you shut down? So what you shut down the Russian space agency's website, how far did you get into it? Probably not very far. We also have a couple of groups and we talked about these guys many times the Conti group, which has been. Terrible and hurting us businesses, individuals, government agencies, and stuff, the Cuming project, both of them have declared their allegiance to Russia. You might remember a few weeks ago, we talked here about how we have had some researchers track down most of these Russian hacker groups and their money. And they all ended up in one building in Moscow. [01:11:00] No, that should tell you something, right? In fact, the most expensive real estate right there in downtown Los gal, the tallest building, et cetera. So these groups getting together in order to protect the father land there in Russia. Ah interesting problem. How much of this is really controlled by the Kremlin? It's a very good question. Context. Was dismantling its infrastructure. It, some of their top people were arrested by Putins military. Not military, but police state over there. And that was interesting too. That was again before the invasion, but why would Putin be shutting them down at all? Apparently they said some things. That they shouldn't have said. So now they've come out and have decided they're going to support Russia in its entirety. Now we mentioned Microsoft and how [01:12:00] Microsoft has decided they are going to protect other countries. As well as you crane, at least as far as the Russian malware goes, and they've been very active in that. And there are a number of cybersecurity companies and other organizations that have released free versions of some of their software, these digital defense tools. Free offerings. Our big cranes defend the networks. Google says it's human rights focus de dos protection service project shield is now in use by more than 150 Ukrainian websites. So it's very good. Bottom line propped up by the way, published this massive trove of personal data. Allegedly identifying 120,000 Russian soldiers deploy. In Ukraine that was Ukrainian prov, not the old good old Russian Sophia Pramata man. I [01:13:00] remember I bought one of those on new standing Canada once. And I had a friend who was from Yugoslavia and he said, oh, can I show that to my wife? He showed it to his wife. She tore it up. I said, I want my Pramata, Craig Peterson got calm.

What Can Be done About Russia?What Can You Do? There is a whole bunch going on when it comes to Russia, of course, the invasion of Ukraine. Why are people calling to have dot RU deleted? This is really a big deal. And if you're watching from home, I'm going to go full screen on this article. [Automated transcript follows.] [00:00:23] This is an article from ARS Technica, and I've been talking about it all week, which is that I can won't revoke Russian in Jeanette domains, says the effect. Devastating. This is frankly pretty darn fascinating to me because I can, as this international organization, it was put together in order to help make the internet international. [00:00:49] And I'm not talking about the data international, but control of it. A lot of countries work. Because of course the internet was created in nodded states. It was created by us tax payers, money for the DOD. And it was designed to be very resilient, in fact, so resilient that there could be a nuclear blast and that nuclear blast and. [00:01:13] Causing problems, but yeah. Yeah, the internet is still going to work. And the whole idea behind it was you could have multiple routers. They're all talking to each other nowadays. They're talking BGP four and they can say, how can I get from here? To there. And so the idea behind BGP is they all share this information once the least cost way. [00:01:36] What's the easiest way to post way. If you will, for me to get from point a to point B and it changes all the time. So you might be on a phone conversation. You might be listening to me right now, online streaming or watching the video you might be doing, who knows what out there with digital communications. [00:01:57] But the communications channel that you think you're using, where the data is going from, let's say my microphone, ultimately to your device, your ears, that data path, once it becomes dated. Can be changing multiple times a second. Now it actually changes quite a bit. Initially as these internet backbone routers, send the least cost, routing information back and forth to, and fro a very good thing, frankly, because it helps to speed everything up. [00:02:28] And there's other tricks that we're using you. Might've seen. For instance, Akamai and some of the URLs before have sites that you've gone to, and that's called a content delivery network and that helps get the content to be closer to you. So if you're on a website in California and you're in New Hampshire, that website video, that website graphic, et cetera, is going to be coming from a server local to me here in New Hampshire. [00:02:59] All right. That's how that all is supposed to work. So we have names you guys know about that internet, domain names and those domain names. You already know those are turned into internet addresses, and those addresses are then used by the routers to figure out where to go, how to get the data. The problem that we're having right now, of course, is Russia seems to be substantially abusing the intranet Putin, put a kill switch on to the Russian internet sometime ago. [00:03:31] And the idea behind the skills, which was, Hey, listen, if we don't want the world to be talking to us, we'll just cut it. Now he's tested it a couple of times, but what he has not done is shut it down and he hasn't shut it down. As part of this Ukraine, more, what they did is they passed laws saying, Hey, if you publish something that disagrees with what we're saying, you get 15 years. [00:03:59] And even these people who've been protesting on the streets, they're getting a bound 60 days, 30 to 60 days in jail, just for protesting what's going on. So a lot of people have been saying why don't we just, we turn off the Russian internet now we're not going to use Putin's kill switch in order to shut it all off. [00:04:19] We're not going to do a well, a few things. She decided not to do, denial of service attacks, et cetera. Although there are hackers doing that and we are going to talk about that today, but they're saying what? Let's just go ahead and let's kill their dot R E. The country domain. And I can, the guy who heads it up said, Hey, listen our mission is just to make sure that the internet works. [00:04:46] So shutting off the dot R U domain so that no one can go ahead and. We send right. A request out to the domain name servers and get a resolution to an IP address. So if you try and go to Kremlin dot REU or something, you will get blocked and you will get blocked. Not blocked. No, I like the great firewall of China or of Russia. [00:05:10] Now they've got one going pretty good. Yeah. Thank you. You ain't using us technology. It's crazy. What we've got. But what it does is it says, oh, I hide dot, are you, I don't know. What are you talking about? So there have been a lot of people who have been pushing for it. And you'll see on my screen here that you cranes requested to cut Russia off from some of these core parts of the internet. [00:05:35] And I can, which is the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers. I couldn't remember what that was earlier said that I can must remain neutral and their mission they say is not to take punitive actions. It's to make sure the internet works. So are they really taking punitive actions of the cat Russia off? [00:05:56] It's really interesting to me because look at what has been going on. You've got companies like Facebook as the great example who has gone ahead and just shut off people. They didn't like what they were saying. My goodness. At one point of you said you should wear a mask during this pandemic. [00:06:15] You would be cut off from Facebook. And then of course, if you said, no, you don't, you shouldn't don't need you, you shouldn't wear a mask that at that point you would be cut off, because science right. Sciences, we know exactly what we're doing now. It goes on and on. If you said that it came from a lab in China, you would have your account suspended. [00:06:35] Now of course their whole tune has changed and yeah probably came from a lab in China. It's crazy what these people have been doing. So we have arbiters of truth, who are some contractors sitting in their home or wherever it is the contractors for Facebook that are going through posts that people are flagging as Incorrect as fake news. [00:07:02] So what happens is people say fake news and then that goes off to their team that then looks at it and says okay. Yeah, fake news because we disagree with it. It just blows my mind. We have to have free and fair and open discussions. Don't we. You have that line at Facebook and Google does some of the same. [00:07:22] A lot of these sites do a lot of the same. You get our major media outlets that are all deciding what they want to report on and what they want to label as fake and fake news. I'm just shaking my head because it's hard. It's hard to believe. What about. Russia is putting out fake news, as I've said many times before the E the first casualty in war, this isn't my quote. The first casualty in war is what, it's the truth. So if truth is the first casualty, then that means we've got a lot of propaganda going on. We had propaganda coming out of Ukraine. We've caught some of those, like the, what was it? The. Chat goes, fighter, pilot, whatever it was who had killed, what was it? [00:08:12] Five Soviet or Russian jets, Soviet era using silver deer, techno era technology on the part of the Ukrainians turns out well. Okay, that, that was false news. That was fake news. The whole thing about snake island, where you had that Russian military. I know what it was a frigging but anyways boat sitting there saying we are a Russia. [00:08:33] Warship, you will surrender or, whatever. Do you remember that snake on just the small place, 13 guys and supposedly they shelled it and they killed all 13 turns out that was probably fake news as well. So that's from the Ukrainian side and on the Russian side they hardly reported I as to how many. [00:08:57] The we're in fact, initially for quite a while, they were saying there are no desks. Then at the same time, the Ukrainians are saying they're 2,500 Russians dead. And that number keeps going up, who knows what it is today. It gets really crazy in the time of war. So if Facebook is going to stop someone from saying don't wear masks or do wear masks, depending on what day of the week it is basically right. [00:09:20] Wednesday. It's okay to say that Thursday is not okay to say that we're back. No it's not. Or then why can't that type of censorship? Move on to the next. I that's a big question I have now. Should we be shutting it off? I'll pull this back up on the screen again. And it, this article from ARS, Technica is saying that experts have warned, whoever they are that shutting down the dot R U domain. [00:09:53] Is going to cause just incredible problems for Russians, which man would it ever talking about a major blow to the economy. And it would also cause problems for people who are trying to find out more truth about. Russia cause you couldn't get to their site. Now we've seen some amazing things in Russia. [00:10:15] We had the Russian, one of the Russian news agencies are T which is broadcasting and here in the U S that their entire staff just walked out saying, forget about it. We're not going to promote this fake news, but this is a little to do trip question me personally. I don't think anybody should be censoring any. [00:10:38] For almost anything. Yo, there are some limits, but they're pretty extreme in my book. I'd rather know someone is an idiot because they're allowed to say stupid things, and counter, counter it, counter their arguments. You've got to have discussions  [00:10:54] Microsoft. Yeah, they've been around a long time. They've been helping us. They've had lots of cybersecurity problems. People use Microsoft software on their desktop. Some people use it for servers, which is crazy, but listen to what they're doing now. [00:11:10] This is a little concerning. I'm going to pull this article up on the screen. [00:11:15] For those of you who are watching a long, either on rumble or YouTube ARS, Technica article, they have some really great articles. This particular one is about our friends at Microsoft. This is cool. Microsoft announced today? This was like a week or so ago that Microsoft would be suspending all new sales of Microsoft products and services in Russia. [00:11:45] Following the countries, unjustified, unprovoked, and unlawful invasion of. Now Microsoft didn't give any specifics about the products, but it really is likely to be a blanket ban of all of the Microsoft products. This is very cool because Microsoft has taken an approach I've never seen them do before, which is okay. [00:12:10] When. Gets hacked. You get our friends at apple, putting together patches and getting them out. They get them up pretty quick. Microsoft had been doing much the same. The problem was some months there were patches every day that you had to apply. That's how bad this software is. And they decided that man, let's be like politicians here. [00:12:34] Let's release some very damning news Friday. At about 4:30 PM before a long weekend. So no one will notice. Yeah. Y'all are friends of politicians do that all the time. What Microsoft decided they do is, Hey, wait a minute. We're going to have patches. It's not going to slow down. And because our code is terrible. [00:12:56] So what we're going to do, let me see here. How about we just release all of them at once and we'll just call it patch Tuesday, right? Because people were complaining about how much work it was, how much effort was effort. It was to try. They hate them. These machines apply these patches every day. Huge problem for everybody from home users to big companies out there. [00:13:21] So Microsoft has said, okay let's do that. Let's burry it. So nobody will notice okay that's what Microsoft does. And now we've gotten used to that. Now we have. We remember two guys, right? Bill gates followed by Steve Ballmer. Steve Ballmer was a nut job. Bill gates was a bad man. [00:13:40] I think he's just been trying extra hard to compensate for all of the evil he did over the years. But what we're looking at now is new management and that he's been in there now for a few years, doing a great job, cleaning up Microsoft, making it a very competitive company. He has done some amazing things. [00:14:02] One of the things that he has decided to do, that's been very effective is how about this? How about we go ahead. And we work with various governments to help stop these Russian hackers. And I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, what was happening and the Microsoft had reached out to the white house and said, Hey, listen. [00:14:27] What we have been looking at the hacks that have been coming from the Russian hackers, and we've been preparing fixes for some of those hacks. How about we work directly with some of these other countries? This reminds me a whole lot of the lend lease program in world war two. You might remember this thing, but the us of course, initially was not involved in the war and they decided, okay we've got to help the United Kingdom. [00:15:00] How are we going to help them? The UK doesn't have the money to buy ships, to have us make weapons, bullets know. What they did is they had people donate the rifles, the guns, AML from home. Plus they made them the government, instead of selling them to the UK, they lent them to the UK because the UK could not afford everything that it needed in order to fight a war against the national socialist in Germany. [00:15:28] So what did they do? We just shipped the stuff over there and called it a lend slash lease. I think that's a great idea. And what Microsoft is doing is also great idea. They have been decoding, reverse compiling, if you will, and interpreting the code, looking at what some of the ransomware and other malicious code the Russia has been using against Ukraine, and they have been providing. [00:15:57] All kinds of insight information to these other countries. Now, this is a great idea for a few reasons, one of the reasons, and I think maybe the biggest reason is that the ransomware, the viruses, all of this malware that they're producing is. Not particularly discriminating. Do you guys remember maybe I dunno, what was it? [00:16:22] Six months ago, I taught, told you how to avoid getting most of this Russian ransomware. And it was as easy as just installing. Yeah, installing a keyboard on your computer windows or Mac, windows. Those are the machines are always getting attacked quite successfully most of the time, but the windows keyboard. [00:16:49] Russian language. Now you didn't even have to use it. You don't have to have a keyboard, right? This isn't a Russian keyboard that I'm holding up here on camera. This is just a regular us keyboard. You can just install a virtual, Russian keyboard. And once that keyboard was installed, you're pretty safe. [00:17:06] Why? Because Vladimir poop. Dictator for life of Russia decided he would just go ahead and stop anybody that was trying to hack Russian. Companies businesses, government agencies and what's the best way for the hackers to do that. Cause they didn't want to end up in Siberia for the rest of their lives because of a hack. [00:17:29] Now they went ahead and said, okay if there's a Russian Cyrillic keyboard on the machine, we're not going to activate. So if the software, the malware on your computer, all you need to do is have a Russian keyboard. Yeah, that's it pretty simple. I told you that months ago, now what we're seeing is these indiscriminant types of software that are being used in Ukraine. [00:17:57] Why doesn't the keyboard trick work while some of Ukrainians peak Russian, we could go in. To the background on that of the massacre, the starvation purposeful starvation of Ukrainians by the Soviet union over many years ago. And how they then gave their property, their homes to Russians to move into in order to occupy Ukraine. [00:18:23] So there's people in Ukraine who are Russian speaking of course. Now we're talking two or three generations, four, maybe down the road from when the Soviet union killed all of those millions of people. But there are some fights that to say, there's Russians, Russian speaking people there. Let me put it that way. [00:18:41] Perfect. In Southeastern Ukraine anyways I'm going on and on I, this is not an education on war or history. This we're talking about cyber security. So the, they have, they been, Microsoft found many cases of Russians putting destructive. And disruptive or even more than that data wiping malware onto computers, it spreads indiscriminately. [00:19:13] So Microsoft looking at what's happening, you crane, trying to get patches together for all of us, letting other countries know about what's going on is going to be. Amazing because this malware, which is wiping computers, primarily, it's not really just straight up ransomware give us money and we'll give you your data back. [00:19:35] This is just showing your data, that malware is going to leak outside of Ukraine. Yeah. Cause us all kinds of book tension, probably. When we get back, I want to talk about this here. This is our friend Ilan Musk, and we've been following along with some of the stuff been going on with his new satellite system in Ukraine. [00:19:58] The whole concept of these satellites and circling the earth, providing us with internet, just regular guides. It's going to be in our smartphones is changing everything. We're going to talk about Elon Musk and what's happened over in Ukraine. [00:20:15] Our friend Elon Musk has done a lot of things over the years. He has really helped us for frankly, the Tesla and what's been happening there. [00:20:26] Space sex, his main concern being let's get. Off of a single planet on to multiple planets, right? The movement to Mars, NASA's working on a serious moon base. I reminded him of space 1999. You guys remember that show, but yeah, we're going to have a moon base by then and it makes a lot of sense. So who's going to go to these well, there's some interesting lotteries people have to apply and everything else, but he's done so much, right? [00:21:00] He's got the boring company you'd already know about Tesla and boring company in case you didn't know makes underground tunnels. He has also. A few other things has got a huge battery manufacturing facility. They're working on new battery technologies to make all of our lives a little bit better, particularly if we have an electric house or electric car, because this is what good is it to have electricity that you can't use. [00:21:25] And that's really what they're trying to do is make it so that electricity is available 24 7 for you. And. Those space X, which is what I mentioned as well as what we're going to talk about right now. I'm going to pull this up on my screen. For those of you who are watching over on rumble, or of course, YouTube, this is fascinating. [00:21:49] He said there's a high probability of Russian attacks on Starlink in Ukraine. Now that is fascinating because what he's done is he has sent over truckloads. I'm showing a picture of a truck. In fact, with these Starling terminals in it, that's from ARS Technica. Just double-checking it here, but this is very cool. [00:22:12] This is posted by the vice prime minister over there in Ukraine. And they are talking about these terminals. Now a terminal in this case is something that allows your devices to talk to the Starlink satellites, or there's going to be a huge constellation. They've got 2000 satellites up and they're putting another 12,000. [00:22:38] These types of satellites are much different than what we've been used to over the years. We typically we've had these massive things sitting up in space. I worked with RCA Astro space many years ago and I saw. They're testing facilities, which are just incredible. They had this huge vacuum chamber that they brought me in to see as we were working on space shuttle software. [00:23:05] Yeah. I wrote software that they used to put the space shuttle together yeah. Way back in the day. So that was a pretty proud moment. Anyways. It's we're not talking about these huge satellites, like they used to launch, we're talking about very small cell. And they're not just sitting way, way up there. [00:23:26] These are in basically in low orbit around the earth and they're geostationary. In other words, they stay in one spot. I believe this is the way they've got these things set up. So these satellites then allow because they're so close to the earth, allow them to use less power. And also the other advantage to that is. [00:23:49] The delay, right? The delay between having to send it all the way up and back down, because electricity takes time, right? Yeah. Travels at the speed of light. But nowadays you might've noticed it can take your quarter second, half a second. When you're talking to someone, when I'm on the radio with some of these radio stations or the delay can be absolutely incredible. [00:24:11] Like I half second to a second sometimes. And that's just because they're being cheap. This type of technology where you have these constellations and it isn't just Elon Musk. It isn't just Starling, but constellations with will ultimately we'll have tens of thousands of satellites up there. Not, there's all kinds of other potential problems not getting into that right now. [00:24:34] But what it does mean is. Can communicate and we've never had this sort of thing before we had the us military, the Navy in fact, put together a communication system that lives on top of the internet and called nowadays. Generically the dark web. And it was set up to allow our military, our state department to be able to communicate with people in countries that are back in the day under Soviet control, all kinds of potential problems. [00:25:10] So whenever those problems existed, they just went ahead and used this onion network, which is a part of the dark web, et cetera, et cetera. So let's say we had before. Now what happens if you're a country like Ukraine, where 100% of your internet comes from Russia, Russia obviously can sit there and listen in. [00:25:32] Hopefully your encryptions. Good. A lot of Russians have been using telegram and already get real news about what's happening in their country and other places. And Della Graham is not that secure, frankly. WhatsApp pretty secure signal is the one you want to pay close. Attention to signal is considered to be the most secure of all of these secure communications apps. [00:25:57] But there's a level above all of that, because if they can tell that you're communicating, even that is enough to give them some information. So they might not know what was in that transmission, but if the transmission is all of a sudden, a tons of activity coming over, lots of data, lots of messages going back and forth, they can say maybe there's something about to happen. [00:26:21] That came out. You might remember the old orange book for security way back in the eighties, I think is when it came out. But part of what you had to do was cover up your. Actual real communication. So it's one thing to have the communications encrypted, but you wanted to always have about the same amount of communications going back and forth. [00:26:42] So people couldn't figure out what you're doing now with these types of devices. That kind of problem still exists. And this is part of what Elon Musk is warning about here. Pull it up on my screen again, for those people who are watching Elon Musk is urging users of his satellite system to put their Starlink antennas as far as. [00:27:08] From people as possible. Now, why would he be doing that? Because frankly, that terminal is transmitting to the satellite as well as receiving from the satellite. And it is entirely possible that there could be some evil software that is listening in for the satellite transmissions and sends a little missile your way. [00:27:36] Also, of course the Russians have satellites in space that can look down on the ground. Now it's something as small as a terminal four Starlink, little hard to see, but Elon Musk is saying, Hey, listen guys, go ahead and camouflage it. You might want to spray paint. It just don't use metallic paint so that they can't see it and place it as far away from where people are as post. [00:27:59] So you can still use it and only use it when you need to use it. Don't keep it up and running all the time. But this is the start of something great. Something where you can't easily block people's communication. So Russia has tried to do. And they have been jamming the Starlink satellites. So what did must do? [00:28:23] He delivered all of his engineers to working on how can we get around the Russian Jack? And according to Elon Musk, they have gotten around it and they now have their satellite systems completely jammed free from the Russians. I think that's fascinating. They're probably using some good spread spectrum technology that was actually known about it and world war II. [00:28:47] And then we can talk about that for a long time. Heady, you might remember her anyways, skip that for now. Stick her out. We got more when we. A whole bunch of pandemonium out there because of what Russia's been doing in Ukraine and how it's flowing over to us as well. Hey, this is not great news. [00:29:15] Pandemonium is the name of the game over there in Russia. And they are being very successful. We're going to talk about what happened in Bella ruse. We'll talk a little bit about what happened in Ukraine with cybersecurity and what's happening right here right now. [00:29:36] Complete ARS Technica today. They've got some great articles this week, looking into the Russians. What are they doing? What kind of problems is that causing us? But we are seeing some interesting attacks back on. And back in very big way. Russia has been going after you crane in the cyberspace for a long time, we spoke a few years ago about what Russia had been doing with the tax software for Ukraine. [00:30:12] We don't do this in the U.S. Or in Canada, but my number of European countries do you, where you have to have. The old official tax preparation software put together by the government for your business or for your person, depending on the country you're living in France is a great example of this. And Ukraine is another one. [00:30:36] So Ukraine says, Hey guys, you got to go ahead and use our software. That means every business in Ukraine is using their software. To manage their tax payments and their accounts, frankly. And that wonderful little piece of software was hijacked by our friends in Russia. So they grabbed a hold of it. They in. [00:31:02] Did some code into it that added rent somewhere to the software. So now all of the businesses in Ukraine are pretty much guaranteed to be using this hacked software. We have a client who has offices over in France, and we found a really interesting problem with them because. The French software that was being used for taxes for French businesses had an extra little problem. [00:31:33] And that extra problem was, it was insecure as can be whoever wrote this, must've taken a Microsoft programming course and had no idea DIA about the consequences of what they were. So it was very insecure. The, it was using a version of SSL, which is an encryption that's based on another type of increase. [00:31:57] I don't want to get too wonky here, but that was just one of its many problems and bad keys, et cetera, et cetera. And keys by the way, was using keys that have been revoked, which you should never do. Bottom line. Oh my gosh. Hey, if you want more information on this, just drop me a note. [00:32:16] me@craigpetersohndotcomandyoucanalsogetmynewsletterwithallkindsofgreatlittletipsmeatcraigpeterson.com. Just let me know. So in this case, we had to help that company in France. Ignore the security restrictions that were on their systems so they could use the French tax system. So anyways, I told you that, so I could tell you that the same thing happened to Ukraine. [00:32:45] In a different way, their software was pre infected. So when they downloaded it, ta-da. They got that piece of ransomware that virus had spread. It was just a nightmare. And of course it robbed. If you will, Ukraine, government of funds, that would have been. So we had now a bit of a shift. I'm going to pull this up on the screen again, this article, because what this shift has shown is that the hackers are now operating on the side of you. [00:33:21] Crazy. Which is just fascinating. So the group called anonymous, you might be familiar with them. Of course, they've been doing a lot of hacking for a lot of years, releasing private information, government and information, all that sort of stuff. And they have a mast what they're calling a volunteer. [00:33:44] It. And this it army has been going and doing what well hacking Russian sites apparently. So this article is just absolutely fascinating and they pulled some of from wired as well, but the Russian space research Institute, their website was hacked, leaked files that were stolen from the Russian space agency, made it all the way on to the. [00:34:13] The space agency was hacked in their website said, leave Ukraine alone, Alto anonymous. Will you up even more? They also did. What's called a D O S. Which is a distributed denial of service attack. Those can be very difficult to protect against unless you're set up in advance to help protect yourself. [00:34:39] And that pretty much destroyed Russia's dot are you top level domain? So we've talked about how domain services work, right? So Doug are, you is like.com except dot R U is for running. And so the domain name servers that handled our, you were knocked off the air because no one could really get to them. [00:35:02] They used amplifying attacks and stuff without getting into all of the details. So basically they were trying to cut off access and they did for a lot of people to any. That ended in, are you? It's great. These are just some of the latest in this surge of hacktivism. That's been going on one of the ones I mentioned a couple of weeks ago with the Belarusians deciding they were going to hack the Belarus railroad, which was being used. [00:35:31] To bring Russian troops, supplies, tanks, et cetera, all on rail, right on down right to the border of Ukraine. So that was hacked so that they couldn't use it in order to go after. Of course Russia was able to get to Ukraine, but there's also been protests around the world. 48 Russian cities raise millions of dollars through cryptocurrency donations. [00:36:01] Now, I'm not a big cryptocurrency guy and I'm not a big crypto currency guy because while. Cryptocurrency is likely to be outlawed by most, if not all governments. And they certainly could shut it down and it is not anonymous. All right. So using cryptocurrency does not mean it does not equate to completely anonymous. [00:36:28] They have done a lot of donations. They're big companies including, we just talked earlier about Microsoft, but also apple shell, BP, a McDonald's Starbucks. And these hacktivists have really joined in. And w we talked about a couple of other things, so this is messy. Because even more than in peace time, these active combat that are really hacking happening right now, rendering, hacktivism, any effectual and largely just distracting because we are now in a hot war right now. [00:37:10] Maybe we don't have our. Eric planes bombing Russian movements or other things, but there is a kinetic war going on over there. There are bullets, et cetera, mean exchanged. So the hacktivist efforts have been, visible. There's no question about that. But what have they done? See, that's an advantage to being a country like Russia, or like the Ukraine, or excuse me, Ukraine, because both of those countries there, their industrial base, the military industrial base is not heavily automated unlike ours. [00:37:50] What could you do? What can you shut down? So what you shut down the Russian space agency's website, how far did you get into it? Probably not very far. We also have a couple of groups and we talked about these guys many times the Conti group, which has been. [00:38:07] Terrible and hurting us businesses, individuals, government agencies, and stuff, the Cuming project, both of them have declared their allegiance to Russia. You might remember a few weeks ago, we talked here about how we have had some researchers track down most of these Russian hacker groups and their money. [00:38:30] And they all ended up in one building in Moscow. No, that should tell you something, right? In fact, the most expensive real estate right there in downtown Los gal, the tallest building, et cetera. So these groups getting together in order to protect the father land there in Russia. Ah interesting problem. [00:38:52] How much of this is really controlled by the Kremlin? It's a very good question. Context. Was dismantling its infrastructure. It, some of their top people were arrested by Putins military. Not military, but police state over there. And that was interesting too. That was again before the invasion, but why would Putin be shutting them down at all? [00:39:20] Apparently they said some things. That they shouldn't have said. So now they've come out and have decided they're going to support Russia in its entirety. Now we mentioned Microsoft and how Microsoft has decided they are going to protect other countries. As well as you crane, at least as far as the Russian malware goes, and they've been very active in that. [00:39:46] And there are a number of cybersecurity companies and other organizations that have released free versions of some of their software, these digital defense tools. Free offerings. Our big cranes defend the networks. Google says it's human rights focus de dos protection service project shield is now in use by more than 150 Ukrainian websites. [00:40:12] So it's very good. Bottom line propped up by the way, published this massive trove of personal data. Allegedly identifying 120,000 Russian soldiers deploy. In Ukraine that was Ukrainian prov, not the old good old Russian Sophia Pramata man. I remember I bought one of those on new standing Canada once. [00:40:36] And I had a friend who was from Yugoslavia and he said, oh, can I show that to my wife? He showed it to his wife. She tore it up. I said, I want my Pravda, Craig Peterson dot com. [00:40:47] The tech world is all a buzz with this log for J or log for shell. However you want to call it because we are looking at what is probably the biggest security vulnerability the internet has had in a long time. I don't know how to express it anymore, but there are multiple problems here. And even the patch that was released to fix this problem was broken as being exploited in the last 24 hours. There've been no less than 30 different new. Variations of the exploit. So what is going on? There is a computer language that's used by many programmers, particularly in larger businesses called Java. [00:41:37] You might remember this, I've been following it and using it now, since it first came out very long time ago from sun Microsystems. Java is a language that's designed to have kind of an intimate. CPU processor. So think about it. If you have an Intel chip that is an x86 type chip, what can you use instead of that Intel chip to run that code? [00:42:03] There are some compatible chips made mainly by AMD advanced micro devices, but you're really rather limited. You have problems. Power. Guess what you're stuck. You're stuck in that architecture. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have some of these devices that are designed by companies like apple, Google has their own. [00:42:24] Now that our CPU's their graphics processing units as well. And they completely replaced the Intel architecture. But the Intel code, the programs that are written for the Intel architecture that are compiled for Intel are not going to work on the apple chips and vice versa. So what did apple do? Apple, for instance, just moved from Intel over to. [00:42:51] Own chipsets and these chips don't run Intel code. So how can you run your old apple apps? Apple has a little translator. They call Rosetta. It sits in the middle and it pretends it's an Intel processor. This really rather simple. And they've done an amazing job on this. And w Rosetta is actually a third party company and they helped apple as well with the transition from the IBM power series chips to the Intel chips. [00:43:23] So how do you move the code around while you either have. Recompile it, you may have to redesign it, rearchitect it for the new type of processor and the new types of computers that are supported by that processor. Or you may do what Apple's done here a couple of times now, and that is having an interpreter in the middle that pretends it's something else pretends as an Intel chip. [00:43:49] And then you can still run your in. Code because it knows, okay. It was designed originally for this apple Intel architecture. So I know how to make all of this work Java steps in and says why are you doing all of that? That's crazy. Isn't it moving all of your code around all of the time. So Java's original claim to fame was what will make life easy for? [00:44:14] What you do is you write your code. Using Java in Java is very similar to C plus in some of these other languages that are out there. And that language, when you're writing your source code will be compiled into an intermediate. Code. So what happened is sun Microsystems designed this virtual machine? [00:44:36] Now don't think of it like a normal VM, but we're talking about a CPU architecture and CPU instructions. And so what it did for those CPU instructions. Which is really quite clever, as I said we'll come up with what we think are the most useful. And it's a Cisco architecture for those of you who are ultra geeks like myself. [00:44:59] And we will go ahead and implement that. And so the compiler spits out code for this CPU that doesn't actually exist anywhere in the known universe. And then what happened is sun went out and said, okay we'll make an interpreter for. Artificial CPU that'll run on Intel chips and we'll make another one that runs on these chips, that chips and the other chips, beautiful concept, because basically you could write your code once debug it and run it off. [00:45:32] Anything that was one of the original claims to fame for Unix, not so the run at anywhere part of it, but the part that says it doesn't take much work to move your code to different machine, and we're not going to get into Unix and its root I've been around the whole time. It's crazy. [00:45:51] I just finished reading a book and saying, I remember that. And they were going through all of the history of everything I was in the middle of that. I did that. That was the first one to do this. It was fun. Anyhow, what Java has done now is it's really solidified itself in the larger enterprises. [00:46:11] So basically any software that you might be using, like our website that is particularly with a larger business. Is going to be using Java and that Java language is using libraries. So in programmers, instead of doing what I used to do way back when which is write in assembly code, or even in COBOL, and basically you had to write everything, every part of every program, anything you wanted to have done, you had to write, or maybe you borrowed somebody else's code and you embedded it in. [00:46:45] And mind you, we only had 32 kilobytes of memory in the mainframe back then the 360 30, for those of you who remember those things, but here is where things really changed. You now had the ability to take that code that you wrote and put it on a smart. You could take that exact same code, no recompiling or anything, and take that code and run it on a mainframe on our super computer in a car. [00:47:15] So Java became very popular for that. Very reason in these libraries that Java provided, made it even quicker to program and easier to program. Now there's some problems with languages. Java, which are these object oriented languages where you can, for instance, say one plus one equals two. That will make sense. [00:47:38] But what does it mean when you use a plus sign? When you're talking about words? So you say apple plus oranges, what's that going to eat? That's called overloading an operator, and this is not a course on programming languages, but what happens is a person can write the library and says, oh if the programmer says a non-Apple plus an orange or string plus a string, what I want you to do is concatenate the strings. [00:48:06] Now that programmer who wrote that has to figure out a couple of things, make some assumptions. Oh I should I put a space between apple and. Or not. And what do they really mean? Okay. So this is how I'm going to interpret it. So that, it's a very simple example. But the concept is that now with these overloaded opera operations and these libraries that can go deep deep, you now have the additional problem of people designing and writing the libraries, making assumptions about what the programmer wants and what the programmer needs. [00:48:43] Enter the problem with the log for J vulnerability. This is a very big deal because we're talking about a library function that is being used in Java by programmers. Now, you know that I have been warning everybody. Android for years, the biggest problem with Android isn't its user interface. It isn't that it's made by somebody else. [00:49:10] The biggest problem. And of course, this is my opinion is that Android software is provided by Google and. It is given basically to any manufacturer that wants to license it. And then that manufacturer can't just take Google and run it. Have you ever tried to install windows or Linux or free BSD? [00:49:36] It's mainly a windows problem, frankly, but you go on ahead and install that. And what do you need in windows? You're going to need driver. Oh wait a minute. This laptop is three years old. So how can I find them? And then you go around and you work on it and takes you a day and you finally find everything you need. [00:49:53] And you've got all of the drivers and now it works. But Microsoft provided you with the base operating system. Why do you need drivers? You know the answer to that and it's because every piece of equipment out there is different. Think about this in the smartphone market. Think about it in the more general. [00:50:10] Android market. There are thousands of these devices that are out there and those different devices are using different hardware, which require different drivers. So when Google comes up with a software patch, how well we just fix the log for J issue that patch. Has to be given to the devices manufacturer who then has to talk to the manufacturers of the various components and make sure that the device drivers that they're using by the manufacturer are actually compatible. [00:50:50] They're going to. Got the upgrades, wire it all together, and then test it on all of the different phones that they have and cars because the cars are running it. Now you see how complicated this get. And most Android devices will never. Get another update. They will never get a security patch versus apple. [00:51:14] Right now. They're still supporting the apple six S that came out in 2015. If I remember right, it's five or six years old. Now you don't find that in the Android space. You're lucky if you get two years worth of support, we're going to continue this. But this is this is really important. I'm going to talk more about the actual problem. [00:51:36] What is being done about it? What you can do about it as an individual, a home user, and as a business, in fact, keep an eye on your mailboxes. Cause I've got some more links to some sites about what you can do and how to do it and how to test for it. [00:51:53] We're talking about what is likely to be the biggest set of hacks in internet history right now. It's absolutely incredible what's going on. So we're going to talk about what it means to you and what's really going on. This whole problem is probably bigger than anybody really realizes because Java, as I explained is a very common computer programming language. [00:52:23] And it has a lot of features that bigger businesses love. They love the ability to have multiple programmers working on something at the same time. They love the inheritance and multiple inheritance and all of these wonderful features of Java. One of the really cool features is that you can, while your program is running, have the program change. [00:52:48] It's. That's effectively what it's doing. It's pulling in libraries and functions in real time. And that's where this particular problem comes in. This has been a nightmare for Java forever. It's one of the reasons I have never migrated to Java for any of the projects that I have. Don, it just gets to be a nightmare. [00:53:12] It reminds me of Adobe flash. It was the biggest security problem that has ever been. And the number two Java and Java is running in the Android operating system. It is the core of the operating system. All of the programs are almost certainly written into. And now we're seeing Java up in the, not just entertainment systems in our cars, but in the actual computers that are driving the cars, running the cars. [00:53:45] And I get very concerned about this. We had two major outages just this week before this log for J thing came about over at Amazon. And those two Amazon outages knocked thousands of businesses. Off the air out of business. You couldn't get to them. You remember the big problem with Facebook that we talked about a little while back and in both cases, it looks like they were using some automatic distribution of software sent out the wrong stuff. [00:54:15] And now you are effected. What happens? What happens with the cars? If they push out a bad patch, how are we going to know. What's that going to mean? And if your car has Java in it, are you going to be vulnerable to this? You wouldn't be vulnerable to log for J if your computer wasn't hooked up to anything, but nowadays the cars are hooked up to the net. [00:54:39] We've had a couple of car dealers for our clients. Who've had the Mercedes we've had Acura Honda and others over the years. And it's interesting going in there now and working with them because they are doing massive downloads of firmware whenever a car comes in. So that car, if they don't have the right kind of networks, that car can take hours to do. [00:55:07] Dates. And I got to tell you, man, I'm just shocked by so many businesses, not willing to spend the money that it really takes. So the poor technician is sitting there waiting for it to happen. We could make it happen in 15 minutes, but they're stuck there waiting for three or four hours sometimes for some of these downloads, no it's called cash them locally. [00:55:26] These cars, some of them need new and different firmware. Some of them use the same and have. A reliable, fast internet connection. And we've done that for many companies. Anyways, I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here. So forget that let's get back into this with Java. You can have a routine. [00:55:48] Call another routine that was not even necessarily thought of by the programmer. Now, can you imagine that? So you're programming and you're not considering adding something that's going to send email out and yet you could have a log in. That's part of the DNS and it gets logged that actually causes an email to be sent or causes anything else to happen. [00:56:17] That the exact problem we're seeing right now, it's absolutely crazy patterns in text fields, things like you can put a user desk agent. Which is normal for nature. UDP connection. You say, this is usually a guy who using Chrome version bar or Firefox or safari, but you put the user agent field. [00:56:40] And then after that, you've put in some, a little bit of code that tells Java, Hey, what I want you to do is this. This is a problem because we're finding now that I'm, again, I said the last 24 hours, 30 different exploits over a million companies have been attacked on this. And we're talking about 10. [00:57:05] Companies, absolutely hacked every minute right now. Can you think of, let's just think about that. And we're in the middle of what, right? The big holiday season, we've had some holidays, there's people online, shopping there's businesses that are trying to buy stuff, business stuff, almost every one of those sites is likely to be compromised. [00:57:31] It's that bad. It's absolutely nuts. What's happening here. This is a huge flaw. And by the way, it is flaw. Number this you ready for? This 44,228. In the year 2021. So the written 44,000 flaws that have been discovered and reported, this is the CVE system for those of you who are interested, but this really is a worst case scenario. [00:58:02] Because this log for J library is being pulled in to so many pieces of software out there on so many different platforms. The paths to to exploit this vulnerability are almost unlimited. And because there's so many dependencies on this particular log for J library, it's going to make it very difficult to patch without breaking other things. [00:58:32] And the fact the exploit itself fits in. Tweet come injected almost anywhere. So it's going to be a very long weekend for a lot of people, but let me tell you this. It is not going to be solved in a few days, a week, a month. We're going to be seen this. Years, because you have to be the person that wrote the program that has the source code to link in the new libraries, distributed out to your customers. [00:59:03] Do you see what a nightmare? This is now? Some people are saying let's blame this on open source. This is an open source product. Yeah, it is an open source project and it turns out that even though anyone can grab this, these, this library routine or any of these pieces of code, anybody can grab it. [00:59:21] Anybody can look at it. It turns out it's one guy. Who actually maintained this, who has a budget of $2,000 a year to maintain it. Nobody else pitched in. And all of these big companies are all out there grabbing this code that this guy has been working on and not paying much attention to it. Not donating to the project. [00:59:46] Which is saving them millions of dollars, not that one project, but all of these projects collectively in the open source community, it's it is more far reaching than this stretch vulnerability. You might remember this drug vulnerability that's was, that was the root cause of the massive breach at Equifax that Explo exposed all of our personal information. [01:00:14] To the dark web. That's how bad this is. Oh my gosh. So Hey, if you want information, I've got a links, a bunch of links set up here on what to do while you're waiting for the log for J updates from your vendors, how you can find on your servers. If they have the log for J vulnerability, I've got a bunch of information that I've stored up on that. [01:00:41] And some others just email me. M e@craigpeterson.com asked for the list of the log for Jay's stuff or the Java's stuff. I'll figure it out. Be glad to send it to anyone that's interested. And if you need to scan to find out yourself and your business, let me know to me@craigpeterson.com. [01:01:03] Wow. I was just going through a list published by Seesaw, this federal government agency that tracks some of these types of vulnerabilities. And wow, this list is daunting of all of these pieces of software that are vulnerable to this huge hack. [01:01:19] This is now a problem for each and every one of us. [01:01:23] I think I've established the man. This is nasty. So what do you do? First of all, I sent out. Email a list of things have in fact, a few different lists of things that you can do. So I had one for consumers, one for businesses and a general thing as well. And then a bunch of references. [01:01:47] Of course there's even more references and more great information now because I got that email. Pretty early. So I hope hopefully you had a chance to really look through that, but here let's just talk a little bit about this, what to do thing you already know because you guys really are the best and brightest that you need to be careful when you're on. [01:02:11] You cannot be online, Willy nilly, clicking on things. And that includes emails and links. And this time of year in fact, all year long, we're looking for. Wow, let's see. Is there a great bonus here? Look at they're having a sale, a discount. Oh no. I've only got three hours to respond or the deal's going to go away. [01:02:33] I've usually been of the sort that I just am, not that influenced by some of these deals, but. I do sometimes want to find out what it is. So I find myself this week clicking through on. I'm on a lot of marketing lists because I like to follow what different marketers are doing, that's technology. [01:02:55] And it's something I want to keep you guys informed about. And I found myself just crazy amount of double checking to make sure the link was valid. Now I'm sure you guys have, if you're on my email list, you might notice that the from address is not the me at Craig Peterson. Calm email address. You can always send email to me@craigpeterson.com and it ends up in my email box. [01:03:21] And it might take me a few days, or even as much as a week or two to get back to you. If it's something there's an emergency, you really need to fill out the form on my website, but I will get back with you. But the problem that some people have noticed lately is. It doesn't say return address or sent from me@craigpeterson.com. [01:03:45] It's got this rather long convoluted convoluted URL that has nothing to do with Craig peterson.com, sows a number of people question it, it is a tracking. When can the idea is if I am going to be able to get back to people and if Karen is going to be able to nudge. I have to have these things tracked. [01:04:09] So the email from address, when you hit reply, it is going to go to the, again, my email list server guys, and it is going to get tracked so I know. Okay. Okay. So now I've got a few minutes or an hour. Let's sit down and go through a lot of these emails so I can get back to people. That's a problem for many people, that's even more of a problem today than it ever has been in the past. [01:04:38] Now there's been a few sites that have done something about tracking because many people don't like to be tracked. My self included, although, as I've always explained on the show, it's a double-edged sword because I would rather see commercials or ads for a Ford F-150 pickup truck. When I'm looking to buy. [01:05:00] Car or certainly a truck. I don't want to see ads for things I don't care about. And you probably don't either. So the tracking, I don't think is a huge deal. The statistics that have come out from apple recently are very interesting because what apple ended up doing is they put some new technology and to stop tracking. [01:05:25] And to stop you from being tracked. And basically what they're doing is a couple of things. One, they've got this new feature where they will download images and emails from their website, so that it's not they're not being able to localize where you are and then they're also doing something where you. [01:05:49] Are you are, you can't be tracked like you used to be able to be tracked. Let me just put it simply like that applications now have to have that little label warning label in the app store to let you know what they might be tracking, et cetera. So they've been accepting anti tracking behavior that came from our friends from. [01:06:13] Apple now Google, Facebook and others have been very upset about this thinking that they were going to lose a lot of business here in the advertising side, because you wouldn't be able to track them. So if you've got an apple iOS device, you probably noticed, it says, allow app to track your activity across other companies. [01:06:36] And websites, your data will be used to measure advertising efficiency. I don't know that's such a bad thing. And looking at the stats right now, I'm looking at Google's income. And a lot of that comes from YouTube after. Apple launched its new privacy initiative and it looks like Google really wasn't hit very badly. [01:07:00] What Facebook was worried about that they would just be losing all kinds of revenue. Also didn't turn out to be true. So it's an interesting thing to see and I've got to really compliment apple again. At this time on trying to keep our information private, I read a really great book this, so this is how the world ends talking about the whole cyber race and where things are likely going. [01:07:30] And it's frankly impressive. To see what Google has done to try and keep out our government from their networks, as well as foreign government and the whole thing with the Chinese hackers we've talked about before, where I've found them. Active inside our customer's network before. And this is where we get called in because there's a problem. [01:07:57] We look around, we find indications of compromise. We find the Chinese inside. Okay. So it isn't something that we were protecting them, the Chinese got in, but we come in after the fact and have to clean up the mess. But what we have really seen happen here is the largest transfer in. Of wealth, I should say, in history, the largest transfer of wealth in history to. [01:08:25] From us and from other countries, but primarily from us because of what they've stolen. And so Google really has fought hard against it. The Chinese have been in their systems have stolen a lot of stuff. Apple has fire fought hard against it, but we know about the apple stuff. Google's seems to be a little quieter about some of it. [01:08:45] So they may be selling our information to advertisers, but there certainly are trying to keep nation states out. I'm really wondering too, what is Google doing? Moving that artificial intelligence lab to China. It just it's insane. We know we, if we're going to get out of this financial position, we're in as a country, we need to have an amazing new technology. [01:09:09] So people are coming to the United States and we're certainly not seeing that. At least not yet. It's all been stolen. So what to do, man. I started talking about that and we got a little sidetracked. So I will talk about that a little bit more here coming right up and what to do if you're a consumer, if you're a business person. [01:09:32] And of course, as I mentioned earlier, I have. Quite a list. I'm more than glad to send you. If you go ahead and just email me, M e@craigpeterson.com. I'll keep you up to date, let you know what's happening and give you those links that you can follow to find out exactly what is happening and what you can do. [01:09:53] Including some tools. There are some tools out there to check to see if that vulnerability exists inside your networks or systems MI. Ed Craig peterson.com. And I'll be glad to reach out, reach back to you.  [01:10:09] I'm gonna tell you what to do as a consumer because of this massive internet hack that is underway. It is huge. Also going to talk a little bit about apple and what they're doing with their tracker detect app on Android devices. [01:10:24] This will be going on for months and probably years in some cases, because there are many systems that will never. [01:10:35] Patched for this vulnerability. So from now on, you need to be doubly cautious about almost everything, the big targets for this. Then people who tend to be the most valuable. Big businesses. And I can send you a list of devices that are known to be either immune to this they've been fixed or patched and devices that are known to have this problem. [01:11:03] You send me an email. Excuse me. If you have any questions about it. So it's me M e@craigpeterson.com. I'd be glad to send you that list. Seesaw has it online. You can certainly search for it yourself. If you're interested in. So for you as an individual, it's just extra caution, use these one time, use credit card numbers. [01:11:31] I have talked about this before. And that is, I use fake identities as much as I possibly can online. And I'm not trying to defraud anyone. Of course, that would be legal. What I'm trying to do is not make myself as easy at target. As is frankly pretty much anybody who uses a computer out there, because if you're always using your, in the same name and email address and having forbid password, then you are a bigger target than you have to be. [01:12:07] And I have a whole index file. I have a spreadsheet that I put together with 5,000 different identities, different names, of course, different sexes, races, origin stories, everything. And the whole idea behind that is why does some company that's providing me with some little website thing, need my real info. [01:12:31] They don't obviously you give you real info to the banks or. Counts, but you don't need to give it to anybody else. And that's what I do. That's my goal. So if you can do that, do that. Apple also has a way for you to use random. Email address a suit can set up a different email address for every website you visit. [01:12:57] There are a few services out there that can do it. If you're interested, drop me an email. me@craigpeterson.com. I'll send you a list of some of them. I think they're all paid except for the app. But you have to have an apple account in order to use it. One of the things that businesses really need to do is do a scan. [01:13:19] Again, I can send you a list of scanners so that you can look at your network, see if there's any. Obvious that might have huge implications for your business. Again, me@craigpeterson.com, one of the things apple has come up with that I really have turned out to and I think I mentioned them before on the air, but it's these news. [01:13:41] Trackers that apple has, that you can put on things. And we spoke a little bit last week about the problem with these trackers being put on to high-end cars, and then being used to track the car. Now apple got around that problem a while ago, by letting you know, Hey, there is a tracker following you isn't that handy. [01:14:04] Wait a minute, somebody dropped one of these little tags into my purse. Coat my car or whatever it might be. And so now you can have a look and see where is this thing that's following me and get rid of it. Of course, in order to know that there's one of these apple tags tracking, you've needed to have an apple phone. [01:14:26] Because it'll warn you. Apple now has something called tracker detect. If you are using an Android phone, I would highly advise you to get this app tracker detect app on Android. And it's designed to help you Android users from being tracked by apple airtight. 'cause if you don't know you're being tracked right, then you can't know if you're being tracked. [01:14:55] If you don't have an iPhone, unless you get this app so good for them, apple has it up now on the Google play store. That's just in the last week or so, and it lets you locate nearby air tags. So let's I think a very good thing kind of wonder if apple isn't using the Androids also for part of the. [01:15:16] Crowdsourcing for the air tags, but that's a different conversation. Great article in vice this week by Aaron Gordon, about how car companies want you to keep paying. Features you already have, and they specifically made a call out about a car manufacturer. Toyota. Who's now charging $80 a year for people who bought their car years ago, six years ago, $80 a year. [01:15:51] If you want to keep using the remote start function on your key. Yeah, so you paid for it and life was good. You went a few years, really nice on a cold winter day or a hot summer day, warm up the car or cool it down all automatically. But now Toyota is charging. $80 a year. So people are saying why I bought it? [01:16:16] Why would I pay for that? Apple's now claiming that the several first years were merely a free trial period, but this isn't even the big play for these car companies, this $80 a year for marginal features like remote start instead. Is probably going to happen. And I agree with this author as well is we're going to see a, an approach that Elon Musk has used with his Teslas. [01:16:47] They're going to charge extra for performance, for range, for safety upgrades, for electric vehicles that actually make the car better car, a better car. So upgrades used to be difficult or impossible with gas cars. A lot of these are trivial for the electric cars, with the dashboards that have games that you can play while you are charging. [01:17:13] Some of them were complaining about it being for when they're on the road. Of course that's going to happen because frankly, when, once we get a full autonomous car, what are outs are you going to do? I should also mention this isn't really a, but Mercedes-Benz has been awarded the very first license for the manufacturer sale and distribution of a fully autonomous vehicle. [01:17:39]

In this episode of Project Management Office Hours Matt Hubbard and Mario H Trentim join Joe Pusz - PMO Joe to have an in-depth discussion about the Citizen Developer program. Matt Hubbard works to bring citizen development programs to organizations using his 20+ years of operational excellence experience. The core of Matt's success is his belief that process, technology, and people must be optimized together to achieve a lasting result. “Generically, citizen development is when you empower business people who are not trained coders to solve business problems through the use of low-code/no-code tools, which are tools that basically assemble apps, instead of coding apps. You are dragging and dropping existing elements to assemble the app.” -Matt Hubbard Mario Trentim is currently Citizen Developer at PMI.org, founder at TRENTIM.com, and Board Member at PMOGA.world. Mario is and Engineer with +15 years of experience managing global projects and implementing Project Management Offices in Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. “The development for project managers, is not just to build the finance applications or sales applications, it's also expanding our boundaries outside technical projects to events, to human resource projects, finance projects, marketing projects, and more. When we think about citizen development, an agilest, business analyst, project manager, PMO manager, will be ten times more effective.” -Mario Trentim Listen to Matt and Mario with PMO Joe discuss these topics further in E90 on Project Management Office Hours and do not forget to subscribe! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/project-management-office-hours/id1398533604 Want to discover more? Connect with the guests: Connect with Mario Trentim https://lnkd.in/d7pptwK2 https://trentim.com.br/ Connect with Matt Hubbard https://lnkd.in/gdCsTdsn https://trackvia.com/ Thank you to THE PMO SQUAD and The PMO Leader for sponsoring this show. Learn more about, Project Management with a Purpose. The PMO Squad helps you navigate your Project Management Journey. Learn more about The PMO Squad - www.thepmosquad.com Where do PMO Leaders go for Information, Learning, Networking and Services? The PMO Leader community has “Everything You Need to Become a Great PMO Leader”. One PMO World, One Community! Learn more about The PMO Leader - www.thepmoleader.com

On this special bonus episode of We Chat Divorce, we are welcoming not just one but TWO AMAZING guests, Casey Shevin and Sonia Queralt, Co-founders of Divorceify.  Sonia is a divorce litigator, divorce coach, and divorce survivor. She now dedicates her career to helping people going through divorce focus on building their future. She became a programmer and co-founded Divorceify to help people demystify the complexities of the divorce process. Casey is also a divorce litigator turned divorce mediator turned divorce innovator. Casey earned her bachelor’s degree at Smith College and studied law at Georgetown University, where she was recognized for excellence in clinical fieldwork in family law. Casey is admitted to practice law in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. So, let’s get to it…. Today we are chatting about Four Early Divorce Mistakes and How to Avoid Them – Failing to Confront Indecision Failing to Get Organized Choosing the Wrong Divorce Process Hiring the Wrong Help As companies founded by divorce professionals, My Divorce Solution, and Divorceify have quite a bit in common, beginning with our commitment to the people we serve. This partnership combines an innovative flat-rate financial foundation – The MDS Financial Portrait – with Divorceify’s roadmap that includes a customized action plan, an education, access to reliable resources, and vetted local professionals selected specifically for you. Together, we will make the divorce experience clearer and more manageable. We are thrilled to partner with Divorceify and support all the amazing work they’re doing to positively impact how people get divorced.  Learn More >> If you have questions for us or a topic you’d like us to cover, contact us at hello@mydivorcesolution.com or visit MyDivorceSolution.com  ----more---- The We Chat Divorce podcast (hereinafter referred to as the “WCD”) represents the opinions of Catherine Shanahan, Karen Chellew, and their guests to the show. WCD should not be considered professional or legal advice. The content here is for informational purposes only. Views and opinions expressed on WCD are our own and do not represent that of our places of work. WCD should not be used in any legal capacity whatsoever.  Listeners should contact their attorney to obtain advice with respect to any particular legal matter. No listener should act or refrain from acting on the basis of information on WCD without first seeking legal advice from counsel in the relevant jurisdiction. No guarantee is given regarding the accuracy of any statements or opinions made on WCD. Unless specifically stated otherwise, Catherine Shanahan and Karen Chellew do not endorse, approve, recommend, or certify any information, product, process, service, or organization presented or mentioned on WCD, and information from this podcast should not be referenced in any way to imply such approval or endorsement. The third-party materials or content of any third-party site referenced on WCD do not necessarily reflect the opinions, standards or policies of Catherine Shanahan or Karen Chellew. WCD, CATHERINE SHANAHAN, AND KAREN CHELLEW EXPRESSLY DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL LIABILITY OR RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR OTHER DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF ANY INDIVIDUAL'S USE OF, REFERENCE TO, RELIANCE ON, OR INABILITY TO USE, THIS PODCAST OR THE INFORMATION PRESENTED IN THIS PODCAST. ----more---- Transcript: Karen Chellew: Welcome to We Chat Divorce, Catherine and I are so excited to introduce you to Sonia and Casey, two of the founding partners of Divorceify. Today we're going to talk about the four early divorce mistakes and how to avoid them. But first, let me introduce you to our guests. Sonia is a divorce litigator, a divorce coach, and a divorce survivor. She now dedicated her career to helping people going through divorce, focus on building their future. She became a programmer and co-founded Divorceify to help people demystify the complexities of the divorce process. Casey is also a divorce litigator, turned divorce mediator, turned divorce innovator. Casey earned her bachelor's degree at Smith College and studied law at Georgetown University, where she was recognized for her excellence in clinical field work and family law. Casey is admitted to practice law in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Thanks for being here, Sonia and Casey were so excited had this conversation with you. Casey Shevin: Thank you for having us. Karen Chellew: Of course. Casey, do you want to start off by telling us a little bit about Divorceify? Casey Shevin: I would love to. So as we just mentioned Karen, I started out my career in family law as a litigator, which mean for those people who are listening and are not totally sure what litigation means, that basically means that you take your divorce to court. So you ask a judge to set a schedule where you're making regular court appearances, and although most people assume that ends in a full-blown trial, 95% of cases actually settle. So most of the time I was helping people try to settle out of court. But with the watchful eye of a judge setting the schedule for every step of the process. What I found in litigation was that that wasn't the best fit for me as a way to serve my clients. And so, I was always trying to get people to settle rather than fight for every penny they could get, because I felt like there was a real value in shortening the duration of the divorce and kind of salvaging whatever co-parenting relationship my client had to their soon to be ex spouse going forward. Casey Shevin: So I ended up leaving litigation and forming my own practice in mediation. And around that time, I was looking for other people who were finding themselves unsatisfied with the divorce status quo. And that's when I met Sonia and our third co-founder Tali. All three of us are attorneys and working moms, and we all wanted to find a way to help people avoid some of the earliest divorce mistakes. So what I found in mediation is that people would start in litigation, they'd spend tens of thousands of dollars, they'd have tons of headache. Their stress level would be through the roof, and they would find that they were fighting over things that really either didn't matter to them. They felt like their money was being spent inefficiently, or it was just ratcheting up the conflict level in their household to like an unsustainable point. Casey Shevin: And they felt like there was no end in sight for the litigation. So when they found out about mediation they would come to my office, they would have a couple sessions, they would really get down to the root of whatever was left in front of them to decide. And they'd be like, if we had known about mediation earlier, we could have saved ourselves so much time, so much money and so much conflict in our household. So that was a real light bulb moment for me in terms of thinking, wow, people need a place to go for divorce orientation and education. So that they can really get their divorce started on the right foot. And Sonia was at the time... And I'm going to let her speak for herself in a second, but Sonia was actually thinking the same thing. She was seeing it from a different perspective which I'm sure she'll share, but she was out there thinking the same thing, which is that people need a one-stop shop for orientation and education. And that's where Divorceify was really born. Casey Shevin: So when you come to Divorceify's site, you do a pretty simple intake as a client. We ask you natural language questions, you answer them, it takes five to 10 minutes. And then at the end, we spit out what we call DivorceGPS, which kind of directs you to what we think are the best process options for you, because there's more than one way to get a divorce agreement. And we also direct you to the types of professional help that can help you get to the finish line efficiently and holistically. And so it's not just attorneys, it's also financial advisors and mental health professionals and parenting coaches and mediators, et cetera. So we're really excited about it. We think it's a great place for people to start their divorce process and really learn about the options out there and really figure out what's the best fit for them. Karen Chellew: Love that. Sonia do you want to add... Oh, go ahead, Catherine. Catherine Shanahan: Sorry. It is exciting because I want to hear Sonia side first before I say anything more, I guess, but it's exciting for people to have a place to go because there are so many options and a lot of times the only options available to you are the options of your friends and family members who have gone through the process and everyone's financial situation is different. But before we expand on that I didn't mean to interject there Sonia. So tell us a little bit about you and how you jumped into the Divorceify process? Sonia Q: Thank you, and that's okay. So I also was a divorce litigator. I litigated divorces in Boston, Massachusetts. I did a lot of high-end, high-conflict divorces, I was in court a ton. And really also in my own personal life my marriage was imploding. So I was able to advocate for my clients, I couldn't advocate for myself. And so, what really solidified that I needed to sort of help people through the divorce process in a different way was I was involved in a three year divorce trial. So two high-end executives spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, liquidated assets, children went into regression behaviors. And basically we ended up having to settle because in Massachusetts there's a mandatory retirement age for judges. So the judge was about to retire and he looked at us after three and said "You guys are either going to have to settle or you're going to have to start over." Well, what ended up happening was we ended up settling with the very first proposal that I had drafted to the other side three years prior. Sonia Q: Done, no more, no thank you. So with that my personal life was kind of crazy, and I decided that I needed to walk away from litigation. And part of that was based on what Casey said, that education orientation piece, I kept finding that clients were coming to me and they were making three critical mistakes. Number one, starting off on the wrong process. Why, exactly Karen and Catherine, what you said that they're responding to their divorce and their marriage, how their best friend did their neighbor. Everybody's got a divorce war story, but that's a problem, it's their own, it's not yours. And number two, that clients really don't realize divorce is much more than a legal problem. So if you don't address all of the pieces of your divorce with the right experts and professionals, you're not able to get through the process in the healthiest way possible. Sonia Q: Number three, which we're going to talk about is clients really felt disempowered. They didn't realize that during the waiting period there are things you can do to empower yourself and prepare. All of those things together with my own thing going on, I decided to walk away from litigation. I packed up my car with only my belongings, and I left the marital home. Before doing that as a divorce litigator, everybody kind of looked at me and said, "You do this all the time. You know exactly how to do this. It's going to be nice and easy or divorce is simple." And I thought, yikes, it a lot different. [crosstalk 00:08:45] And it became really critical for me to surround myself with the right team of professionals that really understood what I needed, what my non-negotiables were, and to educate me on what I was choosing to walk away from. Sonia Q: Only then could I make a well-informed decision? And so my decision became my non-negotiable, my happiness, I was stuck in a miserable marriage for way too many years. And the other thing that I did was I walked away from everything. I left equity on the table. I left a lot of things, but I didn't knowingly and having brought in the right professionals to help me understand what that meant for my future and for next steps. So with all of that Divorceify was born. Karen Chellew: I love it. And your third partner Tali, she's also an attorney. Do you want to just give a little bit about her? Casey Shevin: Sure. At the time we met Tali, she was working with judges for the court system. So she really saw the burden of over litigated two cases on the court system. Part of the reason litigation moves so slowly is the court system is overwhelmed by the number of people coming to it for help, when realistically a lot of those cases don't need to be in active litigation. It's very common to feel like you need the help of a lawyer. You shouldn't necessarily expect that you're going to understand the legal ins and outs of your case, but hiring a lawyer doesn't mean you're going to go to litigation. So Tali really saw that from the court's perspective of how beneficial it would be to head people off before they really even stepped foot in the courtroom and get them to other alternatives. So Tali actually took some time off from the law to learn to code, and so she's like our tech co-founder. And she's just been really awesome in coordinating all the various tech aspects. Casey Shevin: And like really what Divorceify is. It's a multidisciplinary marketplace of services where you can come and we all love a curated shopping experience these days. I don't want to sort through every option on Amazon. I don't want to sort through every option on Netflix, I want them to already know what's the best fit for me. So that's really what Divorceify offers like a tech and innovation enabled way to get your divorce started on the right foot. Sonia Q: That makes me think of TJ Maxx. Maxx seems always fine to say deal. But for me, I have to walk in and only see their front circular, whatever you call them through all the whole deals going on there. Casey Shevin: [crosstalk 00:11:35] multiples of options. I just want to know like what's in my style, directing me to the things I know I like. Karen Chellew: Right. Catherine Shanahan: So if you're listening to this, the big takeaway I'm hearing right now is three litigating attorneys ran for the hills. They knew that there was a better way to do this. Then they set out to set up Divorceify a great marketplace for people to find a better way to do it. So I'm really glad that we met you all and that we're partnering to make it even stronger. Casey Shevin: Yes. Catherine Shanahan: For people gaining financial clarity so that they know where to turn and where to go. Karen Chellew: Absolutely. So let's talk about some early mistakes people make when entering the divorce process or even thinking the divorce process. So the first one is failing to confront and decision. Casey Shevin: Yeah. So Sonia mentioned a few things that like we do focus on Divorceify, but what we think are like the four earliest mistakes that you can make is, like you said, the first one is failing to confront indecision. The second one is failing to get organized. The third one is choosing the wrong divorce process, and the fourth one is hiring the wrong help. So we'll start with the confronting indecision. So you don't wake up one morning and know for sure that you need to get a divorce. It's not like a light bulb moment that happens for most people. Most people it's a gradual thing. You're like, "Is this marriage working? I don't think it is. Is there a way to make it better? Maybe we'll try that. Am I done? What would divorce be like? Is that what I want?" Casey Shevin: The period of indecision lasts a really long time for most people. And it's a huge decision to make, so that makes perfect sense. I want to normalize that because that makes perfect sense. That being said, the longer you spend mired in indecision and without doing anything to help yourself get past it, the more likely you are to make a mistake that costs you money. So how can you confront indecision and why does starting your divorce before you've really made a decision cost you money? Sonia and I have both dealt with clients who started their divorce, not really sure that they wanted a divorce, and that costs you money because you're just ping ponging back and forth between, do I want to do this or do I want to stay in my marriage? And you're spending money with attorneys, maybe you're shopping around, maybe you've picked one. And this attorney is like, "Can I send that first letter? And can we put together a financial statement? Like, what are we doing?" And every time they're contacting you to try to prod you along, they're charging you legal fees. Karen Chellew: I'm going to add to that, Casey. Casey Shevin: Yeah. Karen Chellew: Because I just had a situation this week where we had clients who I guess were in indecision. And they didn't realize that once you hire an attorney and once you filed that complaint, and once someone sends over that discovery, all of a sudden you're mandated by court deadlines. I think that a lot of people have no idea about that. They think, okay, I'm going to file, then I can think some more. Well, now, you're in the midst of deadlines that your attorney has no choice, but which to respond to. Or their license is at risk, or you're going to get a sanctions motion against you. So I think to that point a lot of people are unsure, but they don't even know that filing a divorce actually is a commitment. It's not an exploratory decision. Catherine Shanahan: Well, you say that people don't just wake up and want to get a divorce the next day. But I know that there's a lot of people out there myself included, who said once my youngest kid graduates from high school, I'm getting out. So there was all those years of waiting, but then the time comes and now you're sitting there thinking, well, do I want to do this or do I not want to do this? And it's because they don't have financial clarity they're afraid to be alone. Or they just don't know what their life will look like after divorce. So when you Karen and I worked really hard on our process of the Financial Portraits, because how do we know what attorney to send them to, or what therapists that they need? If they don't know what their financial situation looks like. Catherine Shanahan: So it always amazes me when somebody comes in and they start doing their portrait and they realize that their inheritance is not marital because they never co-mingled it. And they say, "Oh my gosh, I only stayed because my mom would have died if my husband got any of that money. So I just stayed. If I know he's not going to get it, then I'm going." And the other women who say, I'm going to say mostly women, but there's certainly men also that say the same thing. "Wait, the pension is marital, I get half of that. He always told me, I'll never get that, what will I live on?" So it's really transforming when we're working with our clients and they realize that this is a marital asset, this is not a marital asset. And here's what your life will look like after working on their budgeting. Because then they can make the smart decision whether they stay or go. Karen Chellew: And Sonia, I think you make the point often that you, while you knew the litigation process, you needed support in the emotional process. And we fully believe that physically, financially and emotionally, all of those areas need to be in alignment for you to make really good, clear decisions for yourself. And some people are going to have strengths in places other people do not. But to your point of having a team and that fund of resources where they're all committed to the same cause, which is you is extraordinarily beneficial. Sonia Q: It is, and I think that you just addressed another piece of it. One of the things that... Casey and I are attorneys, our focus was on substantive legal issues. That is where we had our highest value for our clients. So then as a professional in the divorce field, you also have to learn to stay in your lane and respect it. That's what you do. That's what you know, that's a wonderful thing, but then you pull in your colleagues. Then you pull in the other professionals to help that client through, so there's that piece of it. And the other piece is exactly what you said, Karen, most all divorces have the divorce aspect legal issues, whether it's a settlement or you are in the court system or whatever that process is, and the financial piece. Most of them also have a parenting. The finances and the legal process and making it happen are two parts of every divorce. Sonia Q: And if you don't have the right information about the types of ways that you can get divorced, and what your Financial Portrait picture looks like now, what it will look like. And if you don't have that information, there's no way that you can make the best decision for your family. So you need the two pieces, which is why Casey and I are so pumped to be partnering up with My Divorce Solution. Because you guys have the financial piece and we are not financial professionals, but we know it's important and clients need it. I needed it. Divorce is much more than a legal problem. Karen Chellew: And so is mediation. Catherine Shanahan: And what's really great about your process is that yes, you need an attorney we can say, or yes, you have these financial concerns, but when we can vet them... No not vet them, but send them back to you, you can vet out the professionals. So it's really nice bet that we can transition our clients through your process to find the attorney when they need the attorney. Because sometimes in the middle of doing their Financial Portrait, they need an attorney. We're not attorneys, we don't give legal advice, we give financial opinions and financial advice, but to be able to say, go to Divorceify, here's the scenario. And here's the type of professional you need, you've done the hard work for them by vetting out that professional. So that's really so empowering that many people don't have. They just don't know how to find someone for them. Even though they could find the process, they can't find the right professional for them. And you often do that. Casey Shevin: What I wanted to point out is that the vast majority of people who come to our website and use our predictive technology to get recommendations, it's like over 75% of them are just thinking about divorce. Of those people many of them know they want to get a divorce, but they don't know how to get started. And then about a third of those people are just not even totally sure they're ready. They're still in this exploratory phase. What Karen mentioned earlier, I just want to go back to that quickly, which is that when you file something with the court to say that, I think I want to get a divorce. Yeah, it's true. You can withdraw that, you can take that off the table. Of course, you've spent money preparing it. You've now notified your spouse, you want to get a divorce? The ball is rolling. So you've started something by doing that. Casey Shevin: But it also does give you financial protection, like filing something with the court. So the time you spend before you file anything with the court can be a time in which financial stuff goes down that you learn about later. If you and your spouse are actively talking about divorce, the word divorce is going back and forth all the time, people start doing what attorneys called divorce planning. They start moving money around, they start thinking about what would come after this marriage. And there's many cases that came to our office where we would finally be doing financial discovery, we have started the divorce, we're pulling finances, we're putting together what the marital estate looks like. And we find out that the other spouse pulled $50,000 out of retirement in six months before the divorce was filed. Casey Shevin: And you can't get that money back that money's gone now. So you may be can recoup it through a judge. You might not be able to, it depends on the state you're in. And that's a really important thing to think about, like the longer you spend spinning your wheels on, are we going to get a divorce, are we not? Things might be happening that you don't know about. So how can you move past that period of indecision? And like we said, it's not just a legal decision, it's a financial decision, it's an emotional decision. So we have number of professionals in our network that can help you make those decisions. So one way to do it is a type of therapy called discernment counseling. And it's something that you do with your partner. And many people are resistant to couples counseling, especially when they're on the edge of a divorce. Casey Shevin: I don't want to be brought into this room and beat up by a counselor, we never tried marital counseling before. Now when we're like, at the very end, we're going to try it like that doesn't make any sense. But the truth is discernment. Counseling is different. It's a goal oriented process with a set number of sessions. And the goal of the process is to decide, are we in or are we out? And once you make that decision together and you're on the same page about whether you want the divorce or not, you can move forward really efficiently and with a lot of honesty and with like a lot of resolution on the emotional piece. You can also just have an initial consultation with an attorney where you're asking them a lot of really important legal questions and like, what would happen if I decided to file, would we have to go to court right away? What could be happening if I choose not to file? What might it look like for my kids, if I got a divorce? Casey Shevin: You can get some of those initial questions answered without really committing to that attorney or to filing something. So getting an initial consultation is a great way to move past indecision. And then finally the financial piece, a lot of are just really terrified. They can't afford to get divorced, not just the legal fees, but like what does splitting our assets look like? What does splitting our debts look like? Can we refinance this house? Can we afford it to buy two new houses? Were our kids live? So getting the financial piece together and, or understanding what your finances might look like after divorce is a really important way to move past indecision. And that's something we love about My Divorce Solution is that you guys really help people understand what the various outcomes might look like. Karen Chellew: Absolutely, to your point a lot of times when you said they're exploring, and they're in indecision, couples want to work it out more than they want to fight. So they're more willing to engage in honest or more honest financial discussions, than they will be willing to engage once they've engaged with attorneys. Because as an attorney, it's your job to protect your client. So by default it becomes a little- Sonia Q: I like that honest or more honest. So if you are listening ask yourself will you be honest or more honest? Karen Chellew: How much honesty will I get here. Casey Shevin: Right. Totally. Sonia Q: Love that go ahead. Karen Chellew: I thought that you would like that. But what trying to express is as an attorney, it is your job or an attorney's job to protect the client. So in doing so there's some level of adversity created by default. And then I also help people try to understand that even in mediation, mediators, they don't give advice or that's not their role. So I think a lot of people going into mediation saying the mediator is going to help me understand, well, only to a point. Because again, their role is to facilitate conversation. So having the financial clarity of knowing what you have, what's going to look at like what your options are, how much money do I spend a month now and how much money will I have later. Generically speaking, it's such good foundational information to help you make a decision. Do I stay, or do I go? Casey Shevin: Yes. And I think that what we're starting to get into is the second mistake that people make, which is failing to get organized. So there is a huge value to getting organized before you hit the starting line of your divorce. So before you're filing something in court or before you're like really starting to pay attorneys, large sums of money every month to start negotiating for you. The most valuable thing you can do for yourself is to prepare, and what does that mean? So part of that is getting emotionally ready and like, Sonia can speak to that probably even better than I can. But I would say that a big part of it is getting your financial documents organized because really divorce is ultimately the dissolution of a business partnership. When you get married, the state gives you certain rights and responsibilities and that's the contract of marriage. Casey Shevin: And when you get divorced, the state has to go in and look at what rights and how do those rights and responsibilities get dealt with during the marriage. So what did they accumulate together that they're not both now legally entitled to, and what are their responsibilities to each other now that they're getting divorced? Is somebody expected by the States to support the other person financially, for a period of time to help them get back on their feet as a single person. That's like spousal support. You have children together, there's a lot of financial responsibility there through child support. So before you ask the state to go in and make decisions about your rights and responsibilities, dissolving your finances, splitting things up, you need to really have all your ducks in a row as to what are the assets and debts that we're going to be asking the court to divide. Casey Shevin: If you're prepped well for that, then that process that when the court says here's all the different pieces of paperwork you need to produce, or if you're in an out of court divorce process, your attorneys are still going to say, you can't get the court to approve a divorce settlement, unless you have had full financial disclosure. And you're willing to sign a contract that says I have received full financial disclosure, and I'm confident that I understand every asset and debt in this marriage. And I'm confident that it's getting split up in a fair way that I can agree to. My Divorce Solution, financial prep, and the reason we're partnering with you guys to send clients to you is that we really feel like it is the comprehensive preparation that clients need. Right? Karen Chellew: Absolutely. Catherine Shanahan: Well, before even knowing what you want and what you have, if you're out there and you're thinking, how the hell do I do that? All you need to do is don't overlook an opportunity to gather some information that you may not have access to after it's announced that you want a divorce. So if you're out there and you see a statement, but you have no idea what it is, it's okay, you don't need to know what anything means at this point. If it has numbers on it, you gather it. Don't make the mistake of missing the opportunity to gather some information. Just a couple of weeks ago, I heard someone say, "Oh my gosh, I left the house, and I had my hands on the document and now I don't and he won't give them to me. Catherine Shanahan: So make a copy of anything that you have so that we can organize you. We will let you know what's missing. We'll make sure you have the financial clarity when you go through our process, but right now, take the opportunity to gather as much information as you can, whether you understand it or not. It doesn't matter to us. Karen Chellew: If it has numbers on it, make a copy. Casey Shevin: That's very good advice. Catherine Shanahan: Exactly. Karen Chellew: Just to elaborate a little bit on that there have been some couples or some people who come through the process and when they get financially organized and clear, they understand that their relationship issues were more financial. And once they had the clarity, they were willing to work on their marriage again. Now that percentage is very small, but it definitely exists. And so, again, making sure what you're doing so that you don't have regrets later. It's just really important. Catherine Shanahan: That reminds me of something Karen with a client not too long ago. And it was actually the male. He is getting his Financial Portrait and they're going to therapy at the same time. And he said, "I don't know if I want a divorce or not." And I said to him in his review, "It's great, you're taking care of this because you'll know what it will look like if you stay married or if you stay divorced. But the most important piece to this is you're really giving yourself and your wife, the opportunity for you to emotionally work on your marriage because you already have it settled." So the financial piece is not coming into your therapy session. It's just staying on should we stay connected and together because we really do love each other emotionally not, we don't love each other financially because some people can't overcome that in therapy. And that's why therapy sometimes probably doesn't work. Karen Chellew: Yeah. Sonia, you were going to say something. Sonia Q: Yeah. I think one of the other things not to overlook is preparation saves you time and money. So walking into your attorney's office, well-prepared with the Financial Portrait, with documents that you have captured and sitting down there will save money because the attorneys not having to talk to you for a... Usually it's for several sessions about what documents to start to collect, and we don't have to do that. You're coming in and you're ready. And then we can focus on what we need to focus on. Whether it's a pickle, the right process, looking at all of the options, et cetera, children, custody, whatever that looks like, but it really does save time and money. And I think that's something that at least what I would tell clients all the time is coming to me with a stack of papers and documents and just throwing them down at my desk and being like, "I know there's suspicious behavior here. My spouse is hiding money in an account." It's like speaking Chinese. And this is why, one, I don't know your family. Karen Chellew: Two you don't speak Chinese. Sonia Q: Yes, I don't. And number one, they don't know your family. Number two, I have no idea the patterns of behavior that your spouse has or does not have when it comes to money, taking out money for a certain ATMs et cetera. I would always say to clients, pull the documents, and when you have a moment of clarity in your mind, because that's also something, the emotional piece is heavy. And some days you can't either look at or think anything divorced and that's okay. But those moments you can sit down look through it, flag things for your attorney. So that when you're sitting down, it's not just this massive pile of just statements. We were looking at hundreds of thousands of pages of statements all the time. You've actually created your story, what you think that is. And really that is powerful because that's also empowering for you as you're getting through it. And every little step of preparation is a drop in the sort of empowerment bucket. So that's a big piece. Get prepared, get organized, it'll save you money and your attorney will love you. [inaudible 00:33:51] Karen Chellew: That's so awesome. And you always have the spouse that has the spreadsheet. Usually one or the other has to spreadsheet [inaudible 00:34:01] And they for sure know what it is and it's a no brainer. And I can't think of any time that spreadsheet has really laid out the marital assets and the components of the marital assets and what it's going to mean to divide those marital assets. So while from like a straight line of... That's probably the wrong math word, Catherine, but from just a very linear perspective, the spreadsheet may be a good place to start. But it's only a drop in the bucket to the information that you need to know and understand how it plays into dividing assets, in family law situations. Casey Shevin: I mean, look, getting a divorce, like really sucks. It is one of the most stressful things you can go through in your entire life. 85% of the clients who come to our website say that the stress of their divorce is interrupting their day to day functioning. You might be at work, but your head might be somewhere totally different, most days that you're at work because you are so crushed by the stress of what is about to happen to your life. So at Divorceify we're thinking about how do we get people to start their divorce on the right foot and have the best divorce possible. But what we're thinking about is the cost of your divorce, the tone of your divorce and how long it takes to get a divorce. So look, you can have millions of dollars, but do you want to give that money to your divorce attorney? Or do you want to spend it and leave it for your children? Spend it on yourself, leave it for your children. We would so much rather have you do that. Casey Shevin: Even if you have the means to litigate your divorce for years and payer your payer attorneys, hundreds of thousands of dollars. But that's not true for most people. Most people don't have that kind of money, and they really are worried about how much their divorce is going to cost. So in either situation, you want to be thinking about how to be efficient. There's no reason to fork all that money over to your divorce attorneys. Karen Chellew: Right. Casey Shevin: The second thing is the tone of your divorce really sets the tone for your family going forward. Most people who are getting a divorce have kids together, whether or not those kids are adults or young children, you are going to have to be in the same room with your ex at some point in the future. Whether it's a college graduation, a wedding your kid's kindergarten performance at the end of the year, whatever it is, you're probably going to have to be in a room with this person, and you don't want that to be toxic for everybody in your family. So we think about how do we keep the conflict level as low as possible without making you a doormat. Karen Chellew: Right. Casey Shevin: The other thing is the duration of your divorce. Like it is very common for people to spend six months to a year, debating back and forth, do I even want a divorce? That alone is painful. Once you've decided that you want to get one, you don't want to spend another one to three years getting divorced. You want that to be as short, a duration as possible without it feeling like you're on some like hyper speed stress train. So we really think about how do we keep the cost down? How do we keep the tone controlled? How do we shorten the duration of your divorce? And good preparation will influence all three of those things. And I think part of it is knowing you want a divorce, and that this is the right decision for you. And taking the steps that you can take to get past in decision. Be sure about it when you start it. And then getting really well-organized and prepped and having some vision of what it might look like after divorce, that really will help you go into it in a calmer mindset, spend less money with your professionals. Casey Shevin: And some people might think like, well is getting a Financial Portrait really necessary. Isn't that something my attorney's going to help me with anyway? Sure, it might feel like an additional cost at the beginning, but trust me, when I tell you that paying for good financial analysis at the beginning is going to save you money throughout. And you're much likelier to be happy with your settlement at the end of it. So, I mean, I think that that's a huge cost saver and time saver and conflict saver, because also your attorney who your spouse will probably hate is not going to be the one being like, "Well, what we have to do with this asset is X," they're going to already have an analysis that was done by financial professionals. That tax affects everything that shows why this is a great scenario for everybody, that's really what you want. Karen Chellew: And so, I think that goes into our next segment of choosing the wrong divorce process. The third early mistake. Casey Shevin: Yeah. So we think there are basically four main ways to get divorced, there's a few outliers otherwise, but we've talked about litigation. So using the court to set your schedule and going for a judge the other option is really out of court negotiation. So you hire attorneys and you tell your attorneys before we file something at court, we really want to keep this out of court as much as possible. And you have- Catherine Shanahan: Wait a minute, can I stop you there for a second, Sonia? I just can't even imagine going through what you went through. And then the judge tells you "I'm out of here. You need to decide this." So when you mentioned the litigation process, I mean, I never think a judge should decide what the fate of your family is. I just can't get that out of my head, going through all that money, all that time, you being a professional, knowing the process, and then it's out of your hands. And the judge says, "Sorry, see you later." I mean, so if you're listening to this, we all know that litigation, if voidable which it is for 85 or 90% of the cases avoid it, that must've been so traumatic that process. Sonia Q: And I think the other piece is, speaking of the emotional piece, if you want to punish your spouse, you for sure need to get in touch with a mental health professional because using the court system to punish your spouse is the biggest mistake that you can make for your family, for your finances and for your children. And so, I'm going to say it again, if you're thinking that way now is the time to start doing your homework on a mental health professional that you can afford that you enjoy talking to because you need to talk yourself out of that. Catherine Shanahan: That's great a great point. That's another way of doing that. Karen Chellew: It's a great way to punish yourself. Sonia Q: Exactly, and at the end of the day, what Casey was saying is that if you're going to do that through the court system, you're setting the stage for an adversarial hostile co-parenting relationship, which by the way is for life, so good luck. It is absolutely unnecessary. And I can very much understand those moments of absolute rage because your spouse is pushing the right buttons because you've been married, they know which buttons to push, to get the best reaction out of you. I understand, take a breath, whatever you need to do, but do not use the court system to punish the other spouse. Karen Chellew: Right. Casey Shevin: The other thing to think about with courts is judges are there to protect people when they need to be protected. So if there's abuse in your marriage, whether it's financial abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, that's a great case to take to litigation because the court will see through that bullshit, and they will do what they have to do to protect you and your family. But that being said, because the court is really designed for those cases. And really those are the pieces that the judge and their staff want to focus on. If you're arguing over accounts and who gets this account and who gets that account and who gets this vacation house and who gets that vacation house and who gets this collection of collectibles versus that collection of collectibles. The judge's not super excited about your case and being the ones who decide what they think to rational people with the help of attorneys should be able to decide on their own. Casey Shevin: And so, we have seen that number of cases that get all the way up to the line where they have two or three assets or two or three maybe items or debt that they can't figure out, who's going to be responsible for. Who's going to take. And there's like maybe a difference of some amount of money between what this side will accept and what that side will accept. We have seen a number of times where the judges called their attorneys back into their back room, and they're like, "Look, this is probably what I'm going to decide. So you need to just go out there and save the court's time and tell your clients that because you don't want to have a three-day trial on this. And when we could be helping families that like really need our help." Casey Shevin: That's very disheartening as an attorney too, is like, you've been fighting for your client for however many months or years. They've paid you thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars for their day in court. And then the judge is like, "Yeah, I'm just going to save you guys a lot of time and tell you that this is what's probably going to happen. So go settle this." And then hour later, your attorneys have hand written a settlement and sent it back to the judge to approve. Sonia Q: [crosstalk 00:43:36] That's a whole other podcast that I love, but let's go on to the other way, even getting divorced because that's a great topic, I could go on a whole day [crosstalk 00:43:50] Casey Shevin: That litigation is to be avoided if you can. And the next way to get divorced is, you both hire attorneys or financial advisors and whomever else you want, but you tell these professionals, we want to settle out of court and you let them do the heavy lifting on going back and forth and trading proposals, but really like their job is to settle it out of court. The third way is mediation, and usually that's the two of you, you and your spouse, and a neutral third party in a room that person might be an attorney, they might be a mental health professional, they might have a financial background, but their job is not to decide what's going to happen there. They're helping the two of you reach a decision by providing information along the way and helping you guys reach, a compromise. Casey Shevin: And then the fourth way is like a do it yourself process. And there's a few different ways to do a do it yourself process, but there are some companies that are now offering online divorces, where they have the forms available, you and your spouse just really fill in what you want the court to do. That's becoming more popular. And it's understandable why like the cost is a lot lower, the timeframe can be much shorter. And it's empowering to do something on your own. That being said, there's a very narrow window of families where they get the outcome that feels fair at the end of that process. And part of that is like divorce is really complex. It's a complex legal problem, it's a complex financial problem, it's a complex emotional problem. The idea that you could do it all on your own, probably not fair to most people. Casey Shevin: So what we say is that's like a good fit for divorces where the conflict is very low, there aren't any children, you haven't been married that long, and you really don't have that much to divide between you. Sometimes attorneys call those divorces like a walk away. You're both just walk away what's within your name, you split down the middle of whatever's in your joint names. And there are young couples that are totally willing to do that. And if you're one of those, then do it yourself process might be right for you. Otherwise, you probably are going to need some help. Karen Chellew: Yeah. Catherine Shanahan: So in any of these processes, Divorceify I can help direct the client to the right process and the right professional, correct? Casey Shevin: Exactly. Sonia Q: And what Divorceify also does is it also highlights the pros and cons to each process because there's also the collaborative process. And there's been a big collaborative movement. And the reality is that many clients do not know that in the collaborative movement, there are several professionals that sit down at a table for a certain set of sessions to get you to a settlement. However, you do sign a contract in the beginning that if you do not settle the case, or both parties come to an agreement you're starting again, so- Karen Chellew: New professionals. Sonia Q: Correct. So in order to pick the right process you also need to understand what does this process entail? What makes sense, what doesn't. And what the pros and cons to each are. And so Divorceify does that in our DivorceGPS, you will not just get the recommendation, but you will also understand the other ways to get divorced and the pros and cons to each. Because there's a little FYI. So you might think, oh, things are bad right now. We just have to litigate. We can't communicate, I don't trust him or her et cetera. And you think, all right, this is the only way, well, next week when the temperature's been turned down a little bit, you never know, and perhaps then the lines of communication open. So wait a second. Suddenly mediation can be on the table. There's other options. So things can change, but you need know what each decision entails. Karen Chellew: Yeah. I liked my little tour through Divorceify, I did the test tour. And I really appreciated the fact that it did a great job of explaining the different types of how you can approach the divorce process, but specific to whatever scenario, I set my situation out to be, it told me the pros and cons of because you have this, or you have these assets, you're going to need this. And because of this, you're a candidate for this, but you could consider this, but it may or may not work for you. And I found that to be very helpful and I can see how that could be extremely helpful for someone to have all of these considerations as it relates to their divorce journey. It was good. Casey Shevin: Yeah. And, I think that there's ways to overdo it, like to go to litigation when you don't really need litigation, but there's also ways to under do it. So doing a DIY divorce and then getting your settlements approved by the court and then finding out years later that you could have been entitled to more money. That's one of the ways people really underdo it. Another way is like I just want this to be over. I just want this to be better for my kids. I'll do whatever it takes to get to the finish line because I'm so stressed out by this. So I'll do mediation because that's what my spouse wants to do. So I'm just going to do it. And then you get in the mediation room and your spouse's like steamrolling you. And you're like, well whatever, like, it's fine. Casey Shevin: Sonia is somebody who has said, like I left money on the table and I walked away and that was the right choice for her. But it was a totally informed decision that she made. And I think the key is just make sure you're confident in the process that you're using. Make sure you're confident that you're getting all the information that you understand, the decisions being reached. And that you feel confident, you understand how it will affect your financial future, because you can do mediation, you can reach agreements on almost everything and then have some things that you don't agree to, that you then take to attorneys to resolve. You can do a hybrid model between different processes, you don't have to just choose one and stick with it. Casey Shevin: And it's really important if you feel like you're in the middle of mediation or in the middle of litigation or trying to do DIY and you're muddling through, and you're just not confident. Like you can go back to us, use our predictive technology and get a new recommendation, or just look back at the options that we recommended in the beginning. And think maybe I could default to a different process and end it in a better way. Karen Chellew: I so agree. And I do not want to close out this podcast without addressing the concierge service, which I believe is kind of the glue that holds your divorce together, going through the Divorceify process. So Sonia, do you want to talk a little bit about that as we close out you? Sonia Q: So I think that people going through divorce, you need somebody in your corner. You need somebody to be able to meet you wherever you are in the process, whatever that day holds for you. There were days I couldn't get up and shower and that was all right, just let yourself be. So in order to really help people wherever they are in the process or in the beginning stages, we have a concierge service. What do we do? Well, it depends on what you need. So it's very easy, you get to talk right now, the concierge service is myself and Casey. You get to talk to one of us, you get to tell us, or you get referred by your team of professionals that feel that you need a little extra, either hand-holding support orientation, strategy sessions. Sonia Q: So what we really do is you would come in, you would talk to Casey or myself for 30 minutes. We would get an idea of what your situation is, what you need. And then we put the steps in place to get you there. Whether it means more education, whether it's helping to get prepared, whether it's starting to have conversations that you need to have with professionals, let's say a parenting coordinator, and you're thinking, I don't even know where to start with the parenting plan we'll help you. If you need to be connected to the right professionals, we'll help you. If you need a venting session, because things are heavy and you have nowhere else to turn, we're listening. So whatever that person needs, we help them get there. And we give homework. Not tough homework, we're not bringing you back to school. Catherine Shanahan: I just wanted to say you lost me at homework. Sonia Q: I know. Listen we all need a little bit of homework [inaudible 00:52:36] therapist on the phone. That's what it is, a little bit of possibility that you can really count on. And Casey and I offer a level of experience that not many other services provide, because we've been there. We're attorneys, we get it, we've seen it, I had felt it. So our goal is to really get that person through the concierge service to their next step. In the easiest, most efficient way possible for them. Karen Chellew: I love it. Casey Shevin: Our partnership with My Divorce Solution, the way that that kind of works is you might be a client of My Divorce Solution already. And then you get your Financial Portrait and your to do's and it's like, oh great, now I know where I'm at, but I have all these to do's to do. And now I have to figure out how I'm going to get divorced and who I'm going to hire to help me with that. That's a point at which you might be referred to our service by Karen and Catherine, and we can help pick up where they left off. Another way that you might find our partnership working together is you might through a process. Do DivorceGPS, get our predictions, and then get an email from us where we are kind of nudging you to go get a Financial Portrait done, because we think that that's a really important step in the preparation process. Casey Shevin: And so you might start with MDS and come to us, or you might start with us and then go to be referred to MDS and just know that like we are working in partnership with them to really get clients prepared as best they can. And then our concierge service can really layer on top of the Financial Portrait to really help you get in the right hands to take you to the finish line. So hiring the right help whether it's a therapist, a parenting expert, a attorney, a mediator, or whatever you decide is the process that you want to be using. And we can help you make that decision as well, we'll help you get the right help to get you to the finish line. Casey Shevin: And when you're hiring an attorney, it's not just where they went to school, how many years they've been in practice and how much they cost that matters. It's also, are you comfortable talking to this person? Do you feel like they understand your goals? Are they really going to support your process the best you can? So we think about personality fit as well, not just like the credentials on paper, and that's a way that we can be helpful is help you really think through holistically, who do you need to be working with? So at that point, we've got our concierge can really be helpful. Sonia Q: I just wish I go through my divorce again, to have a concierge service. Karen Chellew: I know. [inaudible 00:55:16] Go ahead Sonia Q: Really quickly for anyone listening, because I don't know if we've made this clear. To use the divorce certified DivorceGPS it is free. Karen Chellew: Totally free. Sonia Q: Absolutely free. You can come back like Casey was talking about. If things have changed in your process or things have changed in general. You can come back and do another one and it's still free, 15 more and they're all free. Everything always has strings attached. There are no strings attached here. So just come in and just walk away with something that is completely free and gives you a starting point that you can trust. Catherine Shanahan: Yeah. So if you're hearing anything and you're sitting at home and you feel like you have no place to go and no one to talk to, you don't have to make the decision to get divorced today. You don't have to decide what's going to happen for your rest of your life, but you can go on to Divorceify's website and get a free GPS or some options and that are available to you. So don't sit there and be sad because that really makes me sad, do something for yourself. And if it's just getting information, then good for you get that information that you need. Karen Chellew: Absolutely. And so on that note, while we could continue talking for hours, I'm sure. This concludes this episode of the four early mistakes and how to avoid them in the divorce process. Thank you Sonia and Casey for a great conversation, and we look forward to the next one. Casey Shevin: Thank you. And for your listeners, thank you for joining and we wish you the best next chapter possible. Sonia Q: That's right.  

  Intentions! We all have them. Sometimes we keep them and sometimes we don’t. I have come to realize success in keeping intentions somewhat depends on how you define the word – “intention.” Intentions From the Dictionary A peek in a good dictionary reveals the flavor of the word “intentions.” It mentions things like: purpose or attitude toward what you are setting out to do. a mental determination on some direction. the end intended. Generically, those meanings help define “intentions.” I decided to check out the word “intend” for added meaning and found interesting ideas (dictionary.com): have a purpose or Read More ... For more resources and tools that inspire and equip you to live well using God's Word in practical ways each day, visit the Alive and Active Life website.

We hear the term college interchanged with university fairly regularly, but are they the same thing? Or are they, in fact, quite different? Generically, most people would say that they’re the same, and they’d be right, but there are a number of differences, some quite pronounced and others quite subtle, that are worth a bit of exploration. We dive into the origins and the meaning of both in this episode, and also take a moment to brush-up on our liberal arts!

On this episode the guys talk Spider Bots for sale, Trevor Noah hosting the Grammys, a new Predator film, Black Panther 2 predictions, and much more. Enjoy.

We hear the term college interchanged with university fairly regularly, but are they the same thing? Or are they, in fact, quite different? Generically, most people would say that they’re the same, and they’d be right, but there are a number of differences, some quite pronounced and others quite subtle, that are worth a bit of exploration. We dive into the origins and the meaning of both in this episode, and also take a moment to brush-up on our liberal arts!

A very sleepy D.C. Lundberg updates the stats of the players on the M's roster, and also talks about how Taijuan Walker & Daniel Vogelbach have fared in Toronto thus far. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A very sleepy D.C. Lundberg updates the stats of the players on the M's roster, and also talks about how Taijuan Walker & Daniel Vogelbach have fared in Toronto thus far. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

D.C. talks about Monday & Tuesday's Spring Training games, a few roster moves, and some injury news. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

D.C. talks about Monday & Tuesday's Spring Training games, a few roster moves, and some injury news. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Knowing your numbers & having a solid strategy to manage your trade marketing will level the playing field & give you a sustainable competitive advantage. It begins with customer first strategies that align your brands values with shoppers through story. This episode's FREE downloadable guide Trade marketing includes everything required to promote your brand. It's your growth engine and the largest item on your P&L. Most trade spending is wasted. Every brand seeks to maximize their promotional ROI. There is a better way to grow sales & profits. CLICK HERE TO GAIN INSTANT ACCESS TO MY TRADE MARKETING ESSENTIALS COURSE Welcome, there's a hard way and an easy way to do just about anything. There's a right way and there's a wrong way to run your business. Today's story is about a brand that leverages the strategies that they learned in big CPG to help them reduce their spending and help them compete at the highest levels. Knowledge truly is power, especially in this industry where everything is negotiable. This is where knowing how to go beyond a canned top line report and being able to help understand what the insights are telling you, let alone finding the insights, especially in the natural channel where they're so difficult to come by. This is why this topic is so critically important and this is something that every brand needs to be proficient at. This can literally determine how long your brand will be around, a week, a month, a decade, or longer. My point is this, the more you know about the nuts and bolts of your business, what kind of promotions actually drive sales, and what kind of promotions are just a waste of time and money? Knowing this and knowing how to work with a retailer to help drive sustainable sales for that retailer by leveraging the strength of your brand, that's what every retailer wants. They want to know that if they put your product on their shelves, they want to know that you're going to help them increase shopper traffic, give them a reasonable profit in the category, and help them compete more effectively in their market. As a result, some retailers, savvy retailers might even give you insights into things that other brands would have to pay a lot of money for. For example, what's in their customer's shopping basket at the end of the trip? You're going to hear a strategy today about how a brand leverages their relationship with retailers and how they leverage their understanding of their promotional spending and their merchandising and all the key things that you need to be paying attention to work with retailers. As a result, and because of their understanding of their business and their category, retailers look to them for expertise that other brands aren't providing to them. The point is this, the more you can help your retail partners the more they're going to want to bend over backward to help support your brand, to give you incremental opportunities that they charge other brands. That's what today's story is about. Why does this matter? If you think about your trade spending, your trade spending is everything that it's required to get your product in the hands of a shopper. Generically speaking, 25% of most companies gross sales is directed to their trade spending, and yet 70% to 90% of your trade spending's wasted. This is why this is so critically important. You need to be able to leverage the strategies that we talk about on today's podcast to help grow your brand, especially in natural where the resources, the insights aren't as available as they are in mainstream. More about that and these strategies in a minute. Download the show notes here: brandsecretsandstrategies.com/session151

Welcome back to another installment of Black Nerd Planet. This time around Marlon and Jordan get to talking about celebrity look-alikes, being part-time delivery boys, and some upcoming series to look out for. Support for the podcast at Patreon You can get early access and input topics for the show. (:45) Intro (2:25) Celeb Look-alikes (6:50) GrubHub/DoorDash (11:00) Jordan's McDonalds Binge lol (16:30) Disney Plus (19:00)New Marvel Shows (24:00) Detective Pikachu (28:00) Star Wars IX (32:40) MK11 (44:00) Space Jam 2 (50:00) PSN name changes Follow Black Nerd Planet On Twitter Apperition_ Twitter Theme song by: O.D. Soundcloud Instagram

"For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." (Isaiah 9:6) Wonderful Counselor This morning we begin looking at the most familiar passage of names for Jesus in the Old Testament prophets. We begin with "Wonderful Counselor". What is a "Counselor"? And what does it mean for Jesus to be a "Wonderful Counselor"? Let's first look at the word "Counselor". It seems to be a simple enough word. Generically, it's someone who gives advice. In ancient times, however, it was also a title for the ruler of the land. After all, the king or queen was the highest authority in the land so everyone sought their advice. Now, let's see the word "Wonderful". It truly means "full of wonder" in the Hebrew. It's an extraordinary, hard to be understood item. Isaiah's not calling Jesus hard to understand. On the contrary, grasping just how much He understands about life and the Law and God fills people with wonder. It's all over the Bible--especially in His enemies. They're filled with awe and wonder over all the things He knows without their strict instruction. He was a simple man who had profound ideas. This combination of words brings about the ideal of such a ruler who inspired awe and wonder in their subjects over their knowledge. Solomon is touted to be the smartest man to ever live. Isaiah here is prophesying about a ruler coming that's EVEN SMARTER than Solomon. Not a man endowed with God-given wisdom, but the God Himself who bestows that wisdom on those who have faith in Him as their Savior from sins. This is the Jesus who is ruling the hearts and minds of His followers. This is the Jesus who we can only sit and stare in awe and wonder over all the things He has done for us through His birth, life and death. Spend a moment to think on these things. Amen.

In this episode:In episode 81, we talk about Mel’s logic problems in her submitted pages. Logic problems on a first draft are common, and easier to catch when you have someone else reading through your pages who can say, “Wait….what?” A lot of logic problems can be solved by simply putting more on the page – MORE thoughts, MORE feelings, MORE internal goings-on in your character’s mind and motivations. Once again, it’s the WHY that gets us.Jennie uses the example of Tom Cruise movies—everything is very clear, very well-explained, very black and white. We’re never left in the dark, we know the stakes, and that’s why it’s so suspenseful. We have to know why, or we’re not going to care. Generically “bad things” aren’t enough. Big drama isn’t powerful unless there’s big meaning behind it as well. Give the reader MORE MEANING.Jennie also brings up the big issue of Mel dancing around the sexual tension in her scenes – dancing around it isn’t working! She totally admits to chickening out, which is a common problem of the chronically awkward among us. Jennie assures her this is totally fixable, however – Mel needs to get the emotion and meaning on the page. She also admits that growing up in a very conservative culture has probably stunted her ability to express any sort of sexuality in her writing. Writing is about being vulnerable, however – the author has to be vulnerable in their work, and vulnerability in your characters helps us relate to them as we watch them change and grow. Give the reader MORE EMOTION.“You can’t be a writer and write well without confronting the scariest things in your own self. People think it’s hard because you have to sit down and put words on the page – it’s hard because if you do it well you’re going to have to go to the places you don’t want to go.” - Jennie Nash

You’re taught to use out-dated strategies every brand uses to sell your unique disruptive brand. Your sales strategies should be as innovative as you are. Knowing your brand health& leveraging it at retail is the best strategy for sustainable growth. This episode's FREE downloadable guide New product innovation is the lifeblood of every brand. New products fuel sustainable growth, attracts new shoppers, and increases brand awareness. Know the critical steps to get your product on more retailer’s shelves and into the hands of more shoppers. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE STRATEGIC GUIDE: The Essential New Item Checklist - The Recipe For Success I appreciate you for listening to these shows.  This podcast is about you, and it's for you. The goal here is to help you get your products on more retailer shelves and into the hands of more shoppers. Remember, at the end every podcast, there's one free downloadable guide. I always try to include one easy to download, quick to digest strategy that you can instantly adopt and make your own, one that you can use to grow sustainable sales and compete more effectively. If you like the podcast, subscribe, share it with a friend, and please leave a review. To sell more and grow beyond other brands in your category, you need to use strategies they overlook. You've put your passion, your money, and energy into building your brand, and you should have access to affordable tools and strategies that actually work. Traditional retail is expensive, with brands using what I call push strategy where your checkbook is the most valuable resource in your arsenal. The old pay-to-play push strategies will not differentiate you on a shelf. They will not give you a significant sustainable competitive advantage. Generically speaking, retailers don't make anything. They sell other people's stuff. What they sell is real estate in the form the space that your product takes up on their shelf. The Achilles heel of big brands is that they are complacent in their go-to-market strategy. This is a huge opportunity for small brands to leverage these strategies to provide retailers with what they really want. Retailers want three things. More shoppers in their store, a competitive advantage in their market, and a reasonable profit. Brands that help retailers achieve these objects will gain a significant and sustainable competitive advantage. Savvy retailers reward those brands with preferential merchandising, incremental promotions and reduced fees, the fees they charge other brands. I know this because I became a trusted and respected resource to these retailers, and these are just some of the results I achieved. Why does this matter?   Download the show notes:  brandsecretsandstrategies.com/session107

Ever think about how many times you ask for a generic item by its brand name? Well we did and here is the list.

Meet Elizabeth Gomez a 41 year writer, teacher, story teller and comedian. Listen along as we discuss our affinity for white boys, buying her first pair of gym shoes at 28 and how she turned questions about her ethnicity into a drinking game.

ControlTalk NOW for the week ending September 6th, 2015 features Siemens’ Come Fly With Us RDY2000 Commercial Thermostat Promotion. Already dubbed the ReadyStat 2000, it launches with an exceptionally rewarding marketing promo. Tridium’s Niagara 4 is available, NOW — and so is DGLogik’s DGLux5 IoT Platform for Niagara 4. Automated Buildings’ Ken Sinclair September edition throws a “delay of game penalty flag” on the HVAC Industry’s historical slow rate of meaningful change. And, Fred Gordy’s depiction of supervisory controllers — exposed on Shodan’s website, provides more stark visualization of fixable cyber security exposure. Niagara 4 is Here! Next-generation IoT Framework Now Available! Niagara 4 builds on the legacy of the Niagara Framework® in many new and ground-breaking ways, and is designed to help businesses take full advantage of the Internet of Things. Some of the most exciting advancements include: Modern user interface and design language (HTML5); Powerful and easy-to-use security features’ and Seamless conversion from Niagara AX. ControlTalk NOW welcomes SK Foo. EasyIO’s strong technical support is anchored by SK Foo, who was exceptionally busy the past two weeks with nonstop visits to Twinco in NYC, NY and the new Belimo Air Controls factory in Danbury, CT; then to Pittsburgh, PA and Seattle, WA, to conduct EasyIO refresher training; and then finally, off to Sydney, Australia, where he will conduct EasyIO certification training. Listen in as EasyIO’s SK Foo gives us a preview of the feature-rich FG-32+; the new developments with Belimo MP Bus Gateway, which be featured at the EasyIO Global Partner Conference scheduled foe September 20-22 in Paris, France. Automated Buildings September Theme: Change Evolves from the Possible — 17th Education Sessions at AHR EXPO 2016 in Orlando. Ken Sinclair, owner and editor of Automated Buildings, has chronicled the slow rate of change within in our industry, citing in particular, the compelling need to change the vendor-centric unconnected world of traditional marketing of our products and services. Join Ken and a host of industry experts at the 17th Educational Sessions being held at the AHR EXPO 2016, Orlando, FL. Gateways Aren’t Supervisory Controllers But They Offer A “Greatway” Into Your Site. If you haven’t looked at Shodan maps maybe you should. It shows a stark visualization of just how exposed we are. The above image shows all of the Lantronix devices that exposed. In the US alone there are 7,024 as of this morning (9/3/2015). Generically speaking gateways convert one protocol to another. Typically in the BAS world gateways convert serial communication such as RS232 and RS485 to IP. More specifically BACnet serial to IP and Modbus serial to IP (Lantronix gateways are just one of several gateway manufacturers). DGLux5 for Niagara 4 is Available for Download — NOW! Niagara 4 has officially been released and our innovative technology is alongside Tridium’s latest and greatest. Yes, DGLux5 for Niagara 4 is available for download! IoT Application Platform, DGLux5 is the finest compliment to Niagara 4, providing an enhanced user experience for all your data visualization needs. DGLux5 is an award-winning, fully HTML5 drag and drop development platform that allows users to rapidly create stunning, data-driven applications. The Best Product Promotion of 2015? The Siemens RDY 2000 Thermostat! Siemens introduces the RDY 2000, one of the most powerful and flexible thermostats money can buy, and one of the coolest promotions we have seen. This Siemens promotion won’t last forever so get on board now! “Come Fly With US!” Siemens, CGNA and Control Trends have joined forces to promote the new Siemens RDY2000 Thermostat. It is a gift card promotion along with a contest for the best contractor RDY2000 installation/application video from your phone. The Grand Prize Winner for the best video will receive a $750 travel voucher. The post ControlTalk Now Smart Buildings Video Cast for September 6, 2015 appeared first on ControlTrends.

A monthly audio round-up detailing the contents of the latest issue of DTB.Articles:Generically speaking DTB 2009; 47: 109Does BNP testing aid diagnosis of heart failure? DTB 2009; 47: 110 - 113Imiquimod for superficial and in situ skin malignancy DTB 2009; 47: 113 - 116Anticoagulation with dabigatran or rivaroxaban DTB 2009; 47: 116 - 120

This thesis is concerned with two approaches on the singularity problem of the general theory of relativity. The first is of bottom-up nature. We start from Einstein's well established general relativity and make an educated guess for an asymptotically equivalent but non-singular theory. In the second approach we take the top-down perspective starting with the assumption that string theory gives the fundamental description of nature and analyse the resulting low energy effective theory. Our bottom-up approach is an application of the limiting curvature hypothesis to anisotropic cosmologies. This extends the success for isotropic cosmologies of Brandenberger et al. Applying the LCH, they constructed a theory in which all homogeneous and isotropic solutions are singularity free. Due to the non-analytic nature of the equations we were unable repeat the proof in the anisotropic case, but analytical and numerical analysis produce circumstantial evidence for a resolution of the singularity in this case as well. Generically this resolution seems not to involve a de Sitter phase as expected. Instead it would interpolate between a contracting anisotropic universe and a universe, that time-symmetrically expands anisotropically. During this transition spacetime evolves through a nearly flat, Minkowski phase. This solution could represent an alternative to the so-called bounce solutions as they appear in pre-big-bang scenarios. In our top-down approach we construct a simple model in type IIA super string theory. With a non-BPS D7 or D9 brane we introduce a tachyonic degree of freedom. Its potential is influenced by the compact background wrapped by the brane. In a way the mass can be tuned by the size of the compact dimension. We use a truncated action which was constructed in order to approximate the full string theory result for the dynamical creation and decay of non-BPS branes quite accurately. Taking the lowest order effective action for metric, dilaton and an effective action for the open tachyonic mode, we obtaine bounce solutions. The bounce results from the positivity of the pressure of the tachyon field in our Lagrangian. Both curvature and time derivative of the dilaton remain small during our bounce so that the gravitational sector behaves entirely classical. Asymptotically our bounce solutions are similar to pre-big bang and post-big bang solutions respectively. Thus there remain singularities in the curvature and the dilaton before or after the bounce. These asymptotic string frame curvature singularities can be resolved by the ad hoc addition of a potential term, that might result from alpha' corrections in the open string sector. Exact calculation of the corrections would be necessary in order to give a more precise picture.