Podcasts about Nowadays

Should you get your DNP? Nowadays, many NP’s are graduating with a doctoral program, but many others are wondering whether to take the DNP route or pursue their MSN.    Today I’m speaking with Dr. Veronica Sampayo on the differences, how the DNP can be leveraged to stand out to employers, and how her practice is different because she has her DNP.   Be sure to stay until the end to hear all of Veronica’s great advice for DNP graduates!   Read today’s show notes for more info and links from today’s episode: https://www.theresumerx.com/041

Italian Wine Podcast episode 530 Monty Waldin has a chat with the first Master of Wine of Italy Gabriele Gorelli MW. Gabriele Gorelli was born in Montalcino in 1984. His grandfather used to be the smallest Brunello di Montalcino producer, accounting for a mere 0,46ha’s. That’s where he developed a real passion for wine. After completing his studies in Languages in 2004 he co-founded a wine-oriented advertising agency, Brookshaw&Gorelli. Over the years, he has had the opportunity to consult for many Italian wineries and Consortiums. In 2015, Gabriele started his studies at the ‘Institute of Masters of Wine’. He is now the sole Italian Master of Wine. During the same year, he co-founded KH Wines S.r.l., a company that helps European wineries in export markets. Nowadays, KH Wines holds a significant number of custom-made products designed from scratch, from the sensory profile end of the spectrum, to packaging, to storytelling. Since 2019, he has been the ambassador for Italy at the ‘International Wine Challenge’ in London. Let's keep in touch! Follow us on our social media channels: Instagram @italianwinepodcast Facebook @ItalianWinePodcast Twitter @itawinepodast Tiktok @MammaJumboShrimp LinkedIn @ItalianWinePodcast If you feel like helping us, donate here www.italianwinepodcast.com/donate-to-show/ Until next time, Cin Cin!

The COVID-19 pandemic produced what might be the largest workforce disruption since the Great Depression; its effects on the global economy are devastating. Unemployment in some areas hit 30%, which turns the economic crisis into a human resources crisis. Our guest, Christy Pambianchi, Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer of Verizon, explains how her company has transformed recruitment, hiring, and retention, given the chaotic scenario. She describes the challenges of maintaining the company’s values and culture in a virtual environment. Pambianchi has more than 30 years of experience working as an HR professional. She has a bachelor’s degree in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University. Before Verizon, she worked for 10 years as HR Director at PepsiCo Inc. When the internet revolution arrived, her passion for communication and technology spurred her to join Corning Inc., optic fiber inventors. She worked her way up in the company, becoming Executive Vice President of the People and Digital department. Creating People + Work Connect while at Verizon is definitely among her career highlights. The idea came about as an answer to the HR crisis generated by the pandemic. The free, online employer-to-employer platform helps companies that need talent or are displacing workers to quickly identify and fill positions. The hiring process is also evolving, according to Pambianchi. Companies used to hire for job titles, looking for workers who fit into a specific role. Nowadays, it is more about skills and every worker’s attributes and interest in learning. She believes the skill economy will gain even more prevalence in the next decade. Plus, Pambianchi shares her thoughts on the best way to assist workers during the unstable times we are going through and the silver linings of the pandemic’s effect on companies.Some Questions Asked:What are the biggest challenges and surprises this pandemic has presented to companies?How did Verizon recruit for the summer 2021 virtual internship program?How does People + Work Connect help people who have lost their jobs because of COVID-19 get back to work? Are companies looking for previous experience with a specific role, or are they looking for the skills that can be applied to a variety of roles? How can companies help their employees, both full-time and contract, with navigating times of change and instability? The pandemic has hit women, working mothers in particular, especially hard. Can you tell me how Verizon is stepping up for women and what you believe is important to help women in the workforce thrive?In This Episode, You Will Learn:Verizon’s growth plan in technology and innovationFinding fulfillment in working for companies where you feel connected to the purposeWays to drive retention and tenureThe innovation happening in HRWhy the Verizon 2020 summer internship was recognized as one of the best virtual internship programsHow Nestlé filled 75 open roles quickly using People + Work Connect when business demand increased due to COVID-19 Links:Christy Pambianchi - LinkedInVerizonPeople + Work Connect See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Alex Pardo’s dream was to be the big CEO of a company, but as he started climbing that career ladder, he realized that he didn’t want to work 70-80 hours a week anymore. As he transitioned into real estate, he found himself making the same mistake by building a massive team that took an ever-increasing amount of time and energy to make it work.That’s when Alex became passionate about growing a business that supported his lifestyle. Determined to share the message with other entrepreneurs that were stuck in the grind, Alex’s started his Flip Empire podcast to help them see how they can have a life they love with real estate investing. And he did exactly the opposite of what the gurus tell you; he made more money with a smaller team.Pretty soon, Alex realized that he felt more excitement over helping other investors than he did cashing $20,000 checks, and that’s when he decided to form the exclusive Ascend mastermind. Nowadays, Alex starts his day at 9:30 and ends it around 3:30, and he gives himself plenty of time to work on personal development and hang out with his kids.If you’re serious about building your life around your business, connect with Alex on his podcast or through his website. With over 500 episodes, he’s been pouring his heart out with the good, the bad, the ugly, and the unbelievable successes of his real estate empire.What's Inside:—Why Gavin believes that the majority of what we do is grounded in mindset.—Starting with wholesaling baseball cards, Alex has loved the wholesaling business model for years.—Why Alex says, “A salary is a ticket to forego your dreams”.

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. Maybe you have dreamed about making deals with big companies, and getting renowned clients to do business with you. I know I’ve been there, and I also know that at first glance, those clients might seem unreachable. Let me assure you, they’re not.  Today we're going to talk about the 3 quickest ways to get in front of a decision-maker; those big clients that you would ideally love to work with.  The first one, and maybe the most obvious way to get a hold of them is to get referred. All you need to do is ask somebody that you know, somebody that has a connection with your ideal client, “Can you please introduce me to him, or her?”.  It is as simple as writing an email. They can say: “Gloria, please meet Stewart, he has worked with us on such and such project, he's really good at what he does, I'll leave you guys to connect.” that's all they need to write.  Nowadays, there is even an Introduction function on LinkedIn that you can use to get people to know you so, getting in contact with your ideal clients is easier than ever.  In this episode, I’m going to talk about this in detail and I’m also going to share with you another two quick ways to get in front of those decision-makers; they will guide you through this process so you can make sure you do everything that’s in your power to approach them in the best possible way, even when it seems like you are at a dead-end trying to reach them.  Listen to this episode to learn about the 3 Fastest Ways to Get Appointments, they have generated a lot of business opportunities for me, and I know you’ll find them just as useful as soon as you start using them.  To DOUBLE your lead-to-sale CONVERSION with the leads you already have, go to http://JohnBlakeAudio.com for his exclusive, free, no-fluff, audio training and companion PDF guide. Inside you’ll get word-for-word email follow-up templates, phone scripts, and more that you can put to use today.  

Sorry guys, this week was quite busy for me with meetings and presentations for my business.  We will be back next week with a new so but for today this is a re-air of the February 20th Podcast. Check out the website for the latest articles I found for you to read. Craig Welcome!   We lost a Radio Icon this week and he had a big impact on me, I have a short tribute to him but it was also another busy week on the technology front.  We are going to get into the differences between Backups, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity, often these get tossed around in discussions as one in the same - they are not. Then we will discuss Bitcoin and it metoric rise and why that happened.  Next we'll discuss Apple and Google and why Google is trying to play hardball but may end up getting burned.  Then we are headed to Space and NASA space travel and a discussion on Rocket Fuel for future missions to Mars and there is even more, so be sure to Listen in. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read: Breached water plant employees used the same TeamViewer password and no firewall As Prices Surge, Bitcoin Now Reportedly Consumes More Electricity Than Argentina, Netherlands, And UAE Google flags its iOS apps as “out of date” after two months of neglect White House hastens to address global chip shortage Report: NASA’s only realistic path for humans on Mars is nuclear propulsion A Windows Defender vulnerability lurked undetected for 12 years Hackers try to contaminate Florida town's water supply through a computer breach Barcode Scanner app on Google Play infects 10 million users with one update SolarWinds Attack Reinforces Importance of Principle of Least Privilege U.S. Unprepared for AI Competition with China, Commission Finds Brave Launching Privacy-Focused Brave Search Hackers are finding ways to hide inside Apple’s walled garden Apple changes 'subscribe' to 'follow' on Podcasts because people think subscribing means paying Russian government websites go dark after the U.S. vowed retaliation for SolarWinds hack Exchange servers first compromised by Chinese hackers hit with ransomware Google must face $5B lawsuit over tracking private internet use, judge rules Want to borrow that e-book from the library? Sorry, Amazon won’t let you. --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] I've got to say the big story of the week is this breached water plant and how it really affects all of us. Not just because our water could be poisoned by a hacker, but it gives us a bit of a lesson on what we should be doing and what we did. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. There are many things that we did over this lockdown. Things we did. In fact, the lockdown itself to try and help stop not just the spread of the virus, but remember it was a two-week lockdown just so that we did not overwhelm our hospitals. Who could disagree with that, right? We all stayed home for two weeks that make sure that we're flattening the curve, that we're not going to have a lot of. People in hospitals. Unfortunately, other people who couldn't make it into the hospitals needed it. That two-week locked down to flatten the curve has turned into what? Now, almost a year later we are still seeing these lockdowns.  These lockdowns have caused havoc. We've talked about many of them. Of course, you hear them all the time on the radio. Everything from suicides of our children. Through our parents dying in these homes and without the comfort of their family and without human touch for almost a year. It's just so, so, so sad to see. Now I'm not going to get into the political sides of this and what should we have done? What shouldn't have we'd had done? I've got my opinions on some of this. What I want to talk about is what we did with our jobs? What did we do with our businesses? I think we did some terrible things there, too. What I'm talking about is we need to stay home, but we have certain businesses that need to stay open. Now, frankly, every business needs to stay open. It's a business because it's fulfilling a need, right? It is so basic. It's hard to think that people don't understand this, but obviously, they don't. We shut down businesses. Businesses that will never, ever come back. People's lives destroyed. People whose entire savings, their entire retirement plan, everything was based on the business. That's where their money was. The people working there were counting on having that money to pay the rent, to pay the electric bills and other utilities. To pay for all of the things in life that we need to pay. It's one thing to have credit card bills that you can't pay because they're not a whole lot they can do about unsecured debt. They can certainly harass you.  When it comes to things like your home or whatever it is, you're renting, whether you own it or not, how can you make those payments if you don't have money coming in.  The money that the government is issued has just been a mere pittance. I get it. In some cases, people had just incredible amounts of money compared to what they were normally making with unemployment, with the federal subsidies, et cetera. That didn't last. PPP money, this payroll protection money, lasted for about six weeks for those businesses that could get it. Those that qualified. My business didn't qualify for PPP money.  Not because it's too big, but because it's too small. Most of what happens in my business are done by my family members. I've got myself, I've got my wife, of course, you've probably seen Karen mentioned in some of my emails that go out. I've got my eldest son involved. He loves security. He's great at it. He's been working with me now for more than 10- 15 years on this. I've got one of my daughters working with this on me. So it's primarily a family business. We've got contractors who will do different things for us. We have a lot of suppliers and we have to pay those bills, but no payroll per se. You know what? That's a lot of businesses. The number of businesses that were in the same boat as I is huge. That's how things get started in this country.  All of these companies could have started. The companies that had started had entered into lease agreements. That had started to provide services for their customers. Whether it be B2B like mine, business to business, or business to consumer they were all stifled. What have we done to ourselves? Really? What have we done? The virus itself is obviously pretty nasty and can be lethal in a lot of cases. It has been.  Now we found out that people like governor Cuomo apparently just cooked the books. Cooked the books, something awful. We went home, we started working from home. Our businesses said, what can we do?  We had people getting very, very busy trying to figure it out. There are a lot of little remote programs that you can use in one of those is Team Viewer. Now there's nothing particularly wrong with Team Viewer. I'm not fond of the idea of things like Team Viewer, remote desktop, and others, but sometimes it is the best solution for a particular problem.  Team viewer in this case was used by a small government agency. Think about what would have happened. You had to shut down, you still had to do work. What did you do as a business? You probably got something like Team Viewer, one of these logins, remote login programs. Maybe you set up a remote desktop so people could get in remotely. Maybe you set up a VPN because that's going to solve all of your problems. Which of course it causes almost as many as it solves, but most people don't realize this. That's the case here. We're talking about a small town, 15,000 people, called Oldsmar. I don't think it's because they're a small town. I think this problem happened because they did what most of us did. We were not ready for a shutdown. As businesses, we weren't ready for a shutdown. In fact, the year before they did the shutdown, they had this massive pandemic planning session about eight months before. They all agreed that a shutdown was the wrong thing to do in the case of a worldwide pandemic. They also redefined pandemic. I think maybe getting the angle I'm coming from here. Right. They decided no, we're not going to do that. They did not plan for pandemics. In fact, they didn't plan for a lockdown. Obviously, you don't. Well, I don't know, maybe you do plan for a pandemic. If you're coming up with a virus you're going to release it, but they were not planning for a pandemic. They were not planning for the lockdown and neither were businesses.  Most businesses, government agencies, and NGOs had no plans in place, even for disaster recovery or business continuity. You may or may not be aware of this, but there are different levels. You've got basic backups and you should be doing backups because hard disks fail. One of my customers' CEO thought that hard desks never fail. She was really upset when a disc crashed that we'd been warning her about because we keep an eye on things called smart stats on the disks.  We said you've got this disc it's going to fail. You probably need to fix things because you're not in a raid array. You've fallen out of that already. Things didn't just get worse. You have a backup. You hope that Mac going to work. If you get ransomware and I got to tell you, nowadays, the answer's no. There's two sides to ransomware, but we've talked about that before. I'm not going to get into it right now. You've got the backup mainly in case the disk fails, or you accidentally delete a whole bunch of files and you want to get them back. The next step that you have is disaster recovery. You have a disaster like there's a massive snowstorm that caused a water main to break in the roof. All of your computer equipment is covered with water and none of it will work anymore.  In a disaster recovery situation, you now take your backups and you get new machines and you load it all on, and hopefully, your backups are remote. They weren't damaged by the water. Unfortunately, most businesses, again, not thinking this through just hoping, crossing their fingers, that they're not going to be one of that 50% of businesses that is out of business because of a disaster. Actually is closer to 75%. It depends on whose numbers you're looking at. So they're hoping. No, no, I'm going to be part of your disaster. Disaster recovery. Is just think of that, of a snowstorm and the roof collapses of a fire and the computers have burned. Can you get your business back in business? Then there is business continuity. That's a whole other level of planning and business continuity is where you say, Hey, I need to make sure my business continues to conduct business. If you have a hundred, 200, 300 employees, You're much better off being able to let's say the computer room burns down as an example that or that roof caves in because of the snow and you've lost those computers. You're much better to be back in business in four hours or less. We've had business continuity solutions where we had equipment on site in a different part of the building.  If there was a problem in one part of the building, we could failover to the other part. Now this is an awfully big building and we had fiber links between them, but they could be back in business in less than 10 minutes. It's just that quick. That is business continuity, right? If you are a public company or you are a division of a public company by law, you cannot be out of business for more than four hours. Now, that's just public companies. By the way, those same rules are in place for doctor's offices, for hospitals, any medical personnel you have to be able to get at the patient's records within four hours. How many of us are ready for that?  Then along comes a shutdown, remote workers. We're going to get into this a little more detail. We're going to talk about these SCADA systems, supervisory control, and data acquisition. What does that mean? And why is this a problem for all of our infrastructure? How did this guy poison or at least try to a town of 15,000? You're listening to Craig Peterson. What happened to that town, a Florida city of about 15,000, Northwest of Tampa when hackers got into their water supply and hacked up the amount of lye by a factor of 100. Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here. This whole concept of having a backup versus some sort of disaster recovery plan versus business continuity is something most businesses really don't pay enough attention to. Now, we've got another problem which is really a business continuity problem. What do you do when your employees can't get into the business? When we've set up business continuity for businesses, in the past, what we've done is I mentioned earlier this data center where we duplicated part of it in another part of this massive building. If there was a problem with something, could just be some of the core switches go down or something, we could automatically failover and continue running within 10 minutes. That's one way to do it. But how about if the rest of the building went away? How about if your main servers okay, but the roof collapses or there's some sort of a fire? What happens if your employees can't come to work because there's a lockdown? There are so many reasons you need to have business continuity in place. We didn't have it right. Not we, as in me, but so many people, so many companies didn't have that. That's what happened in Oldsmar, Florida. They have a water plant. Of course, they have all of the normal things any city of 15,000 people would have. They had in their water treatment plant these devices that are called SCADA devices that are used to control valves. These valves are exactly what you think of a water plant. They're used to control the mixture of various chemicals to divert water around the plant.  The source of the water, the type of filter switched over to a new filter so that the older filter can be replaced. In many cases, the main filtration is just done through sand and it has to backwash every once in a while. This is all controlled by computer, nowadays. They were running a Windows seven machine. No, I know you're saying, well, I've got Windows seven I'm okay.  The problem is Windows seven is no longer supported by Microsoft unless you're paying them ungodly amounts of money. I'm talking about $50,000 a year per machine sort of money. It's just crazy amounts of money. Most companies don't have that, right? I don't know anybody outside the federal government that actually has that. There's probably some, but they will not release it to the general public. Sometimes they'll release a few little security patches because something was just so apparent that they had overlooked. But most of the time, no. Most of the time these security patches just aren't available for older versions of Windows. So they had a Windows machine that was controlling this network with all of these valves on it. They had that machine hooked up to something called Team Viewer. The idea behind Team Viewer is, Oh, this is really handy. I can put Team Viewer on our control machine. Then I can have my employees be at home and then use that control machine remotely over Team Viewer. That's what Team Viewer is designed for, isn't it? Well, as it turns out, they were using Team Viewer throughout the water district. That became a bit of a problem because they did not have proper firewalls to protect it. And they were all sharing the same password. The interesting advisory that came out about this particular problem from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, if you can believe it. This cybersecurity advisory for public water suppliers is talking about how water suppliers can guard against cyberattacks on water supplies. It goes through a lot of these basic things that I've talked about. They should listen to my show every once in a while, right? Or attended the briefings that I had put on for the FBI's InfraGard program. It would be pretty simple for them. The state of Florida came out with some guidelines, et cetera, after the fact. As did Massachusetts. They were running Windows seven. They were remotely accessing plant controls. The computer had no firewall installed. Well, that's what they're saying. In reality, Windows ships with a firewall installed, but that doesn't mean it's going to do any good. I talk a lot about that in some of my courses, but the computer was visible to the internet apparently. Okay. They all shared the same password. What do you want to bet it was a bad password and employees could remotely log into city systems using this Team Viewer application. It was really that simple. Now this actor's here apparently is more than one and they are unidentified. So we don't have a whole lot of information on it, but I did get a notice. It's called a pin, which is a notice from the FBI it's labeled green, which means I can share it with everybody. It's saying that they obtained unauthorized access to it. Now, here's the most important part. These cyber actors likely access the system by exploiting cybersecurity weaknesses, including poor password security and outdated Windows seven operating system to compromise the software used to remotely manage water treatment. The actor also likely uses the desktop sharing software Team Viewer to gain authorized access to the system. We've seen this, not only with Team Viewer, we have seen this with remote desktop and many other systems that people have been using to allow their workers to get in remotely. All of this because of the lockdown, people working at home. All of this should have been handled properly by having a business continuity plan in place. It's really that simple. Now the putting the plan together, isn't that simple, frankly, but we've got to think about what happens here. No. I also think about this particular hack and who did it. Well, it could have been the Russians, right? It could have been the Chinese or the North Koreans. We know Vietnam has gotten into the game lately. It could have been any of those guys. But do you know who the most likely people are to do this sort of thing? It's somebody who works for the company or in this case, very likely that it's a disgruntled employee. They all shared the same password. They use Team Viewer. I said, I'm not blaming Team Viewer here, but this is not good. This is really bad. This is not just something that could happen at a water plant where they're moving the amount of lye from a hundred parts per million to 11,000 parts per million. They're using it in drinking water to change the Alkalinity, the acidity of the water. I don't know, I don't know. We've got to do something about this.  I'm going to have some training on this, what you should be doing for remote workers. If you're interested, let me know I'm going to plan some, but I'm not going to do it until I hear from you to know it's worth my time to put it all together. Email me M E at Craig Peterson. Let me know that you'd like to know about remote workers or maybe this whole business continuity idea. Again, email me me@craigpeterson.com. Let me know. Hey, you'll find a whole lot of stuff. If you go to Craig peterson.com and it's all good information that you need. Make sure you sign up for my newsletter right there. Craig peterson.com Hey, we can't go without talking about Bitcoin. It has surged surged surged. It may go up, it may go down. I'm not somebody who advises on investments, but we're going to talk about what it is and why people are mining it. Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here. Well, we have a really big thing to talk about when it comes to Bitcoin, but first I have to take a minute and honor a man who has inspired me in broadcasting for decades. A man who has changed the whole face of radio. AM radio was pretty much dead. Then he started his national show. Of course, I'm talking about Rush Limbaugh. Whether you agree with him politically, and I think most of you guys probably do. We all have our differences, or not, he is a man that deserves great respect. He changed the face of American politics. He literally single-handedly saved AM radio. He created this whole concept of a nationally syndicated talk radio show, and it has helped to educate millions of people. I started listening to him back in the late eighties, quite a while ago. I was just amazed with him and the way he did it. One of the things that inspired me about it is he took callers, but they weren't the guest, he was the guest. They were asking him questions. That is so topsy turvy from how, even today, most radio shows are. People would call him up and they would ask him questions and he'd be able to answer them. He also asked them some questions, obviously, in order to figure things out, he also was not afraid to take opposing calls. He would look for those and he would put those at the top of the queue. He would take those callers that disagreed with him before he took callers that agreed with him, his ditto heads, as they like to call themselves. When I heard this week that he had passed, I knew it was coming, but it hit me hard. It hit me really hard. He's not that much older than me. Although I remain in really good health,  knock on wood here I am just flabbergasted. I don't have words for his passing. So it would not be right for me not to have mentioned a man who inspired me, who educated me, and played a role in my life, such that when he passed, I was just gobsmacked. It's absolutely a sad, sad time. I really wish my best, obviously to his wife. I guess Catherine is his fourth wife, so I'm guessing he didn't have the best home life out there. Things obviously didn't do well on that front. I think he's a little bold and brash and maybe that's part of it. But my memories of him being down in Cambridge, Mass. I was working as a contractor for about a year and a half at the Open Software Foundation.  I was working on the operating system and that was rewriting the TCPIP stack. If you know what that is, it's the basis of the internet today and the Open Software Foundation provided its code to pretty much everybody out there. That's how I can say with a high degree of confidence, the code I wrote is still in use today to help run the internet.  I was working down there as a contractor for about 18 months. I also put in the  i18n, the internationalization code into many of the Unix libraries and at lunchtime. I had a small radio with me and I would go out and walk around for lunchtime and listen to Rush Limbaugh while I was out walking around.  He had been quite the companion for me, gave me a lot of things to think about, disagree with him on, and agree with him on. Conversations were spurred with other people. I've come to realize, I mentioned this to my wife, as well, this week after he passed that as someone who's on radio, call us personalities or whatever you might want to call us. But as someone on the radio, this is a very personal medium. I've come to realize that  Rush taught me something. I realized it when he passed, I've never met the man. I have a photograph of him signed by him around here, somewhere. He taught me something else and that is, I never met the guy, yet I felt an attachment to him that I had never felt really to anybody else. Certainly, I've never felt that way about a movie actor that died. I've never felt that way about an author whose books I loved. I've missed some of them, some of these books where there a series of books and the author died. You could tell mid-book that the voice changed and it was being written at that point by someone else. I was just disappointed by that.  I didn't feel that sense of loss that I felt this week.  It helps me to realize. How important it is for me with you guys. Without you guys listening, we wouldn't have a radio station. Without you guys buying from the advertisers it couldn't afford to, pay for the electricity and all of the people that are involved. It's the listeners. Right. I have an obligation to you to present the information that you need in a way that you can understand and hopefully in a way that you can use it, right? What good is a show like this? If I'm giving you stuff that there's nothing you can do about it? You notice, I always try and do that, but that's the way Rush was too. Rush wouldn't just sit there and complain. Rush would talk about the facts, what's happening, where he thinks it should go, and what we should be doing. What we should be doing as a nation and what we should be doing as individuals.  To me, that was very inspirational.  Frankly, that's how I've patterned this show. I've had this radio show for over 20 years and I've patterned it that way, where I try and help.  If you've ever sent me an email you get a personal reply from me because I am here to help. And I felt that way about Rush. I've sent him emails. I'd never gotten responses, right? But you, I feel this attachment to these people. That's part of the beauty of these smaller radio stations, where there are people, we are local, we do care about you. These advertisers tend to be local as well. Certainly, local businesses advertise locally, and we really have an obligation to you, to every one of you. So I appreciate you. I really do.  I really do want to help.  I am beginning to understand some of the responsibilities that I have it isn't just to help you understand technology a little better to keep your machines clean, to stop your businesses from being stolen from, by hackers, or by Snowfall that might bring your building down. It is to help you as best I can, as often as I can. So that's why I do it. That's why I do these courses, the newsletters, everything else. Rest in peace, Rush. We're going to miss you. Visit online as well, Craig peterson.com, and sign up for my newsletter so I can help you a little more. Well, we really, are going to talk about Bitcoin in this segment. So stick around. I had to talk about Rush this last time around.  Bitcoin, the prices are surging. People are mining. What does that mean? And why are they using more electricity than the country of Argentina? Craig Peterson here. Bitcoin has been around for a while. I don't think anybody out there has not heard about Bitcoin. It is a power in and of itself. We don't know who actually came up with this whole concept. There's a concept behind Bitcoin called blockchain technology.  Blockchain technology is based on the concept of ledgers. Where you have ledgers, just like a bank ledger that keeps track of every transaction. There are hundreds of thousands. Just so many ledgers in the world.  In order to verify transactions, half of those ledger entries have to agree. So it's pretty basic on that level. What is Bitcoin itself, which sits on top of this blockchain technology? Well, if you want to look at it, simply take a look at prime numbers. Hopefully, you can name the first five prime numbers, right? What do we get? One, three, five, seven, 11. There you go those are the first five prime numbers and a prime number a number that is only divisible by itself and one, which is why one is a prime number. We use prime numbers a lot nowadays. Most of the encryption that you're using is based on prime numbers. If you go to a secure website, you're using something called SSL, which is the secure socket layer and that's what shows up in your browser, in that URL line as a little lock, if you see that lock that you have effectively a VPN, a virtual private network between your browser and that remote site. Guess what? You already have a VPN, right? Why use one of these VPNs that spies on you? That is encrypted data and it's very difficult to encrypt in between. How does it do that? It's using something known as public-key technology, the RSA algorithm. We're not going to go any further down that, but basically, it allows someone to have a public key and use that public key to encrypt a message. then you, the person who's receiving the message whose private key was used to do the encryption can decrypt it using their private key. So the public key side, and the private keys side, it allows the encryption from end to end. That's what the SSL is all about. Well, when we're talking about Bitcoin, we are talking about something that goes and uses some of the similar technology. What it's doing is using these prime numbers. That's what the RSA algorithm is using this encryption algorithm, using these very large, very complicated prime numbers because you get past 11 and let us see 12. That's not a prime, right? Uh, because it's divisible by. Two and six and three and four, and then let's see 13. Okay. That's a prime 14, no 15, no 16. No.  It gets more difficult. I remember way back when, writing a little program that just found prime numbers and it looked for prime numbers and the easiest way to do it was I would start, first of all, you take a number, divide it into. There's no reason to go any higher than that when you're trying to figure out if it's prime or not.  Then I would start looking at some of the base numbers to try and figure it out. Of course, real mathematicians were able to figure out better ways to find primes. Well, when we're talking about Bitcoin and some of these other cryptocurrencies, they are also using these very large prime numbers, just like you're being used for this public key encryption. They also have some other parameters around some of these prime numbers. To have a Bitcoin is to have this digital number that represents a unique prime number. If you want to mine, what you're doing is you are trying to find a prime number that no one has ever found before, just to oversimplify things a little bit. You find that prime number and Tada now you have a Bitcoin. Sounds easy enough, sounds quick enough. It is not easy and it is not quick. It's not just based on the prime number algorithm, but we're keeping this simple here. We have found millions now of these Bitcoins. I should look that up and find out exactly how many, but there are many Bitcoins. The whole algorithm, the whole system is set up to do some restrictions here, there's only a certain number of these Bitcoins that will ever be mined. It's estimated that something like 20% of the Bitcoins that were found has been lost because the encryption was used to keep the keys. People forgot it. You probably heard about this guy that has a quarter of a billion dollars in Bitcoin in this wallet.  He only gets eight tries before it auto destructs. He hasn't found them yet.  There's a quarter of a billion dollars that's unreachable, but that's what we're talking about here. Bitcoin mining. In this day and age, Bitcoin mining is so hard and it takes so much computing power that it is using a couple of things. First of all, the thing that bothers me the most is it's using up these GPU's these graphical processing units, because GPU, which we typically use for graphics processing is set up so that we have are hundreds, thousands of processes that can be happening on that card simultaneously, various small little tiny processes that can be set up to somewhat be optimized for Bitcoin mining or mining, any of these other cryptocurrencies. Then the people who really want to make money on mining these cryptocurrencies have machines that are special machines. They are designed specifically to mine, one type of coin, one of these crypto coins. We're talking about Bitcoin. There are machines that are designed to mine bitcoins, go to E-bay and look for Bitcoin miners. They used to have them on Amazon. I haven't checked in a while, but you'll find them in both places. At least you used to be able to, you can certainly still find the money bank.  You'll find some that are old, that are used and some brand new ones. Well, it is expensive to mine them. One of my sons and I, decided years ago to try and do a little mining. We probably should have tried harder but we gave up.  It was a, who knows what's going to happen with Bitcoin. There are so many cryptocurrencies and today there are people introducing new cryptocurrencies all of the time. I avoid those like the plague because you never know what's going to happen. Bitcoin is definitely the 800-pound gorilla out there. We were able to mine I guess my son said he mind a couple of other little currencies they're worth a penny or two, not a very big deal. We have now so many people in China that were doing Bitcoin mining China could not produce enough electricity to mine Bitcoins. China went around and shut down anybody that was mining Bitcoin. We have something called the Cambridge Bitcoin electricity consumption index. This is an index designed to figure out how much electricity is being used in order to mine Bitcoin. This is, of course, over in England, the University of Cambridge the judge business school. I'm looking at a graphic right now that they have, and this is showing the electricity and Bitcoin mining. They actually have all of the data for downloading, if you ever wanted to do some serious analysis.  It's showing there was hardly anything, if anything, back in 2016. Summer 2017, when it started to jump up and that's, of course, when the price of Bitcoin started to go up. Why? Well, mainly because of ransomware. People having to pay ransomware and buy Bitcoin in order to pay that ransom. In terawatts. Now we are showing at about, okay, this is Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 288 terawatts of electricity on that one day. Isn't that something? The amount of electricity that's being used has been surging because, of course, the price of Bitcoin has been going up. Just been going up in crazy, crazy rates. The amount of mining going on has doubled, almost doubled since October last year. We're talking about using more electricity than the entire country of Argentina, the Netherlands, and the United Arab Emirates. It is absolutely amazing, amazing how much we're using. People are alarmed by this. Countries are having major problems in trying to figure this out. What else is funny about it? They talk about Bitcoin being one of these so-called green technologies. Well, it turns out that Bitcoin because of the electricity that it's using for people to mine now has a carbon footprint comparable to the entire country of New Zealand. It's producing about 37 megatons of carbon dioxide per year. I think that's funny, frankly, because they call it green. Right? It's like green cars that are electric. Well, guess what? They aren't green in so many ways. They're cool as heck don't get me wrong, but don't think they're green because they're not. A lot of reasons for that.  I've talked about it many times in the past, on my radio show. If you go to my website, you can just look that up and you can find out why, and I've got hard numbers there, anything else? All right, everybody, make sure you visit me online. We have started some new stuff. If you are a frequent reader of my, now Sunday newsletter, which has my show notes. You are getting also one or two other newsletters during the week just short pieces of training. I'm trying to help you out, but if you're not opening that newsletter if you don't download the images. That's how I tell that you opened it, then you're not going to get all of the supplemental material, including some audio programming that you can't get anywhere else. So make sure you go to Craig peterson.com and sign up for the newsletter.  Open the silly thing. So you get all of this free training and more. Craig peterson.com. Apple has been really busy trying to make sure we know who's using our data and what they're using it for turns out Google's not too happy about that. You'll be surprised what they did this week. Hi everybody. Thanks for joining me. I've talked here about how Apple is really taking some major steps up in trying to defend our privacy. Apple does not make money off of our data. They don't sell it. They don't compile it and then sell it, Google, however, is trying to be the repository of all of our information. So much for the don't be evil thing. Right? Well, Apple's got these almost like nutritional labels. You remember when the CDC or it wasn't the CDC, it was some federal agency, I can't even remember forced food companies to put labels on the packaging, telling us about calories, fat, various other types of things. You could make a bit of an informed decision by looking at that. Obviously, there's other stuff that I don't know what this word means. I don't know what that is. What's red dye number two, all of those types of things, but at least it brings it to your mind. You can also see how many servings there are. It'll say this muffin is 500 servings and only a calorie a piece, right. The reality is that box is really meant to be two or three or four servings, including that Coke that you might be drinking. I am more of a Pepsi man, but I haven't drunk either in years now, frankly. Well, Apple is trying to do kind of the same thing. They've got millions of apps up at their app store. In the app store, of course, you can not only find the apps, but you can download them. You can buy them depending on what the app is. Most of these apps that are free, are really not free right? We've talked about that before. I don't know that we need to get into a lot of detail, but it goes back to that saying of if it's free, then your, probably the product. That's been very true.  Apple and Google both have caught a lot of companies. Who's been trying to steal our information successfully in some cases. Obviously, that's a bad thing particularly when you don't know about it. So these labels that Apple is having app developers put on their apps have got a whole bunch of people upset, Google ran full-page ads in newspapers, complaining about it and how it's going to hurt small business. The reality is, it is going to hurt some small businesses that do advertising. That's very, very narrow. It's going to hurt me if I'm doing that type of advertising no question about it. I don't do that. But one of these days, I hope to be able to do it. What it is doing now, is stopping companies like Facebook. Facebook has always been doing tracking, not just when you're running their app. Facebook has been getting information from other websites from web pages like mine, for instance, I've got a Facebook pixel on my website so I know if you came from Facebook, what you're interested in and in what you're doing so that I can present information to you based on your interest. I'm doing now for the very first time, this week, a similar thing. With my newsletter. If you have, for instance, said that you're interested in my improving windows security course, the newsletter isn't going to bother you about that anymore because I have this little signature at the bottom, here are a few things that I could do for you. If you want a little extra help.  Some of it's paid, some of it's free, obviously, but. I think it's annoying personally to keep getting the same message every week.  I've put into my email program, some conditional stuff so that if you've asked for the improving windows security course, I'm not going to bother you about that anymore. By the way, no, the course hasn't started yet. It's a labor of love. What can I say? There are a lot of different types of tracking that are done and not all of them are bad. For instance, I just gave you an example of something that I've started doing, and I am doing some tracking in order to do that because I don't want to annoy you. I want to give you the information you need when you need it, right? Bottom line. It's like, I've always said, if I'm interested in buying a Ford F150, then I don't mind seeing ads for it, but if I'm not interested in buying a pickup truck or a Silverado, why would I want to see a GM ad when I'm going to get a Ford, right? It's really that simple. Google, as I mentioned, has been complaining. They've done the full-page ads. They've complained to congress critters they've spent so much money. Lobbying, it's a real problem and a difficult solution to it. If you want to get rid of lobbyists, obviously the bottom line is you have to get rid of the money going to, and coming from Washington DC.  If they don't have control over our money. If they don't have control over our lives. Then the lobbyists aren't going to be going there. I don't care which side of the aisle you are on, or if you're right in that middle of the aisle. Lobbyists do not represent our interests as a nation. That's the bottom line. Google's down there spending money saying, Oh, you're going to hurt the small businesses. When in reality, the biggest target that's going to be hurt by Apple cracking down on people taking our information without letting us know is Google. It's going to be a problem for Google, so how to get around it. One of the things that Apple has for its apps that are on your iPhone and on also your tablets is a tracker. When was the last time that app was updated? Of course, when the app gets updated, Apple has a look at it and tries to see if there's anything malicious going on. Now it's impossible to catch everything. Some of the stuff is very well, obfuscated.  I can't blame Apple or Google for letting some of this malware through. But the bottom line is they want to know. When did you update it? What's going on? Google apparently flagged its own Apple apps. The apps designed for iOS. Think about the Google apps, obviously. There's the Google app itself. There are Google maps. Apps can be very useful, including Waze. I was so upset when they bought Waze, but that goes into the anti-trust stuff that is going on right now in Congress. But I was looking at the phone and looking at the app and they were flagged as out of date. It had been two months since Google updated iOS apps. It has been updating its apps in the Android space, but not the iOS apps. The theory is that Google has not been doing updates on its Apple apps because of this new privacy labeling that Apple's come up with. You see back in early January, Google could have said, we haven't been updating our apps because of the lockdown. The engineers are busy trying to handle this and that. We just had the holidays and I would have accepted that you would have accepted that. Well, that was what now six weeks ago. Google has, every year around the holidays a code freeze, which means no one can make any changes, that is done with right now. The company Google should have released two new versions, particularly since they come out with the new versions for the Android operating system, Gmail, Google Maps, Google search, Chrome, drive, photos, keep and Duo have all been frozen since Apple launched these privacy requirements. What do we think is going on? Well, it looks like frankly, Google just doesn't want us to know what data they're trying to get at. What they're doing? What they're selling? What they're tracking, the inter-app tracking. Google's been doing as well as Facebook and many of these others.  What's the easiest way to not have to worry about that don't have a new release so that you don't have to abide by the new terms from Apple, which include, Hey, what information are you gathering? How are you gathering? What are you doing with my personal information? It looks like Google took the easy way out again. It's phenomenal.  I'm looking right now at, Gmail and it has not been updated on iOS since December 1st. The Android version of Gmail has had four updates since then. That's a pretty big deal, frankly. Apple's definitely got people's attention. The app developers' attention. I am glad they're doing it as a user. I'm not so sure. I'm glad if I decide to try and do targeted marketing through some of this online pay-per-click and some of these other ways of reaching people. But you guys, already how I feel about you and I'm going to be giving you lots of good information. Some of you guys become my clients because your businesses and you need that little extra help for your poor overworked IT people internally. Lots of what's going on with Google. We'll see when they do come up with the next update, but it's a real problem. Hey, if you want to get my weekly email where I have my show notes. Now, these show notes are what I use here on the show. That's what all of these stations pick from, my show notes.  The only way you can get them and get information about what's going on in the world and things you have to do right now is by signing up for my email. Craig peterson.com. Boy, I love space stuff. I have for years. I was so excited to play an extremely minor role, but to get involved with the NASA space shuttle program. Let's talk a little bit about what's next up for it. I remember that day. I can't remember what day of the week it was, but that day when we landed on the moon watching it live. It was just mind-blowing.  Of course the newspaper, the first time I had ever seen a color cover on a newspaper and it was a picture of our astronauts there on the moon. It was just so incredible. Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson. NASA has been trying to get back to the moon for a long time.  We haven't been funding them. Priorities have changed. A lot of people say why don't we spend the money domestically rather than on the space program? The space program has provided us all kinds of benefits over the years. It's benefited mankind, not just by giving us things like Tang, for instance. It's given us all kinds of technology and science that we would never have had any other way. I'm looking right now at a report that was put together by AIESEC, which is the international space exploration, coordination group. It just a top-level executive summary. Numerous cases of societal benefits, new knowledge and technology from space exploration, things like solar panels came from the space program, implantable heart monitors. Cancer therapy, lightweight materials, water purification systems, improved computing systems, global search and rescue systems, course rockets as well. There's so much more, things we just weren't expecting. Thin materials, power generation, energy storage, recycling, and waste management, advanced robotics, health and medicine, transportation, engineering, computing, and software. Not just the $800 hammers. Okay. Culture and inspiration. As you can tell I find this very, very inspiring. We've got all kinds of things that we are using just day-to-day that we don't even think about it. As space scientists, engineers overcome obstacles, in some cases, we never even realized were there and I think that's another phenomenal thing. Well, right now, what we're doing is having private organizations competing to send our missions up. For many years now, since the space shuttle program was ended and it lasted far longer than they expected it to. But now that the space shuttle program has been over. We've mostly been using Russian rockets to get our astronauts into space and also to get things to things like the international space station. What are we going to end up doing in the future? We already know who was it, Bob and somebody, right? A couple of astronauts. They went up on the Elon Musk rocket and docked with the space station. It was again, one of the most amazing things ever. I sat there glued watching it on the computer. It was just, wow. To see that. We're looking at going to Mars. Now, we're looking at exploring some of Mars's moons more than we have in the past, doing all kinds of things that are just going to make a huge, huge difference to humanity. It's been quite a while since that Apollo program of 50 years ago took humans to the moon and they were using chemical propulsion. What that means that you had rocket engines burn liquid oxygen and hydrogen in a combustion chamber. Nowadays we're playing around with hydrogen peroxide in order to get that oxygen. They use to have their advantages and that gives NASA the ability to start and stop an engine really quickly. Back in the sixties, this was the most mature technology for space travel. We'd been using rockets. They were really piloted in world war two. It made a lot of sense back then. However, now we've got some other problems we've gone to prepare for. We're going to be sending four or more astronauts to Mars. We want to colonize Mars, but relying on chemical propulsion to get beyond the moon, bottom line, it just won't cut it. The main reason is the amount of rocket fuel.  Most of that rocket fuel is going to be consumed getting out of the atmosphere. It's crazy how much we're talking about $2 billion for a flight of one of these huge rockets. These block one B configurations, NASA's SLS or space launch system rocket, is going to be able to carry 105 tons to lower earth orbit. That's a lot of money. They're not going to be able to get that many of them up there. That only takes it to lower earth orbit. Now, of course, the idea is to do what in fact, the Apollo mission had looked at, which is get the fuel up to orbit and then have a rocket up there that maybe is assembled an orbit and is refueled in orbit. Then it goes to the moon. That was actually the plan NASA was originally going to pursue. We're looking at that now when we're talking about going to Mars while we're talking about going even further out there. What can we do?  Just for the fuel, by the way, $20 billion just to get the fuel up. That's just absolutely crazy. There were some tests that were done, some studies that were done on behalf of NASA for a mission to Mars in 2039. So this one's quite a ways out. Of course, Elon Musk wants to do it even sooner. He is relying on these chemical rockets.  By the way, to get back home from Mars, he's relying on being able to make rocket fuel right there on the surface of Mars and then charge up the rocket engines in the launch vehicle and then launch back up to get back to earth. It's going to be really, really interesting to see what we end up doing. They are looking at a nuclear propulsion system. It's going to be interesting. NASA has had a budget for this. They got $110 million for nuclear, thermal propulsion development. We know a lot about nuclear fuel nuclear propulsion. We'll see what happens.  This starship concept that space X is building to send humans to Mars using chemical propellant. They're countering the costs involved with the chemical propellant by having this low-cost reusable launch system. We just saw one blow up here a few weeks ago, but that's okay there was no intention of having astronauts sitting on that candle. That was just a test system. We've seen him repeatedly now land successfully. All of those boosters and it's amazing what's been happening now. They're not the only ones. We've got a number of other companies that are working on these types of systems. Space X, ultimately we're talking about pushing the boundaries of reuse and heavy-lift rockets to extreme limits which is exactly what space X is trying to do. They're looking for some other answers. Hey, make sure you sign up Craig peterson.com. I want you to make sure you have all of the latest materials. Craig peterson.com. We're going to talk about how some of our technology we're bringing into our homes to keep us safe is actually ending up killing people. Yeah. Yeah. Death by a police officer. Here we go. If you want to see my show notes, all you have to do is subscribe. Craig peterson.com. And once you're there, you'll see all of the information that I have available my podcasts, and a few articles that we've written, and you'll also have the opportunity to subscribe to my newsletter. I just want to get the message out is my bottom line. We have these home cameras that we have welcomed into our homes. And one of the ones that have been getting a lot of heat lately is the ring camera. I don't know if you've seen these things. They've been advertised on television and it's basically like a little doorbell. You put it out there by your front door, side door, whatever, and it has a doorbell button. And it also has a camera and a speaker that's built into it. Then the microphone, obviously. So someone comes to the door or rings the doorbell. There's an app that you can have on your phone. So you could be at the beach. You could be at the DMV. Someone comes to your home and hits that button. You can now converse with them and tell them to leave the package or go away or whatever it is you want to do. There have been some problems. One of them that has been rather controversial is that there are a number of police departments that are part of a program with Ring that gives them live Real-time access to all of the ring doorbells in neighborhoods. And the idea there is the police can patrol the neighborhoods without having to spend money on cameras that might be up on telephone poles, et cetera. And they get their feeds alive from people's doorbell cams, these ring doorbell cams. So that could be considered good. It could be considered bad, just like about almost anything. Now we're seeing that they have been hacked. Yes, indeed. There is a hack that's out there that has been used and hijackers have been live streaming people's Ring doorbell cameras Now where this gets really dangerous and where it hasn't been really dangerous is something called swatting. You probably know about SWAT teams, the police have, and unfortunately, most federal agencies have their own SWAT teams, which just constantly blows my mind because why does this little department or that little department need of full SWAT team, it should really be a police department of some sort, but at any rate, the whole idea behind a SWAT team is they have special weapons and tactics that they can use in a situation where there might be a hostage or maybe there's a report of a bomb or something else that they have to take care of. And thank God these teams exist in, they do drills. They'll do drills in schools. I know my police department does that fairly frequently and I was involved with some of those when I was a volunteer on the ambulance squad here in town. All make sense, but what has happened on a number of occasions and far more than we like to talk about is that there are. The bad guys or people who don't like their neighbors and call in hoaxes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So there here's an example in Wichita, Kansas, this happened a couple of years back where a man had been arrested after allegedly swatting a prank led police to shoot dead, a 28-year-old man. So this guy, 28 years old, Wichita, Kansas, please surrounded his home. After they received a hoax emergency call from a man claiming to have shot dead his father and taken his family hostage. And this call apparently stemmed from a kind of a battle between two online gamers playing call of duty online. The way these games work is you can talk back and forth. You can have. Teams and you or your team members can be from almost anywhere around the world. And you sitting there with headphones on and talking back and forth. You've got these teams and in some cases, this is just one person against another. And apparently, they believe the report was an act of swatting where. Somebody makes a false report to a police department that causes the police to respond with a SWAT team. Now the audio of these emergency calls been made public, a man can be heard telling the authorities. This is according to the BBC that he had shot his father in the head and claimed to have taken his mother and siblings hostage. The color also said he had a handgun that had poured fuel over the house and wanted to set the property on fire. Sounds like the perfect thing for. A SWAT team to come to. Please say they surrounded the address. They called her given and we're preparing to make contact with the suspect reportedly inside. When Mr. Finch came to the door, they said one round was released by the officers after the 28-year-old failed to comply with verbal orders to keep his hands up. Why would he, what did he do wrong? Obviously. The police ordered you to put your hands up. You probably should put your hands up. And they said he appeared to move his hands towards his waist multiple times when she probably did. Please say Mr. Finch was late found to be unarmed and was pronounced dead at a local hospital. A search found four of his family members inside. None of them dead or Injured nor taken hostage. His family told local media, he was not involved in online gaming. Gaming is a little different than the call of duty and stuff. Gaming typically is gambling. Now we're finding that those hackers are out there who do this swatting maneuver on somebody. And then they have the hacked ring camera at that house and they watch the SWAT team respond. Can you believe that? And the FBI is saying that this is the latest twist on the swatting prank, some prank, right? Because victims had reused passwords from other services when setting up their smart devices. How many times do I have to warn about this? My buddy, I was just telling you guys about a couple of weeks ago, he's done that his. His revenue, his pay from the work he was doing, delivering food to people's homes were stolen by a hacker because he was using the same email address. Yes. To log in and the same password as had been stolen before. Absolutely incredible. There's also been reports of security flaws in some products, including the smart doorbells that have allowed hackers to steal pet network passwords, et cetera. In one case in Virginia. Police reported hearing the hacker shout helped me after arriving at the home of a person they had fought might be about to kill himself. That's swatting that using technology you've brought into your home, causes death, many examples of that, and we're still reusing passwords. Give me a break. We were busy trying to defend the election this year and had the, what did they call it? The most secure election in history, which baffles me. But anyway our businesses and government got broken that's what we're going to talk about right now. Let's get into our big problem here this week. And this has been continuing for what now about two or three weeks we've known about it? This is a hack of a company called SolarWinds. This hack apparently allowed intruders into our networks for maybe a year and a half. But certainly, since March of 2019, this is. A huge deal. We're going to explain a little bit about that here. Who got hacked? What does it mean to you there? And I'm going to get into it just a little bit of something simple. It could be, haven't been done, right? That I have been advising you guys to do for a long time. Does this, like earlier I mentioned, Hey, change your passwords, use different passwords. And in fact, That's a big problem still, but we'll talk about this right now. SolarWinds is a company that makes tools to manage networks of computers and the network devices themselves. And my company mainstream was a client of SolarWinds. Sorry. I want to put that on the table. However, about a year and a half to two years ago, it's probably been about two years. We dropped SolarWinds as a vendor, and the reason we dropped them and we made it very clear to them as we had found security. Vulnerabilities in their architecture, the way they were doing things. We reported these security vulnerabilities to SolarWinds a couple of years ago, and they wouldn't do anything about it. So we said goodbye, and we dropped them as a vendor. Yeah, we were customer SolarWinds. We were using their stuff, but then we abandoned them when they wouldn't follow what we considered to be basic security guidelines. It turns out they weren't and we got it as a country. This has been called the Pearl Harbor of American information technology. Because the data within these hack networks, which included things like user IDs, passwords, financial records, source code can presumed now to being the hand of a Russian intelligence agent. This is from. The United States of America's main security guide general Paul NACA sewn. It's just incredible what he's admitting here. He said SolarWinds, that company that the hackers used as a conduit for their attacks had a history of lackluster security for its products. What did I tell you, making it easy target interviews with current and former employees suggest it was slow to make security a priority even as its software was adopted by federal agencies expert note that our experts noted that it took days after the Russian attack was discovered before SolarWinds websites stopped offering the client the compromised programs. Microsoft by the way said that it had not been breached and initially here, but now this week it discovered it had been breached and resellers of Microsoft software had been breached too, and we've got intelligence officials now very upset about Microsoft not detecting it. It's just absolutely incredible here. This wasn't something like we had with Pearl Harbor, but this attack may prove to be even more damaging to our national security and our business prosperity. This is really fast. I love the fact. I'm not going to say I told you because, I didn't tell you guys this, but I do love the fact that I was right again. How unfortunately I'm right too often when it comes to security and it is very frustrating to me to work with some clients that just don't seem to care about security. And I want to jump to an opinion piece here from our friends over at CNN. This is an opinion piece by Bruce Schneider. You've probably seen him before. He is also, I think he writes for the Washington Post. But remember when this came out the word about the SolarWinds hack, president Joe Biden said we're going to retaliate which I don't know that makes a whole lot of sense in this particular case for a number of reasons. Not the least of which we're not a hundred percent sure it's the Russians, but how are we going to retaliate? Cyber espionage is frankly business as usual for every country, not just North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, and Vietnam. It's business as usual by us as well. And that it States is very aggressive offensively. In other words, going out after other countries in the cybersecurity realm. And we benefit from the lack of norms that are in cybersecurity. But here's what I really liked that Bruce said and I agree with it entirely. I'm glad, he must listen to the show. The fundamental problem is one of economic incentives. The market rewards, quick development of products. It rewards new features. It rewards spying on customers, end-users collecting and selling individual data. Think of Facebook when we're saying this, our Instagram, or any of these services that we're using all the time. So back to the quote here, the market does not reward security, safety, or transparency. It doesn't reward reliability past a bare minimum, and it does not reward resilience at all. And this is what happened with SolarWinds. SolarWinds ended up contracting software development to Eastern Europe where Russia has a lot more influence and Russia could easily subvert programmers over there. It's cheaper for Russia, not just for SolarWinds short-term profit. That's what they were after here was totally prioritized over product security, and yet their product is used to help secure it. It just drives me crazy out there. Just absolutely crazy what some people are doing. I read a little quote down. I'm looking here to see if I've got it handy on my desk and I just don't see it. But they are prioritizing everything except. Security. And that is, I think, frankly, completely inexcusable, right? Inexcusable. So this is happening with SolarWinds right now, but it's going to be happening with other places out there. We have probably 250 federal government agencies that were nailed by this. Can you imagine that? The man who owned SolarWinds is a Puerto Rican-born billionaire named Orlando Bravo. His business model is to buy niche software companies, combine them with competitors, offshore work, cut any cost he can and raise prices. The same swapping corrupt practices that allowed this massive cybersecurity hack made Bravo a billionaire. Another quote here. This is from the tech beacon. Hey, this is just crazy. Okay. So we know. Okay. I've established it. Craig, stop the stop. The monotonous. Okay. But I got to mention, we've got the US treasury department was hacked the US Department of Commerce's national telecommunication infrastructure administration, department of health, national institutes of health, cybersecurity, and infrastructure agency CISA, the department of Homeland security, the US department of state, the department of justice, the national nuclear security administration, the US department of energy, three US state governments, the city of Austin, many hundreds more including Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, VMware, and others. I use two of those.We use Cisco and VMware. We use Intel, but only peripherally and we actually prefer other processors. So this is a real problem. How are we going to change it? I don't know that we can, you and I, but I can tell you what you can do. Just like I keep reminding everybody to use a password manager and I will have a course on that this year. Absolutely guaranteed using a password ma

When Martine Postma was done with the "throw away and buy new" behavior of society, she had no idea that her idea for a repair cafe where the layman can come in and get help repairing their electronic devices, would cause international awareness. Nowadays repair cafes are spread all around the world! Learn her story how it all started, how it moved the society back to a more repair-than-bin mentality, and how it helps the #righttorepair movement despite she is not officially a part of it. (Interview begins at 6:30)

When Erev Pesah falls on Shabbat, one should preferably recite "Minha Gedola," meaning, he should recite Minha during the early afternoon hours. Halacha forbids eating meals late in the afternoon on Erev Pesah, in order that one will sit down to the Seder with an appetite. As such, when Erev Pesah falls on Shabbat, one must eat Se'uda Shelishit (the third meal) early in the afternoon, and thus Minha should also be recited early.On the afternoon of Erev Pesah, the prohibition against eating Hames already applies, and it is likewise forbidden to eat Masa. Therefore, on Shabbat Erev Pesah, one may, according to the strict Halacha, eat other foods (besides bread) for Se'uda Shelishit, such as fruit, salads, meat and rice (according to the Sephardic custom allowing eating rice on Pesah). Some, however, boil or fry Masa before Shabbat and eat it for Se'uda Shelishit. (One recites Ha'mosi over boiled or fried Masa.) Another custom is to partake of Egg Masa for Se'uda Shelishit on Shabbat Erev Pesah, however is must be noted that if one is eating Egg Massa for Se'uda Shelishit he can not eat more that 2oz if eating after 4:10 NY time this year 5781/2021. As mentioned, however, strictly speaking one may partake of other foods, even though on ordinary Shabbatot one's Se'uda Shelishit should include bread.On the afternoon of Shabbat Erev Pesah one should recite the text of "Seder Korban Pesah" which is printed in many Siddurim and Haggadot. This text consists of passages from the Humash and Mishna that outline the procedure for the Korban Pesah – the paschal offering that was brought on Erev Pesah during the times of the Bet Ha'mikdash. Nowadays, when we cannot actually perform this Misva, we commemorate the Korban Pesah by reciting this text, so that through our study we will be considered as though we actually brought the sacrifice. One should recite this text on Shabbat Erev Pesah after Minha, either before or after Se'uda Shelishit. (The text is available for download from www.dailyhalacha.com, by clicking ‘Download Special Tefilot’ on the left of the home page.)As mentioned, one should not eat substantial amounts of food late in the afternoon, so that he will have an appetite for the Seder.When Shabbat ends, women should recite, "Baruch Ha'mavdil Ben Kodesh Le'kodesh" and then light the Yom Tov candles. Halacha forbids kindling a new flame on Yom Tov, and therefore one must light the Yom Tov candles from a preexisting flame, such as a pilot light or a candle that had been lit before Shabbat. When lighting the candles a woman recites the Beracha, "Asher Kideshanu Be'misvotav Ve'sivanu Le'hadlik Ner Shel Yom Tov." Our practice is not to recite "She'he'heyanu" at the time of Yom Tov candle lighting.After a woman lights the Yom Tov candles, she may begin making the preparations for the Seder.

This week, we're joined by Dr. Michelle Deering, a mother-daughter relationship consultant who helps busy moms meaningfully connect and develop close bonds with their daughters. Michelle's refreshing approach has made her a sought-after speaker, online educator, and consultant.Before running her consulting business, Michelle served as a licensed psychologist and board-certified sport psychologist at a BIG 10 University, Fortune 500 corporate trainer, and higher education professional. Nowadays you’ll find her speaking at conferences, training for her next Reebok Spartan Sprint Race, and practicing rudiments on her drum kit—all while coaching, serving clients, and recording her hit podcast, Mother Daughter Connections.Podcast: MotherDaughterConnectionsTM Episode 2: Personal DowntimeWebsite: http://www.CurativeConnections.comInstagram: @MotherDaughterConnectionsFacebook: @MotherDaughterConnectionsLinkedIn: https://bit.ly/DrDeeringLinkedInDownload Michelle's free PDF of "The Quick Guide To Lessen Arguments" here: https://bit.ly/lessargumentsStay in touch by sending us your questions and feedback!Phone: (857) MANNERSEmail: hi@evieandsarah.comAnd don't forget to find us on Clubhouse! Read more about Why Parents Belong on Clubhouse (and in Our New Positive Parenting Club) and find us there, @egranville and @drsarahdavis. You can also join our brand new Positive Parenting Club for access to our rooms each week!Take our quiz to discover your Parenting Perspective: "What type of parent are you in public?" When you discover your unique strengths as a parent, you can develop your confidence, character, and connections.Website: http://www.evieandsarah.comFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/evieandsarahFacebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/modernmannersformomsanddadsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/evieandsarah/Music: Something Elated by Broke for Free See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Nowadays it seems like crime stories seem more popular than ever. But why are we obsessed with them? This week the IFTT ladies breakdown some facts and information on why specifically women are so intrigued by true crime. We also want to bring awareness of the importance of highlighting victims of these horrible cases versus glorifying the storyline. Content Warnings: General discussions of violence, murder, and rape. Please listen with caution.   #saytheirname Jennie Vincow Maria Hernandez Dayle Yoshie Okazaki Tsai-Lian "Veronica" Yu Vincent and Maxine Zazzara Bill and Lillian Doi Mabel "Ma" Bell and Florence "Nettie" Lang Carol Kyle and her 11-year old son Mary Louise Cannon Whitney Bennett Joyce Nelson Sophie Dickman Lela and Maxon Kneiding Chainarong and Somkid Khovananth, and their 8-year old son Chris and Virginia Peterson Sakina and Elyas Abowath, and their two children Peter and Barbara Pan James Romero Jr. and family Bill Carns and Inez Erickson Mai Leung Anastia Hrondas, a 6-year old girl, a 9-year old boy, a 8-year old girl Patty Higgins Lorraine and John Rodriguez Christina and Mary Caldwell Anne Marie Burr Lonnie Trumbell Joni Lenz Lynda Healy Donna Gail Manson Susan Elaine Rancourt Brenda Baker Roberta Kathleen Parks Brenda Carol Ball Georgeann Hawkins Janice Ott Denise Naslund Caryn Campbell Julie Cunningham Denis Lynn Oliverson Melanie Cooley Shelly Robertson Nancy Wilcox Melissa Smith Laura Aime Debby Kent Carol DaRonch Nancy Baird Sue Curtis Debbie Smith Rita Loraine Jolly Vicki Lynn Hollar Karen Chandler Kathy Kleiner Lisa Levy Margaret Bowman Cheryl Thomas Kimberly Leach Lynette Culver Rita Curran Nina Jo Schmale Patricia Ann Matusek Pamela Lee Wilkening Mary Ann Jordan Suzanne Bridget Farris Valentina Pasion Merlita Gargullo Gloria Jean Davy        

Nowadays it’s difficult to relax and enjoy a spiked beverage without worrying about feeling sick, bloated, or gross afterwards. But what if you mixed tea with alcohol? I mean REAL tea, not the stripped down flavor imitations loaded with sugar that you find on store shelves. That’s why Jennie Ripps and Maria Littlefield founded Owl’s Brew, ensuring there’s a tea for every occasion. Shop Owl’s Brew: https://www.theowlsbrew.com/home Ritual is offering my listeners 10% off during your first 3 months. Visit ritual.com/MAI to start your Ritual today Treat yourself and your loved ones with a unique gift at AnaLuisa.com/HUNNAY by using my code HUNNAY to get 10% off. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What were you doing at the tender age of eight? While most of us were busying ourselves with My Little Pony and Lego sets, Australian-born Jeremy Heimans was focused on things a bit headier. His childhood obsessions were nuclear non-proliferation and global poverty. He even tried to stop Desert Storm (with a fax machine). Nowadays he's a globally known activist and movement builder, whose work has literally touched all of your lives. On this week's episode of Why Here, Jeremy sits down with hosts Benton Whitley and Tristan McAllister to discuss all of this and how his Lebanese and Jewish heritage has shaped the way he's taken on the biggest racial, social, economic and environmental issues of our time.

Hi, everybody! I am Georgiana, your English teacher and founder of SpeakEnglishPodcast.com. My mission is to help you speak English fluently. In today’s episode  – I’m going to tell you how you can get vegetables without going to the supermarket. And I’m not talking about magic

As a business grows, scaling becomes necessary for it to reach new heights. But with scaling being a term that often gets thrown around a lot, many business owners find it hard to prepare for the time to finally upscale their business model. Allison Maslan is the CEO of Pinnacle Global Network and the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book Scale or Fail. She began her business journey at 19 years of age. Today, she can lay claim to having built 10 successful companies. Allison’s star-studded clientele includes Ben & Jerry’s, Supercuts, and Allstate. Nowadays, she dedicates her time to helping other business owners scale their companies, fast-track their success, and have a more meaningful life.On this episode of the Perfectly Mentored Podcast, Allison shares her entrepreneurial journey to becoming the Western world’s foremost expert on business scaling.Topics Covered:Who is Allison Maslan? [0:16]Let’s talk about your entrepreneurial journey and how you become the scaling expert. [1:13]What does scaling a business actually mean? [4:43]At what point do businesses go into growth or scale mode? [6:45]What are the biggest reasons businesses fail to scale? [8:52]What can start-up businesses do to prepare themselves before they can actually scale? [10:51]What is your advice to business owners who find it hard to delegate? [12:27]How do you train or coach someone to take risks and break through fears? [19:07]How would you coach your clients to bounce back from a great loss? [23:25]What’s your advice to have both visionary and integrator roles work together properly? [26:23]What’s the biggest change in mindset that you need in order to scale? [29:04]Connect with us:Perfectly Mentored InstagramWatch the Interviews on YouTubePerfectly Mentored FacebookConnect with Allison MaslanFacebookTwitterLinkedInYouTubePinterestPinnacle Global Network Connect with Jason Portnoyjportnoy.comInstagramFacebookWant to see how Jason and his team can help you grow your business? CLICK HERE to book your Free Business Assessment CallLike the episode? Come visit us on Apple Podcasts - don't forget to subscribe and leave a review! We appreciate your feedback and would love for you to help spread the word! See all Podcasts HERE

A warning to all investors: “Cancel culture” is attacking Wall Street.   Nowadays, public opinion changes with the tide… and smart investors know to separate themselves from negativity and stick to their convictions. [00:30]   While most goldbugs are negative about anything but gold… Ed Karr, executive chairman of U.S. Gold Corp, is a fan of both the yellow metal and bitcoin. He shares his thoughts on bitcoin’s bull run… what’s behind the pullback in gold prices… and why he’s bullish on both assets long-term. [19:40]   Then, Daniel and I discuss the latest stimulus bill… why the market is rallying… and some ideas we like right now. I explain why interest rates won’t crash this market… and share a newly public stock I believe will hit $100 billion in valuation. [50:30]       Enjoyed this episode?  Get Wall Street Unplugged delivered FREE to your inbox every Wednesday: https://www.curzioresearch.com/wall-street-unplugged/       Wall Street Unplugged podcast is available at: --: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/wall-street-unplugged-frank/ -- : https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/curzio-research/wall-street-unplugged-2 -- : https://www.curzioresearch.com/category/podcast/wall-street-unplugged/   : https://twitter.com/frankcurzio :. https://www.facebook.com/CurzioResearch/ : https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-curzio-690561a7/ : https://www.curzioresearch.com

It was in the late 19th century that sports trading cards became a thing, being these neat paper collectibles you got with a pack of gum or tobacco. Despite these rarities likely being worth a fortune nowadays, it seems hard to believe that most folks back then knew how popular these cards would later become. But, it’s a piece of paper with an athlete and short biography attached to it—how valuable could it actually be? Despite reservations some people may have held, it eventually became widely understood that sports trading cards held value, whether it be sentimental or monetary. Nowadays there has been a new sports memorabilia item that has jumped in popularity in a similar fashion—NBA Top Shot. The online company, which has been backed by the NBA, has built a blockchain service that allows people to buy virtual packs containing “moments” that can be kept and sold in their site’s marketplace. NBA Top Shot’s growth has become meteoric since it first started in 2019, having processed more than $250 million in sales in February alone. This all the while sports trading cards are growing in interest once again and selling for similar exorbitant prices. Today on AirTalk, we discuss the rise and appeal of NBA Top Shot while also looking at the resurgence of sports trading cards. Are you a collector of sports trading cards or of NBA Top Shots’s moments? What got you into collecting? Join the conversation by calling us at 866-893-5722. Guests:  DeMarco Williams, senior writer at SLAM Magazine; he tweets @demarcowill Michael Provenzale, production manager for Heritage Auction, a multinational auction house that collects memorabilia and other valuable objects

On today's episode, we're talking all things International Women's Day, the best female-founded companies, and 10 amazing brands you need to know, shop and love from now on. Over 70% of the women and founders on this list are women of color.  Celebrated on March 8 annually, International Women's Day is one of the most important days of the year to celebrate women's achievements, raise awareness about women's equality, lobby for accelerated gender parity, and fundraise for female-centered charities. I'll be sharing some fantastic brands and initiatives that are perfectly aligned with International Women's Day.  This episode is proudly sponsored by briCandles, 100% natural soy candles hand-poured in Brooklyn. Bri Books listeners get 20% off their briCandles.com order with the code BRIBOOKS.  If you’re new to the show, leave a review of Bri Books on Apple Podcasts, and listen to Bri Books on Apple Podcasts, Spotify  Stitcher, and SoundCloud! Show me what you're reading by using #bribooks on Instagram, and subscribe to the Bri Books newsletter at bribookspod.com/newsletter. Follow @BriBooksPod on Instagram and @bribookspod on Twitter.   Uoma Beauty, founded by Sharon Chuter Cashe cashmere donates 10% of all purchases to the Nepal Youth Foundation. Their new 'Women of Nepal' docu-film, created via a partnership with multimedia journalist Rajneesh Bhandari on behalf of the Nepal Youth Foundation (NYF), showcases the intersection of livelihood and motherhood for two profound women. Black Girl Sunscreen was designed to start the conversation around sun safety and education, and works to decrease the risk of melanoma within the Black community, one bottle of SPF at a time.  K-Swiss Girl Scouts collection.  Each shoe takes details from its namesake and translates them to a reimagined take on the iconic Court 66, with textures that mimic the Girl Scout Cookies they represent.  Here's a link to how you can build community partnerships with your local Girl Scout troop.  The Lip Bar's story is a complete Cinderella story. The founder, Melissa Butler, was turned DOWN from Shark Tank! But that "rejection" just sharpened her direction, because now you can find TLB in Walmart and Target stores across the country! Here's my favorite new product from TLB, a 3-in-1 skin conditioner tinted moisturizer which comes in 8 glorious shades.  Soon Skincare is a beauty brand started with the goal of bringing the excitement and innovation of Korean beauty to the entire world. The company is named after co-founder Lisa's grandmother and means 'smooth and pure' in Korean, which is at the crux of the entire line. I'm obsessed with the Vitamin C + E serum, and the Mermaid Marine collagen serum. DBF Interiors founder Dominique Fluker is an interior design service bringing interior styling to modern professionals. Dominique believes luxury is truly experienced when one slows down and embraces the fruits of her labor. Here's a link to book a consultation with Dominique.  Dominique Broadway is an award-winning millennial personal finance expert and entreprenuer. Her personal journey to educate and assist women of color in reaching their financial goals began with working with the uber wealthy and realizing that money advice should be available to anyone who wants to learn it. Through her platform and The Wealth Transfer Investing course, she has changed the game and broadened so many people's understanding of what's possible when it comes to making money in the market. More than that, she's passionate about changing people's money mindset, which is crucial.  Corey Paige is a designer who started her business in her dorm room at Tulane University. Nowadays, Corey is designing leggings, jogers, crewnecks, phone cases, face masks with her signature 'Millennial Lisa Frank' aesthetic of bright, cheerful colors.  Bearaby is a weighted blanket comapny I've been loving for about two years. Bearaby believes that self-care should be joyful and deep, revitalizing rest should be natural. The blankets are all-natural, sustainable and made from recycled materials. The founder Kathrine Hamm was led to create the brand out of her on sleep struggles. It's a brand I can put my name (and money!) behind. 

Finding spare change is different these days. It used to be found in couch cushions, on the sidewalk or maybe in a payphone coin return. Nowadays, most payments are done with a credit card or online, making loose change nearly a thing of the past. So where do you find it? More importantly, how do you grow it? “CentsAble” Bobbi details the where and how to deal with digital spare change and shows you what a difference it can make in your budget and in helping to eliminate debt.

Nowadays, people live at a time when discerning what’s right and wrong is getting more complex. As your choices can have profound, long term implications, it’s best to know where your moral compass lies. In this episode of Follow Your Different, Dr. Susan Liautaud talks about Ethics and why it is more than just common sense. She explains why it matters more today, and how to apply an Ethics lens to critical areas of society. This is a fascinating conversation that will matter to anyone who cares about making the world a different place. Dr. Susan Liautaud is the author of the new bestseller, The Power of Ethics: How to Make Good Choices in a Complicated World. She is an Ethics Advisor to major corporations and institutions, and also teaches Ethics at Stanford. She serves as Chair of the London School of Economics and Political Science Council. Why Ethics is Not Common Sense It used to be that people grew up on stories that gave examples of what’s right and wrong. Everything seemed black and white, and the lines in the sand were clear. In today’s world, where information is but a touch of a screen away, these lines have seemingly been blurred. Dr. Susan Liautaud uses media platforms like Facebook or Twitter as examples for this. On one hand, it serves as a tool to connect people together and have lively conversations. On the other hand, there are some that use it to bully people and spread misinformation. “In today's world, you know, good and bad are all mixed. We are in this gray zone and things that can be used for the good like social media. Yet they can also be used for harm, like bullying on social media or spread of disinformation. So I think largely because the world has just gotten so complicated and technology and all the forces driving it aren't really common sense for a lot of people.” - Dr. Susan Liautaud The World is Changing so Fast Christopher shares that for him, changing your opinion on something is not a bad thing. It means that you are open to new ideas and correcting your own. “If you haven't changed your mind lately, how do you know you have one?” - Christopher Lochhead Dr. Susan agrees with this sentiment, and describes that Ethics can be the same way. The things we find ethical or otherwise can be flipped due to recent events or newly-available information. For her, it’s better to be in-the-know rather than to always stick with the old ways. “I think one of the things about ethics that's different today is that the world is changing so fast. The complexity I referred to earlier is evolving so quickly that we need to be monitoring, instead of holding our nose and leaping into a decision and being sure that we're absolutely right. So I don't call it flip flopping. I call it staying grounded in reality.” - Dr. Susan Liautaud Finding Non-Binary Solutions As more people get access to information and the lines between black and white get even more blurred, people’s definition of Ethics changes even further. For Dr. Susan, this is not a bad thing. Her main concern lies with people still looking for binary solutions to solve ethical problems. Dr. Susan explains how people can get stuck behind a yes or no mindset for different situations, which limits their thinking to binary solutions. She elaborates further by using Christopher’s foil board example: “What I would say is, can't we find a solution that is non-binary, other than you can't foil board on a public beach. Maybe you can foil board at certain times of day, in a place where there are only foil boarders who are willing to put themselves at that risk. We get ourselves into this Yes, No, black, white, one side of the wall or the other binary thinking, and we never get to seizing opportunity and mitigating risk.”   - Dr. Susan Liautaud To know more about Dr. Susan Liautaud and how Ethics is not common sense in some companies, download and listen to this episode. Bio Dr. Susan Liautaud teaches cutting-edge ethics at Stanford University and se...

Nowadays, people live at a time when discerning what’s right and wrong is getting more complex. As your choices can have profound, long term implications, it’s best to know where your moral compass lies. In this episode of Follow Your Different, Dr. Susan Liautaud talks about Ethics and why it is more than just common sense. She explains why it matters more today, and how to apply an Ethics lens to critical areas of society. This is a fascinating conversation that will matter to anyone who cares about making the world a different place. Dr. Susan Liautaud is the author of the new bestseller, The Power of Ethics: How to Make Good Choices in a Complicated World. She is an Ethics Advisor to major corporations and institutions, and also teaches Ethics at Stanford. She serves as Chair of the London School of Economics and Political Science Council. Why Ethics is Not Common Sense It used to be that people grew up on stories that gave examples of what’s right and wrong. Everything seemed black and white, and the lines in the sand were clear. In today’s world, where information is but a touch of a screen away, these lines have seemingly been blurred. Dr. Susan Liautaud uses media platforms like Facebook or Twitter as examples for this. On one hand, it serves as a tool to connect people together and have lively conversations. On the other hand, there are some that use it to bully people and spread misinformation. “In today's world, you know, good and bad are all mixed. We are in this gray zone and things that can be used for the good like social media. Yet they can also be used for harm, like bullying on social media or spread of disinformation. So I think largely because the world has just gotten so complicated and technology and all the forces driving it aren't really common sense for a lot of people.” - Dr. Susan Liautaud The World is Changing so Fast Christopher shares that for him, changing your opinion on something is not a bad thing. It means that you are open to new ideas and correcting your own. “If you haven't changed your mind lately, how do you know you have one?” - Christopher Lochhead Dr. Susan agrees with this sentiment, and describes that Ethics can be the same way. The things we find ethical or otherwise can be flipped due to recent events or newly-available information. For her, it’s better to be in-the-know rather than to always stick with the old ways. “I think one of the things about ethics that's different today is that the world is changing so fast. The complexity I referred to earlier is evolving so quickly that we need to be monitoring, instead of holding our nose and leaping into a decision and being sure that we're absolutely right. So I don't call it flip flopping. I call it staying grounded in reality.” - Dr. Susan Liautaud Finding Non-Binary Solutions As more people get access to information and the lines between black and white get even more blurred, people’s definition of Ethics changes even further. For Dr. Susan, this is not a bad thing. Her main concern lies with people still looking for binary solutions to solve ethical problems. Dr. Susan explains how people can get stuck behind a yes or no mindset for different situations, which limits their thinking to binary solutions. She elaborates further by using Christopher’s foil board example: “What I would say is, can't we find a solution that is non-binary, other than you can't foil board on a public beach. Maybe you can foil board at certain times of day, in a place where there are only foil boarders who are willing to put themselves at that risk. We get ourselves into this Yes, No, black, white, one side of the wall or the other binary thinking, and we never get to seizing opportunity and mitigating risk.”   - Dr. Susan Liautaud To know more about Dr. Susan Liautaud and how Ethics is not common sense in some companies, download and listen to this episode. Bio Dr. Susan Liautaud teaches cutting-edge ethics at Stanford University and se...

Mikal Shumate grew up in a blue-collar family, served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War, and worked in the construction industry for over 45 years before retiring. He holds a certification in interpersonal and trans-person counseling, and is an ordained spiritualist minister and oneness trainer. A lifetime of interest in learning about and obtaining higher consciousness lead Mikal to study and decipher the mysteries of all the world’s major traditions, spiritual philosophies and experiences. This ultimately led him to discover and interpret the mechanism for achieving awakening and enlightenment, which he now pass on to others within the pages of “Blue-Collar Enlightenment” Connect with Mikal at LoveLightConsciousness.com ! Brandon Handley 0:00 4321 Hey, their spiritual dope this is Brandon Handley. And I am on with Michael Shumate, who grew up in a blue collar family and served in the US Navy during the Vietnam War. He's also worked in the conduct construction industry for over 45 years before he retired. He holds a certification and interpersonal and transpersonal counseling and as an ordained spiritualist minister and oneness trainer, after a lifetime of interest in learning about and obtaining higher consciousness, he was led to study and decipher the mysteries of all the world's major traditions, spiritual philosophies and experiences. This ultimately led him to discover and interpret the mechanism for achieving awakening and enlightenment, which he now passes on to others within his new book, blue collar enlightenment, Michael, thanks for being here today. How are you? Mikal Shumate 0:51 Thank you. I'm doing well. Brandon Handley 0:54 Fantastic. Awesome. So I'd love to start these off with the idea that you and I are basically, you know, we're conduits for source energy, right? And, and we, you know, something's flowing through us, you and I, today through this podcast is hitting somebody's ears, or maybe a video depending on what they watch the video, but there's a message that can only be delivered through you to that person today. What is that message? Unknown Speaker 1:26 That Mikal Shumate 1:28 it is possible to live life in a peaceful and happy state of consciousness where you're not stressed, and you can achieve anything you really want to achieve. Brandon Handley 1:51 So I think that's a I think that's a powerful message. Right? And, and, you know, you build out this system for it. But even before we kind of get there, let's go, you know, what are some of the, you know, the, I'd be curious about what is even a spiritualist minister, right, and just kind of let's talk a little bit about your path and how you got to where you are today. So in in regards to even being the spiritualist minister, what would you tell me that is, and what's that mean? Mikal Shumate 2:19 Well, early, early in my life, I had a number of experiences they had to do with people that I knew or people that I met. The most profound was a woman named Nancy Cappy who actually, at the time that I met her, I was a young man in my late teens, and she worked with my mother at the time in are in the same company, and they knew each other, so they and we also had a group of friends and things like that for the family. And so she was part of that network. And she did what are called reads. Okay, well, readings, you know, in most terms are, are seen as being psychic readings, she was psychic, but with a very definitive methodology. And her her method was Auric reading. So she would read the energy fields around your body. And she, I mean, she was she was one of these people that was born that way. You know, and she just, she just over her lifetime learned until she got to the point where that's all she did was, was her work by reading orders. And she, she had a profound effect upon me. I came home I was in, just joined the Navy. I came home on leave. And our neighbor, Latasha comes by and says, You got to go down and see Nancy. So why would you know, she's doing readings down here and was in San Diego. She's down here at the waterfront, and you need to get out and see her. Well, okay. Don't What else you got to do, you know? So I found a hotel room down on the waterfront where she had rented a room it was giving readings. And I walked in and she looked up and saw me and she just kind of stared at me for a minute. And then she finished what she was talking about. And then she says, may I come to you? I had no idea what she was talking about at the time. So she said, Yeah, okay. And so she, she told me things about myself. And two profound things stuck with me out of that. One of those was that I needed to learn how to separate my work life. from my home life. A lot of people bring their work home with them. And she told me, it would be very important for me to separate that. Which I learned to do. And in fact I do, I learned it so well that I would tell myself as soon as I get home, I need to call so and so and I wouldn't remember until the next morning. So it's, you know, so that separation was important. And then she also then exposed me to the idea that there was something else beyond what I had learned in my life. That all fell into the category of spirituality. In spiritualism itself, to answer your question is the study of psychic phenomena, the study of energetics that are beyond our normal, day to day process. And what it did for me was, it inspired me to, to wonder about and seek to, to refine and define and understand what consciousness is. So I had like, two, two operations going on in my life, I had my, my, my work, business, all that sort of thing. And then on the other side of it, I had my quest to learn about spirituality and consciousness. And, and then, of course, that evolved over the process of time. And we're talking about, you know, a 50, year 5050 plus year process, actually, over 60 years, almost 60 years process, to try to figure out, you know, who I am and what I am and who we are, and what we are, and that sort of thing, in my book is the culmination of that process up to the point I wrote a book, because consciousness and awareness is not something that you just reach it reach an endpoint, and that's it. No, it's not like, it's not like, okay, your body has reached its limit, and you drop the body and whatever happens after that, right. So it's not like it's not terminal. Yeah, no, Brandon Handley 7:26 I get that for sure. Sure. Just to jump in real quick. You know, we're already got a little bit to unpack there, Michael. So before we, before we get too far along there, right. I love what you're saying there in terms of, you know, there is, I mean, there may seem to be points where there's a plateau, but it's still ongoing, right? Even if it levels off, it's still expanding that that consciousness that you're talking about, right? Yes. And my Mikal Shumate 7:49 experience is that we, that it's like a ladder, you you expand, you reach a point, and you stabilize it, that area, you in my experience, I would like have what they would call a colic cathartic experience of reaching a plateau. And then that experience then becomes normal. And it's like, okay, at that time, you know, it's like, You're full of Listen, you're full of joy, and it's just this wonderful thing. And then, and then that just kind of becomes ordinary. And then as you grow, then you step up again, and it's just a continuous process of that. Enlightenment is not a endpoint, it is a actually a beginning point of the understanding of the totality of your consciousness. Brandon Handley 8:42 Can I tell you how frustrated I was with that one, right? Because, you know, as I as I look back on my experience, right, kind of mine was kind of a sudden, sudden thing, right? Kind of, like, I would liken it to a discarded seed that just goes ahead and sprouts anyways. Right? And and really, there was no stopping it. So you just kind of like, Oh, well, great. This is amazing. And then it's taken me personally about three years to kind of understand what's going on, try to verbalize it and really develop it. It's like, just like literally like being reborn, right? There's this whole there's a whole new language that I don't understand, or I understand but I'm looking for the language to to encompass the experience. Right. So when you know when so you've got this you got this lady, right? What What is it that makes you even believe her right at that time, because she's telling us some things. I'm gonna you know, your your your your, you know, late, late to your late teens or early 20s I'm guessing and what makes you believe her that what she's telling you is something that's even worth pursuing. Mikal Shumate 9:55 Well, my attitude is I am I am a A dyed in the wool skeptic. So you can, I will listen to whatever you have to say. And then I will look into the world and see if that's valid for me or not. And so what what happened with me was, you know, a number of things that she talked about kind of resonated. And okay, well, let's, let's just see what this is. And actually what happened was, after I, after I got out of the Navy, I went into college. And after going to college, I came back to my hometown of Encinitas, California. And there was a place there called the chapel of awareness that I happen to just walk by one day and see Oh, no, and, you know, it's like, you know, your your, if you allow yourself to be spirit will drive you to wherever it is that you need to be. So, Brandon Handley 11:03 agreed with that real quick there. You know, what, what would you say specifically resonated with with you? I know, it's been a while, right. But you said a few things she'd said resonated. And I'm just curious what those resignation points were? Unknown Speaker 11:16 Well, Mikal Shumate 11:20 gee, it's, I mean, you're talking. Brandon Handley 11:23 As I say, look, if you can't remember, if it's I get it, but you know, that was this kind of the question that popped up in my mind, you know, what are these? What are some of the sticking points? Mikal Shumate 11:31 Yeah, I think, you know, the, the, looking at that process, because that was just a step. You don't know, it's just one step in a whole lifetime of steps. But I did, I did study spiritual ism, which is that study of psychic phenomena and, and contact with just disconnected, you know, disembodied souls and that sort of thing. And a lot of other things, which is a very primal level kind of experience, you don't have to be highly spiritually evolved, to be able to connect into that frequency of energy, you just have to have that resonance in you, that resonates with you know, whatever it is that you're you're trying to connect with. Like that. For me, for me, it's a very, was a very primal level kind of thing. And there's a whole lot more stuff, the increases with frequency as your Brandon Handley 12:38 frequency goes up. And I think that i think that's interesting, too. Even going back to kind of, you know, the, the kind of awakening experience, right, where the awakening or the initial enlightenment isn't, isn't the end point, right? That's, it's kind of ongoing, whereas even Alright, well, hey, here it is, I've awakened, not only have I awakened, now, I feel this the source energy flowing through me right now. Now, what I'm hearing you say, is that you don't even have to be like that elevated or, you know, you don't have to be that deep end to be able to do that right to connect with sources that what you're saying, like, you know, Mikal Shumate 13:18 we're not talking about connecting with source we're talking about connecting with, with the spiritual entities. Brandon Handley 13:24 Okay. would you would you define things? Mikal Shumate 13:28 Well, the requirement, as I've come to learn, okay, the requirement is that you need to resonate at the same frequency, it is true, all the way up the scale, you want to resonate with your higher self, you have to bring your vibration, so to speak, you know, that's the term that was used when I was a kid, you know, you got to raise your vibration, Brandon Handley 13:50 it's back Michael, just say no, it's it's all it's all coming back, right. It's a cycle a cycle of things. Mikal Shumate 13:58 So so it's like, you know, the higher you raise your vibration that gives you the ability to connect out to other intelligence at that vibration, because we are in we are in we have been divided there. There. There has been definition stated that we have that we have dimensions of existence, like the third dimension is the primal dimension of existence on Earth, right. Raising that vibration of Earth up to the fourth fifth dimension is now what what's being called, you know, the evolution of humanity. A lot of things come together as you gather pieces of the puzzle. And so what happened for me was I spent pretty much my lifetime gathering pieces of the puzzle. And about three years ago, three, four years ago, it all kind of coalesced and children came together and I had a much clearer Understanding of a much larger picture. And that's really where where my book takes people is how to get yourself into that state of being. So that you can, as you say, connect with source, because ultimately, everyone is connected to source, Brandon Handley 15:23 for sure, for sure, for sure, right? It's not that you're not connected to source, it's your ability to recognize your connection with source or your awareness or, you know, kind of, you know, listen, so my mom, I was born in late 70s. My mom, you know, in San Francisco, right? So I've got a little bit of background in tuned in what does it tuned in turned on or whatever? Tune into now, whatever you tune in, drop out, whatever, you know, so there it is, right. There it is. Right. So the language right there, you know, is it right? It's already kind of in existence, kind of like there's already like a radio tower out there. All we got to do is dial into it. Right. And, and just recognize it. And and I think you would you say that you've got to want it, which you've got to say that you've got to be willing to receive it, that type of thing? Mikal Shumate 16:15 Well, I yes, I think I think there are exceptions to people that with people that actually came in to, specifically to do that kind of connection. But for most people, you you meet, you need to be drawn into the what I would call it spiritual curiosity. Okay, so if you're, if you're, if you're, if you wonder, what is this? And you know, I mean, I would think that a majority of people wonder about, you know, why they're here on this planet at this time, and what their purpose in life is, and, and such like that, you know, the big existential questions that people have, but I think that the basis of all evolution is spiritual curiosity, that you want, you have a, you have an innate internal sense that there is something else and you want to find out what that something else is. And it can be drawn, you know, depending on your state of evolution, it can be drawn into a religious movement, you can be drawn into, you know, higher consciousness type movements, you can be drawn into meditation, you can be drawn into all kinds of things. I mean, there's 7 billion people on the planet, and there's 7 billion ways in which we can access this information. Yeah. Brandon Handley 17:44 100%. And that's why like, I was definitely catching, catching your language saying, Hey, this is what you know, in my experience, this is what's been valid for me. Right, I'm hearing you say that. But what I think is also interesting, too, is that, you know, so here you are, you're, you know, you're in the military, how long were you in the military? And, and kind of what was your experience while you were seeking through that we sharing your experiences of seeking through that? Or was that kind of a solo experience for you? Well, Mikal Shumate 18:14 I was in the military for three years, nine months at 26 days. Counting, right, so I did a minority term where I enlisted when I was 17. And I got out on my 21st birthday. So Unknown Speaker 18:31 it was Mikal Shumate 18:34 it was a process of working out. Or at least at least, the beginning of working out things from my childhood, in the military. It provided it provided a structure for me. It provided discipline, Unknown Speaker 18:59 and Mikal Shumate 19:02 gave me a chance to discover what I was capable of doing as a person. And that I was capable of going through this training and such like that. But more More importantly, what it was it was a mechanism for, for my future. In the fact that at the time, they had the GI Bill, well, they still have gi Yu GI Bill, but at the time. The GI Bill was very generous. And when I got out of the Navy, after about two years of, you know, flopping around and in society, I thought, you know, I want to I want to get an education, you know, I'd be the first person in my family to get a college education. And so the GI Bill help you do that. And, of course, when you go to college, what happens there is it's not about necessarily the subject matter. It's about the exposure to all the different things That at that time was probably the best way to broaden your horizons to expand your perspective on the world. Nowadays with the internet, it's a whole different story, because there's so much information available on the internet that you have a world education, you know, just by sitting in your, in your home, you know, but for me at that time, that was a, it was a mechanism that took me in to set me up for how I was going to operate in the business world and make a living and that sort of thing, at the same time, giving me opportunities, because where I went to school was up in the Monterey Peninsula for two years, and then up in Sonoma State University, for another three years. It gave me an opportunity to be exposed to a lot of different things, culturally different people, and become aware of other types of spiritual movements. It was a time of the Maharishi doing his thing. So I got exposed to that I got exposed to people that were interested in different spiritual paths, different gurus and things like that, because it was a lot of influence from the east coming in, at the time. So in that in those five, six years that I was hanging around in that environment, I got exposed to a lot of different philosophies, a lot of different perspectives and things like that. And each one of those things, gave me a piece of the puzzle. Brandon Handley 21:38 Sure, sure. And that's pretty cool. How you're the first you like that you're the first new college, college graduate, right? And in your family taking kind of advantage of that mechanism for a future, let's talk about, like, how you're talking about the idea of, you know, going in getting that education, but the education, you know, and, you know, like, you keep saying, you know, in my experience, right, and my experience, you know, going back to school, after you've had some world experience makes that education a little bit, a little bit more applicable, right. If you just go from if you just go from school to school, you're just continuously learning, you don't have some real world application. So what you're sharing is that you were able to go, you know, finish up school, go to the military, you know, like you said, flop around a little bit. And then when you went back to school, you were able to kind of learn some things that you could actually apply to the real world. Is that how I'm picking that up? Yeah. And then it's pretty neat. Like how you were exposed to all these different types of new philosophies or philosophies. I think that during during the time that you were growing up in that period where we're new to the United States, right? Yes. What was your What was your personal background prior to even jumping into these these Eastern philosophies? Were you a Christian? Mikal Shumate 23:04 Yeah, we was Catholic. I'm the old guy. So I'm the oldest of nine children. Guess what, guess what religion? We were. Right. Right. Brandon Handley 23:16 Right. That's fair. So it wasn't Mormon. Yes. Were you? Did you know? Did you break away from that faith while you're studying all these others, to go off on your own and figure it out yourself? Mikal Shumate 23:28 Actually, I broke away from from Catholicism when I was about seven years old. that I had, I had an experience that kind of made me stop and think and look, it's like, you know, this has always been part of my character to, you know, wonder about things. So, one Sunday, we were getting ready to leave for church. And I think we were there was like, four or five children in the family at that time. And I just put on Sunday clothes, all the good clothes and all that sort of thing. And I and I would walk it outside. I was I'm six foot five now, which is shrunk from six foot six. And I was so I was a tall, gangly, uncoordinated kid. And I stumbled on the way out, stepping down the porch, and skinned my knee. And I tore my pants. And my father just got furious with me about it. And I couldn't understand why he was so mad about it. No, it wasn't that I tore my new clothes and things. He says, We can't go to church with you looking like that. And I thought, why not? Because why does Why does God care what I look like? And that just started me looking seriously at Catholicism and things. You know, and religions in general, over over my lifetime to see what it is that you know, that was that made sense of what didn't make sense. And so that was that was that was the initial point right there that was early in my life. Brandon Handley 25:16 Yeah, I mean, that's definitely young to be breaking away from your own kind of foundations right or even your family structure. So that's pretty cool. Let's, um, let's talk a little bit about, you know, the idea that you've got this mechanism for achieving awakening and enlightenment, right, let's talk a little bit about maybe what we can find inside of the book, blue collar, enlightenment. Mikal Shumate 25:36 Okay, well, the, the, the essential point is that the, there's a, there's a whole process that I go through in the book to get to this point, but the essential point is, is that the, the best state of being is to be present. Totally present for the experience of your life. And what keeps us from being present is our memories, which are, which we indulge in the thoughts of our past, actions and, and, and things like that. And that's most its most destructive and most seriously understood. If you think about times, when things that happen to you, and it just rolls around in your head and rolls around and just won't let go will leave you alone, it just, you're just stuck back there at that moment in time. Well, the past is the past, it's gone, there's nothing you can do to change it, you can reiterate yourself experience within your mind as long as you want, it's not going to change anything in the future hasn't happened yet. So that's it, that's a you know, the reality is, is that we live our life, in moments by moments by moments. And so if we can be present for the moment, then what happens is everything changes because at that point, we are connected to our core self. And we are able to be guided to that thing, which is the most appropriate for us to be Brandon Handley 27:31 what would you say some of the mechanisms are specifically to stay president way? How do you how do you break out of, of, you know, living in the past or in the future and bringing yourself to be fully present? Mikal Shumate 27:44 Well, it is a it is a actually a very simple thing that is hard to do. That's what I find about the truth about most things is they're very simple. It's just that they seem to be hard to do. So what I was, you know, I I trained in for about 10 years in India, learning different kinds of meditations and processes and things like that. And one of the most influential people on that kind of brought me to the Enlightenment moment was a couple of people called, well, it started out with oneness universities, where I studied with Sri Bhagwan Shri Rama were the founders of that his son tree mine stopped. Unknown Speaker 28:45 You can just go with a son, Mikal Shumate 28:47 he and his wife prekmurje have taken over the, you know, the university and combine their operations to into what's called Unknown Speaker 29:06 one one world Academy. Mikal Shumate 29:12 It doesn't make any difference. What what he what he showed me was that there are only two states of being that you can possibly be in. You're either in, you're in a state of being happy or you're in a state of being stressed. So, understanding that what isn't if you take a look at what is it you can do for yourself to resolve stress in your life. The most effective thing that you can do is calm the mind. And how you learn to calm the mind. The best way that I know is to learn how to be silent, which is is what is what we call it meditation. Okay, so if you if you Put yourself in a position where you can be called, where you can slow your process down. And your awareness can watch the mind, then what happens when you start watching the mind is it starts, it doesn't like to be watched. So it will stop chitter chattering, in this stopping chitter chatter will happen a little bit at a time. And as you persist in the process, it becomes more and more and more until you can sit and be in silence. In in when you're sitting in Venus as your total awareness and experience of what of what is there for you. And that's, that's how you get to that point. After that, it's, you know, there's all kinds of things that can happen for you, who become aware of, in fact, you know, science is actually catching up with spirituality now. They're, they're aware that everything in the universe is connected. Well, all of us are connected to each other. What I do affects you, what you do affects me on some, at some degree in some level. And so when we're able to be in that space of silence, we're able to be in a place of total connectivity. And therefore we have access to the field of consciousness, which then can out of which we can then create whatever it is that we want. The reality is, is that we're doing that all the time. We just don't know that. That's the we're creating our life. We're, you know, as they say, we're co creators of the experience. Brandon Handley 31:51 Yeah. 100%. I think that were, I love that you got the opportunity to spend, you know, 10 years in India, right. Do you think I mean, just out of curiosity, do you think that your experience is still possible for somebody else today? To go back? Well, Mikal Shumate 32:06 it wasn't 10 continuous years, it was over a period of 10 years. Okay, gotcha, Brandon Handley 32:11 gotcha. Well, I mean, even Mikal Shumate 32:15 the most time I spent there was like about six weeks. Okay. Is it possible? Absolutely. Okay. You know, it given the current pandemic condition, we have to get through that. And then once we travel again, right, yes. All those things in India are still there, right? If you feel drawn to that, Brandon Handley 32:36 right. 100% 100% I mean, you're you're out there. I think Monterey is got some places out there. I was just out there in LA not too long ago, where they've got the Self Realization Foundation, right. Yogananda Mikal Shumate 32:51 fellowship, Brandon Handley 32:52 fellowship. That's, Mikal Shumate 32:53 that's in Encinitas. That's where I used to live. Brandon Handley 32:55 Yes. I mean, you're right down. Did you did you did you spend some time there? So, okay, I mean, yeah. Okay. Mikal Shumate 33:02 Most, most the time it was my biggest exposure was when I was young, you know, and we actually we, it's, it's actually, there's a state park there called Swamis beach. And that's, that that's because the locals used to call the place to Swamis place, you know? Who was there? Yeah. pazza Yogananda was a great influence on me very early in my life. Okay, his Brandon Handley 33:31 book, right? I actually just ordered it. I've never read it. And I said, Fine. You know, I'll go ahead and read it. Yeah, it's, um, I don't know if you know this, but Steve Jobs actually handed out that book on his deathbed. So what was the Yeah, Steve Jobs died. He gave everybody in attendance, a copy of that book? Mikal Shumate 33:49 Yeah. So I thought that was it. There's a lot of there's a lot to be learned from that. That's one of the one of the things that I read when I was younger, right. Brandon Handley 34:02 You talked about, you know, just jumping back a little bit in the in being in the military, and processing, like kind of some childhood stuff. Was there anything like in there? What would you say you had the process? to kind of get through that, how did you do it? Unknown Speaker 34:22 Well, Mikal Shumate 34:32 this is a lot of things. Probably just, it just, it just gave me an opportunity to grow up, you know, to to transition out of childhood behaviors into a more disciplined adult behavior. At the same time, I recognized after a couple of years, that I didn't want to spend my life doing this. So I knew that Did you know that this was just a one time thing, it really was an opportunity for me to get away from home. My father was very abusive. When, when I got big enough that I could square off against them, he stopped being physically abusive to me, and just mentally abusive to me. And actually, it was so, so intense that I actually left home. When I was 16 years old, I left home. And but, you know, after a few months, out there on your own living at friends, homes, and that sort of thing, you know, it's like, oh, what are you gonna do with your life? Boy? Well, that's what I say, Well, you know, I could join the Navy. Brandon Handley 35:49 Nice, nice. Well, look, I mean, you got it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, good for you to kind of kind of get out of there and away from that, right, split off from there. And I'm sure that that has a lot to do with what you needed to process kind of going counter that. And even kind of going forward, right? That's not the type of thing that just that just falls away super easily. So thanks for Thanks for answering that one. You know, you talk about the calming the mind silent meditation. And I'm just trying to imagine you out there working in the construction industry, pausing in the middle of the day, taking some deep breaths and saying no mistake or something like that. How did that how, how were you able to, you know, weave this into practical application on the job and that sort of thing. Just curious how it shows up there for you? Well, Mikal Shumate 36:36 it's not like it was a continuous day to day process for most of my life. Once, once you achieve the ability to do this, then it's fairly easy to exist in that state. It doesn't mean that you don't have thoughts that the, the achievable goal is, like 70 to 80% of the time, you're in this state of presence, not 100% of the time, if I was there, 100% of the time, I probably would have no reason to stay here. You know, if I drop the body and go do something else. Yeah. Right. But so it's not like it's all the time and it we're talking about a process here for me, that has spanned a period of Firstly, 60 years. Michael, would Brandon Handley 37:40 you say there's any way to accelerate that, Mikal Shumate 37:42 I would say that now is the time to accelerate that, that that it is the energy and everything is changed the dynamic, the the the the push for ascension into higher dimensions and things like that, have brought in an opportunity for people to, to make these transformations in their life, and do it in a very short period of time. Brandon Handley 38:10 What would you say? There's evidence of that, right? Where, where? Where would somebody See that? I guess, what's the basis of that statement for you? Mikal Shumate 38:18 Well, it has to do with all the people I'm in contact with, and the things that I am continuously studying. But also from, from my experience, because it didn't all come together for me until, you know, 20 2017 2018 that's when I had my transformational experience. And, and discovered what this actually feels like. I mean, you know, this is really, we're talking about, we're talking about the mechanism for, for experience on this planet is feeling. So, you know, you pay attention to your feelings and how you feel how you how your body feels, how your attitude is, and you can accelerate this process now. And the only way that you're going to know how long that's going to take is to start doing it. But I'm, I'm very confident in in my observation of my environment and my experiences out in the world these days. shows me that yes, it's possible to make these transformations and make it you don't need to spend Unknown Speaker 39:43 years in India Mikal Shumate 39:44 a lifetime or you don't need to spend lifetimes doing Brandon Handley 39:47 this. Sure. Sure. You got a couple things in there that that are intriguing to me, right. One is that you're an older male, right? And and, you know, born born and raised Western civilization, a different generation. And it's this idea of males dealing and with their feelings, right? How did you kind of come about that spot yourself to say, holy shit, I gotta I gotta pay attention to my feelings. Right? This is, this is this is the key. And then you know, so finding that key. So it's like you find the key, and you're looking for a lock, right? You're like, you're like, holy shit, here it is, the feeling is the key. What does this unlock and sounds like that, that unlocks this kind of an ongoing, enlightening experience, but just I just want to hear how you were able to get there and especially share it out with the males out there? Well, Mikal Shumate 40:45 I have to say, first of all, I have been very emotionally aware, from very early in life. A lot of emotion was not very positive emotion. But it, it my awareness of how it affects my body and such like that. I've been aware of that for a long time, I consider myself to be very male, female, balanced. It's, I'm unusual for males. Most, most, most people are one way or the other. But I think that simply the process of being aware of what's there and acknowledging the truth of what's there is what transforms your ability to have, you know, a total experience. Brandon Handley 41:55 Agreed, right, agreed 100%. But again, you know, it's, I guess, how did you be? What do you have a point in your life where you feel like you were always kind of emotionally aware and how it was impacting your body? Your daily life? Isn't a pinpoint for that, right? Because, again, this is something that I see over and over, especially in the western male civilization, right? Not understanding what emotions that they're feeling to begin with, right, nor understanding, you know, kind of the impact on the body, right? The, you know, if we look at alchemy, right, we are walking chemical creation factories, right, and what we feel, creates those chemicals that impact our body that impact, you know, our magnetic field and resonance, right, and on and on and on. So my question to you again, is, was there a point where you said, This, is it right, or you began to recognize those feelings and emotions and the impact that they were having? Or is it just always innate for you? And that's, that's Mikal Shumate 43:03 its primary, it's primarily an eight. And there was a point where I recognize the impact of emotions on the body. And interestingly enough, it was when I was in college. It is one experience of many that stands out for me. I had been in a relationship and then had the gone through a relationship breakup. And it really hit my sore plexus. To the point where I had gut pain, like, I just couldn't understand why, you know, it was just, the emotion was so intense. And interestingly enough, the solution was hugging a tree. Somebody told me, you know, yeah, tell me. Tell me, the trees, trees will help you release this emotion. So I said, Okay, fine. I, you know, I've had enough of this. And I found a nice, I think it was a nice redwood tree or something like that big Brandon Handley 44:17 tree, Mikal Shumate 44:18 and just grabbed the whole thing and then held on for an hour or so. And it actually worked. Brandon Handley 44:25 Wow. Well, you know, I've definitely seen that type of thing. I've got a bunch of trees in my backyard. I'm like, I kind of want to go try it out myself. But I want to do it in private, right, like, Okay, this tree and I have a moment, please. So, I enjoy that. And I also just, I see a sea kind of, and I'm familiar with this type of someone's this, this this gut punch right? Where your your feelings are just all centered right there. And just for that one moment, you're kind of your hidden pain, right? That solar plexus, right? Yes, and there's just there's nothing but that moment which, in honesty, you know, if you, you know, if I reflect back on I'm like, there's a moment where I was truly present to myself right truly present to what was happening within me. At that time, I wouldn't have addressed it. In the same way, I would have just addressed it as this sucks. But at the same time, that's what I was present for was just that feeling emotion and listening to my body. Right, and just kind of coming, you know, surrendering to that moment? space. So how can you use good ideas? If you're going through this type of thing? Michael, just I mean, another one, if you said there was a keystone to your entire program, you know, sounds like sounds a little bit like, you know, calling the mind awareness be present? Are there any other key stones or just really revelatory moments? What do you do even recall? Like, when you recognize the whole puzzle had kind of come together for you? You know, you're talking 2017 18 you're like, Eureka. Mikal Shumate 46:07 Well, yes, there, there was a thing I was. I was studying at the One World Academy. And, and they were taking us through a process. And that process was called Unknown Speaker 46:31 the Mikal Shumate 46:40 minds, the mind slips. Oh, mercy. Google, will be Brandon Handley 46:55 able to edit that out. And yeah, just a space. But there's a process that you were going through, you don't remember a specific process? And that's all right, can you talk a little bit about like, what happened during the process, and then maybe, what the well actually what Mikal Shumate 47:09 happens, what happens in the process is they they take you through a meditation where your where your consciousness has expanded out into what they call the, the limitless field of consciousness. And you can, if you can experience that space, then what happens is, there is a space where there are no limitations. And if you can focus on one single thing and focus on a clear intention for that, then you can create that intention manifesting. So Brandon Handley 47:59 do you have a recollection of maybe the first time you realize was this the first time you realize that you were capable of being the CO creator and manifesting those things? Or do you realize that before? Mikal Shumate 48:11 Well, what manifested what made this sink in it actually like to be honest with you took me it took me months to really realize what had to happen. But at the time, I had a very serious cancer related growth on my cheek. It was it covered it covered a good portion of my cheekbone, and it was probably a couple inches in diameter. And so my, my wish my intention was that my face heel, and this, I mean, this looked like a charred burned mass on my face. And but we did that meditation is the great soul sync meditation. That's what is called the great soul sync meditation. So available on YouTube. Brandon Handley 49:08 We got that one out right now. Right? Hey, guys, here's the secret. Oh, wait, I forget what it is. But good luck out there. Mikal Shumate 49:17 Hey, I'm 75 years old. What do you want, you know? But anyway, that was about four days before the course ended. By the time I left, at the end of those four days, that great big mass had shrunk to about the size of a dime. And three days after I got back home, which was about five days later, it was completely healed, because I had an appointment with my dermatologist. And he looked at that and he said, My God is incredible. And so it's like okay, Miracle, right? Well, we can create miracles. And that's when I discovered that process and what it felt like to be connected into that space. I mean, this is the most important thing is what what it felt like. Because when you have a feeling, you now have something you can relate to other than just a thought. So you can, you can be aware of that thing when you when you get back there again, you go, Okay, I'm back here again, Brandon Handley 50:38 Michael, what's up? What's the miracle feeling? Right? Like, I mean, what does that feel like? Tell us a little about Mikal Shumate 50:43 that. It's, it's, uh, it was, it was, it was a soul premiere, it was a slow dawning process, that of what actually happened after I had a few months to, to, you know, live with it, and be aware of it and have people talking to me about it, and that sort of thing. And, and it's kind of like, okay, yeah, this is something that is possible. And, from that, in the experience of learning how to meditate to the point where I can slow down in inactive consciousness where I can be present, you know, those things came all out of that experience. And for me, it's, it's a, it's easy to recognize when my thoughts are running. And I can stop the train. And I can be present, I can move, actually, you know, I mean, this is, this also involves some physical awareness in the heart is the key to the whole thing. So it's like, there is a, that's where our connection to sources, there's a little, little tiny space in the heart, where that little spark of of source resides in us. And so connecting with that source connecting with that spot, and you're able to do that by being present, you've moved, you can actually, actually, you can move your consciousness anywhere in your physical body that you want. I don't know how much time we have. But I, I learned, I learned that when I went through the string, II St. Earhart seminar training back in the 70s, early 80s. We had an instructor who had a scar on his face, and it was an ugly scar. And he says, I'm going in this weekend to have had this scar produced fixed. He says, I'm going to do it without anesthesia. And he says, and that's because if you because I know that if you put your consciousness right there at the point of pain, pain has the job is to tell you that something's going on here that needs your attention. If you put your attention there, if you put your awareness and your consciousness at that point, he will not hurt to pain will have recognized pain will recognize that it's done its job and it will not hurt. This guy did that process, I discovered the truth of that as, as in most things, through my own experience, when I cut myself and slice my finger in, you know, a work related kind of thing. And, you know, I bashed it, it was throbbing in it, so it's okay. Little mind pops up and says, Well, what about that thing? That guy said, Oh, well, let's try that. Okay, so I just focused my attention, put my awareness and my consciousness into that point. And it's not hurting. Because it Okay, this works. Brandon Handley 53:52 Right, this works. And I think that I think that a lot of times, right? It's, it's when somebody tells you something like that, or teaches you, you know, you kind of want to call bs you like, I will bs until you actually experience it yourself. Right. And it's one of those things that can only happen internally, and it's subjective. So it's difficult for somebody else to outside of you believe that right? unless they've had that experience themselves. Mikal Shumate 54:21 Yeah, I think I think it's where healthy skepticism comes in. Unknown Speaker 54:24 We don't for sure, Mikal Shumate 54:25 allow the possibility that this thing may be, in fact true. But don't just become a believer actually branch out and be in become a knower right Unknown Speaker 54:41 now and yeah, no, Brandon Handley 54:42 this thing is true. For sure, for sure. You know, when you're talking about being a co creator, you know, I was definitely skeptical of that kind of thing before until, you know, I've had some experiences myself where there's just been co creation, right, like, Wow, I can't believe that happened almost identically to What I saw my mind with great ease and just kind of showed up in my life. Right? And and that's, I mean, it's pretty crazy. And you have to be willing to look for it right? You have to kind of be willing to look for the evidence of that. And all those other things, one more thing for you kind of before we tie it up, right? This is the book is for ordinary people. Right? And I'm just curious what you mean by ordinary people, Mikal Shumate 55:26 people that have no spiritual training, particularly spiritual training. I try to keep all the blue stuff out of the book. No, it's because I don't want to put people in a position where they have to decide whether this stuff is real or not, you know, I don't want to turn people off, it's a process a very simple process of understanding our relationship to our existence on this planet, and how we can change our experience of that get into the point where we're living in that, what krishnaji calls a beautiful state as compared to be in a stressful state. So if you're experiencing negative emotions, you're angry, you're, you're sad, you're having you know, those kinds of experiences, you're stressed. That's one way to live life. The other way to live life is to, to recognize that those things are just thoughts in your mind. And it's not you. So that you can and then to recognize an experience that you can be something other than that. And, you know, most people have had some kinds of, you know, really positive experiences in their life that they can relate to, to that sense, that feeling of being that way. And in my book, I take you through all the background understanding of how to get to the point where you can know that this is possible, and then it's up to you to to do it. Brandon Handley 57:07 That's awesome. That's awesome. I love it, man. What you know, and why now? Right? Why? Why? Why this book? Why now for you? Mikal Shumate 57:16 Just, it's how it evolved? Brandon Handley 57:18 Yeah. Okay, Mikal Shumate 57:19 I gotta do what I got to the point where I, where I understood it. I just was, I was just was guided, to be honest with you, I was just guided to, okay. You know, I've been, I've been writing these pieces and things like that, you know. And now it's time to put all this stuff together. And because as I go, as I go along, in my training and my experiences and things like that I you know, kept it not necessarily a journal, but I kept a log would write things, things would be inside ones be inspired by I'd write it down. And so all that stuff I brought together into the book, and even the name of the book came to me, you know, I was just like, I was told, look all enlightenment. Let's, let's name your book. Okay. Brandon Handley 58:10 I think I think it's a great name for the book. And I, you know, I'm pretty excited. I haven't read it yet myself. But I think that I think that what you're talking about is going to speak to the blue collar people to those ordinary people to somebody who's maybe had one or two experiences and doesn't know how to kind of pin it down, right doesn't know how to recreate those experiences. And it sounds to me like, you're helping someone to, again, decipher the mysteries, right? And some of those mysteries are what was that feeling that I was feeling and how did this happen? Right, and then being able to pin it down, recreate it and and implement it for the rest of their lives that said about what it boils down to? Mikal Shumate 58:48 That's it's a path to do that. Yeah, for sure. Why can you just all you have to do is do the work? Brandon Handley 58:54 Do the work, right. I mean, that's, that's all that's always the challenge, right? That's the challenge is actually doing the damn things. Right. Dude is a simple, Mikal Shumate 59:02 simple process. That is hard to do. For sure. So this Brandon Handley 59:07 helps you to do that. Where Where can I send people to find out more about you and this book? Mikal Shumate 59:14 Okay, well, I have a website. It's love, like consciousness.com. My book is available to my website. It's available on Amazon. It's available on Melbourne press, who is the publisher of it? And there's a number of things on the website. recently have happened. articles that have been published and that sort of thing that might interest people. Brandon Handley 59:43 Okay. Would you call those kind of just add ons to the book, right? Be like, hey, since I've written the book, you might want to you might you might want to find out about this. Right. Right. Right. Okay. Well, great supplemental material can be found on love, light and consciousness as well as the full book, Michael, I just want to say thank you so much. much for joining us today on spiritual dopes Ben great. Mikal Shumate 1:00:03 Hey, if you send me a link, I'll put it on my website. Brandon Handley 1:00:07 Absolutely. Absolutely. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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

Summary: In this special episode, COMMERCE NOW teams up with Kiosk Marketplace to discuss Self-Service Kiosks and how they are quickly becoming ubiquitous with museums and airports using them for years and McDonald’s successful push in the QSRs industry. Now add the convergence of consumer preference for self-service, COVID related avoidance of human to human interaction and retailers automating tasks to free staff for more involved duties and you have self-service kiosks truly hitting its stride.  Related Content:  Video: QSR drives Seamless Checkout  QSR Infographic K-TWO Kiosk: Offer Customers a Transformed In-Store Experience Related Links: LinkedIn Profiles- Carl Von Sydow Elliot Maras  DieboldNixdorf.com KioskMarketplace.com Transcription: Elliot Maras:                       00:16                     Welcome to Kiosks and the Self-Service Consumer Journey. I'm Elliot Maras, the editor of Kiosk Marketplace. Joining me today is Carl von Sydow, director of Self-Service for the Americas at Diebold Nixdorf. Self-Service Kiosks are quickly becoming ubiquitous while museums and airports have been using them for several years. In the last two years, McDonald's has made a big splash with kiosks in the QSR industry. Many other restaurants and retailers have since come on board. When you add the convergence of consumer preference for self-service, COVID related avoidance of human to human interaction and retailers automating tasks to free staff for more involved duties, self-service kiosks are truly hitting their stride. Retailers from a wide variety of industries are looking harder at self-service. Dave & Buster's for example, is using kiosks to power up playing cards and food ordering. IKEA uses kiosks in their bistros for food ordering and grocery retailers.                                                                                 The always open proverbial essential retailers are expanding food courts and leveraging kiosks in their food journeys. 2020 was a challenging year for everyone, but the kiosks have played a big role in meeting the need for safety. COVID-19 has heightened demand for self-service as a way to improve customer safety. While much of the technology that went into action had already been developed prior to COVID-19, the technology found new use as customers scrambled to improve their safety. The pace of kiosk introductions has never been faster than it is today, with no end in sight. All indications point to self-service kiosks playing a bigger role than ever going forward. Carl, why did we see an increase in kiosk journeys over the past year? Carl von Sydow:                02:08                     Hi, Elliot. Nice to meet you and a very good introduction to the topic. You covered a lot of good areas there. And some of them you mentioned already is the answer to that question. We have had kiosks all over the place for quite a lot of years in airports and museums as we said, but what I feel right now is that the concept of a kiosk is merging with the traditional self-checkout solution that we have seen primarily within grocery retailers. But these two are now merging together, offering new, much more exciting combinations and form factors et cetera for self service. And then we have the drivers, like you mentioned, we have experienced the last 14 months with COVID, which has really pushed self-service to the front of a lot of retailers mind. Elliot Maras:                       03:11                     Tell me why are new retailers in different industries looking more closely at self-service kiosks? Carl von Sydow:                03:18                     Yeah. We have several examples, you mentioned two of them, Dave & Buster's, IKEA, we have several different grocery customers as well. The business model is not only self-checkouts anymore for traditional grocery retailer. They want to add more different customer journeys. It's all about addressing different customer journeys. We use that word quite often in our daily work. Nowadays, it starts with the customer journey and within a customer demography for a typical story, you can have several different subgroups and you need to identify what different subgroups do you have perhaps in your business and try to find the best customer journeys for that little subgroup to make them come to your store or restaurant or whatever it is more often than elsewhere.                                                                                 And the mix between kiosks and self-service and form factors offer this opportunity now in a completely different way than before. You mentioned IKEA. IKEA is adding so many different customer journeys now for self-service with kiosks, not only in the bistro, but elsewhere, there are a lot of exciting projects going on there. Just identify groups of customers and that customer journey and then find the right solution for them and then implement it. So it's somehow... It is driven by customer journey expectations, customer expect higher variety of customer journeys when they go to the store, but also by technology. We have the technology now to offer different customer journeys and form factors. So it's a combination I would say that drives a lot of retailers into this area now. Elliot Maras:                       05:16                     Well, speaking of technology Carl, what new innovations do you see enhancing kiosks? Carl von Sydow:                05:24                     Yeah. That's also very interesting question. A lot of... Since we start with the fact that we are sort of merging kiosks to tradition kiosks with some kind of self-service, self-checkout with perhaps payment, identifying products or ordering products on the screen, we are adding technologies like RFID for fashion retailers or reading different barcode types in a different way than before. Identifying the customer traditionally is done with loyalty cards or programs like that. But now we can also add, with the help of our mobile companies that has pushed face recognition into every man's telephone right now, mobile phones. So adding face recognition as a tool for verifying age, for age restricted item, that is a great enhancing of the kiosk/self-service solution because otherwise, age verification drives staff intervention and take... Increase the time of your customer journey. You want to eliminate all these pain points and if you can find technology that makes that customer journey easier and faster for the customer, it's also a great thing.                                                                                 Another area is for QSR ordering. Imagine that you are a mother and you have three kids and you go to your local or your preferred QSR restaurant. Instead of ordering the same and go through the whole order every time, with the different meals for the kids and all that, with face recognition connected to a loyalty program where we have approved that you can do this, you can have the kiosk identifying you as a customer, "Welcome back. Do you want to use the same order as you did last time?" And then we have the whole order for the family already there and you just press OK. A lot of these things is to make the customer journey faster. A lot of these things are coming strongly now. Elliot Maras:                       07:39                     That's a lot of different technologies, that you're up to speed on. But tell me, what self-service innovations has your company introduced in the last year? Carl von Sydow:                07:51                     Yeah, the pace of development for self-service have raised. I would say the last few years, but even more so the last 24 months, as I said, we have seen this merger between the traditional kiosk to self-service. And just recently, a few weeks ago, we launched our new completely new portfolio of self-service. Which range now from the traditional baskets to bag with grocery self-checkout, with everything that goes with it to a 32-inch kiosk-like-self-service station that you can dress exactly as you want. It could be a self checkout in a grocery store, food ordering kiosk, or you have all these different form factors in the same portfolio, same software platform, everything is run by the same technology. And we are also adding, apart from that modularity and flexibility, we have taken a step away. Traditionally kiosk and in moreso self-checkout have been pretty locked in when it comes to software and solution. You have to buy our software, if you buy our hardware, we have taken a step away from that. So we have a much more open approach now to our customers.                                                                                 We have different software strategies. You can go full on with all our software package or suites, you can go hardware only and you can also go the middle way, where we will offer some of these traditional functions as modules with APIs. So the customer can decide whatever form then they want to use themselves, and then we can help them. They don't need to develop all these self-service specific modules like produce recognition, age verification, security scales, cash management, all these are separate modules that we can offer our customers as a separate software module with APIs. So, that's a big shift from only a few years ago.                                                                                 We are selling self-checkouts in high numbers. We also know about frictionless shopping. Of course, that is a very interesting area. We are monitoring it. We are looking into it, but we don't have anything really in the pipeline right now because it's a little bit too early. As we see it, retailers are asking for a solution that works today... I mean technology is quite expensive to do with frictionless self-service. So just in short, those are some of the innovations that we have just recently launched. And we'll continue to launch new innovations this year. Elliot Maras:                       10:49                     From a short-term perspective what customer verticals do you see expanding the most in self-serving? Carl von Sydow:                10:58                     Our experience over the last six, 12 months, especially here in the U.S., there have been a little bit ahead of us in Europe, but right now we get a lot of interests from fashion retailers that is definitely growing and also convenience stores, C-stores. Again, coming back to the possibility with a little bit different form factors of self-checkouts or cell service stations than before, a traditional basket bags self-checkout doesn't fit in a small C-store environment. But now with kiosks/self-checkout in one, C-stores all of a sudden see this as a great opportunity for them. So we have a lot of C-stores customers looking for self-service in their small stores right now. So that's two very easy identifiable verticals that are looking at self-service much more than only two years ago. Elliot Maras:                       12:04                     Well, tell me, Carl, what are your final thoughts today on the kiosk market? Carl von Sydow:                12:10                     Again, I'm coming back to the customer journey. We try not to just sell technology or to show the customers, "Here, we have the products, which one do you want?" We try to go a little bit deeper and understanding what the customer need. Why do you need? Why do you see this need? What do you want to offer your customers? What customer journeys do you have? And we call all that store advisory service. So we go in and try to help the customer identify exactly what they need, the mix of self-service solutions that would fit their needs the best. And then come to the point here, you have different technology solutions that would fit your customer journey. So by identifying and working with the journeys, you will have a much better implementation of your solutions. And that will grow more and more. It's all about customer journey.                                                                                 It's not so much technology, first it's customer journeys. That is one big thing. And what I also expect to see on the kiosk market is even more alternatives of form factors of kiosks, outdoor kiosks, indoor kiosks and other features that we can add. The alternatives and options are limitless. More or less, the technology goes so fast, but yeah, those are a few things that I would expect to see on the kiosk market the next two years, perhaps? Elliot Maras:                       13:47                     Carl, thank you. Thank you so much for your input. Clearly, this is an exciting time in the kiosk industry. This has been Kiosks and The Self-Service Consumer Journey. Thank you all for joining us.  

Nowadays, almost everyone is working from home due to the pandemic. Turning your home or a part of it into your office space is going to be a must. What are the DOs and the DON'Ts'  in making your office space at the comfort of your home? In today’s episode of the Live Your Dreams Awake podcast, I will share with you how to optimize your office or your workspace at home. Your office space or workspace should not be taken for granted because you will stay there for long hours of work and we want creativity and productivity to start flowing. Grab a pen and a paper to start taking notes of the important things that I will be sharing with you today! Enjoy!   HIGHLIGHTS OF WHAT WE COVER DURING THIS EPISODE: The use of cacti in your office Your position with the door The unnecessary things in your workspace Having a sturdy chair that you can sit on Saving some space on your desktop And many more!   LINKS & RESOURCES:  Feng Shui Your Office   CONNECT WITH PATRICIA: Pop-Up Powerhouse Party Instagram YouTube Website Twitter

As a punishing linebacker for the Texas Longhorns, Robert Killebrew delivered pain. Nowadays, however, as a physical therapist he’s all about relieving it.

Hi! It's day 4 of our Pronunciation Power-Up Mini-Course, and today's theme is brand names. Nowadays a lot of brands and companies are really big and well-known – so we’re going to practice pronouncing 50 of the biggest and most famous brand names. Remember, in your native language, you might pronounce these exact same names differently – because of the different pronunciation rules of your language. But when you’re in a conversation with an English speaker, you’ll want to modify your pronunciation and say these brand names the same way native English speakers would say them. All right, get ready to practice repeating after me – 50 brand names in English.   Thanks for practicing with me! Tomorrow is the final day of our mini-course, but if you want to continue training and improving your pronunciation, make sure to check out my American English Pronunciation Course, which has 30 lessons to help you even more. Inside it, you’ll practice all the sounds of the language – both in individual words and in sentences. I’ll give you tips to avoid pronunciation mistakes. We also cover linking words together and speaking with the right intonation, so that you can sound more natural when you speak English. If you want to see the lesson list for the American English Pronunciation Course, just click here see the topics you’ll learn and practice inside it. OK, I’ll say goodbye for now, and I hope to see you tomorrow for the last lesson in this mini-course – it’s a really good one. Take care!

David Segal is the founder of DAVIDsTEA and Mad Radish. During his time at DAVIDsTEA, he grew the company from a single store to a $200M brand. David left DAVIDsTEA in 2016 and started Mad Radish, a quick-service restaurant concept. In 2017, he was named one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40. Why did David leave his former company? How was he able to bounce back and achieve a higher level of success? Well, time to find out.On this episode of the Perfectly Mentored Podcast, David and Jason discuss what makes an entrepreneur, how important it is to accept the intangibles in business, and the whys and hows of work-life balance.Topics Covered:Who is David Segal? [00:19]How did you build a business without having prior knowledge about your main product? [10:53]How do you reconcile having to pitch into meetings with investors when the business isn’t moving at all? [15:35]What lessons did you learn from the experience of being so young yet having to pitch ideas in boardrooms? [19:48]From your experience growing DAVIDsTEA, which lessons can someone starting a business or looking to scale learn from the most? [21:42]How important is marketing and advertising to building a brand when it comes to your business? Why do you think so many business owners see it more as a cost rather than an investment? [26:43]What was the marketing strategy behind DAVIDsTEA? [28:22]There’s a story going around about DAVIDsTEA and Oprah. Can you share the real version and what was the thought behind it? [30:01]If you could go back in time and start DAVIDsTEA in this era instead, with all the technology available now, do you think it would have been easier for you? [32:46]Do you believe you could teach someone to be an entrepreneur? How do you define what an entrepreneur is and what’s your take on the current landscape? [36:42]How do you balance your personal affairs with the responsibility of building and running such a huge company? [41:36]Nowadays, taking downtime and breaks are given importance. When do you think that shift from work hard-put in the hours happened? [43:42]What’s your routine like? [45:12]Looking back, how important was mindset for all your success and what do you do to take care of that? [46:18]What advice would you give to entrepreneurs struggling with their mental health? [51:18]Did you face Impostor Syndrome? How did you handle that? [55:05]What tea would you recommend for entrepreneurs? What’s the best one for someone who wants to shift from coffee? [57:33]Connect with us:Perfectly Mentored InstagramWatch the Interviews on YouTubePerfectly Mentored FacebookConnect with David SegalInstagramTwitterConnect with Jason Portnoyjportnoy.comInstagramFacebookWant to see how Jason and his team can help you grow your business? CLICK HERE to book your

Hello, hello!! How are y'all, my super busy, high-vibing Vibers? I apologize for the delay today, BUT Arlo has been in midterms (and you college people know how it is

Nowadays it’s not just good enough to have a strong brand. Today’s customers want to know more about you—the creator. And we get that sometimes it can be a little scary. In this episode, Phoebe discusses tactics on how to add a bit more of your self to your brand, through things like Reels TikToks, virtual events and much more and how to step into your power, face your stage fright, and get comfortable on camera.    “This is what makes small businesses special, your story and YOU. This is why customers want to shop your product or your service, it’s because they are supporting you, and receiving a little slice of your special sauce in return.” [01:17]   Episode timestamps:  [0:44] Why it’s important to show up in your content [2:31] Ways you can show up for your business on social media [4:47] Growing your business through events [5:45] The art of a good business DM [7:33] The secret to combating stage fright   Sign up for Level Up Waitlist Show Notes 

Welcome to Tulsa Talks presented by Tulsa Regional Chamber. I’m your host Tim Landes. Annie Ellicott, my guest on this episode, has been singing most of her life. In elementary school she was a member of the Tulsa Youth Opera. Her first solo performance came at 15 as a Central High School student when she performed “Orange Colored Sky” made famous by Nat King Cole. By 16 she was doing paid gigs and has barely slowed down since. In 2016 she released her first album of original material, Lonesome Goldmine. There was a previous release of jazz standards in 2009 and hundreds of shows in between throughout the US and Europe.While living on the West Coast, Ellicott landed an appearance in a Jeff Goldblum concert that turned into many more shows. If you weren’t aware, yes, I’m talking about the actor who played The Fly, Jurassic Park’s Dr. Ian Malcolm and hosted a Disney+ show. She shares the story on how it came to be and what it was like in this conversation recorded Feb. 22 on Zoom.Nowadays when she’s not singing, Ellicott is using her vocal talents in voice acting. She voices the title character of the Soundbooth Theater audio dramedy “Space Buns.” Ellicott does the voice of Ruby Little aka Space Buns and also the voices of a couple of the mice inside Ruby’s head. She also serves as the songwriter for the series that is co-created by her friend Emily Labes. We feature Ellicott in our March issue, and writer Destiny Lyons has this to say about the show’s premise: “The dramedy’s main character, Ruby Little, aka Space Buns, is an aspiring comic book writer who struggles to balance reality and fantasy. After a freak accident the night Ruby is supposed to pitch her idea, the distinction between the two blur even more.”Ellicott discusses how the COVID-19 has impacted her musical career and how it’s opened the door to new opportunities like Space Buns that have forced her to grow as an artist. If you want to check out episodes of her new series and sign up to be notified when new episodes drop, visit soundbooththeater.com. A note, the artwork for Space Buns was created by Tulsa’s own Jeremy Luther, so be sure to check it out as well. I really enjoyed getting to know Annie and learning about her creative process. Be sure to check out the song after our conversation. More on that later. OK, let’s get this going. This is Tulsa Talks with Annie Ellicott. In “Space Buns” Annie Ellicott is not only the lead voice actor, but also the series’ songwriter. To close out this episode we’re sharing a song from the first episode. “The Three Visionarily Impaired Mice” was produced by Mark Kuykendall and is available as part of the episode at Soundbooththeater.com. Here is Annie Ellicott with “The Three Visionarily Impaired Mice.”

Join Mary Grothe as she welcomes an expert digital strategist, Christina Garnett. She brilliantly identified a way to create community engagement, listen to her audience, and build a newsfeed that people love. Nowadays, almost every business is exploring social media to increase engagement and online presence. We have to realize that social media is not a billboard, but a conversation starter. Social listening is a must. Engage more and not just listen to what people say about you. Think about what is your customer talking about, what could they be saying that is related to your industry, your brand, competitors, or products and services.Connect with Us!Quota Crusher™ PodcastMary GrotheChristina Garnett

We cover some heavy global matters on this week’s Arete podcast with Larry Quick: a man whose job it is to help companies understand how macro issues could affect their everyday business. The senior analyst and strategist (and acting MD) of Resilient Futures was incredibly insightful. He basically deconstructed the major systems of the world and explained why they are important to you, the business leader. Larry is a very well travelled man in both a geographical and a career sense. Originally from Perth, he served time in the army and spent a decade in the UK working in the fashion industry, before returning to Australia. He then worked as a sales manager before eventually founding an internet business well ahead of the time most people even had the internet. Nowadays he specialises in conditions analysis. Pre-COVID he was flying back and forth to the USA, presenting his ideas on macroeconomics, community economic development and how they fit into wider society. His methods were so effective that he managed to predict the GFC two years before it happened! There’s no doubt this man is worth listening to. In this episode you will learn: -Why it is important to understand global financial conditions -What our economy is currently threatened by -Digital saturation explained -How not going to uni helped Larry -How Larry battled leukemia and used it as a positive -Why life is too short to work yourself into the ground trying to build a legacy -The ‘value of work cycle’ explained -How environmental and social systems are collapsing -The dangers of the US printing more money than the entire GDP of Australia -How working from home can bring more value to local communities -How climate change is intertwined with the COVID economy -Why past information doesn’t have the currency it had before Extra Resources: Larry’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/larryquick/ Email Larry: md@resilientfutures.com Larry’s company website: www.resilientfutures.com Buy Larry’s book: “Disrupted: Strategy for Exponential Change” here Subscribe to future Arete podcasts at www.aretepodcast.com For a free copy of Richard Triggs’ best-selling book, Uncover the Hidden Job Market, go to: http://www.uncoverthehiddenjobmarket.com

Do you love your body?In this week’s episode, I talk with Andrea Ochoa, a holistic wellbeing coach, and self-love advocate. We talk about the importance of having a relationship with yourself, the problem with chasing quick fixes, and how to practice self-love. Together, we discussed:• Issues with the word ‘diet’ and how to break free from this unhealthy cycle• A mindful eating philosophy that works with our bodies, not against them• Utilising self-love to cultivate a relationship with our bodies and empower ourselves• Advice for navigating food labels to avoid consuming toxic chemicals and unhealthy ingredients• Pressure to conform to societal expectations and breaking free to find peaceAndrea is a former New Yorker who’s worked for Victoria's Secret, L’Oréal, Calvin Klein, and Carolina Herrera. A natural-born creative with an endless curiosity and ten years of corporateexperience in the beauty industry, Andrea shares her journey of learning to love her body. She opens up about feeling pressure to look a certain way, her take on mindful eating, and her actionable advice on loving yourself.Nowadays, Andrea lives in Bologna, Italy with her husband, immersing herself in the culture, language, and food after traveling the world for a year and a half. She’s innovating the self-development and wellness space with a fresh and artistic perspective, turning wellbeing into an approachable and fun lifestyle. She seamlessly integrates her creativity and life experiences to guide people to discover their paths for thriving in life. By infusing a joyful and wholesome approach, she makes the journey easy and fun.If you want to learn more about Andrea’s work, click here or check her Instagram, @andrea.c.ochoa.If you like today’s episode, please send me your feedback!With love, Crina

George Spasov joins us to discuss how Limechain is building secure, trusted and decentralized solutions using Blockchain and DLT.   George is a Blockchain Architect and a co-founder at LimeChain. Heading the technical team at LimeChain, George has experience in leading teams to deliver successful software projects for everyone - from startups like pCloud to international companies like IBM. During the past 3 years, he has consulted and designed the architecture of 50+ blockchain and DLT projects, while also remaining an active member of the public communities. He is now focused on transforming businesses and corporate processes using innovative solutions on Blockchain and DLT.   Nowadays he is focused on system design and architecture, product development, team leadership, and blockchain solutions development with technologies such as Ethereum, Hedera Hashgraph, Hypreledger, Baseline, Polkadot, Leading the innovation adoption at LimeChain, he is one of the well-known and recognizable influencers in the blockchain domain.   Links: LimeChain - https://limechain.tech/ LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/limechain/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/LimeChainHQ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/limechainhq

Dennis Yu is a search engine engineer who built the analytics at Yahoo! Nowadays he's the Founder and CEO of BlitzMetrics, where he has spent a billion dollars of other people's money on Facebook ads while learning how to build a certification for digital marketers. You can watch him on CNN, NPR, the LA Times, Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets. And he's going to hire another 200 people this year, since his goal is creating as many jobs as possible.

In this week’s show, Phil talks to Scott Turman, who has developed software and cryptographic systems over the last 25 years for some pretty big organisations such as NASA, Disney, Hilton and the US Department of Defence.   He is the founder of BrightRay Consulting which is a staffing and software solutions company that he formed 6 years ago.   Scott talks to Phil about making sure we achieve the worth for which we have worked by being as useful as possible and developing skills. He also discusses why we must gain mastery over our area of expertise.   KEY TAKEAWAYS:   TOP CAREER TIP Learn to be as useful as you can, and find an organization that will pay your fairly for the skills you can perform.   WORST CAREER MOMENT Scott was interviewed by someone he looked up to, and failed during the last stages of the interview. If successful, he would have gone to work for Microsoft.   CAREER HIGHLIGHT Scott achieved a position at NASA – his dream job. NASA’s legacy runs deep in Scott’s family, so to win a position there was a lifelong ambition.   THE FUTURE OF CAREERS IN I.T IT in the past was not an agile sector. Ideas remained so until backing and technological development could be resourced. Nowadays, people can bring ideas t life on their own.   THE REVEAL What first attracted you to a career in I.T.? – Scott’s Atari 400 and other early computers. Scott’s father encouraged simulations and other technical pursuits. What’s the best career advice you received? – No matter what they offer you, always ask for more. What’s the worst career advice you received? – To stay out of the fray and under the radar. There’s no better way to be fired first than to offer the least amount of value. What would you do if you started your career now? – Scott would specialize in security, the one area that can never be truly fully automated. What are your current career objectives? – Scott’s organisation is moving into proof-of-concept work. What’s your number one non-technical skill? – Learning to negotiate, especially in terms of salary. How do you keep your own career energized? – Scott consumes podcasts, books and learns bout new technologies whenever possible. What do you do away from technology? – Scott loves to spend time with family.   FINAL CAREER TIP Pick an area of expertise that is useful and once you’ve done that, master it!   BEST MOMENTS   (3:11) – Scott - “Find an organisation that will pay you for your skills” (3:52) – Scott - “Be useful, develop a skill, and be ridiculously good at it” (9:12) – Scott – “From idea to minimal viable product can be done in a few months with the right people” (11:49) – Scott – “If you can demonstrate your value in the world, then there’s always a little bit of room for you” (13:40) – Scott – “Wallflowers don’t ever make history”   ABOUT THE HOST – PHIL BURGESS   Phil Burgess is an independent IT consultant who has spent the last 20 years helping organizations to design, develop, and implement software solutions.  Phil has always had an interest in helping others to develop and advance their careers.  And in 2017 Phil started the I.T. Career Energizer podcast to try to help as many people as possible to learn from the career advice and experiences of those that have been, and still are, on that same career journey.   CONTACT THE HOST – PHIL BURGESS Phil can be contacted through the following Social Media platforms:   Twitter: https://twitter.com/philtechcareer LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/philburgess Facebook: https://facebook.com/philtechcareer Instagram: https://instagram.com/philtechcareer Website: https://itcareerenergizer.com/contact   Phil is also reachable by email at phil@itcareerenergizer.com and via the podcast’s website, https://itcareerenergizer.com Join the I.T. Career Energizer Community on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/ITCareerEnergizer   ABOUT THE GUEST – SCOTT TURMAN   Scott Turman  has developed software and cryptographic systems over the last 25 years for some pretty big organisations such as NASA, Disney, Hilton and the US Department of Defence.   He is the founder of BrightRay Consulting which is a staffing and software solutions company that he formed 6 years ago.   CONTACT THE GUEST – SCOTT TURMAN   Scott Turman can be contacted through the following Social Media platforms:   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottturman/ Website: https://scottturman.com

Welcome!   It was also another busy week on the technology front and we are going to delve into what actually caused the energy problems in Texas.  There is a new type of malware that is affecting Macs and it is has a different MO.  Then we are going to discuss Apple and their ventures into automated electric cars and what we can expect. Why are states having issues making appointments for vaccines? In a word, it is bureaucratic incompetence. Then we have a new type of hack out there.  It is called Buy-to-Infect and there is more so be sure to Listen in. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read: This Basic Math Shows How Wind Energy Failures Contributed To Texas’s Deadly Power Loss An Insider Explains Why Texans Lost Their Power New malware found on 30,000 Macs has security pros stumped Report: Nissan shot down Apple deal to avoid becoming Foxconn of cars N.Y.’s Vaccine Websites Weren’t Working Apple is already working on developing 6G wireless technology Owner of an app that hijacked millions of devices with one update exposes the buy-to-infect scam Mount Sinai study finds Apple Watch can predict COVID-19 diagnosis up to a week before testing Malware Exploits Security Teams' Greatest Weakness: Poor Relationships With Employees --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] You probably know I've been doing cybersecurity now for 30 years in the online world. Yeah, that long. I'm afraid I have some confessions to make about our relationships here, cybersecurity people, and employees. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. I'm so glad to be here. I'm happy your here as well. There are so many ways to listen. I got pulled into this whole business of cybersecurity quite literally, kicking and screaming. I had been already involved in the development of the internet and internet protocols for a decade before. In fact, one of the contracts that I had was with a major manufacturer of computer systems. What I did there was design for Unix systems a way to check for malware, a way to manage them remotely. Yes indeed, I made one of the first RMM systems, as we call them nowadays. We also tied that RMM system, of course, into Windows and a few other operating systems. Unix was where I was working at the time.  I am what they called an OG in the industry. My gosh, my first job with computer networks was back in 75. Believe it or not a long time ago. Back then, of course, it was mainframe to mainframe basically and some of the basic protocols, the RJE, and stuff. I know I've got a lot of older people who are listening who are saying, yeah, I remember that. It brings back memories.  In fact, I got a note just this week from a listener who was saying his first computer was a Sinclair. Do you remember those things? Oh my gosh. It brought back so many memories for us older guys. But it was just such a cool little device with the keys and much different than I'd ever seen before. The XZ81. I just looked it up online so I can remember what the model number was. That was made by Timex. If you can believe that too. It's just. Wow. It had a Z 80 CPU, which of course was like an 8080, which was Intel's, big chip at the time, running at 3.25 megahertz. Yes, indeed. Very cool. I love that computer anyways. I digress.  The whole industry at the time was non-existent, yeah. You had antivirus software. We started seeing that in the eighties and we had some terrible operating systems that many people were running like Windows, just absolutely horrific. Remember windows three-point 11 and XP and the millennial edition just some of the most terrible software ever. That's what happens when you have interns? A lot of the code, it came out in one of the lawsuits, for one of these versions of Windows.  It was a different world and I had to figure out what was going on because I had some servers that were Unix servers. This was the early nineties and I was hosting email for companies and websites and doing some filtering and things with some kind of precursor to SpamAssassin. It was really something. I had some DECservers, Digital Equipment Corporation. Remember those guys and all of a sudden customers started calling me because the email wasn't working.  It turned out it was working, but it was extremely slow and I had to figure out why.  I telneted to my server. I got on, started poking around the servers.  I had a computer room and the first floor of the building that I owned and I was up on the second floor. Off we go looking around trying to figure out what is going on. It was me actually. I said us, but it was really me. Cause I knew the most about this stuff.  There were these processes that just continued to fork and I was trying to figure out why is it creating all these new processes. What's going on? What has happened here? Back then, The internet was a much different place. We trusted everybody. We had fun online. We would spam people who broke our almost unwritten rules of the internet about being kind to other people. What spam was, where the whole term comes from is you would send the script from Monty Python spam and eggs, spam and ham spam, spam, spam routine. You just send it to somebody that was breaking these unwritten rules, like trying to sell something on the internet. Absolutely verboten. What a change to today.  I saw some of this stuff going on. I was trying to figure out what it was, but, we trusted everybody. So my mail server was Sendmail, at the time. We still maintain some instances of Sendmail for customers that need that.  Nowadays. It's usually more something like postfix in the backend. You might have Zimbra or something out front, but postfix in the backend. We allowed anybody on the internet to get on to our mail server and fix some configuration problems. They didn't have full access to everything. Firewalls weren't then what they are today. In fact, one of our engineers just had to run out to a client who did something we told them not to do.  They were using the Sonic wall firewall on their network as well as they had our stuff. So we had a really good Cisco firepower firewall sitting there, and then they have this SonicWall so that they're people, remotely could connect to the Sonic wall firewall, because it's good enough. SonicWall says it's compliant. The SonicWall firewall was being used to scan the network and load stuff. Does that sound familiar? Much to our chagrin.  So he had to run out and take care of that today. It sounds like we might have to do a rip and replace over there restore from backups. You have no idea what these bad guys might've done. We've seen Chinese into these networks before, Chinese malware. It's been really bad.  Boy, am I wandering all over the place?  Back to this, we would allow people to get onto our network to fix things.  If something was wrong, if we were misconfigured, they could help us and they could get on and do it because Sendmail configuration was not for the faint-hearted. In the days before Google, right? Eventually, we had Archie and Veronica, and Jughead. They did basic searches across FTP servers. That's my kicking and screaming story. I was trying to run a business where we hosted email for businesses, which we still do to this day, and where we had some, back then we didn't have websites. The web didn't come in into play until a couple of years later, but we did host FTP sites for businesses so that they could share files back and forth.  That's what I wanted to do. That was my business.  Later on, I ended up helping 80% of my clients find the other web hosts after, these $8 Gator hosting things. We just got a call on that this week. Somebody who'd been a client of ours 20 years ago, went with a guy that charges $5 a month for web hosting. They have personally identifiable information on that site if you can believe it. He was complaining because it wasn't working he was getting a C-panel error anytime he went to the site. We said, Hey, listen, this problem is the guy that you're hosting from. We did a little research and we checked the IP address and how many sites we're at that IP address. This guy that was charging them $5 a month had 150 different websites at that one IP address. Now that's not bad. He was hosting all of these 150 at a site, the charges, the eight to $10 a month for web hosting.  He had all of these sites on top of a machine that was already split up hundreds of ways. It's just amazing what people do.  Man alive.  We got rid of 80% of those customers, the ones that wanted cheap, that's fine, get cheap, and see what happens to you. Some of them, we still maintain a good relationship with and so we help them out from time to time, right?  What am I going to do? So somebody calls me, I gotta help them. That's precisely what we do now with this malware problem.  What's going on here? We talked already about the Great Suspender and how Google has said, Hey, this now has malware in it, so we're removing it from your web browsers. That to me makes a ton of sense. Why not do that?  This is another example of what happened with SolarWinds. This is an example of a supply chain infection. What happened with that? Somebody bought Great Suspender from the developer and then added in this basically malware to the Great Suspender. Just it's a terrible thing. Very surprising, but one of the biggest exploits that are being used by the bad guys right now is the security team's poor relationship with other employees within the organization.  I promise we'll get to this a little bit more and explain the bottom line here. What's going on and it goes back to this customer that we just had to run out to.  Why did they do what we told them not to do?  Stick around. We're getting into the battle between cybersecurity senior officers in companies, owners, business owners, and the, even the employees. There has been such a battle going on.  I saw two examples this week. Hi, everybody, it's a difficult world out there, but I find some comfort in listening to, of course, news radio. It keeps me up to date on what's going on. It helps me to really understand the world a lot better.  I mentioned that one of my guys just had to run out to a client who did something we absolutely told them not to do. They had been using this company that was a break-fix shop, I guess is the way you would put it. They had a business that would respond to problems and they charge by the hour. I think right now their hourly rate is like 160 bucks or something. It is not cheap, but anyhow, That they would sell people equipment and then move on, right? Your problems aren't my problems. Just leave me alone, go away.  It's a beautiful model because their employees at this break-fix shop don't have to understand much. They just have to know more than you do as a customer.  There's one level of understanding that you have, and for someone to appear to be an expert, all they have to do is have slightly more understanding.  That has bothered me so many times listened to the radio and they talk about somebody that's just this great expert, in reality, of course, they are not. But you don't know. That person talking about the expert doesn't know either because they just don't have enough knowledge. Of course, the person that's labeled the expert isn't going to say anything about it.  They were doing what most companies do, which is okay. We know we need a firewall, so let's get a firewall. They went out and they talked to this company and they did their Google research because of course, Dr. Google is an expert on everything.  Even with those differing opinions, you're going to go with the opinion that you like the best.  That's what they did.  They bought a Sonic wall firewall from this vendor, which was a break-fix shop. Now that's all well, and good. The sonic wall is not terrible stuff. They've got some amazing stuff as well. The problem is this device has been out of support for more than two years now. Even though they're not as advanced as some of the systems we can install, not that we always use the most advanced systems. It's not a bad, a little thing for a small business. We warned them that because they were using an out-of-date firewall that they could not get fixes for known vulnerabilities. Now that's a big deal too. Most people are not aware of the vulnerabilities that are on their machines. Do you go out every month and check the firmware versions on your firewall? You should be, even if you're a home user. Are you checking to make sure the firewall that the cable company provided you with is up to date, configured correctly? You've changed the password and the admin username, right? No?  Most people haven't. He hadn't, right. He didn't know. We told them we did a little research and said here's your problem.  That's part of his cyber health assessment. We told them what kind of firewall do you have? What's the version of software on it and we do that. We have a bunch of people that have asked for cyber health assessments. We've got them on a list because we're busy. So we have to schedule these and make them happen.  So we said, do not plug that machine in. Of course, what do they do? They plugged it back in again. So now all of a sudden this morning, we get a wake-up call from our monitors that are running they're on their  Cisco firepower firewall, where we have their extensive suite of additional software. This isn't just an off-shelf, Cisco firewall.  It's telling us that the SonicWall or something through our, via the SonicWall. Is going through all this customer's network. It's actually attacking the Cisco firewall from inside the network. Absolutely amazing. Why does that happen? In this case, the business owner, and it is a  very small business. It has about 5 million in revenue per year, I would guess.  It's a small business by every stretch. The owner just doesn't want to spend the money he doesn't absolutely have to spend. He's not looking at this saying I could lose all my intellectual property. I could get sued by these people. I could lose my clients who find out that their data was released. Their orders were released. Everything was stolen.  He looks at it and says, Oh wow. It's 200 bucks a month. Wait a minute guy, you have how many employees? You're worried about 200 bucks a month. I personally, I don't understand that. Why would you do that?  Now, you're in a poor country. Okay. I get it right. That's a lot of money to spend, but not here in the United States. Doesn't make sense.  A lot of this is really the reason I brought it up. It's showing how there is a disconnect between business owners, C-level people, and cybersecurity people. Basically, if you have less than 200 employees, you cannot afford to have your own cybersecurity team. It's impossible. It's way too expensive.  Then the numbers start to change outsourced cybersecurity, which is what we do.  We do this for this customer and. The in-house cybersecurity people, but we all have the same basic problem. The owner has a problem too, right? He has to weigh the costs of cybersecurity against the risks involved, which is what Equifax did.  What so many of these big companies do, right? There's this, the norm Equifax said it's going to be way cheaper to just pay out $10 million in fines. When we get fined by the federal government for losing everyone in the country's personal financial information then it is to do this or we're not going to bother.  Man, I'd love to see the smoking gun email on that, where they made that final decision, probably doesn't exist. They're smart enough to know that they would get sued and they have been sued because of this.  We've got another problem right now because of people working from home. I mentioned, in fact, this week, you should have gotten an email from me on Thursday. That was a little audio thing that I put together. We call these things, audiograms, and it's a kind of a video that'll play.  This particular one is about part of this problem. We've talked extensively about that water plant in Florida, that was hacked for lack of a better term. It might've been an insider thing. It might've been someone external, et cetera, et cetera. The reason it happened is that business, the water plant for a town of 15,000 people, which would be in a normal world, a small business. That small government operation was all of a sudden faced with lockdowns. What do we do? They didn't have a plan. They didn't have a business continuity plan, which is so important. I talked about it extensively last week as well. They had no way to manage this. So what did they do? They went out and bought team viewer licenses for everybody in the business. That put, well not the business, in this case, the agency, that put the agency at risk. That is putting our businesses at risk too, in such a big way. That's what the audiogram I emailed out on Thursday explaining this a bit.  So stick around. We're going to continue this conversation.   Of course,  you're listening to Craig Peterson online@craigpeterson.com. We have people working from home. We didn't really plan for this. We're doing it because of the lockdown. Maybe, you found that it's actually better for your business, from whatever angle. What are the risks here of people taking computers home? Hello. Everybody Craig, Peterson here. So glad to be with you today. Glad you're taking a few minutes out of your day as well to listen in.  Now I am very concerned about people using computers that they're taking home. I want to make a definition. Maybe there's a better way of saying this, computers that are used at home, home computers should never be used for work.  I'm going to explain why. Computers that are at work probably should not be taken home. We saw the example of this, just this last couple of weeks.  I was talking about this wonderful plugin that I've been using and recommending people use here for a very long time, called the Great Suspender. We've talked at length really about what happened there with the company being bought and then becoming evil, right? Just buying their way into 2 million people's computers.  Sometimes these Chrome extensions that are installed on personal computers get automatically installed and synchronized to your work devices. In fact, that's the default. If you log into Chrome and you're using Google Chrome as your browser and you log into it on your home computer, and when you log into your same account over on your business computer. All of a sudden, now it's syncing. It's syncing things like passwords, which you should not be having Google store for you. You should definitely be using a good password manager and there are a few out there.  If you're not familiar with them or don't know which one to use or how to use them. I have a great little special report on passwords and using password managers. I'd be glad to send it to you. Just email me@craigpeterson.com and I'll send that on-off, right? I'm not making a dime off of that. I want to make you safer.  I don't want to have happened to you what's happened to millions of Americans, including my best buddy who had his information stolen. I've been after him to use password managers. He never did it. I don't know why. Until his paycheck got stolen. Then he came over and I explained it and set it up with them and really helped him out. Maybe we should do a whole webinar showing you how to use these password managers, how to get them set up because it is a little bit tricky. It's certainly different than you're used to. Many people are using their browser Chrome in this example, to save passwords. When you go to a website, you'll automatically have the password there. Maybe you've got it set up so that it'll automatically log you in with all kinds of cool stuff. But there is a very big problem and that is that there is a huge risk with running these extensions, like the Great Suspender. The Great Suspender was approved by Google. It was in the Google store. You could download it from their app store. Absolutely free.   In January of this year in 2021, we had someone out on Twitter, tweet that there was a problem with the security on the Great Suspender. It had been changed. It was being used now to send ads out and other things. That's pretty, pretty bad. The extension wasn't banned until about a month later and you as an end-user had no official notification that this extension was potentially malicious.  Apparently, they could, with this malicious software they embedded, not just show you ad, not just insert their own ads to generate revenue onto the webpage as you were visiting, they could also grab files from your machine. That's a very bad thing.  Now, presumably, if you're at work, you have a team that's helping you outright.  The IT security team, there may be different teams and maybe the same person who also is the office manager, who knows. It does vary. Businesses cannot know what you're doing when you're starting to install those extensions and they are pushing their way onto your office computer because you're using the same Google account in both places. Now, despite the risks, of course, I installed this Great Suspender used it for years and I was pretty happy using it. I know many other people who were in the same boat. Security teams have some great tools. I mentioned my son who's one of our team members got called out to a client. During the break, I was just chatting with him briefly. What had happened is they plugged in this firewall we told them not to plugin. It was apparently hacked from the outside. It had known security vulnerabilities. He had not, this small business owner had not yet paid for maintenance on his little firewall, so he was not getting security updates. In fact, my team member looked at this and found that it had been three years since the firmware on his firewall had been updated. The bad guys got into his network through this secondary firewall, which we told them not to have not to plugin. Our firewall only noticed it because this malware started scanning everything on the network. Of course, it scanned two of our machines, one being the firewall.  Remember this isn't a regular firewall that we put in there. This is a firepower firewall with a whole bunch of extra software on top of it.  In our data center, we have some huge machines that are sitting there watching what's going on remotely. On our client's networks via that firepower firewall.  We started getting all these notices as to what was going on, but this is a great example. We're not updating some of that software. He had a security team and he ignored the security team. We were the security team. We're outsourced cybersecurity that's what we do, but that happens many times.  Many business owners and others look at the cybersecurity situation as having many different shades of gray. What should you do? What shouldn't you do? The teams that are working in these businesses, including us. We have to tell them, Hey, don't use that firewall. Do not plug it in. You don't need it. If you plug it in, it's going to make it way easier for some of your people to work from home.  This is not set up correctly and you're going to have problems. That's a difficult conversation to have with a business owner. We had it and he ignored it much to his peril. In this case, this one is hard to tell how much data was stolen from his business. The impact from this could last for months, and there could be investigations who knows what's going to end up happening here. That business owner and I, because I spoke to him as well about this whole situation before this particular event happened just about two weeks ago. In fact, that was a reminder cause they had plugged it in again. Six months before that we had told the business owner, you can't plug this thing in, you cannot be using it.  How do you do that? How do you let an impacted employee, somebody who's working from home, maybe using their own computer to do work for the business? How can you approach them and tell them, Hey, you cannot use Google Chrome?  You cannot save your passwords on your browser. You cannot install extensions. Even if you had a list of extensions today that were bad, that list is going to be out of date tomorrow, which is going to be a very big problem. Individual users do not have the ability to check this. Frankly, most businesses don't either. Again, that's why a business under 200 employees cannot afford to do this yourself. You just can't. This is a specialty.  We were talking yesterday with a prospect who had been brought to us by a break-fix shop and trying to get this concept through. We're going to talk a little bit more about that. What should you be doing? How can you pay attention? How can you even be safe in this day and age?  Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. We've been talking about supply chain problems. That's a technical term for it, but the software that we rely on becoming evil, and what can we really do about it? Hello, everybody. You're listening to Craig Peterson.  How do you talk to a business owner and help them understand? That's a problem. Isn't it? Look at what happened a few years back with TJX stores. Them as maybe TJ max, that's one of their stores. They have a number of others. Their cybersecurity guys did something I have seen done before. That is, they went to the management of this massive public company and said, Hey, TJX, we need to get this hardware. We need to get this staffing. The hardware course pretty expensive and it sits there and it does much the same stuff. Even back then. Nowhere as good as today. It's exponential, as to how much better it gets every year, but it was good hardware.  It really could have stopped the hack that happened and it did.  Here's what it did. It noticed the hack was going on. The problem was they were able to say yes to the hardware, the senior management said yes. They got the hardware, but senior management would not get the security technicians that were needed to monitor and run that hardware. They were short-staffed.  That's another problem we're seeing. That's why the companies you're dealing with, whether it's Equifax, with who you do not have a direct business relationship with, and yet have all this information about you and sell that. Or maybe it's just some other website. That's why they lose your data. It's a real bad idea. The bad guys are just waiting out there just siphon all of your data. In many cases, when you're talking about a business and a business website, or even your home computer, they're looking to redirect you to malicious websites. What they'll do is for instance, again, the Great Suspenders' an example, that they claim it's been fixed now. With something like an extension or a plugin that you put in your browser, they could rather easily code it up so that you are going to a website that's malicious. It could look like Bank of America's website and you go there and you enter in your information. You put in your username, you put in your password, it asks you a security question. Maybe maybe not, but your username and password. Then it says incorrect. Then your screen refreshes while your screen just refreshed because you were not at the Bank of America, originally. You were at a malicious website and you entered in your username and password. Now the bad guys have your username and password to your banking system, to your login, to your bank accounts. They got that. That's all they needed. They didn't want you to know that this was going on so they just went ahead and redirected you over to the real bank website. Hence, the supposed reload.  It's a very big weakness here in how IT and security teams operate because too few security teams really can relate with the CEO and vice versa.  I've seen that all of the time with people working for me in cybersecurity, you've got a really good idea of what needs to be done, how it needs to be done when it needs to be done. To you, it's the most important thing in the world, right? You don't want the business to go under, you're going to lose your job, maybe your pension retirement plan is tied to that business. You don't want it to happen, but have you got the trust built up with the senior management?  Then how about the other side of this relationship? How about if you're a cybersecurity person? Even if, again, you're not a professional, you're just the person tasked with it in the office or you're the person tasked with it at home. How do you go to the other employees and tell them you can't use your Google Chrome account here in the office? How are you going to enforce it? How are you going to tell your husband or wife, Hey, that's dangerous? I don't want you installing any of these extensions on your computer. One of the really bad things that people do with their browsers is they put on these real fancy little extensions that give all kinds of extra wonderful information. It ends up as a toolbar and it lets you do searches on this site or that site. Maybe it keeps you up to date on the stocks that you have in your portfolio. You're telling hackers what stocks you own, really? It might be legitimate, right. But who knows? That's the problem. Something like that can really mess you up and send you to malicious sites. You know that your spouse is using that or your kids are using that. How do you talk to them? How do you solve those problems? It's a real problem.  There are some interesting tools that you can use, as professionals. There's a Slack channel I can send you to, if you're interested, actually, it'll be in the newsletter that comes out on Sunday. At least it should be under one of those articles. It is a problem.  Netflix, by the way, is really trying to help you out too. Not only did the Netflix security team provide some feedback for what's called the honest security guide, but it's also made some of its user tools, the tools that you might use at your home to find a movie, et cetera, it might help really to secure you.  Git Hub has this. It is called, this is a Netflix skunkworks, the stethoscope app. It's a desktop application created by Netflix that checks security-related settings and makes recommendations for improving the configuration of your computer. It doesn't require central device management or reporting. You can have a look at that. If you are interested, let me know. I can probably point you in the right direction to the stethoscope app. That's what we want to see in this honest security guide. You'll find it online. At honest security is a guide to your devices, security, which in the biz we call endpoint security and it is cool. You can run through all of this list is a big checklist and talking about why honest, and they're saying dishonesty stops you from doing the right thing.  That's why in my courses, I spend a lot of time, more time in fact, on the why than the how.  I want you to understand honestly, why you should or should not do something. There are so many people who are out there yelling and screaming, jumping up and down. Particularly your antivirus companies. You fake VPN companies who are trying to get you to buy their products that not only do not need in most cases but will actually make your computer less secure.  So we have to be careful about all of this stuff. We have to make sure we are talking. We've got to have a trust relationship set up with the owners of our business. Cause you guys, some of you, I know own businesses, some of you work for a business. We've got people listening to this all over the world and every continent I've even seen a listener down in Antarctica.  I really can say every continent. It's important that we know how to work with our fellow employees, with our management, with our family members, to help them to know what they need to do.  There is no time to wait. We have never seen as many attacks as we're seeing now. We've never seen the government using its resources to attack us more than we have now. We've never seen more billions of dollars stolen per year by the bad guys. There are some basic tenants that you can follow that will make you way more secure. And that's why you're listening. That's why I go through some of these things to help everybody understand.  That's also why I go ahead and make sure that I answer your emails. If you have a question, make sure you go ahead and ask. You can just email me at me@craigpeterson.com. If it's something urgent, I have a form on the bottom of my homepage  @craigpeterson.com. You can give me a little bit more information. I tend to keep an eye on that a little bit better than my general email, although I do use some amazing email software that helps me to keep track of the real email and get rid of the spam and put things in boxes and stuff  craigpeterson.com. It's that simple email me me@craigpeterson.com. If you have questions.  I hope that Google is going to continue to improve itself. I love the fact that they found out that this one extension was malicious. For those of you who might've just tuned in, we're talking about something called the Great Suspender something I've used for years, it became malicious, but they need to do more.  As people who are concerned about security, we just can't wait for the next incident. Just again, this client of mine, who we've been warning about this for months, he's stopped doing what we told him to do, and then decided well it's just too difficult. That's something we hear a lot from businesses. Oh, it just hampers the work. It hampers it because now we have to get permission from it in order to mount this particular drive or gain access to those files or materials. Yes you do, because we have to stop the internal spread of all of this malware and all of these hackers.  It is absolutely worth it.  All right, everybody. Thanks again for joining me today. I really hope you've been enjoying this. I have years' worth of podcasts out there and you'll find all of those at craigpeterson.com/podcast or on your favorite podcast platform.  If you subscribed under iTunes, you might've noticed, ah, yeah, I just released a whole batch there too. I expressed concerns about owning an Apple watch. I held off for a long time. I want to talk about these devices now, the security concerns, but also the amazing health tools that are built right in. Hey, welcome back. This Apple watch is really fascinating. It has been around now for six generations. There are a number of other watches that have had, or tried, I should say, to compete with Apple. They haven't been very successful. You might've noticed that. I have a friend that bought some watches for his family and to him that monitor all of the basic vitals and record them and send them up to his phone. It's a 20-ish dollar watch. He got it from South Korea probably are parts made in China, but it is an inexpensive watch and it does some of the basics at the other end of the scale. Let's have a look right now. I'm going to go to apple.com online, and we're going to click on watch. Here we go, Oh, my they've got special watches so you can buy their watches. It looks like the new one, the Apple watch series six for starting at 400 bucks or they have two different sizes. . They have a more basic watch called the Apple Watch SE that starts at about $300. You can still get the Apple watch series three. Now, these all can monitor high and low heart rates. They can give you irregular heart rhythm notification, but it's only a-fib atrial fibrillation, I think is the only one they can monitor, but all three of those can monitor that. As I said, my buddy's watches, he got for his family at 20 bucks apiece are able to do most of that as well.  These are water-resistant to 50 meters, which is really cool. The series six also has an ECG app. That is very cool. You open the app, you put your finger on the crown of the watch and it gives you an EKG right there on the watch and it feeds it to your phone. On your phone, you can turn it into a PDF. You can share it with your doctor on and on. It's just amazing. It's a three-lead type, I was in emergency medicine, right? A med-tech EMT, EMT-PD can't remember. I had a whole bunch of different certifications back in the day. But it's fantastic for that. It also has a blood oxygen app that monitors your blood oxygen levels. It ties all of this into their new exercise app, which is amazing. That ties into your phone or your iPad.  I will go down in the basement onto the treadmill and I'll select your treadmill workout.  It has dozens of them. Have you seen this really fancy treadmill? A couple of years ago they got in all kinds of trouble because they advertised it around Christmas time and apparently this woman really wanted a treadmill and she got one and she was all excited. All of these people jumped out of the woodwork. All your you're saying she's fat, et cetera. No, she wanted a treadmill. These are amazing treadmills because they have built into them. These streams and you can join classes, et cetera. With the Apple Watch, my iPad, and a subscription to this iHealth app, which you can get as part of this Apple plus thing you can buy for 30 bucks for the whole family, 30 bucks a month.  I don't know how many I have seen probably a hundred different workouts on there.  It has different workouts, different types of weightlifting, running, jogging, treadmills, elliptical machines, everything.  You can pick your pace. You can pick your instructor, you can pick everything. Then your Apple watch is monitoring your body. As you're working out. So it's telling you how many calories you've burned. What's your heart rate is to help keep your heart rate in the best range for you, depending on what kind of a workout you're doing. It also lets you compete against other people. Does this sound like an ad for the Apple watch?  You can compete with other people your age doing the same workout and see where you're at. I was really surprised because typically I am at the front of the pack when it comes to my treadmill workouts. That's really cool as well. Those are some of the basics. There are other things too, that Apple is doing. We've found, right now, that Mount Sinai just came out with an announcement and they said that the Apple watch can predict COVID 19 diagnosis up to a week before testing can detect it. Yes. Isn't that something? Not only can the Apple watch help with certain heart arrhythmias, but it can predict that you have COVID-19 too a week before testing normal testing. Those swabs can find it out.  This is from the journal of medical internet research, which is a peered review journal. And they found that wearable hardware and specifically the Apple watch can effectively predict a positive COVID-19 diagnosis up to a week before the current PCR-based nasal swab tests. They called this the warrior watch study. They had a dedicated Apple watch and the iPhone app, and they had some participants from the Mount Sinai staff and it required, of course, these staff members to use the app to turn on the health and data monitoring and collection, and also asked them to fill out a survey every day to provide some feedback about their potential COVID-19 symptoms. As well as other things like stress can obviously make your heart rate, go up your blood pressure, go up, et cetera. Oh. By the way, Apple, supposedly the rumors are, we'll have a BP sensor in the Apple seven that'll be out later this year, most likely.  So they had several hundred healthcare workers and the primary biometric signal. I know that the studies authors were watching was heart rate variability. This is fascinating to me because it's something that I learned about fairly recently. Then when I got my Apple watch, I read up more about this, but basically, heart rate variability is what it sounds like. It's your heart rate. Let's say your heart is beating at 60 beats per minute. It is not beating once every 10 seconds.  It is not beating once a second. Your heart rate will vary over the course of that minute. If you're healthy.  Obviously, a beat every 10 seconds isn't 60 a minute. Let's use that as an example. Somebody who's almost dead and has six beats per minute. The first heartbeat might be at 10 seconds. The second heartbeat might be at 22 seconds because your heart is supposed to vary its rate of contractions based on immediate feedback. It's not just that you're going out in your running and now you've driven up your heart rate and you're doing your cardio and it or you just walked up a flight of stairs or you stood up, which is another test, by the way, what we're talking about here. You might just be sitting there, but your cells have a different need for oxygen or for the blood. The heart slows down slightly or speeds up slightly.  This heart rate variability is something built into the Apple watch and into the iPhone app that you attach to the Apple watch. Isn't that useful without an iPhone, frankly? Then you can look at your heart rate variability right there.  They said, combining that with the symptoms that people reported, these Mount Sinai staff, that the symptoms that they reported that were associated with COVID-19 including fever, aches, dry cough, gastrointestinal issues, loss of taste and smell corresponded with changes in the heart rate variability. I thought that was just absolutely phenomenal because heart rate variability is considered to be a key indicator of strain on your nervous system. COVID-19 obviously is going to put a strain on the nervous system. Just very neat.  It says here that the study was not only able to predict infections up to a week before tests provided confirmed diagnosis but also revealed that participants' heart rate variability patterns normalized fairly quickly after their diagnosis or turning to normal run about one to two weeks following their positive tests. That's from a TechCrunch, that particular quote.   I am very excited about this, but I am also on the concerned side. I'm concerned because they are collecting vital data from us. All of the major companies, Google and Microsoft and Apple want to be the company that holds all of your personal medical records. We're going to get back to that when we come back here. What is happening? How is your doctor managing your medical records? I was really shocked to find out how that industry is working.  Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson. Check it out online. Craig peterson.com. Welcome back. What are you doing? Are you asking your doctor how they are handling your medical records? Because I think you probably should based on what I learned just this week. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me.  We were just talking about health. We're talking about the Apple watch and the fact that there's a lot of competitors out there, some of them, a fraction of the cost. If you buy the Apple watch on terms, you're going to pay less in one month's payment on terms to Apple than you would for some of these other watches out there, but Apple watches do have more features.  Mine even has a built-in cellular modem. Even if I don't have my phone with me, phone calls come through to my watch and text messages, and I can respond and answer. It's really nice. Medically I am very impressed. It has been good at motivating me to do some exercise, to get up, and about just to do a bunch of things I had never, ever done before. Consider that.  It is collecting our data. Apple now has potential access to all of my cardiac data. They've got EKGs that I have run on my watch. They know about my heart rate. They know how often I exercise, and how hard I exercise when I exercise. They know all of this stuff about me. I had a conversation with someone just saying why does that matter? Maybe it's Apple, maybe it's somebody else. Why does it matter?  It does matter. Think about an evil genius, right? The thing about somebody that might want to target Americans and might want medical information about Americans. They can gather it in a number of different ways. We're going to talk about medical records here in a little bit. One of the things they could certainly do is grab all of our watch data. Some of these watches, including my Apple watch, have GPS built into them. When you're out running or jogging, you know where you went, you can plan your route and it'll remind you, Hey, turn here, turn there. That's one of the things I love about the Apple Watch when I'm using it with Apple maps out driving, it taps me on the wrist and reminds me, Hey, in 500 feet, you got to turn.  If I look at the watch, it'll even show me the turn I need to make coming up in 500 feet. It's really amazing. All of this information is being compiled and hopefully, it's being compiled by a company that we can trust. At this point, we can probably trust Apple. Hopefully, they're not going to be broken into. Now, their margins or profit is high enough that they certainly can afford a security team, one capable of defending them and defending our data. I hope they are. I suspect that they are for the most part. How about some of these others? We know Google, for instance, is in the business of collecting and selling our information, is having all of our medical information. Not just the stuff from our watches, but the stuff from our doctors. Are they to be trusted with that kind of information? Going back to that bad guy, that mad scientist we can, and probably do engineer viruses that are targeted at specific things. In fact, the Russians have been doing it. The Soviets' started it, they came up with a phage. That can attack certain viruses and it acts like a virus it gets in and does this little thing. We've got right now, these COVID-19 vaccines and they act like a virus they're messing with, well effectively, the DNA. In fact, it's the RNA, but it's pretending, Hey, I got a message from the DNA, here it is.  What if a bad guy knew that are a certain population in a certain area, and that area was right by this important military base or whatever they came up with something that would target them and they'd have all of the data to do it now. That's obviously an extreme example. A more common example would be that your medical data is there. It's being sold to advertisers and you're going to end up with something.  For instance, there's a company, very big company out there and they sell baby products. What they did was they tracked and they bought this information, but they tracked women who were purchasing certain things. Now, they weren't purchasing things that were directly related to having a baby, right? They weren't purchasing diapers or little jumpsuits or whatever it is. They were purchasing things that were not directly related maybe people wouldn't even think they were typically related to having a baby. Yet they were able to figure this out. They got that good with the data.  So they thought, Oh, okay let's get wise here. Let's send out a postcard, congratulating them on their pregnancy and offering them a discount on something. Yeah. Not a bad idea, frankly.  However, in this case, some of these moms I hadn't told anybody that they were pregnant yet and didn't want to tell anybody that they were pregnant yet. It fell on its face. Didn't it?  How about these ambulance-chasing lawyers that are out there? Are they going to want to gain access to this, to your medical records?  How about your employer? Your employer wants to know I'm going to train this person. Hopefully, they'll stick with us for a while, but is he going to be a burden on our medical plan? Keyman insurance, health insurance, life insurance. Have access to everything about you. That's what really concerns me about these, all of these devices.  Right now, pretty confident that I can give Apple this information and they will keep it pretty safe. But, I said the same thing about the Great Suspender, right? I don't know about the future.  Then I found something out this week that was in my mind extremely disturbing. We have a new clinic that we've picked up as a client. They needed to have security. They had a couple of little security issues. They were worried. They knew they were not HIPAA compliant. They approached us because they know that's what we do is cybersecurity and audits and remediation. Fixing the problems. We pick them up. They're a client. We're in there. They had told us in advance that all of their medical record systems were on-line. It was on the web. All they needed was a web browser to run their business. Okay. That could be a problem. It might be okay. The medical records manufacturer might have good security on all of the records. So we may be safe, although in HIPAA unless you have a business process agreement in place with that vendor if that data is lost, it falls back on the doctor's shoulders. Anyhow, what I found out was, first of all, it wasn't completely web-based, which just shocked me. I'm not talking about they have to scan records or they got the x-ray machine or whatever. It really wasn't web-based and secondarily the company they were using for the medical records was a free service.  The doctor, that clinic, was not paying for their medical records management software.  The way it works is this medical records management company when the doctor prescribes something when the doctor performs a procedure and bills and insurance company, it's all done through this one company and that company takes a chunk of their money. In some cases we found seems to have been inflating the bills that went off to the insurance companies and that, as it turns out is a common practice in the industry. According to the doctors at this clinic, I was shocked, amazed.  Something you might want to look at. Ask your doctors where are your records kept and are they secure? Now we had HIPAA. We thought that would secure it, but it doesn't.  Stick around. Hey, we got a name now for what happened to the Great Suspender and QR code scanner apps over on the Google stores. One at Google Play, the other one over on the Google Chrome store. It's become that popular. Hey, everybody, I wanted to mention this whole new category of malware really, and they're calling it, right now, Buy to infect. What happens is a bad guy, a malware guy buys a legitimate app and then starts infecting it.  We know, obviously, about the one that I've been talking about a lot the Google extension that I used to use all of the time, the Great Suspender. I mentioned this one a few weeks ago, it's called QR code scanner. It's been on the Google play store for a long time, had more than 10 million installs and then all of a sudden it became malicious.  This is a little bit of a different angle on it because, with the Great Suspender, the ownership of that software actually transferred to somebody. With QR code scanner, they were working on a deal with a company and this company wanted to verify the Google play account for QR code scanner. This is all according to the owner, the original owner of QR code scanner.  They said that what had happened is part of this purchase deal. I let them have a look and gain access to the software's key and password prior to purchase so they could confirm the purchase, which doesn't sound too bad. Apparently, as soon as they got a hold of the software's key and password, forget about the purchase, we're going to start infecting it right away.  It ended up getting that app, the QR code scanner app, pulled right from the Google play score store. Of course, now you don't need that quite as much because most of the phone apps when you go to take a picture, the camera apps have built into them, a QR code scanner.  I thought that was fascinating what they did. They totally cheated the company. They didn't even bother buying it. So a little word for the wise out there.  Got another Apple story cause this is showing how the computer industry is really shifting. We've talked about some of the shortages of chips and the shortages of computer chips are so bad that General Motors has had to shut down two-thirds of its manufacturing lines in at least one plant.  Every major automobile manufacturer is having problems making cars because they can't get the chips.  Remember nowadays, a car, a truck is essentially just a computer on wheels. Not really actually computer on wheels. It's really dozens of computers all linked together with a network on wheels.  Apple has been worried about that, right? Supply chain. That's one of the things you're supposed to worry about as a public company. What are the risks going forward including to my supply chain? Obviously your supply chain matters. You gotta be able to make something you need parts, right?  Apple has been upset with Intel for a while. You might remember Apple. When it first came out, was using a Motorola chipset, which was exceptional much better than the Intel chipsets.  Of course, that's my opinion, a lot of people agree with me. You had the 68000, 68010, and 20, et cetera. Very good chips.  When Apple started getting into the laptop business, that's when the problems started to happen.  These Motorola chips gave off a lot of heat and used up a lot of electricity.  At the time Apple looked around and said our only real alternative right now is Intel. Intel has a whole line of chips, different speeds, and they have mobile chips.  Those mobile chips use much less power than the Motorola chips for the main CPU.  They also use less battery. Those two go hand in hand and generate less heat. That's it all goes hand in hand. So they said, we'll start working with Intel. They did. Intel really disappointed them more than once, which is a shame. They disappointed them with the 64-bit migration. AMD, advanced micro devices, beat Intel to the punch. Shockingly Intel started making AMD compatible CPUs right. The 64-bit extensions to the CPU were AMD extensions. They had problems with some of their other chips as well. Mobile chips getting the power usage under control, the heat dissipation problems under control, and they never really lived up to what Apple was hoping for. What everybody in the industry was hoping for. In many ways, Intel has been a huge disappointment, which is really a shame.  We'll look at what they did to the industry, with these predictive instructions, the hyper-threading, and stuff. Where bad guys were able to bring a computer to its knees.  What does Intel say? Here's a firmware patch you can apply to our CPU, those little CPUs you pay upwards of $2,000 for a piece for one chip.  Those CPU's and by the way, it's going to, cut its performance by a minimum of 20%, maybe 50%, that's okay. What are you kidding me?  A lot of people were upset with Intel and Apple and Microsoft and everybody released patches that use the new Intel microcode. You might've noticed when this happened a couple of years ago that your computer slowed down. I certainly noticed, actually, it was little more than a year, anyway, I noticed it because I own a data center. That has a lot of Intel chips in it where we're running mostly Unixes, Linux, and BSD, but we're also running Windows. So the only way to work around this bug was to apply the patch and slow everything way, way down.  Imagine how Apple and Google felt with their huge data centers. IBM too. IBM has Intel-based data centers, as well as its own chips, and boy talking about phenomenal chips, as far as processing power goes, IBM, man, they are still the leader with the power chips and their Z series. That just wow. Mind-blowing.  Most of us are stuck in the Intel world. Apple said we can no longer trust Intel. So what are we going to do? Apple said we've been developing this chip for a long time. Apple took the chip design, they licensed it from this open sourcee type of company that has a number of members. They took this arm architecture and were able to improve it, and keep adding to it, et cetera.  They're still part of this Alliance. They started using these in their iPhones. The iPhones have been using these chips the whole time and they started improving them after they released the first iPhones.  Intel didn't really get them upset until a little later on, too. They came up with newer ones, faster ones, better ones, right to all of these A10 their bionic chips. They've got AI chips, machine learning chips, all Apple designed. Chips, of course, manufactured by third parties, but that's what Apple is using.  Apple has now said we expect all of their Macintosh computers to be based on Apple's CPU within the next two years.  There's already some really good ones out there right now that people like a lot. We've been using them with some of our clients that use Apple. Not everybody has had great luck with them, but Apple is not only ditching Intel, that's not the big story here. Apple's got some job listings out there looking to hire engineers.  So when we get back, we'll tell you more about what Apple is doing and what frankly, I think the rest of the industry should look at. Guess what? They are. It's been Intel versus the rest of the world. They've been winning for years in many categories, but now they're starting to lose, as major manufacturers are starting to leave Intel behind. But there's more to the story still. Hi, everybody.. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for tuning in. We're glad you're here.  In the last segment of the day, I want to point everybody to the website, of course. You can get my newsletter. It comes out every Sunday morning and it highlights one of the articles of the week. It gives you a pointer to my podcast. So you can listen right there. There's just a lot of great information. Plus I'm also doing little training. I'm sending out, hopefully, next week, two little training sessions for everybody to help you understand security a little better, and this applies to business. However, it's not. Strictly business, much of what I talk about is also for home users. So if you want to go along for the ride, come along, we'd be glad to have you. There's a lot to understand and to know that you won't get from anywhere else. It's just amazing. Many other of these radio shows where they are just nothing but fluff and commercials and paid promotions. I'm just shocked at it. It goes against my grain when that sort of thing happens. Absolutely.  We were just talking about Apple and how Apple got upset with Intel, but they're not the only ones upset. We also now have seen a lot of manufacturers who have started producing Chromebooks and surface tablets that are based on chip sets other than Intel's. This is going to be a real problem for Intel. Intel has almost always relied, certainly in the later years has relied on Microsoft and people bought Intel because they wanted Windows. That's the way that goes. It's just like in the early days, people bought an Apple too, because they wanted a great little VisiCalc, the spreadsheet program.  Now, what we're seeing are operating systems that do not require a single line of Microsoft software. Google Chrome is a great example of it. Linux is another great example and people are loving their Google Chrome laptops, and you can buy these laptops for as little as 200 bucks. Now you get what you pay for and all the way up to a couple of grand and they don't have a line single line of Microsoft code. Yet you can still edit Word documents and Excel documents, et cetera. They do not contain any Intel hardware. What was called, well, they might have a chip here or there, but not the main CPU. What used to be called the Wintel monopoly. In other words, Windows-Intel monopoly is dying. It's dying very quickly.  Apple is not helping now. Apple, they've had somewhere between seven and 10% market share in the computer business for quite a while. Personally, I far prefer Apple Macintoshes over anything else out there by far.  I use them every day. So that's me.  I don't know about you. There's a little bit of a learning curve. Although people who aren't that computer literate find it easier to learn how to use a Mac than to learn how to use Windows, which makes sense.  Apple has really done a great job. A bang-up job. With these new chips, it's getting even faster. We are now finding out from a report from Bloomberg who first started these, that Apple has been posting job listings, looking for engineers to work on 6G technology. 6G, right now we're rolling out 5g, which hasn't been a huge win because of the fact that if you want really fast 5g, like the type Verizon provides, you have to have a lot of micro-cell sites everywhere. They have to be absolutely everywhere.  Of course, it's just not financially reasonable to put them up in smaller communities. If the Biden administration continues the way they're going with the FCC and the open internet type thing of a-bits-a-bit, then there will be no incentive for any of these carriers to expand their networks because they can't charge more for better service. If you can imagine that. Ajit Pai fought against that for many years, Trump's appointee as chairman to the FCC, but things are changing. The wind has changed down in Washington, so we'll lose some of those jobs and we're not going to get all of the benefits of 5g. If he keeps us up. 6G is coming.   What that means is Qualcomm, who is the manufacturer of record for most of the modems that are in our cell phones. Qualcomm has also missed some deadlines. Apple is tired of dependencies on third parties because Qualcomm might have somebody else that buys way more chips. It might be able to sell the same chip to the military of whatever country for a much, much higher price. They can sell it to consumers. Maybe they just change the label on it and call it a mill spec, and often goes right, who knows? What they're doing out there, but Apple doesn't want to do that anymore. They are looking for engineers to define and perform the research for the next generation standards of wireless communications, such as 6G The ads say you will research and design next-generation 6G wireless communication systems for radio access networks with emphasis on the physical Mac L two and L three layers. Fascinating, eh? What do you think?  I think a huge deal as Apple continues to ditch, many of its vendors that have not been living up to the standards Apple has set.  Apple has moved some of the manufacturing back to the United States. More of the assembly has been moved here. The manufacturing, it's starting to come back again. We'll see the Trump administration really wanted it here.  We need it here, not just for jobs, we needed it here for our security. We've talked about that before, too, right? I want to also point out speaking of Apple and manufacturing, China, of course, does most of it for Apple and Foxconn is the company in China that makes almost all of this stuff for Apple. It's huge. Foxconn owns cities. Huge cities. They have high rises where people basically don't see the light of day, these high rise factories. You live there, you eat there, you shop there, you work there.  Like the old company store who is it, Tennessee Ernie, right? Owe my soul to the company store. That's what's happening over there. And Foxconn has kept its costs low by bringing people in from the fields, if you will, out there being farmers and paying them extremely low wages. On top of all of that, in some cases they're using slave labor. I found this article very interesting, from Ars Technica's, Timothy B. Lee. He's talking about a potential partnership between Apple and Nissan. Let me remember. I mentioned Apple talking with Kia and Kia is denying it. The financial times reported on Sunday that this potential deal between Apple and Nissan fell apart because Apple wanted Nissan to build Apple cars, they would have the Apple logo on them. They all be branded Apple. It wouldn't say Nissan unless you took something seriously apart you might find it inside.  Nissan wanted to keep the Nissan brand on its own vehicles. Bloomberg reported last week that the negotiations with Kia and of course its parent companies Huyndaiin South Korea had ended without a deal. The Financial Times said that Apple has also sounded out BMW as a potential partner because Apple doesn't make cars. So how are they going to do this? Apparently the talks faltered with Apple and Nissan because Nissan had a fear and apparently this is true of Kia too, of becoming quote the Foxconn of the auto industry, unquote, which is a reference to this Chinese well it's Taiwanese technically, but a group that manufacturers are while actually assembles the iPhones. Fascinating. Isn't it fascinating.  When you start to dig into this self-driving technology and the numbers behind it, that's where you wonder, why is Apple even trying at this point, Apple's test vehicles only traveled 18,000 miles on California roads. Between 2019 and 2020, or over the course of about a year, late in both years. 18,000 miles in a year. Heck, I've done that before with my own car.  Waymo, which is Google's self-driving project put on more than well, about 6

Nowadays there's a lot of judgments about everyone and everything. Everyone has an opinion about something and we all have something to say about someone else. How do you stop caring for other people's opinions? In this episode, I shared how your personality and the need to fulfill these values and requirements can influence the way you feel about opinion and how they trigger your emotions if your button gets pushed. I also shared the acronym FAST and how you can use this to stand for yourself and be yourself. Follow me on IG @elevatelifecoach Follow me on FB @lifecoachingbyelevate Join my Private Facebook Group Every Sunday night live at the LoungeSupport the show (http://patreon.com/michellekuei)

The guys start the show off with a crash, literally, the Tiger Woods car crash. What we know so far and how do we think it plays into the rest of Tigers career. Does he have a career anymore? If he comes back, can he win? We break it all down. Then it’s onto What Not To Say As A CEO in MLB starring Kevin Mather. Greg and Paul don’t want to waste much breath on him, but talk about how he couldn’t be removed quick enough. Nowadays you need to be open to anything and everything and clearly Kevin was not. Next, it’s the NBA All Star Game. Who got snubbed is always the discussion and the guys give a few picks to who they feel were shunned. They also give thoughts on wether or not the game should even be played at all. Finally the show wraps up talking about the Carson Wentz trade, but more importantly the fact that Michael Pittman Jr. told Wentz that “Nah, he can’t have No.11” was this the right move? Plus, what number would Greg and Paul wear as professionals. That wraps it up until next time. As always don’t forget to like and subscribe to us and ALL the great shows at 12oz Sports!

Nowadays, all you hear is crypto this and stonks that. But where do these exchanges even exist and how are people making so much money off of them? Lucky for us, our good friend and stranger this week, SUHAN JUNAID, is here to help us understand the world of digital financing and why we should start paying attention immediately. Suhan is a real estate and angel investor who formerly worked on Wall Street. He tells us how he created a better situation for his family of immigrants by getting smart with their finances, what we need to know about stocks and crypto currencies, what really went on with this whole GameStop and Robinhood situation, and a whole lot more. The Strange Squad talks about the social media culture that infects our minds, the perks of women-only gyms, and more! This is the 139th episode of Strange Flavors, brought to you by Alif Theory. _____________________________________________ Email Us / Send Music / Sponsors: strangeflavorspodcast@gmail.com Tweet us: http://twitter.com/StrangeFlavors_ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/StrangeFlavors Facebook: http://facebook.com/StrangeFlavorsPodcast YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/StrangeFlavors TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@strangeflavors?lang=en _____________________________________________ LINKS: Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/strangeflavors Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/RwnlPwnl Join RwnlPwnl Discord: https://discord.gg/NzyPauXMWQ FOLLOW SUHAN: Suhan’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/suhanjay Suhan’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/suhanjay/ GET OUR MERCH! http://aliftheory.com/shop STRANGE FLAVORS MERCH: https://t.co/x8atDWV3nL RWNLPWNL MERCH: https://rwnlpwnl.com/ BOOK US FOR A SHOW: info@aliftheory.com ____________________________________________ • FARAS • Tweet me: http://twitter.com/Farosty | @Farosty on IG/Snap/YouTube/FB • SHAH-AMEER • Tweet me: https://twitter.com/Shimmerwali | @Shimmerwali on IG/Snap/YouTube/FB • AMBER • Tweet me: http://twitter.com/amberazadi | @amberazadi on IG/Snap/YouTube/FB _____________________________________________ Music this week: 1. Poolside - Getting There From Here (with Todd Edwards) (Miami Horror & Lazywax Remix) https://soundcloud.com/poolside/getting-there-from-here-with-todd-edwards-miami-horror-lazywax-remix 2. Ha.Ris - Vibe (feat. Shimmer) https://soundcloud.com/haris97/vibe-feat-shimmer --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/strangeflavors/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/strangeflavors/support

In this episode of the Age of Indiependence podcast, host Katlyn Eggar interviews Bobby Touran, the CEO of Pathpoint. Bobby breaks down startup culture, how his team is solving big problems in the commercial insurance world, and what your team is really thinking when it comes to cyber insurance. Episode Highlights: Bobby shares his background. (2:08) What are some of the things that Bobby does for fun when he’s not working? (4:47) Bobby gives a little background about Pathpoint. (8:58) Bobby shares what he learned from the commercial insurance industry. (10:57) Bobby mentions one of the inefficient segments of commercial insurance. (13:46) Bobby shares why history is a good indicator for the insurance industry. (18:50) Bobby shares what to do if you want to quote cyber on every account. (26:05) Bobby mentions why the key user of their solution is the CSR. (36:01) Bobby mentions the main goal of every insurance agency. (52:24) Key Quotes: “What we do as a company is we enable a faster, more efficient way to place small commercial ENS business today. I say today because our vision and our roadmap is very much focused on improving all sizes of ENS risk that come into the market.” - Bobby Touran “Agents are working so hard. They're working so many different angles. Nowadays, everyone's working from their house with everything else going on in their lives. Ease of Doing Business is so incredibly important.” - Bobby Touran “One of the things that I really believe is that great software is always a facilitator. If the software is truly good, what it's doing is it's making something easier.” - Bobby Touran Resources Mentioned: Agency Intelligence Reach out to Katlyn Eggar Bobby Touran LinkedIn Pathpoint

Self-love: "having a high regard for your own well-being and happiness". In a time of social media and social comparison, there is never a shortage of things to hate about yourself. Nowadays it takes so much courage to look in the mirror and love what you see. In this episode, Adam and I discuss what self-love means to us, the double standards of self-love, growth/ maturity and so much more. Enjoy! XO        Intro music: Song: Jarico - Island (Vlog No Copyright Music) Music promoted by Vlog No Copyright Music. Video Link: https://bit.ly/2QRJFOA Background music:https://bit.ly/34Tw2qChttps://bit.ly/2ERX5rx Ending music: Provided to YouTube by DistroKid Shopping With Bae · Liles Music Chill Mode ℗ Liles Entertainment Released in: 2020-01-19https://bit.ly/3lJ44Ut

Welcome!   We lost a Radio Icon this week and he had a big impact on me, I have a short tribute to him but it was also another busy week on the technology front.  We are going to get into the differences between Backups, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity, often these get tossed around in discussions as one in the same - they are not. Then we will discuss Bitcoin and it metoric rise and why that happened.  Next we'll discuss Apple and Google and why Google is trying to play hardball but may end up getting burned.  Then we are headed to Space and NASA space travel and a discussion on Rocket Fuel for future missions to Mars and there is even more, so be sure to Listen in. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read: Breached water plant employees used the same TeamViewer password and no firewall As Prices Surge, Bitcoin Now Reportedly Consumes More Electricity Than Argentina, Netherlands, And UAE Google flags its iOS apps as “out of date” after two months of neglect White House hastens to address global chip shortage Report: NASA’s only realistic path for humans on Mars is nuclear propulsion A Windows Defender vulnerability lurked undetected for 12 years Hackers try to contaminate Florida town's water supply through computer breach Barcode Scanner app on Google Play infects 10 million users with one update SolarWinds Attack Reinforces Importance of Principle of Least Privilege --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] I've got to say the big story of the week is this breached water plant and how it really affects all of us. Not just because our water could be poisoned by a hacker, but it gives us a bit of a lesson on what we should be doing and what we did. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. There are many things that we did over this lockdown. Things we did. In fact, the lockdown itself to try and help stop not just the spread of the virus, but remember it was a two week lockdown just so that we did not overwhelm our hospitals. Who could disagree with that, right? We all stayed home for two weeks that makes sure that we're flattening the curve, that we're not going to have a lot of. People in hospitals. Unfortunately other people who couldn't make it into the hospitals that needed it. That two week locked down to flatten the curve has turned into what? Now, almost a year later we are still seeing these lockdowns.  These lockdowns have caused havoc. We've talked about many of them. Of course, you hear them all the time on radio. Everything from suicides of our children. Through our parents dying in these homes and without the comfort of their family and without human touch for almost a year. It's just so, so, so sad to see. Now I'm not going to get into the political sides of this and what should we have done? What shouldn't have we'd had done. I've got my opinions on some of this. What I want to talk about is what we did with our jobs? What we did with our businesses? I think we did some terrible things there, too. What I'm talking about is we need to stay home, but we have certain businesses that need to stay open. Now, frankly, every business needs to stay open. It's a business because it's fulfilling a need, right? It is so basic. It's hard to think that people don't understand this, but obviously they don't. We shut down businesses. Businesses that will never, ever come back. People's lives destroyed. People whose entire savings, their entire retirement plan, everything was based on the business. That's where their money was. The people working there were counting on having that money to pay the rent, to pay the electric bills and other utilities. To pay for all of the things in life that we need to pay. It's one thing to have credit card bills that you can't pay, because they're not a whole lot they can do about unsecured debt. They can certainly harass you.  When it comes to things like your home or whatever it is, you're renting, whether you own it or not, how can you make those payments if you don't have money coming in.  The money that the government is issued has just been a mere pittance. I get it. In some cases, people had just incredible amounts of money compared to what they were normally making with unemployment, with the federal subsidies, et cetera. That didn't last. PPP money, this payroll protection money, lasted for about six weeks for those businesses that could get it. Those that qualified. My business didn't qualify for PPP money.  Not because it's too big, but because it's too small. Most of what happens in my business is done by my family members. I've got myself, I've got my wife, of course, you've probably seen Karen mentioned in some of my emails that go out. I've got my eldest son involved. He loves security. He's great at it. He's been working with me now for more than 10- 15 years on this. I've got one of my daughters working with this on me. So it's primarily a family business. We've got contractors who will do different things for us. We have a lot of suppliers and we have to pay those bills, but no payroll per se. You know what? That's a lot of businesses. The number of businesses that were in the same boat as me is huge. That's how things get started in this country.  All of these companies that could have started. The companies that had started that had entered into lease agreements. That had started to provide services for their customers. Whether it be B2B like mine, business to business or business to consumer they were all stifled. What have we done to ourselves? Really? What have we done? The virus itself is obviously pretty nasty and can be lethal in a lot of cases. It has been.  Now we found out that people like governor Cuomo apparently just cooked the books. Cooked the books, something awful. We went home, we started working from home. Our businesses said, what can we do?  We had  people getting very, very busy trying to figure it out. There are a lot of little remote programs that you can use in one of those is Team Viewer. Now there's nothing particularly wrong with Team Viewer. I'm not fond of the idea of things like Team Viewer, remote desktop, and others, but sometimes it is the best solution for a particular problem.  Team viewer in this case was used by a small government agency. Think about what would have happened. You had to shut down, you still had to do work. What did you do as a business? You probably got something like Team Viewer, one of these login, remote login programs. Maybe you set up remote desktop so people could get in remotely. Maybe you set up a VPN because that's going to solve all of your problems. Which of course it causes almost as many as it solves, but most people don't realize this. That's the case here. We're talking about a small town, 15,000 people, called Oldsmar. I don't think it's because they're a small town. I think this problem happened because they did what most of us did. We were not ready for a shutdown. As businesses, we wern't ready for shutdown. In fact, the year before they did the shutdown, they had this massive pandemic planning session about eight months before. They all agreed that a shut down was the wrong thing to do in the case of a worldwide pandemic. They also redefined pandemic. I think maybe getting the angle I'm coming from here. Right. They decided no, we're not going to do that. They did not plan for pandemic. In fact, they didn't plan for a lockdown. Obviously, you don't. Well, I don't know, maybe you do plan for a pandemic. If you're coming up with a virus you're going to release, but they were not planning for a pandemic. They were not planning for the lockdown and neither were businesses.  Most businesses, government agencies and NGOs, had no plans in place, even for disaster recovery or business continuity. You may or may not be aware of this, but there's different levels. You've got basic backups and you should be doing backups because hard disks fail. One of my customers CEO thought that hard desks never fail. She was really upset when a disc crashed that we'd been warning her about, because we keep an eye on things called smart stats on the disks.  We said you've got this disc it's going to fail. You probably need to fix things because you're not in a raid array. You've fallen out of that already. Things didn't just get worse. You have a backup. You hope that Mac going to work. If you get ransomware and I got to tell you, nowadays, the answer's no. There's two sides to ransomware, but we've talked about that before. I'm not going to get into it right now. You've got the backup mainly in case the disk fails, or you accidentally delete a whole bunch of files and you want to get them back. The next step that you have is disaster recovery. You have  a disaster, like there's massive snow storm that caused a water main to break in the roof. All of your computer equipment is covered with water and none of it will work anymore.  In a disaster recovery situation, you now take your backups and you get new machines and you load it all on and hopefully your backups are remote. They weren't damaged by the water. Unfortunately, most businesses, again, not thinking this through just hoping, crossing their fingers, that they're not going to be one of those 50% of businesses that is out of business because of a disaster. Actually is closer to 75%. It depends on whose numbers you're looking at. So they're hoping. No, no, I'm going to be part of your disaster. Disaster recovery. Is just think of that, of a snow storm and the roof collapses of a fire and the computers have burn. Can you get your business back in business? Then there is business continuity. That's a whole other level of planning and business continuity is where you say, Hey, I need to make sure my business continues to conduct business. If you have a hundred, 200, 300 employees, You're much better off being able to  let's say the computer room burns down as an example that or that roof caves in because of the snow and you've lost those computers. You're much better to be back in business in four hours or less. We've had business continuity solutions where we had equipment on site in a different part of the building.  If there was a problem in one part of the building, we could fail over to the other part. Now this is an awfully big building and we had fiber links between them, but they could be back in business in less than 10 minutes. It's just that quick. That is business continuity, right? If you are a public company or you are a division of a public company by law, you cannot be out of business for more than four hours. Now, that's just public companies. By the way, those same rules are in place for doctor's offices, for hospitals, any medical personnel you have to be able to get at the patient's records within four hours. How many of us are ready for that?  Then along comes a shutdown, remote workers. We're going to get into this a little more detail. We're going to talk about these SCADA systems, supervisory control and data acquisition. What does that mean? And why is this a problem for all of our infrastructure. How did this guy poison or at least try to a town of 15,000. You're listening to Craig Peterson. What happened to that town, a Florida city of about 15,000, Northwest of Tampa when hackers got into their water supply and hacked up the amount of lye by a factor of 100. Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here. This whole concept of having a backup versus some sort of a disaster recovery plan versus business continuity is something most businesses really don't pay enough attention to. Now, we've got another problem which is really a business continuity problem. What do you do when your employees can't get into the business? When we've set up business continuity for businesses, in the past, what we've done is I mentioned earlier this data center where we duplicated part of it in another part of this massive building. If there was a problem with something, could just be some of the core switches go down or something, we could automatically fail over and continue running within 10 minutes. That's one way to do it. But how about if the rest of the building went away? How about if your main servers okay, but the roof collapses or there's some sort of a fire? What happens if your employees can't come into work because there's a lockdown? There are so many reasons you need to have business continuity in place. We didn't have it right. Not we, as in me, but so many people, so many companies didn't have that. That's what happened in Oldsmar, Florida. They have a water plant. Of course, they have all of the normal things any city of 15,000 people would have. They had in their water treatment plant these devices that are called SCADA devices that are used to control valves. These valves are exactly what you think in a water plant. They're used to control the mixture of various chemicals to divert water around the plant.  The source of the water, the type of filter switched over to a new filter so that older filter can be replaced. In many cases, the main filtration is just done through sand and it has to backwash every once in a while. This is all controlled by computer, nowadays. They were running a Windows seven machine. No I know you're saying, well, I've got Windows seven I'm okay.  The problem is Windows seven is no longer supported by Microsoft, unless you're paying them ungodly amounts of money. I'm talking about $50,000 a year per machine sort of money. It's just crazy amounts of money. Most companies don't have that, right? I don't know anybody outside the federal government that actually has that. There's probably some, but they will not release it to the general public. Sometimes they'll release a few little security patches because something was just so apparent that they had overlooked. But most of the time, no. Most of the time these security patches just aren't available for older versions of Windows. So they had a Windows  machine that was controlling this network with all of these valves on it. They had that machine hooked up to something called Team Viewer. The idea behind Team Viewer is, Oh, this is really handy. I can put Team Viewer on our control machine. Then I can have my employees be at home and then use that control machine remotely over Team Viewer . That's what Team Viewer is designed for, isn't it? Well, as it turns out, they were using Team Viewer throughout the water district. That became a bit of a problem because they did not have proper firewalls to protect it. And they were all sharing the same password. Interesting advisory that came out about this particular problem from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, if you can believe it. This cybersecurity advisory for public water suppliers is talking about how water suppliers can guard against cyber attacks on water supplies. It goes through a lot of these basic things that I've talked about. They should listen to my show every once in a while, right? Or attended the briefings that I had put on for the FBI's InfraGuard program. It would be pretty simple for them. The state of Florida came out with some guidelines, et cetera, after the fact. As did Massachusetts. They were running Windows seven. They were remotely accessing plant controls. The computer had no firewall installed. Well, that's what they're saying. In reality, Windows ships with a firewall installed, but that doesn't mean it's going to do any good. I talk a lot about that in some of my courses, but the computer was visible to the internet apparently. Okay. They all shared the same password. What do you want to bet it was a bad password and employees could remotely log into city systems using this Team Viewer application. It was really that simple. Now this actor's here apparently is more than one and they are unidentified. So we don't have a whole lot of information on it, but I did get a notice. It's called a pin, which is a notice from the FBI it's labeled green, which means I can share it with everybody. It's saying that they obtained unauthorized access to it. Now, here's the most important part. These cyber actors likely access the system by exploiting cybersecurity weaknesses, including poor password security and outdated Windows seven operating system to compromise the software used to remotely manage water treatment. The actor also likely use the desktop sharing software Team Viewer to gain on authorized access to the system. We've seen this, not only with Team Viewer, we have seen this with remote desktop and many other systems that people have been using to allow their workers to get in remotely. All of this because of the lockdown, people working at home. All of this should have been handled properly by having a business continuity plan in place. It's really that simple. Now the putting the plan together, isn't that simple, frankly, but we've got to think about what happens here. No. I also think about this particular hack and who did it. Well, it could have been the Russians, right? It could have been the Chinese or the North Koreans. We know Vietnam has gotten into the game lately. It could have been any of those guys. But do you know who the most likely people are to do this sort of thing? It's somebody who works for the company or in this case, very likely that it's a disgruntled employee. They all shared the same password. They use Team Viewer. I said, I'm not blaming Team Viewer here, but this is not good. This is really bad. This is not just something that could happen at a water plant where they're moving the amount of lye from a hundred parts per million to 11,000 parts per million. They're using it in drinking water to change the Alkalinity, the acidity of the water. I don't know, I don't know. We've got to do something about this.  I'm going to have some training on this, what you should be doing for remote workers. If you're interested, let me know I'm going to plan some, but I'm not going to do it until I hear from you to know it's worth my time to put it all together. Email me M E at Craig Peterson. Let me know that you'd like to know about remote workers or maybe this whole business continuity idea. Again, email me me@craigpeterson.com. Let me know. Hey, you'll find a whole lot of stuff. If you go to Craig peterson.com and it's all good information that you need. Make sure you sign up for my newsletter right there. Craig peterson.com Hey, we can't go without talking about Bitcoin. It has surged surged surged. It may go up, it may go down. I'm not somebody who advises on investments, but we're going to talk about what it is and why people are mining it. Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here. Well, we have a real big thing to talk about when it comes to Bitcoin, but first I have to take a minute and honor a man who has inspired me in broadcasting for decades. A man who has changed the whole face of radio. AM radio was pretty much dead. Then he started his national show. Of course, I'm talking about Rush Limbaugh. Whether you agree with him politically, and I think most of you guys probably do. We all have our differences, or not, he is a man that deserves great respect. He changed the face of American politics. He literally single handedly saved AM radio. He created this whole concept of a national syndicated talk radio show, and it has helped to educate millions of people. I started listening to him back in the late eighties, quite a while ago. I was just amazed with him and the way he did it. One of the things that inspired me about it is he took callers, but they weren't the guest, he was the guest. They were asking him questions. That is so topsy turvy from how, even today, most radio shows are. People would call him up and they would ask him questions and he'd be able to answer them. He also asked them some questions, obviously, in order to figure things out, he also was not afraid to take opposing calls. He would look for those and he would put those to the top of the queue. He would take those callers that disagreed with him before he took callers that agreed with him, his ditto heads, as they like to call themselves. When I heard this week that he had passed, I knew it was coming, but it hit me hard. It hit me really hard. He's not that much older than me. Although I remain in really good health,  knock on wood here I am just flabbergasted. I don't have words for his passing. So it would not be right for me not to have mentioned a man who inspired me, who educated me and played a role in my life, such that when he passed, I was just gobsmacked. It's absolutely a sad, sad time. I really wish my best, obviously to his wife. I guess Catherine is his fourth wife, so I'm guessing he didn't have the best home life out there. Things obviously didn't do well on that front. I think he's a little bold and brash and maybe that's part of it. But my memories of him being down in Cambridge, Mass. I was working as a contractor for about a year and a half at the Open Software Foundation.  I was working on the operating system and that was rewriting the TCPIP stack. If you know what that is, it's the basis of the internet today and the Open Software Foundation  provided its code to pretty much everybody out there. That's how I can say with high degree of confidence, the code I wrote is still in use today to help run the internet.  I was working down there as a contractor for about 18 months. I also put in the  i18n, the internationalization code into many of the Unix libraries and at lunchtime. I had a small radio with me and I would go out and walk around for lunchtime and listen to Rush Limbaugh while I was out walking around.  He had been quite the companion for me, gave me a lot of things to think about, disagree with him on, and agree with him on. Conversations were spurred with other people.I've come to realize, I mentioned this to my wife, as well, this week after he passed that as someone who's on radio, call us personalities or whatever you might want to call us. But as someone on radio, this is a very personal medium. I've come to realize that  Rush taught me something. I realized it when he passed, I've never met the man. I have a photograph of him signed by him around here, somewhere. He taught me something else and that is, I never met the guy, yet I felt attachment to him that I had never felt really to  anybody else. Certainly I've never felt that way about a movie actor that died. I've never felt that way about an author whose books I loved. I've missed some of them, some of these books where there a series of books and the author died. You could tell mid book that the voice changed and it was being written at that point by someone else. I was just disappointed by that.  I didn't feel that sense of loss that I felt this week.  It helps me to realize. How important it is for me with you guys. Without you guys listening, we wouldn't have a radio station. Without you guys buying from the advertisers it couldn't afford to, to pay for the electricity, and all of the people that are involved. It's the listeners. Right. I have an obligation to you to present the information that you need in a way that you can understand and hopefully in a way that you can use it, right? What good is  a show like this? If I'm giving you stuff that there's nothing you can do about it? You notice, I always try and do that, but that's the way Rush was too. Rush wouldn't just sit there and complain. Rush would talk about the facts, what's happening, where he thinks it should go, and what we should be doing. What we should be doing as a nation and what we should be doing as individuals.  To me, that was very inspirational.  Frankly, that's how I've patterned this show. I've had this radio show for over 20 years and I've patterned it that way, where I try and help.  If you've ever sent me an email you get a personal reply from me because I am here to help. And I felt that way about Rush. I've sent him emails. I'd never gotten responses, right? But you, I feel this attachment to these people. That's part of the beauty of these smaller radio stations, where there are people, we are local, we do care about you. These advertisers tend to be local as well. Certainly local businesses advertise locally, and we really have an obligation to you, to every one of you. So I appreciate you. I really do.  I really to want to help.  I am beginning to understand some of the responsibility that I have it isn't just to help you understand technology a little better to keep your machines clean, to stop your businesses from being stolen from, by hackers or by Snowfall that might bring your building down. It is to help you as best I can, as often as I can. So that's why I do it. That's why I do these courses, the newsletters, everything else. Rest in peace, Rush. We're going to miss you. Visit online as well, craig peterson.com and sign up for my newsletter so I can help you a little more. Well, we really, are going to talk about Bitcoin in this segment. So stick around. I had to talk about Rush this last time around.  Bitcoin, the prices are surging. People are mining. What does that mean? And why are they using more electricity than the country of Argentina? Craig Peterson here. Bitcoin has been around for a while. I don't think anybody out there has not heard about Bitcoin. It is a power in and of itself. We don't know who actually came up with this whole concept. There's a concept behind Bitcoin called blockchain technology.  Blockchain technology is based on the concept of ledgers. Where you have ledgers, just like a bank ledger that keeps track of every transaction. There are hundreds of thousands. Just so many ledgers in the world.  In order to verify transactions, half of those ledger entries have to agree. So it's pretty basic on that level. What is the Bitcoin itself, which sits on top of this blockchain technology? Well, if you want to look at it, simply take a look at prime numbers. Hopefully you can name the first five prime numbers, right? What do we got? One, three, five, seven, 11. There you go those are the first five prime numbers and a prime numbers a number that is only divisible by itself and one, which is why one is a prime number. We use prime numbers a lot nowadays. Most of the encryption that you're using is based on prime numbers. If you go to a secure website, you're using something called SSL, which is the secure socket layer and that's what shows up in your browser, in that URL line as a little lock, if you see that lock that you have effectively a VPN, a virtual private network between your browser and that remote site. Guess what? You already have a VPN, right? Why use one of these VPNs that spies on you? That is encrypted data and it's very difficult to encrypt in between. How does it do that? It's using something known as public key technology, the RSA algorithm. We're not going to go any further down that, but basically it's allows someone to have a public key and use that public key to encrypt a message. then you, the person who's receiving the message whose private key was used to do the encryption can decrypt it using their private key. So the public key side, the private keys side, it allows the encryption from end to end. That's what the SSL is all about. Well, when we're talking about Bitcoin, we are talking about something that goes and uses some of the similar technology. What it's doing is using these prime numbers. That's what the RSA algorithm is using this encryption algorithm, using these very large, very complicated prime numbers because you get past 11 and lets see 12. That's not a prime, right? Uh, because it's divisible by. Two and six and three and four, and then let's see 13. Okay. That's a prime 14, no 15, no 16. No.  It gets more difficult. I remember way back when, writing a little program that just found prime numbers and it looked for prime numbers and the easiest way to do it was I would start, first of all, you take a number, divide it into. There's no reason to go any higher than that when you're trying to figure out if it's prime or not.  Then I would start looking at some of the base numbers to try and figure it out. Of course, real mathematicians were able to figure out better ways to find primes. Well, when we're talking about Bitcoin and some of these other cryptocurrencies, they are also using these very large prime numbers, just like you're being used for this public key encryption. They also have some other parameters around some of these prime numbers. To have a Bitcoin is to have this digital number that represents a unique prime number. If you want to mine, what you're doing is you are trying to find a prime number that no one has ever found before, just to oversimplify things a little bit. You find that prime number and Tada now you have a Bitcoin. Sounds easy enough, sounds quick enough. It is not easy and it is not quick. It's not just the based on the prime number algorithm, but we're keeping this simple here. We have found millions now of these Bitcoins. I should look that up and find out exactly how many, but there are many Bitcoins. The whole algorithm, the whole system is set up to do some restrictions here, there's only a certain number of these Bitcoins that will ever be mined. It's estimated that something like 20% of the Bitcoins that were found have been lost because the encryption was used to keep the keys. People forgot it. You probably heard about this guy that has a quarter of a billion dollars in Bitcoin in this wallet.  He only gets eight tries before it auto destructs. He hasn't found them yet.  There's a quarter of a billion dollars that's unreachable, but that's what we're talking about here. Bitcoin mining. In this day and age, Bitcoin mining is so hard and it takes so much computing power that it is using a couple of things. First of all, the thing that bothers me the most is it's using up these GPU's these graphical processing units, because GPU, which we typically use for graphics processing are set up so that we have are hundreds, thousands of processes that can be happening on that card simultaneously, various small little tiny processes that can be set up to somewhat be optimized for Bitcoin mining or mining, any of these other cryptocurrencies. Then the people who really want to make money on mining these cryptocurrencies have machines that are special machines. They are designed specifically to mine, one type of coin, one of these crypto coins. We're talking about Bitcoin. There are machines that are designed to mine bitcoins, go to E-bay and look for Bitcoin miner. They used to have themon Amazon. I haven't checked in a while, but you'll find them in both places. At least you used to be able to, you can certainly still find the money bank.  You'll find some that are old, that are used and some brand new ones. Well, it is expensive to mine them. One of my sons and I, we decided years ago to try and do a little mining. We probably should have tried harder but we gave up.  It was a, who knows what's going to happen with Bitcoin. There are so many cryptocurrencies and today there are people introducing new cryptocurrencies all of the time. I avoid those like the plague because you never know what's going to happen. Bitcoin is definitely the 800 pound gorilla out there. We were able to mine I guess my son said he mind a couple of other little currencies they're worth a penny or two, not a very big deal. We have now so many people in China that were doing Bitcoin mining China could not produce enough electricity to mine the Bitcoins. China went around and shut down anybody that was mining Bitcoin. We have something called the Cambridge Bitcoin electricity consumption index. This is an index designed to figure out how much electricity is being used in order to mine Bitcoin. This is, of course, over in England, the university of Cambridge the judge business school. I'm looking at a graphic right now that they have, and this is showing the electricity and Bitcoin mining. They actually have all of the data for downloading, if you ever wanted to do some serious analysis.  It's showing there was hardly anything, if anything, back in 2016. The summer 2017, when it started to jump up and that's, of course, when the price of Bitcoin started to go up. Why? Well, mainly because of ransomware. People having to pay ransomware and buy Bitcoin in order to pay that ransom. In terawatts. Now we are showing at about, okay, this is Wednesday, February 10, 2021 288 terawatts of electricity on that one day. Isn't that something. The amount of electricity that's being used has been surging because, of course, the price of Bitcoin has been going up. Just been going up in crazy, crazy rates. The amount of mining going on has doubled, almost doubled since October last year. We're talking about using more electricity than the entire country of Argentina, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates. It is absolutely amazing, amazing how much we're using. People are alarmed by this. Countries are having major problems in trying to figure this out. What else is funny about it? They talk about Bitcoin being one of these so-called green technologies. Well, it turns out that Bitcoin because of the electricity that it's using for people to mine now has a carbon footprint comparable to the entire country of New Zealand. It's producing about 37 mega tons of carbon dioxide per year. I think that's  funny, frankly, because they call it green. Right? It's like green cars that are electric. Well, guess what? They, aren't green in so many ways. They're cool as heck don't get me wrong, but don't think they're green because they're not. A lot of reasons for that.  I've talked about it many times in the past, on my radio show. If you go to my website, you can just look that up and you can find out why, and I've got hard numbers there, anything else? All right, everybody make sure you visit me online. We have started some new stuff. If you are a frequent reader of my, now Sunday newsletter, which has my show notes. You are getting also one or two other newsletters during the week just short trainings. I'm trying to help you out, but if you're not opening that newsletter, if you don't download the images. That's how I tell that you opened it, then you're not going to get all of the supplemental material, including some audio programming that you can't get anywhere else. So make sure you go to Craig peterson.com and sign up for the newsletter.  Open the silly thing. So you get all of this free training and more. Craig peterson.com. Apple has been really busy trying to make sure we know who's using our data and what they're using it for turns out Google's not too happy about that. You'll be surprised what they did this week. Hi everybody. Thanks for joining me. I've talked here about how Apple is really taking some major steps up in trying to defend our privacy. Apple does not make money off of our data. They don't sell it. They don't compile it and then sell it, Google however, is trying to be the repository of all of our information. So much for the don't be evil thing. Right? Well, Apple's got these almost like nutritional labels. You remember when the CDC or it wasn't the CDC, it was some federal agency, I can't even remember forced food companies to put labels on the packaging, telling us about calories, fat, various other types of things. You could make a bit of an informed decision by looking at that. Obviously there's other stuff that I don't know what this word means. I don't know what that is. What's red dye, number two, all of those types of things, but at least it brings it to your mind. You can also see how many servings there are. It'll say this muffin is a 500 servings and only a calorie a piece, right. The reality is that box is really meant to be two or three or four servings, including that Coke that you might be drinking. I am more of a Pepsi man, but I haven't drank either in years now, frankly. Well, Apple is trying to do kind of the same thing. They've got millions of apps up on their app store. In the app store, of course you can not only find the apps, but you can download them. You can buy them depending on what the app is. Most of these apps that are free, are really not free right? We've talked about that before. I don't know that we need to get into in a lot of detail, but it goes back to that saying of if it's free, then your, probably the product. That's been very true.  Apple and Google both have caught a lot of companies. Who've been trying to steal our information successfully in some cases. Obviously, that's a bad thing particularly when you don't know about it. So these labels that Apple is having app developers put on their apps have got a whole bunch of people upset, Google ran full page ads in newspapers, complaining about it and how it's going to hurt small business. Reality is, it is going to hurt some small businesses that do advertising. That's very, very narrow. It's going to hurt me if I'm doing that type of advertising no question about it. I don't do that. But one of these days, I hope to be able to do it. What it is doing now, is stopping companies like Facebook. Facebook has always been doing tracking, not just when you're running their app. Facebook has been getting information from other websites from web pages like mine, for instance, I've got a Facebook pixel on my website so I know if you came from Facebook, what you're interested in and in what you're doing so that I can present information to you based on your interest. I'm doing now for the very first time, this week, a similar thing. With my newsletter. If you have, for instance said that you're interested in my improving windows security course, the newsletter, isn't going to bother you about that anymore because I have this little signature at the bottom with, here's a few things that I could do for you. If you want a little extra help.  Some of it's paid, some of it's free, obviously, but. I think it's annoying personally to keep getting the same message every week.  I've put into my email program, some conditional stuff so that if you've asked for the improving windows security course, I'm not going to bother you about that anymore. By the way, no, the course hasn't started yet. It's a labor of love. What can I say? There are a lot of different types of tracking that are done and not all of them are bad. For instance, I just gave you an example of something that I've started doing, and I am doing some tracking in order to do that because I don't want to annoy you. I want to give you the information you need when you need it, right? Bottom line. It's like, I've always said, if I'm interested in buying a Ford F150, then I don't mind seeing ads for it, but if I'm not interested in buying a pickup truck or a Silverado, why would I want to see a GM ad when I'm going to get a Ford, right? It's really that simple. Google, as I mentioned, has been complaining. They've done the full-page ads. They've complained to Congress critters they've spent so much money. Lobbying, it's a real problem and a difficult solution to it. If you want to get rid of lobbyists, obviously the bottom line is you have to get rid of the money going to, and coming from Washington DC.  If they don't have control over our money. If they don't have control over our lives. Then the lobbyists aren't going to be going there. I don't care which side of the aisle you are on, or if you're a right in that middle of the aisle. Lobbyists do not represent our interests as a nation. That's the bottom line. Google's down there spending money saying, Oh, you're going to hurt the small businesses. When in reality, the biggest target that's going to be hurt by Apple cracking down on people taking our information without letting us know is Google. It's going to be a problem for Google, so how to get around it. One of the things that Apple has for its apps that are on your iPhone and on also your tablets is a tracker. When was the last time that app was updated. Of course, when the app gets updated, Apple has a look at it and tries to see if there's anything malicious going on. Now it's impossible to catch everything. Some of the stuff is very well, obfuscated.  I can't blame Apple or Google for letting some of this malware through. But the bottom line is they want to know. When did you update it? What's going on? Google apparently flagged its own Apple apps. The apps designed for iOS. Think about the Google apps, obviously. There's the Google app itself. There are Google maps. Apps can be very useful, including Waze. I was so upset when they bought Waze, but that goes into the anti-trust stuff that is going on right now in Congress. But I was looking at the phone and looking at the app and they were flagged as out of date. It had been two months since Google updated iOS apps. It has been updating its apps in the Android space, but not the iOS apps. The theory is that Google has not been doing updates on its Apple apps because of this new privacy labeling that Apple's come up with. You see back in early January, Google could have said, we haven't been updating our apps because of the lockdown. The engineers are busy trying to handle this and that. We just had the holidays and I would have accepted that you would have accepted that. Well, that was what now six weeks ago. Google has, every year around the holidays a code freeze, which means no one can make any changes, that is done with right now. The company Google should have released two new versions, particularly since they come out with the new versions for the Android operating system, Gmail, Google maps, Google search, Chrome, drive, photos, keep and duo have all been frozen since Apple launched these privacy requirements. What do we think is going on? Well, it looks like frankly, Google just doesn't want us to know what data they're trying to get at. What they're doing? What they're selling? What they're tracking, the inter app tracking. The Google's been doing as well as Facebook and many of these others.  What's the easiest way to not have to worry about that don't have a new release so that you don't have to abide by the new terms from Apple, which include, Hey, what information are you gathering? How are you gathering? What are you doing with my personal information? It looks like Google took the easy way out again. It's a phenomenal.  I'm looking right now, Gmail and it has not been updated on iOS since December 1st. The Android version of Gmail has had four updates since then. That's a pretty big deal, frankly. Apple's definitely got people's attention. The app developers attention. I am glad they're doing it as a user. I'm not so sure. I'm glad if I decide to try and do targeted marketing through some of these online pay-per-click and some of these other ways of reaching people. But you guys, already how I feel about you and I'm going to be giving you lots of good information. I some of you guys become my clients cause your businesses and you need that little extra help for your poor overworked IT people internally. Lots of what's going on with Google. We'll see when they do come up with the next update, but it's a real problem. Hey, if you want to get my weekly email where I have my show notes. Now these show notes are what I use here on the show. They're also what I send to people like Matt Gagnon who I am on with every Wednesday morning. That's what he picks from. That's what all of these stations pick from, my show notes.  The only way you can get them and get information about what's going on in the world and things you have to do right now, is by signing up for my email. Craig peterson.com. Boy, I love space stuff. I have for years. I was so excited to play an extremely minor role, but to get involved with the NASA space shuttle program. Let's talk a little bit about what's next up for it. I remember that day. I can't remember what day of the week it was, but that day when we landed on the moon watching it live. It was just mind blowing.  Of course the newspaper, first time I had ever seen a color cover on a newspaper and it was a picture of our astronauts there on the moon. It was just so incredible. Of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson. NASA has been trying to get back to the moon for a long time.  We haven't been funding them. Priorities have changed. A lot of people say why don't we spend the money domestically rather than on the space program? The space program has provided us all kinds of benefits over the years. It's benefited mankind, not just by giving us things like Tang, for instance. It's given us all kinds of technology and science that we would never have had any other way. I'm looking right now at a report that was put together by AIESEC, which is the international space exploration coordination group. It just a top level executive summary. Numerous cases of societal benefits, new knowledge and technology from space exploration, things like solar panels came from the space program, implantable heart monitors. Cancer therapy, lightweight materials, water purification systems, improved computing systems, a global search and rescue systems, course rockets as well. There's so much more, things we just weren't expecting. Thin materials, power generation, energy storage, recycling and waste management, advanced robotics, health and medicine, transportation, engineering, computing, and software. Not just the $800 hammers. Okay. Culture and inspiration. As you can tell I find this very, very inspiring. We've got all kinds of things that we are using just day-to-day that we don't even think about it. As the space scientists, engineers overcome obstacles, in some cases, we never even realized were there and I think that's another phenomenal thing. Well, right now, what we're doing is having private organizations competing to send our missions up. For many years now, since the space shuttle program was ended and it lasted far longer than they expected it to. But now that the space shuttle program has been over. We've mostly been using Russian rockets to get our astronauts into space and also to get things to things like the international space station. What are we going to end up doing in the future? We already know who was it, Bob and somebody, right? A couple of astronauts. The went up on the Elon Musk rocket, and docked with the space station. It was again, one of the most amazing things ever. I sat there glued watching it on the computer. It was just, wow. To see that. We're looking at going to Mars. Now, we're looking at exploring some of Mars is moons more than we have in the past, doing all kinds of things that are just going to make a huge, huge difference to humanity. It's been quite a while since that Apollo program of 50 years ago took humans to the moon and they were using chemical propulsion. What that means that you had rocket engines burn liquid oxygen and hydrogen in a combustion chamber. Nowadays we're playing around with hydrogen peroxide in order to get that oxygen. They use have their advantages and that gives NASA the ability to start and stop an engine really quickly. Back in the sixties, this was the most mature technology for space travel. We'd been using rockets. They were really piloted in world war two. It made a lot of sense back then. However, now we've got some other problems we've gone to prepare for. We're going to be sending four or more astronauts to Mars. We want to colonize Mars, but relying on chemical propulsion to get beyond the moon, bottom line, it just won't cut it. The main reason is the amount of rocket fuel.  Most of that rocket fuel is going to be consumed getting out of the atmosphere. It's crazy how much we're talking about $2 billion for a flight of one of these huge rockets. These block one B configurations, NASA's SLS or space launch system rocket, is going to be able to carry 105 tons to lower earth orbit. That's a lot of money. They're not going to be able to get that many of them up there. That only takes it to lower earth orbit. Now, of course, the idea is to do what in fact, the Apollo mission had looked at, which is  get the fuel up to orbit and then have a rocket up there that maybe is assembled an orbit and is refueled in orbit. Then it goes to the moon. That was actually the plan NASA was originally going to pursue. We're looking at that now, when we're talking about going to Mars while we're talking about going even further out there. What can we do?  Just for the fuel, by the way $20 billion just to get the fuel up. That's just absolutely crazy. There were some tests that were done, some studies that were done on behalf of NASA for a mission to Mars in 2039. So this one's quite a ways out. Of course, Elon Musk wants to do it even sooner. He is relying on these chemical rockets.  By the way, to get back home from Mars, he's relying on being able to make rocket fuel right there on the surface of Mars and then charge up the rocket engines in the launch vehicle and then launch back up to get back to earth. It's going to be really, really interesting to see what we end up doing. They are looking at a nuclear propulsion system. It's going to be interesting. NASA has had budget for this. They got $110 million for nuclear, thermal propulsion development. We know a lot about nuclear fuel nuclear propulsion. We'll see what happens.  This star ship concept that space X is building to send humans to Mars using chemical propellant. They're countering the costs involved with the chemical propellant by having this low cost reusable launch system. We just saw one blow up here a few weeks ago, but that's okay there was no intent of having astronauts sitting on that candle. That was just a test system. We've seen him repeatedly now land successfully. All of those boosters and it's amazing what's been happening now. They're not the only ones. We've got a number of other companies that are working on these types of systems. Space X ultimately we're talking about pushing the boundaries of reuse and heavy lift rockets to extreme limits which is exactly what space X is trying to do. They're looking for some other answers. Hey, make sure you sign up Craig peterson.com. I want you to make sure you have all of the latest materials. Craig peterson.com. We're going to talk about how some of our technology we're bringing into our homes to keep us safe is actually ending up in killing people. Yeah. Yeah. Death by police officer. Here we go. If you want to see my show notes, all you have to do is subscribe. Craig peterson.com. And once you're there, you'll see all of the information that I have available my podcasts and a little articles that we've written, and you'll also have the opportunity to subscribe to my newsletter. I just want to get the message out is my bottom line. We have these home cameras that we have welcomed into our homes. And one of the ones has been getting a lot of heat lately is the ring camera. I don't know if you've seen these things. They've been advertised on television and it's basically like a little doorbell. You put it out there by your front door, side door, whatever, and it has a doorbell button. And it also has a camera and a speaker that's built into it. Then the microphone, obviously. So someone comes to the door or rings to the doorbell. There's an app that you can have on your phone. So you could be at the beach. You could be at the DMV. Someone comes to your home and hits that button. You can now converse with them and tell them to leave the package or go away or whatever it is you want to do. There have been some problems. One of them that has been rather controversial is that there are a number of police departments that are part of a program with ring that gives them alive. Real-time access to all of the ring doorbells in neighborhoods. And the idea there is the police can patrol the neighborhoods without having to spend money on cameras that might be up on telephone poles, et cetera. And they get their feeds alive from people's doorbell cams, these ring doorbell cams. So that could be considered good. It could be considered bad, just like about almost anything. Now we're seeing that they have been hacked. Yes, indeed. There is a hack that's out there that has been used and hijackers have been live streaming peoples ring, doorbell cameras. Now where this gets really dangerous and where it hasn't been really dangerous is something called swatting. You probably know about SWAT teams, the police have, and unfortunately, most federal agencies have their own SWAT teams, which just constantly blows my mind because why. Does this little department or that little department need of full SWAT team, it should really be a police department of some sort, but at any rate the whole idea behind a SWAT team is they have special weapons and tactics that they can use in a situation where there might be a hostage or maybe there's a report of a bomb or something else that they have to take care of. And thank God these teams exist in, they do drills. They'll do drills in schools. I know my police department does that fairly frequently and I was involved with some of those when I was a volunteer on the ambulance squad here in town. All make sense, but what has happened in a number of occasions and far more than we like to talk about is that there are. The bad guys or people who don't like their neighbor and call in hoaxes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So there here's an example in Wichita, Kansas, this happened a couple of years back where a man had been arrested after allegedly swatting prank led police to shoot dead 28 year old man. So this guy, 28 years old, Wichita, Kansas, please surrounded his home. After they received a hoax emergency call from a man claiming to have shot dead his father and taken his family hostage. And this call apparently stemmed from a kind of a battle between two online gamers playing call of duty online. The way these games work is you can talk back and forth. You can have. Teams and you or your team members can be from almost anywhere around the world. And you sitting there with headphones on and talking back and forth. You've got these teams and in some cases, this is just one person against another. And apparently they believe the report was an act of swatting where. Somebody makes a false report to a police department that causes the police to respond with a SWAT team. Now the audio of this emergency calls been made public, a man can be heard telling the authorities. This is according to the BBC that he had shot his father in the head and claimed to have taken his mother and siblings hostage. The color also said he had a handgun at had poured fuel over the house and wanted to set the property on fire. Sounds like the perfect thing for. A SWAT team to come to. Please say they surrounded the address. They called her given and we're preparing to make contact with the suspect reportedly inside. When Mr. Finch came to the door, they said one round was released by the officers after the 28 year old failed to comply with verbal orders to keep his hands up. Why would he, what did he done wrong? Obviously. The police ordered you to put your hands up. You probably should put your hands up. And they said he appeared to move his hands towards his waist multiple times when she probably did. Please say Mr. Finch was late found to be unarmed and was pronounced dead at a local hospital. A search found four of his family members inside. None of them dead. Injured North taken hostage. His family told local media, he was not involved in online. Gaming. Gaming is a little different than the call of duty and stuff. Gaming typically is gambling. Now we're finding that the, that hackers are out there who do this swatting maneuver on somebody. And then they have the hacked ring camera at that house and they watch the SWAT team respond. Can you believe that? And the FBI is saying that this is the latest twist on the swatting prank, some prank, right? Because victims had reused passwords from other services when setting up their smart devices. How many times do I have to warn about this? My buddy, I was just telling you guys about a couple of weeks ago, he's done that his. His revenue, his pay from the work he was doing, delivering food to people's homes was stolen by a hacker because he was using the same email address. Yes. To log in and the same password as had been stolen before. Absolutely incredible. There's also been reports of security flaws in some products, including the smart doorbells have allowed hackers to steal pet network passwords, et cetera. In one case in Virginia. Police reported hearing the hacker shout helped me after arriving at the home of a person they had fought might be about to kill himself. That's swatting that using technology you've brought into your home, it causes death, many examples of that, and we're still reusing passwords. Give me a break. We were busy trying to defend the election this year and had the, what did they call it? The most secure election in history, which baffles me. But anyway our businesses and government got broken thats what we're going to talk about right now. Let's get into our big problem here this week. And this has been continuing for what now about two or three weeks we've known about it? This is a hack of a company called SolarWinds. This hack apparently allowed intruders into our networks for maybe a year and a half. But certainly since March of 2019, this is. A huge deal. We're going to explain a little bit about that here. Who got hacked? What does it mean to you there? And I'm going to get into it just a little bit of something simple. It could be, haven't been done, right? That I have been advising you guys to do for a long time. Does this, like earlier I mentioned, Hey, change your passwords, use different passwords. And in fact, That's a big problem still, but we'll talk about this right now. SolarWinds is a company that makes tools to manage networks of computers and the network devices themselves. And my company mainstream was a client of SolarWinds. Sorry. I want to put that on the table. However, about a year and a half to two years ago, it's probably been about two years. We dropped SolarWinds as a vendor, and the reason we dropped them and we made it very clear to them was we had found security. Vulnerabilities in their architecture, the way they were doing things. We reported these security vulnerabilities to SolarWinds a couple of years ago, and they wouldn't do anything about it. So we said goodbye, and we dropped them as a vendor. Yeah, we were customer SolarWinds. We were using their stuff, but then we abandoned them when they wouldn't follow what we considered to be basic security guidelines. It turns out they weren't and we got it as a country. This has been called the Pearl Harbor of American information technology. Because the data within these hack networks, which included things like user IDs, passwords, financial records, source code can presumed now to being the hand of Russian intelligence agent. This is from. The United States of America's main security guide general Paul NACA sewn. It's just incredible what he's admitting here. He said SolarWinds, that company that the hackers used as a conduit for their attacks had a history of lackluster security for its products. What did I tell you, making it an easy target interviews with current and former employees suggest it was slow to make security a priority even as its software was adopted by federal agencies expert note that our experts noted that it took days after the Russian attack was discovered before SolarWinds websites stopped offering client the compromised programs. Microsoft by the way said that it had not been breached and initially here, but now this week it discovered it had been breached and resellers of Microsoft software had been breached to, and we've got intelligence officials now very upset about Microsoft not detecting it. It's just absolutely incredible here. This wasn't something like we had with Pearl Harbor, but this attack may prove to be even more damaging to our national security and our business prosperity. This is really fast. I love the fact. I'm not going to say I told you because I, I didn't tell you guys this, but I do love the fact that I was right again. How unfortunately I'm right too often when it comes to security and it is very frustrating to me to work with some clients that just don't seem to care about security. And I want to jump to an opinion piece here from our friends over at CNN. This is an opinion piece by Bruce. Schneider. You've probably seen him before. He is also, I think he writes for the Washington post. But remember when this came out the word about the SolarWinds hack, president Joe Biden said we're going to retaliate which I don't know that makes a whole lot of sense in this particular case for a number of reasons. Not the least of which we're not a hundred percent sure it's the Russians, but how are we going to retaliate? Cyber espionage is frankly business as usual for every country, not just the North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, and Vietnam. It's business as usual by us as well. And that it States is very aggressive offensively. In other words, going out after other countries in the cyber security realm. And we benefit from the lack of norms that are in cybersecurity, but here's what I really liked. The Bruce said. And I agree with entirely. I'm glad he must listen to the show. The fundamental problem is one of economic incentives. The market rewards, quick development of products. It rewards new features. It rewards spine on customers, end users collecting and selling individual data. Think of Facebook when we're saying this, our Instagram or any of these services that we're using all the time. So back to the quote here, the market does not reward security, safety, or transparency. It doesn't reward reliability past a bare minimum, and it does not reward resilient at all. And this is what happened with SolarWinds. SolarWinds ended up contracting software development to Eastern Europe where Russia has a lot more influence and Russia could easily subvert programmers over there. It's cheaper for Russia, not just for SolarWinds short-term profit. That's what they were after here was totally prioritized over product security, and yet their product is used to help secure. It just drives me crazy out there. Just absolutely crazy what some people are doing. I read a little quote down. I'm looking here to see if I've got it handy on my desk and I just don't see it. But they are prioritizing everything except. Security. And that is, I think, frankly, completely in excusable, right. Inexcusable. So this is happening with SolarWinds right now, but it's going to be happening with other places out there. We have probably 250 federal government agencies that were nailed by this. Can you imagine that? The man who owned SolarWinds is a Puerto Rican born billionaire named Orlando Bravo. His business model is to buy niche software companies, combine them with competitors, offshore work, cut any cost he can and raise prices. The same swapping corrupt practices that allowed this massive cybersecurity hack made Bravo a billionaire. Another quote here. This is from tech beacon. Hey, this is just crazy. Okay. So we know. Okay. I've established it. Craig, stop the stop. The monotonous. Okay. But I got to mention, we've got the US treasury department was hacked the US department of Commerce's national telecommunication infrastructure administration, department of health, national institutes of health, cyber security, and infrastructure. Agency. SISA the department of Homeland security, the US department of state, the department of justice, the national nuclear security administration, the US department of energy, three US state governments, the city of Austin, many hundreds more including Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, VMware, and others. I use two of those. We use Cisco and VMware. We use Intel, but only peripherally and we actually prefer other processors. So this is a real problem. How are we going to change it? I don't know that we can, you and I, but I can tell you what you can do. Just like I keep reminding everybody use a password manager and I will have a course on that this year. Absolutely guaranteed using a password manager, use a password manager and generate different passwords for every website using the password manager, use the manager to log in. Okay. So that's step number one. That's the best thing you can do right now for your cybersecurity next to keeping all of your soccer up to date. The second thing that we can do. Is block this malware from getting out of your network. If you are a business, and if you consider yourself an it security person, you need to block all outbound connections. All of them. Only allow connections where they are absolutely mandatory. For instance, your accounting department may need access to some form of cloud services out there. Heaven forbid. Okay. Maybe you're using an Oracle product, et cetera. Only those people that need access t

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for February 19, 2021 is: anodyne • \AN-uh-dyne\ • adjective 1 : serving to alleviate pain 2 : not likely to offend or arouse tensions : innocuous Examples: "Since much of TikTok is wordless and anodyne, Tik-Tok seems the perfect corporate antidote to more pointed and politicized commentary on Twitter or Facebook." — Elizabeth C. Tippett, Government Technology, 3 Dec. 2020 "He also voiced the donkey in the Shrek movies, talked to animals in the Dr. Dolittle movies, and goofed his way through an anodyne kiddie picture called Daddy Day Care. But this comeback, however well it served [Eddie] Murphy financially and spoke to his home life as a contented dad (of 10 children, as of now), was not the comic revival that his fans were rooting for." — David Kamp, The Atlantic, December 2020 Did you know? Anodyne came to English via Latin from Greek anṓdynos (meaning "free from pain, causing no pain, harmless, allaying pain"), and it has been used as both an adjective and a noun ("something that soothes, calms, or comforts") since the 16th century. It has sometimes been used of things that dull or lull the senses and render painful experiences less so. British statesman Edmund Burke used it this way, for example, in 1790 when he referred to flattery as an "anodyne draft of oblivion" that renders one (in this particular case, the deposed King Louis XVI) forgetful of the flatterer's true feelings. Nowadays, in addition to describing things that dull pain, anodyne can also refer to that which doesn't cause discomfort in the first place.

Are your friends pushing you forward or holding you back? Think about it. How do you feel after hanging out with them? Be honest. If you feel worse than before spending time together, that is a sign that something is amiss with the relationship.  But how do you take control of your relationships? Becoming a leader in your relationships can be hard at first, but it is essential if you want to live in alignment with your goals. Your friends do not happen by chance, you actively chose them, and, if need be, you can choose new ones. Curious? Listen to the podcast to learn more about how you can make new friends and positively influence your current relationships. What you’ll get out of tuning in: What are the signs you outgrew your friends? How to be a leader in your relationships How to make connections that move you forward Links Mentioned in Episode: Body Thrive - the book More about the Change Your Life Course Get some free resources Get to know Anna’s work Show Highlights: Dealing with negative friends Redirecting conversations and asking the right questions Networking to grow personally and professionally Timestamps: 2:46 When your friends are not moving you forward 11:33 Becoming a leader in your relationships  20:57 Surrounding yourself with people in alignment with your future self 29:33 Asking the right questions and networking Guest Bio: Anna has a background in nursing, yoga, and Ayurveda which has given her a grounded and broad perspective on health and lifestyle. She had the courage to step out of her experience of overwhelm, lethargy, brain fog, and digestive issues.  But, as she says, she couldn’t have done it alone, she consistently engages in supportive communities with peers and mentors who empower her. Nursing has always brought Anna a lot of joy. There's a lot of bonding through a shared understanding of the rewards and demands of the vocation. She considers it to have huge professional growth and an emotional journey that knows no bounds! Nowadays, she works as a health coach and is a leader in Yoga Health Coaching.  

PHP Internals News: Episode 76: Deprecate null, and Array Unpacking London, UK Thursday, February 18th 2021, 09:04 GMT In this episode of "PHP Internals News" I chat with Nikita Popov (Twitter, GitHub, Website) about two RFCs: Deprecate passing null to non-nullable arguments of internal functions, and Array Unpacking with String Keys. The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript Derick Rethans 0:14 Hi I'm Derick. Welcome to PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to explain the latest developments in the PHP language. This is Episode 76. In this episode, I'm talking with Nikita Popov about a few more RFCs that he has been working on over the past few months. Nikita, would you please introduce yourself. Nikita Popov 0:34 Hi, I'm Nikita. I work on PHP core development on behalf of JetBrains. Derick Rethans 0:39 In the last few PHP releases PHP is handling of types with regards to internal functions and user land functions, has been getting closer and closer, especially with types now. But there's still one case where type mismatches behave differently between internal and user land functions. What is this outstanding difference? Nikita Popov 0:59 Since PHP 8.0 on the remaining difference is the handling of now. So PHP 7.0 introduced scalar types for user functions. But scalar types already existed for internal functions at that time. Unfortunately, or maybe like pragmatically, we ended up with slightly different behaviour in both cases. The difference is that user functions, don't accept null, unless you explicitly allow it using nullable type or using a null default value. So this is the case for all user types, regardless of where or how they occur as parameter types, return values, property types, and independent if it's an array type or integer type. For internal functions, there is this one exception where if you have a scalar type like Boolean, integer, float, or a string, and you're not using strict types, then these arguments also accept null values silently right now. So if you have a string argument and you pass null to it, then it will simply be converted into an empty string, or for integers into zero value. At least I assume that the reason why we're here is that the internal function behaviour existed for a long time, and the use of that behaviour was chosen to be consistent with the general behaviour of other types at the time. If you have an array type, it also doesn't accept now and just convert it to an empty array or something silly like that. So now we are left with this inconsistency. Derick Rethans 2:31 Is it also not possible for extensions to check whether null was passed, and then do a different behaviour like picking a default value? Nikita Popov 2:40 That's right, but that's a different case. The one I'm talking about is where you have a type like string, while the one you have in mind is where you effectively have a type like string or null. Derick Rethans 2:51 Okay. Nikita Popov 2:52 In that case, of course, accepting null is perfectly fine. Derick Rethans 2:56 Even though it might actually end up being different defaults. Nikita Popov 3:01 Yeah. Nowadays we would prefer to instead, actually specify a default value. Instead of using null, but using mull as a default and then assigning something else is also fine. Derick Rethans 3:13 What are you proposing to change here, or what are you trying to propose to change that into? Nikita Popov 3:18 To make the behaviour of user land and internal functions match, which means that internal functions will no longer accept null for scalar arguments. For now it's just a deprecation in PHP 8.1, and then of course later on that's going to become a type error. Derick Rethans 3:35 Have you checked, how many open source projects are going to have an issue with this? Nikita Popov 3:40 No, I haven't. Because it's not really possible to determine this using static analysis, or at least not robustly because usually null will be a runtime value. No one does this like intentionally calling strlen with a null argument, so it's like hard to detect this just through code analysis. I do think that this is actually a fairly high impact change. I remember that when PHP 7.2, I think, introduced to a warning for passing null to count(). That actually affected quite a bit of code, including things like Laravel for example. I do expect that similar things could happen here again so against have like strlen of null is pretty similar to count of null, but yeah that's why it's deprecation for now. So, it should be easy to at least see all the cases where it occurs and find out what should be fixed. Derick Rethans 4:35 What is the time frame of actually making this a type error? Nikita Popov 4:38 Unless it turns out that this has a larger impact than expected. Just going to be the next major version as usual so PHP 9. Derick Rethans 4:45 Which we expect to be about five years from now. Nikita Popov 4:49 Something like that, at least if we follow the usual cycle. Derick Rethans 4:52 Yes. Are there any other concerns for this one? Nikita Popov 4:55 No, not really. Derick Rethans 4:57 Maybe people don't realize it. Nikita Popov 4:58 Yeah, possibly. You can't predict these things, I mean like, this is going to have like way more practical impact for legacy code than the damn short tags. But for short tags, we get 200 mails and here we get not a lot. Derick Rethans 5:14 I think this low impact WordPress a lot. Nikita Popov 5:17 Possibly but at least the thing they've been complaining about is that something throws error without deprecation, and now they're getting the deprecation so everyone should be happy. Derick Rethans 5:28 Which is to be fair I think is a valid concern. Nikita Popov 5:30 Yes, it is. I've actually been thinking if we should like backport some deprecations to PHP 7.4 under an INI flag. Not like my favourite thing to work on, but people did complain? Derick Rethans 5:47 Which ones would you put in there? Nikita Popov 5:48 I think generally some cases where things went from no diagnostics to error. I think something that's mentioned this vprintf and round, and possibly the changes to comparison semantics. I did have a patch that like throws a deprecation warning, when that changes and that sort of something that could be included. Derick Rethans 6:12 I would say that if we were in January 2020 here, when these things popped up, then probably would have made sense to add these warnings and deprecations behind the flag for PHP seven four, but because we've now have done 15 releases of it, I'm not sure how useful this is now to do. Nikita Popov 6:30 I guess people are going to be upgrading for a long time still. I don't know I actually not sure about how, like distros, for example Ubuntu LTS update PHP seven four. If they actually follow the patch releases, because if they don't, then this is just going to be useless. Derick Rethans 6:48 Oh there's that. Yeah. Derick Rethans 6:50 There is one more RFC that I would like to talk to you about, which is the array unpacking with string keys RFC. That's quite a mouthful. What does the background story here? Nikita Popov 7:00 The background is that we have unpacking in calls. If you have the arguments for the call in an array, then you write the three dots, and the array is unpacked into actual arguments. Derick Rethans 7:14 I'd love to call it the splat operator. Nikita Popov 7:16 Yes, it is also lovingly called the splat operator. And I think it has a couple more names. So then, PHP 7.4 added the same support in arrays, in which case it means that you effectively merge, one array to the other one. Both call unpacking and array unpacking, at the time, we're limited to only integer keys, because in that case, are the semantics are fairly clear. We just ignore the keys, and we treat the values as a list. Now with PHP 8.0 for calls, we also support string keys and the meaning there is that the string keys are treated as parameter names. That's how you can like do a dynamic named parameter call. Actually, this probably was one of the larger backwards compatibility breaks in PHP eight. Not for unpacking but for call_user_func_arg, where people expected the keys to be thrown away, and suddenly they had a meaning, but that's just a side note. Derick Rethans 8:21 It broke some of my code. Nikita Popov 8:23 Now what this RFC is about is to do same change for array unpacking. So allow you to also use string keys. This is where originally, there was a bit of disagreement about semantics, because there are multiple ways in which you can merge arrays in PHP, because PHP has this weird hybrid structure where arrays are a mix between dictionaries and lists, and you're never quite sure how you should interpret them. Derick Rethans 8:54 It's a difference between array_merge and plus, but which way around, I can ever remember either. Nikita Popov 9:00 What array_merge does is for integer keys, it ignores the keys and just appends the elements and for string keys, it overwrites the string keys. So if you have the same string key one time earlier and again later than it takes the later one. Plus always preserves keys, before integer keys. It doesn't just ignore them, but also uses overriding semantics. The same is the other way round. If you have something in the first array, a key in the first array and the key in the second array, then we take the one from the first array, which I personally find fairly confusing and unintuitive, so for example the common use case for using plus is having an array with some defaults, in which case you have to, like, add or plus the default as the second operand, otherwise you're going to overwrite keys that are set with the defaults which you don't want. I don't know why PHP chose this order, probably there is some kind of idea behind it. Derick Rethans 10:01 It's behaviour that's been there for 20 plus years that might just have organically grown into what it is. Nikita Popov 10:07 I would hope that 20 years ago at least someone thought about this. But okay, it is what it is. So ultimately choice for the unpacking with string keys is between using the array_merge behaviour, the behaviour of the plus operator, and the third option is to just always ignore the keys and always just append the values. And some people actually argue that we should do the last one, because we already have array_merge and plus for the other behaviours. So this one should implement the one behaviour that we don't support yet. Derick Rethans 10:40 But that would mean throwing away keys. Nikita Popov 10:43 Yes. Just like we already throw away integer keys, so it's like not completely out there. So yeah, that is not the popular option, I mean if you want to throw away keys can just call array_values and go that way. So in the end, the semantics it uses is array_merge Derick Rethans 10:58 The array_merge semantics are.. Nikita Popov 11:01 append, like ignore integer keys just append, and for string keys, use the last occurrence of the key. Derick Rethans 11:07 So it overwrites. Nikita Popov 11:08 It overwrites, exactly. Which is actually also the semantics you get if you just write out an array literal where the same key occurs multiple times. Unpacking is like kind of a programmatic way to write a function call or an array literal, so it makes sense that the semantics are consistent. Derick Rethans 11:26 I think I agree with that actually, yes. Are there any changes that could break existing code here? Nikita Popov 11:32 Not really because right now we're throwing an exception if you have string keys in array unpacking. So it could only break if you're like explicitly catching that exception and doing something with it, which is not something where we provide any guarantees I think. So generally I think that, removing an exception doesn't count as a backwards compatibility break. Derick Rethans 11:55 I think that's right. Do you have anything else to add here? Nikita Popov 11:59 No, I think that's a simple proposal. Derick Rethans 12:02 Thank you, Nikita for taking the time to explain these several RFCs to me today. Nikita Popov 12:07 Thanks for having me Derick. Derick Rethans 12:11 Thank you for listening to this instalment of PHP internals news, a podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. I maintain a Patreon account for supporters of this podcast, as well as the Xdebug debugging tool. You can sign up for Patreon at https://drck.me/patreon. If you have comments or suggestions, feel free to email them to derick@phpinternals.news. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you next time. Show Notes RFC: Array unpacking with string keys RFC: Deprecate passing null to non-nullable arguments of internal functions Credits Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Hi, everybody! I am Georgiana, your English teacher and founder of SpeakEnglishPodcast.com. My mission is to help you speak English fluently. Today I will tell you how to train your brain to listen more in English. And with a fun mini-story, you will improve your English fluency. Nowadays, we are very used to watching content on the Internet. There is a wide variety of materials. And when it comes to learning English, it is no exception, so I understand that you can feel overwhelmed by so many possibilities. That's why I'm here, to give you clarity and to help you speak English in a very short time and with a very efficient method. While most teachers switch from audio to video, I have done the opposite. There are several reasons why I have stopped making videos regularly. I've started making videos a decade ago. Meanwhile, I was teaching English one on one to students from all over the world and of all ages. That's how I came up with the best method to learn English. I noticed that when my students were listening to simple audio repeatedly, they were learning faster, and their listening and speech improved. I've realized that many students learn with their eyes and not with their ears. Listening was a greater challenge than reading for many. If you want to understand a language better, you need to train your brain to listen more. Another aspect that has helped me understand what my students really need was the fact that I'm a polyglot. I've started learning several languages when I was a kid, by using different techniques. For me, the most effective way to learn a language was to learn by listening. With my podcast, you will improve your listening and comprehension, especially if you listen repeatedly. Most students think that the more variety, the better. So what they usually do is listen to an audio once or twice and then change to something else. Well, variety is useful, but what you want is to consolidate what you listen to; if you want to train your brain to listen, the most effective way to achieve this is through repetition. For example, you can use one of my podcast episodes. I recommend that you listen to every episode several times to consolidate the content. I provide a transcript for each episode, so after listening to an episode a few times, get the transcript and read it at the same time. Another excellent way to improve your English is by using my premium courses. Get the transcript here: SpeakEnglishPodcast.com

It is customary when writing the Megila to ensure that the first word of every column is "Ha’melech." However, as the letters of the Megila should be written the same size, a Sofer should not make some letters bigger than others in order to arrange it that the word "Ha’melech" appears at the top of every column. Nowadays, most Sofrim write Megilot by copying from a Megila that has already been written with the word "Ha’melech" at the top of every column, so they know precisely how to arrange the text, and this is a perfectly acceptable method (Hazon Ovadia – Purim, p. 250).When writing a Sefer Torah, it is proper to write at least three columns of text on each piece of parchment. (A Sefer Torah is comprised of several pieces of parchment sewn together.) When it comes to Megilat Ester, however, this is not necessary. Hacham Ovadia Yosef rules that since even a Sefer Torah is valid for use if the Sofer mistakenly wrote fewer than three columns of text on a piece parchment, this may be done even Le’chatehila (optimally) when it comes to a Megila.It is preferable to leave the same amount of empty space around the text of every column as is required when writing a Sefer Torah. This means leaving three Esba’ot (fingers’ width) of empty space on top of the text, four Esba’ot underneath the text, and two Esba’ot in between every two columns. Nevertheless, a Megila is valid for use even if there is less empty space, as long as there is two Esba’ot of empty space on top of the text, three Esba’ot underneath the text, and one Esba in between every two columns.Summary: It is customary to write the text of the Megila such that "Ha’melech" is the first word of every column, though the Sofer should not write some words larger than others for this purpose. Although when writing a Sefer Torah it is preferable to ensure that at least three columns of text appear on each piece of parchment, this is not necessary when writing a Megilla. It is preferable when writing a Megila to leave the same amount of empty space above, below and alongside each column of text as is required when writing a Sefer Torah.

Sam is a portfolio landlord & investor with a property portfolio spanning across Scotland from Glasgow up to Aberdeen. All of Sam's acquisitions since 2016 have been funded by private investors and his main strategy is acquiring portfolios. He also co-owns Dyer & Co Property, an ARLA accredited property management company that focuses on the property investment sector. Sam’s main role within the company is running the portfolio building department, which put simply helps property investors spend their cash! Dyer & Co operate across Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Falkirk, Edinburgh & Fife.We cover:Sourced just shy of £8 million of property for investors.Co-own a letting agency that started off as a sourcing business. Portfolio across Central Scotland. Business is focussed on property investors & portfolio landlords (www.dyerandco.co.uk). First BTL in 2015 (was working offshore at the time), since 2016 have used none of my own money to build a multi-million pound portfolio. Mainly BRRR for first couple years. Nowadays mostly portfolio purchases, do the odd single unit if it’s a higher value property.Virtually all my private investor finance has come through clients of my letting agency – which is one of the reasons I started an agency (to build relationships with & provide a service for people that have money).Follow me: INSTAGRAM YOUTUBELEARN WITH ME See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome!   It is another busy week on the technology front.  We discuss Facial Recognition and some of the problems with false positives and how you can see if your pictures are included in some of these websites. Then we discuss Amy Klobachers anti-trust legislation against big tech.  Then we get into Info-Sec Careers and something you might want to know before considering a career move. We also discuss Zero-Trust and why you must be thinking about that if you want to be secure and there is even more, so be sure to Listen in. For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com. --- Tech Articles Craig Thinks You Should Read: Strengthening Zero Trust Architecture Here’s a Way to Learn if Facial Recognition Systems Used Your Photos Scalpers aren’t the main reason you can’t find a new console What I Wish I Knew at the Start of My InfoSec Career Chrome users have faced 3 security concerns over the past 24 hours Klobuchar targets Big Tech with biggest antitrust overhaul in 45 years I Fought the Dark Web and the Dark Web Won How the United States Lost to Hackers --- Automated Machine-Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We're going to talk a little bit about scalpers. They're not the main reason you can't find a new gaming console.  I've had a number of people ask about getting into information security. I'm going to give you some tips about what I wish I knew at the start of my career.  Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here.  I want to start out by talking a little bit about the facial recognition systems and there are a lot of concerns, legitimately, a lot of concerns because now our privacy is getting worse and worse. I'm going to talk next week a little bit, at least it's on my schedule about what's happening with GPS and pros and cons to it because there are some very concerning things about GPS. Much of our business and private lives is based on GPS, nowadays. You're in a plane, you're in a boat, trains, I guess don't use GPS a whole lot, but we depend on them in our cars, everywhere. We'll talk a little bit about that next week. When it comes to facial recognition, it has come to the forefront. Now we know that, for instance, London, England was probably the most surveilled city in the world. I don't think that's anywhere near true now, considering what the Chinese have been doing to their citizens. No, I probably shouldn't call them citizens. I'm not sure what the right thing would be to call them, but the people living over there in China are under a constant eye. They're even watching them over there for jaywalking and they use facial recognition systems to automatically send them a ticket. Oh, also this social credit score they have over there where if you do jaywalk or do something else, you get points taken off of your social credit score. If your score reaches a certain point, you can't even take public transportation anymore. That's how they're controlling people. One of the many ways that they're controlling people in China. These facial recognition systems are used there. We know they've been in use in London where they're trying to track people and reverse engineer crimes, someone commits a crime. There are sensors that listen for gunshots, for instance, and then they will just backtrack all of the people that were in the area. Okay. Watching them where they work, as you remember, it's being recorded. So you're here now, where did you come from? Some of that same type of technology was used in Washington, DC for what happened on January six, with the riot of well, 80 people. Some riot. We're also now aware of what was done in Oregon and in Washington state and New York City where they were tracking people as well now. Did they get charged? Did they go to jail? They were using facial recognition systems and they were figuring out where they were, where they had been. They were also looking forward to the fact, because unlike China, where they want to know where everybody is and they've got this whole social credit system. What we were doing is finding people who were committing serious crimes. The police obviously don't want to go into that area because there are so many rioters and they were armed with all kinds of things, the baseball bats, but they had frozen bottles of water. No, I don't know. I threw a bottle of water at him. You had. That thing, deep, frozen, in a deep freeze, below zero degrees, which is way cold Fahrenheit. You brought it with you and you use that liter bottle to bash someone over the head. We saw this again and again. So you find those people. You don't arrest them right away. You don't send the police in. No reason to put their lives in any more danger than they are everyday, normally. Then what you do is track them as they leave. Now when they were leaving, they were using facial recognition to figure out who was there and where did they go? That facial recognition technology then was able to track them down. Once they got into an area where there weren't a lot of rioters or no rioters about to get in their car, or however it is, they got there, they arrested them. Of course, some of these rioters, real rioters, right? Where there's hundreds of people rioting, not 80. They were able to track them down. Some of them were arrested, some of them were charged. In a lot of these cases, the mayor said, no, don't do anything. Just let them I was going to set them riot, but that's not how they phrased it. I'm trying to remember how they phrased it. So we are seeing. Facial recognition used in law enforcement. It's one thing to track them either.  What happens over in London where a crime is committed and they now track everybody back to figure out where did they come from? What car did they get into? Did they get out of it initially? Then what was the license plate number and who owns that car? Crime-solving that way, where they don't necessarily recognize your face. They don't know it's you.  However, now we're finding more and more of that happening, where the systems recognize your face and they know it's you, and they know what your social media accounts. They know obviously where you live, it's all tied in.  A lot of cases is tied in via your driver's license or now these federally mandated national ID cards that so many people are carrying around.  Apparently, I'll have to carry around to next time I get my license because my state has finally decided they are not going to issue regular driver's licenses anymore, which definitely bothers me. I'm sure you can figure that out too. How were they identifying people? It's one thing to see a face and okay. There's the face here. Okay. There's a face there. There's okay. Here. Okay. So he just got into this car to leave. That's one thing, right? I think that's pretty legit. You don't have a particular right to privacy when you're in a public place. In fact, you have no right to privacy when you enter a public place. So I don't have a problem with that.  Now we're using artificial intelligence and we've talked about some of them before, Clearview is a great example, clearview.ai. Here's a company that some would argue illegally captured scraped. What kind of her kind of wording you want to use pictures of people all from all over the internet and the police can subscribe to their service and Clearview says, Oh no, we only let police at it, although there's evidence that would suggest otherwise. They're allowing all kinds of third parties access to the database, but you can put a person's picture into their software.  Their software, by the way, includes a mobile app, so it can be done on the street and you know who they are.  Now, this is getting RoboCop-ish. If e you've ever seen the movie Robocop. Actually, there's a series of these things with the Ed two Oh nines. What happened is the police officer could go out and he'd be patrolling in the streets and he come across some people in the computer in that kind of the heads up display would figure out, okay, that's this person they've been arrested 20 times a felony, this and that, and okay that person was shoplifting with their names and addresses and things right there in the screen. That's been a theme of science fiction movies for very long time.   I interviewed probably about a decade ago, a guy out at the consumer electronic show who had a very cool device that you could wear.  It was designed for policemen and it was like a pair of big goggles back in the day, right? This is before Google glass and some of these other things came out, but they were able to with this the heads-up display put anything you wanted on it. So it's coming, it's not here yet. It's going to be here even more in the future.  If you want to check if your photo is part of all of this stash and there are billions literally of photos that Clearview AI has out there, but you can check at least the basics.  So many of us use this website online that allowed us to upload our photos and share them with friends and relatives and family, and put it together, and have a really great little album that you could share with people.  That was on a site called flicker. Today, many of us are uploading our photos to Amazon or to Google. Apple, of course, has many of them. What happened with flicker is they went out of business. They got sold and resold few times.  What they ended up doing is selling the pictures online. There's people I talked about this a couple of years ago, this guy driving down the highway and he sees a billboard with his picture on it, not the sort of thing that he was expecting that's for sure. It's probably not something you expected when you uploaded your photos to flicker. So take a minute.  Go to a website called exposing.ai.  This particular website is specifically aimed at flicker photos. It'll tell you if it has found your picture. So you can, you put in your flicker username and they'll let you know if your flicker photos have been taken and used for facial recognition by a few different companies.  Dive face, face scrub, mega phase Pippa, VGG face, and many others. You can just put in your username. You can put in a tag that you tagged that photo when you uploaded it, or the URL of a photo. If you have a photo, it is online and it's yours and you want to see if anybody else is using it somewhere on the internet.  The easy way to do this is to go to Google image search. You can upload the image, you can give it the URL of the image, and it'll tell you if it finds matching images or at least images that are close to it online.  Stick around. Visit me online Craig Peterson dot com. During the lockdown, we've had a lot of things that have become difficult to get your hands on. Turns out that includes various types of games like your PS5's, but it extends a whole lot further than that. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here.  Here we go, man, another fallout from the whole lockdown thing. This is a pretty darn big deal because it's affected the entire computer industry. We've heard a lot of complaints about how difficult it's been to get a Sony PlayStation five or a Microsoft X-Box series SX. They both hit store shelves last year, but they have been almost impossible to find at any of the major retailers.  There's a great little article that was in ARS Technica, and they put together a graph based on some data obtained from E-bay. This data was looking at the availability and costs specifically of the PS five. Now, this is a fairly advanced computer, frankly, in order to play these video games, of course, it's got a lot of graphics capability built right into this silly thing.  It seems that there were a certain number of consoles sold on certain days at certain prices. You can see this massive price increase. It just jumped right up in November. Pretty much stayed up there in the thousand dollars plus range. Isn't that amazing.  It went down in January and is more or less flat right now. You can get them on eBay for about 380 bucks right now. Why is that? What's been going on here. We've got scalpers. Obviously, a thousand dollars is a lot higher than the $380 you can get it for right now.  It turns out that there is a huge problem and the problem we're seeing is affecting the entire computer world. There are certain chips for which there is a shortage. Why is there a shortage? Well, it had to do with the lockdown. Companies were trying to figure out, okay, how many of these devices am I going to sell when everybody's locked down?  They miscalculated, frankly. It wasn't a problem with supply. It was that these companies that had been ordering these components cut their orders back or stopped them entirely.  You've got Sony and others out there, Microsoft's console as well, trying to find the parts. They have had a very hard time. Well, what happens when it's hard to find something? Either the quality is going to go down to keep the price the same or the price is going to go up. There's only a couple of ways that it really can go.  They're estimating right now that these constraints on the supply chain are probably going to last for a few more months. We've seen it big time in the computer world, particularly in the storage space. You may not be aware of it, but there are, of course, hard disks that aren't really disks called SSD, which is a solid-state disk. Okay. You probably know about that. I wrote up a thing, in fact, Because people were asking me about what to buy, to upgrade their computers.  If you have a slower computer, putting an SSD in is usually a very good idea, but there are many grades of SSDs.  In fact, I've got a little document. If you want it to send an email to me@craigpeterson.com. I'll be glad to send you a copy. I wrote this for one of our clients. It drives me crazy. They need a new computer, in this case, a desktop. So they say, Hey Craig, can you guys go ahead and work us up a quote? So we look at what they're using the computer for. We look at the longevity of that computer so that they get the best bang for their buck and usefulness. How useful is it going to be? Is it going to be offline just five minutes a day, by the way, adds up to over $2,000 a year for just an average salary of a data entry worker.  It adds up pretty quickly if it goes down.   We put together this proposal and this was for a customed Dell machine and we specify all of the components that go into it. That's an important thing to remember because these components all have varying levels of quality.  We sent them the quote and we've done this before, right? Who's the fool here, them or us. They said no. I went to the Dell site and I got this special going on and then I can get the same computer for 300 bucks. Not true. It's not true. Now, you guys are the best and brightest, right? This sort of stuff, you can't compare a Yugo to a beautiful Cadillac right there. There's no comparison between the two, but that's what they were doing. They needed an F150 in order to haul stuff but instead of getting the F150, they just got a little hatchback that they can maybe throw a couple of things in the back, but they needed a big bed pickup truck. That just drives me crazy. So I wrote this probably three or four-page long, a thing explaining why you need to buy the right kind of hardware. Why the stuff that they're selling you at a discount isn't going to work for you and things need to be included, include things like the hardware encryption and SSDs.  Again, I'll send you this report if you want it. Just let me know, call me@craigpeterson.com.  I started this whole thing because we're talking about SSDs. SSDs are not all created equal. Some of these SSDs store one bit per little bubble, if you will. Some of them store two bits on them store three-bit bits. They're all constrained in their lifetime based on how many writes are occurring to that disc.  You've got to look at that as well to figure it out. Now, of course, I got into SSDs because we were talking about the capacity in manufacturing and the shortage that we're seeing right now. If some of these game consoles, there is a shortage in all of these types of disks, there's even a shortage of memory and certain CPUs.  The disc shortage started a few years ago when there was massive flooding in Indonesia. That's where a lot of the hard disks are made. Now, these are the things that spin, right? Now we've got new technology that lets us pack more data into the SSDs.  Whereas we were seeing the hard disk go up in size. I remember my first one was, I think it was five megabytes. It was just, Whoa, how could I have used five Meg and then 10 megabytes? Of course, hard disks, reasonably priced ones tend to 12 terabyte drives and again, multiple different types of drives.  There's the more server-oriented that if there's an error on the disk, the disc stays alive and it repairs itself in real-time in the background. Then there's the stuff you get as consumers where if the disc starts failing, the whole disc goes offline until it fits fixes itself. Then there's real crap. The ones like these green drives from Western digital, that I do not like. I just had confirmation on that this week that are even cheaper, but all of these are hard to get right now.  We will see eventually all of these supplies back in line. The manufacturers can make them. The whole lockdown hasn't really been a problem for them. The problem has been that people aren't ordering because they're afraid during the lockdown that people wouldn't be buying computers. Of course, we found the opposite to be true. Didn't we.  People were buying these consoles to play video games. Buying computers to work from home. Trying to buy network security stuff as well.  That's really changed the whole thing.  When we get back, let's get into we'll get into the InfoSec career a little bit later if you miss it. If you're thinking about getting into information security. Make sure you go online to Craig peterson.com. So you can catch that.  We'll talk about that, but let's do something I think that might affect a lot of people and that's Chrome users, three security problems in the last week. Hey, you guys are the best and brightest. You know what I think about Google and Google Chrome? Just this last week, over one 24 hour period, Chrome had three security problems. We're going to talk about that right now. Hi, everybody. Craig Peterson here.  Google is evil. I've established that I think, before, the things they do, the things they have been doing to us.  Remember their motto used to be, don't be evil. They removed that from the website a couple of years ago. Now, no longer don't be evil. Nowadays they're doing pretty much everything they can to, maybe be evil is a little strong a word, but they're pretty much-doing everything they can to get as much information about you and sell it.  Do you remember his goal? Larry Page when they were starting it up. The goal was okay, where we are going to get all of the world's information and democratize it. Make it available for everyone, anyone out there who wants to get at it. Frankly, it's been pretty good until fairly recently. At which point I switched over to duck duck go.  Chrome is another one of their products. Microsoft frankly, jumped right onto the Chrome bandwagon. What they ended up doing over Microsoft is taking Google's open-source version of the base of Chrome. They call it chromium. It's the guts, if you will, of the Google Chrome browser and they made it available to anyone that wants to get their hands on it. So Microsoft got their hands on it and messed around with it a little bit. As Microsoft is wont to do. They came up with their Edge browser. The latest Edge is really Google Chrome in disguise.  There are others out there too. You probably know if you've been through one of my courses when I'm talking about browsers. The Epic browser is a pretty good browser. It is designed to be more or less safe. But we go into that a lot more detail. In which cases is it not et cetera. Some people have used the Tor browser, which ties into the Onion network that provides even more anonymity. So there are options. Of course, Safaris available from Apple for almost every platform now. It is a very fast browser and it does a lot to try and keep your data secure. The same thing's true with Firefox. In the Improving Windows Security Course, I go into the problems with each one of these, including Firefox and what you have to consider.  This past week we had a bit of an issue. If you attended my webinars last year. This would have been in 2020.  I went through some of the privacy plugins that you can use for your browser. You might remember that one of them was something called the Great Suspender. Highly recommended at the time. Got to add that in there because I don't want you to just go grab it.  It was recommended. I used it, extensively on a bunch of different browsers, because what the Great Suspender did is save your machine's memory CPU, frankly, even a little bit of disc I/O when you were on a tab on your web browser, your tab would just respond.  Normally everything looks good, but if you're like me, you probably opened another tab or maybe another window and then another tab or another window. You just dig deeper and deeper as you're looking into something, trying to figure something out.  You might have 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 tabs. Open each one of those tabs represents a different thread, a different process, basically on your computer. That means it's using memory, it's using CPU and it might be also hitting your disk, using your disk. The Great Suspenders said wait a minute, now you haven't used this tab in whatever you set it for, I usually had it about 15 minutes. What I'm going to do now, Yes, I'm going to take a snapshot of this page.  I am going to just release all of the resources that were associated with the page. If you go back to that tab, all you have now is a snapshot, just a picture of what was on the page.  You can see what was on the page and depending on how you configure the Great Suspender, I had it set up so that if I activated a tab again, it would automatically reload that page. You could have had it so that if you got to that picture and you really wanted it, you'd click on it and it would reload the page. Very. Handy.  It allowed you to have hundreds of potentially of tabs open quote-unquote, when in fact they weren't open and they weren't using hardly any resources at all. The Great suspender this last June was sold.  The original person who wrote this thing, and it's a great little really great, actually a little piece of software decided that he wanted to make some money off of it. Why not?  He sold it. It's unclear as to who actually owns it or controls it right now and who he sold it to because the name of the account, the developer account, is the Great Suspender. So that's not going to help you at all.  It started showing some signs of what Google and what people are calling malice, under this new ownership. There was a thread in GitHub that was published in November and GitHub is where so much of this code is stored, right. It started to show some signs of frankly, of malice under this new ownership. They said that a new version contained malicious code that tracked users and manipulated web requests.  Now the Great Suspender did normally manipulate web requests, in order to keep everything flowing and smooth. So you might go to a website and then it suspends it, and it might use a different URL and the URL is going to cause the Great Suspender inside your browser to be called. Okay.  So I'm not sure what they mean about the manipulation here, but Google removed it. It's gone like that and no warning or anything else just within the last week. They completely removed the Great Suspender, not just from the store, they removed it from your machines where you were using it.  It said this - the extension contains malware, that's the only warning they gave. That is the only background they gave. They really haven't said a whole lot. People, by the way, who were using the Great Suspender were really left in a lurch because any suspended tabs when Google went bye-bye, any suspended tabs you had were a lost. How's that for a terrible thing? Absolutely terrible.  There is a Reddit thread out there that you can see.  They talk about how you can get your tabs back. So if you had followed my advice back then and put it on, good for you.  However, the problem is that it turned out to ultimately be malicious. So that's a big deal.  Remember I said three security problems in 24 hours, Google on Thursday, released a Chrome update that fixes what it called a zero-day vulnerability in the browser. This is another buffer, overflow problem. If you're programming, you know what that means in version eight, which is Google's open-source Javascript engine, and they rated it as high. Again, Google didn't say much about what the vulnerability was. Probably didn't want to encourage people to try and use it, but they said it was existing in the wild. That's not very good.  Then sync abuse, a security researcher reported on Thursday as well. Hackers were using malware that abused the Chrome sync feature to bypass firewalls so the malware could connect to command and control servers. Not good.   If you are using, if you have Chrome, I have it because I have to, cause I have to test things out.  If you are using it, make sure it is up to date. Most of the time Chrome will update itself, but this week is one where you should double-check Chrome and make sure it really has been updated. Cause these are some pretty nasties. All right.  I'm sure you're familiar with Senator Amy Klobuchar. She ran for President, under of course the Democrat ticket, this last election cycle. She is targeting big tech, at least. That's what she says. We'll talk about the reality. Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate hearing from you as well. Any questions? I have so much information to give you guys we're starting some training courses, free email training, just everything me@craigpeterson.com. Any questions as well and visit me online at Craig peterson.com.  Senator Amy Klobuchar, is a Democrat from Minnesota and she has introduced a bill here in Congress and supposedly big tech is in her crosshairs. Now I think that's really funny because it's not in reality. Okay.  Here's an article from ARS Technica a very good website, by the way, on some of the tech. It says not only our major firms, such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google under investigation for allegedly breaking existing antitrust law.  A newly proposed bill in the Senate would make it harder for these and other firms to become so troublingly large in the first place.  If you've been listening to me for a while, I have friends that have been absolutely destroyed by some of these big tech firms. Where companies have gone ahead and then announced a product because they found, Oh, wait a minute. These guys over here, they're doing pretty darn well with that product. Let's see if we can't figure out if there's really a market forward or not end up, they're competing with us. So here's what we'll do. Let's go ahead and announce. We're going to have a product and it's going to be better than their product, and you can get it from us and you can rely on us. Don't pay attention to that small company over there. They are entirely unreliable.  All of a sudden that small company's sales plummet because people are waiting for big co to come up with their version of whatever it might be. Then they'll compare it to and maybe buy it a bit later on.  That's a way that many of these companies have grown and grown in a very big way.  Senator Klobuchar introduced this bill called Clara. Should have called it Clarice. The competition and anti-trust law enforcement reform act. This would be the largest overhaul to the US antitrust legislation in almost 50 years if it became law. It's interesting because her statement says while the United States once had some of the most effective antitrust laws in the world. Our economy today faces and massive competition problem.  I'm a little confused here. It looks like she is asking for competition. I don't know. I don't understand it. I thought she was one of these far-left ones. I remember the debates quite well. They're looking at expanding resources. In other words, give them more money at the federal trade commission, the department of justice in their antitrust division. They're looking to pursue a review of more mergers, more aggressively. Now my knee jerk reaction is, these big companies usually we'll fail. They usually just keep getting greedier and bigger. Look at what happened to GM. They went bankrupt and unfortunately, they use tax dollars to bail them out. Chrysler has gone bankrupt twice, and they've used our tax dollars to bail them out. I don't think that's a good idea.  Remember our tax dollars mean our time. We have to put in our time, we can't spend with our families. Time, we cannot spend on vacation. Time we cannot spend relaxing. It takes our time now, where we have to work to make money, to give to the government, to bail out companies that are failures. What the government decided to do rather than let these bigger companies fail as they ultimately always do. If you're old enough, you'll remember back in the seventies and eighties, IBM, too big to fail. They owned the business, the computer business in the sixties and seventies, and they just fell off the edge. Didn't they? That usually happens.  I'm not sure a hundred percent is going to happen with the social media companies but I suspect they are. Look at what's happening right now. If you have kids that are under 20, do they have a Facebook account? Even in their thirties, under 20-year-olds, they don't use Facebook anymore. Facebook is likely to die off unless they change in a big way. So what's Facebook do? They buy competitors. They buy WhatsApp. We've talked about WhatsApp before and my thoughts on that. They buy Instagram. They buy competitors and they use competitors too. Change their business model a little bit and move laterally rather than vertically. That's not a bad idea in business.  Frankly, most businesses expand their product line, expand their way of doing things by acquiring successful small businesses. So I get that. I think that's wonderful.  But what the Senator is proposing is that we have the government decide if a business should be allowed to acquire another business. There is a line in there where I agree with her. I'm not a hundred percent sure where that line should go. We've had antitrust laws here in the United States since 1800s, a very long time. The Sherman act short and simple back then it made it illegal to monopolize or attempt to monopolize or conspire to monopolize the market. I liked that one. How about if you're defining the market? There's two sides to this, one side often overlooked.  You've got the side of the supplier. You've got Facebook or GM or whoever. You say Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla. They own this market. So what should you do about Facebook? That's what she's trying to figure out here. What should we do? They're saying we should have a government regulator decide if it's a monopoly or not. We know how well that ends up working. You end up with a revolving door, the regulators working for the corporations, and then going back to the regulators right back and forth. It's absolutely crazy. That side of it.  There is another side and this other side is frankly not that new, but it has gotten worse more recently. It's called a monopsony. What this is where you have a lot of suppliers. So you'd have a whole lot of Facebook' for instance, but only one purchaser. You said, Craig, what are you talking about? We're the best and brightest. I'm not quite sure where you're going with this.  Here's where we're going. Monopsony is typified by Walmart. Walmart is well-known as a company that you do not want to sell to.  If you're a small business, you look at it, say, Oh yeah we got Walmart. They're going to sell our product. Okay. Okay. Great for you. It's not wonderful. Walmart took out every rubber hose they had, and they beat the supplier over the head and shoulders and back until they capitulated.  Walmart was routinely criticized for this forcing vendors to lower prices until it became unsustainable. I can think of a few of these products right off the top of my head. Do you remember Rubbermaid, right? It was the. The dominant force for those rubber containers at Walmart. Then all of a sudden it wasn't there anymore. Do you remember that? Because they couldn't sell it to Walmart at the prices Walmart wanted it at. That's one way Walmart keeps the prices low. With this monopsony problem. We're talking about a lot of companies that make competing products, but there's really one 800 pound gorilla. That's buying it. Walmart has a huge share of the US retail market.  Of course, now they've been one-upped by our friends over at Amazon. Amazon is there now in that kind of the same position. If you're going to sell something, you pretty much have to have it on Amazon. Amazon's basically going to dictate how much you can sell it for. Isn't that interesting. By the way, that word monopsony dates back almost a hundred years as well. Antitrust laws have never addressed the idea of this kind of anti-competitive behavior from the bottom-up direction. It's an interesting way.  So what do I think is the way to go on all of this stuff? First of all, we'll see if it ever becomes law. They tried something similar with a bill back in 2019, and it didn't get very far. With the Democrats controlling the white house, the house of representatives, and the Senate. The idea of reform being passed is more feasible, but there's one other side to this.  This goes back to my friends who have had their businesses effectively stolen by large companies. That is when we're looking at more regulation, which is exactly what she's proposing. More regulators, more money going to the regulators. They're making the entire marketplace harder.   If you're a small company and do you have to comply with all of these new rules, you now have to make all of these regulators happy. What are the odds? You're going to be able to do that compared to the big guys.  The big guys can quite easily afford all of the attorneys, all of the regulatory compliance people, everybody that's needed. But you can't.  So the big companies love this sort of thing because the regulations make it easier for them to keep competitors out of the market.  They're keeping competitors out of the market. We've already established that they're buying competitors, so they don't have to compete with them.   Now we're going to make matters worse with this Klobuchar bill. By doing what? By increasing regulation, making it harder to compete.  I propose that we'll actually have more monopolies after this. I would much rather just keep it simple and watch out for monopolies.  If a company makes mistakes and is going under, let it go under. Any parts of that company that have any value will be sold. That's what bankruptcy laws all about. If, someone who's thinking about maybe getting into an information security career. Or maybe you're looking at another career because right now there are millions of jobs open in InfoSec. We're going to talk about it. What do I wish I knew? Hi everybody, Craig Peterson here. Thanks so much for joining me.  You probably know that I have been in information security for a very long time. It started out as I had to protect my own company. When I got nailed 30 years ago with what was called the Morris worm. If you've been on any of my webinars where I do a little background, you heard my story there. It just scared me to death. I almost lost a bunch of clients because of this worm.  The worm is a piece of software that gets onto a computer and then spreads to other computers. Nowadays, we have a lot of things that act like worms. For instance, ransomware gets in and starts to spread. We have all kinds of bad guys that are doing the same thing. They'll get onto a machine in your network. Then they'll manually start looking around and seeing what you have, what file servers you have. Oh, let's connect to the G drive or whatever you call that file server drive or shared drive. They will look through your files and just the rest of the story, right?  You guys are the best and brightest. You really are. So here's where I come down. I think there is a lot of opportunities here and I did a little presentation for a mastermind group. I'm a member of last week.  I talked about a guy that became a friend of mine who is in his late fifties is right around 60 years old and decided he needed a new career. His prior career had literally disappeared. They had just been destroyed. He was in retail and he was managing a store and he had a lot of clients.  Of course, that job went away and he was looking for, what do I do next? He's been listening to me for a very long time on the radio and decided that maybe he should look into an InfoSe career. So he did.  I used him as a case study with my mastermind group. What should people be looking to do and how can I help them? So I figured let's do this because I saw an article in Dark Reading. That's one of my favorite websites for all of these articles on security. They were talking about exactly that, what should I be doing now, if I want a security career?  What are the things I should know and do?  The author of this is Joan Goodchild, an easy name to pronounce.  What happened to her? She points out, do you know information security can be really rewarding?  I absolutely agree with that. It is a thankless job, you miss one thing and something gets in. Someone brings it from home you don't quite have everything in place or everything up to date.  The biggest problem I've seen and I see with this friend of mine that I talked about in the mastermind is that we don't think we know enough. It's something called imposters syndrome. You've probably heard of it. It exists in a lot of different facets of our lives, not just in careers.   So he has imposter syndrome, as do a lot of people who are in cybersecurity because there's so much to know.  That's why I've said forever businesses cannot do cybersecurity.  Antivirus isn't going to work for you. Basic firewalls are not going to work for you. Even if you have the right equipment in place if you don't know how to manage it and set it up. All of this stuff, it's just not possible to do.  Maybe you should look at a security career, cybersecurity.  Let's run through some of the things that she put in there. Of course, I'll add my little side things, but she asked a bunch of people in cybersecurity, specifically what do you wish you would have known when you first started. Here's Gregory Touhill, president of Applegate, federal Brigadier general retired in first, us CSO under president Barack Obama, CSO is the chief information security officer for the federal government. He said. I love this quote. Cybersecurity is a full-contact team sport. There is no single person who is an expert on all of the various aspects of the area of the discipline. Once I got over myself and recognize that I couldn't do it all, I focused on building the right team of experts to solve issues before they become problems. That revelation triggered great future success. So there you go.  I think that's absolutely phenomenal to remember. You're going to have imposter syndrome if you decide to go into this, but the bottom line is to work with a team. If you can find a vendor like me, that knows what they're doing, that has people that can help you out because you cannot just be out there yourself. Next point here. This is from Wayne Pruitt, cyber-range, technical trainer in North America.  I've seen him before. He's been on one of my webinars where I was teaching about cybersecurity. To be effective in cybersecurity you need to have an understanding of all areas of information technology. Boy, is that true? If an analyst does not understand how a web application communicates with a database on the backend, how will he know if the traffic he's seen is normal or malicious? Without this understanding, analysts are just relying on security tools to make the determination. Hopefully, those tools are configured correctly. Sometimes you have to learn the basics. Don't understand the more complex. Again, this goes into you've got to have a team. You have to have multiple people who can help out at different levels because frankly, you can't know it all. Going back to that the general Brigadier general, he had such a good point. Next up is a chief strategist at Point 3 security.  Her name is Chloe Messdaghi. I really wish I knew how little diversity and inclusion were practiced. When I first entered the industry, many of us in our current organizations are now working for to improve the situation are gaining ground. But within my first year, I felt like I had entered the 1940s. I personally think this is ridiculous.  Men are attracted to certain things and certain careers, women, the same thing. There are some careers that are dominated by women and some that are men. One of my daughters works with me and she is a cybersecurity analyst and she's just finishing some more training. In fact, our people tend to spend about a third of their time in training and she's very good and it has nothing to do with the fact that my daughter's a girl. So come on, quit seeing sex and seeing the race everywhere. It's just crazy. It's out there and she's right there aren't many women that are in this career.  Next up here, Lakshmi Hanspal. She is CSO of a company called Box whom I have used before. They've got some very good products for file sharing. I switched over to Dropbox. I like some of the stuff a little bit better having come from a traditional stuff background.  It was not until I entered higher leadership roles and began formulating hiring strategies that I realized the more diverse teams solve the toughest challenges, skills, such as critical thinking, how to manage risk trade-offs and cybersecurity not being a zero-sum game are extremely fundamental and understanding and thriving in the security industry. It is obvious she spent some time writing that and trying to put in lots of big words.  She is right. We when we're talking about diversity in this case, what she's talking about are the diversity of skills, critical thinking, managing trade-offs, and understanding that we all have to work together on a team in the cybersecurity field. I thought she had a really great point.  Next up, we have Josh Rickard security research engineer over at Swimlane. I wish I knew and understood that an organization's priorities are guide rails for information security teams, as with most starting in InfoSec. I wanted to solve all the security issues I came across, but this is impossible. Understanding business priorities while communicating potential risks is critical. Okay. But helping the business with those priorities gives you credibility. Wow.  I'm going to save that one, frankly, because that is something that we all need to remember. I've had people on my team that was just a hundred percent focused on doing the right thing, quote unquote, on the cybersecurity front, and to them, the right thing was to make sure there are no holes. So I can see that from a certain perspective. And again, back to the diversity of thought, having someone like that on your team is a good idea, but it does have to be tempered.  Mary Writz VP product development over at ForgeRock. When I started 20 years ago as a penetration tester at IBM. I wondered how I even got the job because I did not feel qualified in hindsight. No one was truly qualified because it was such a young domain. I was hired because of my technical background, my curiosity, my interest, fast forward, 10 years, I was teaching a technical audience how to build hunt teams and I expect everyone in the audience knew more than me. A gentleman in the audience raised his hand and said, you're assuming we know what we're doing, but we don't. After we all laughed, we shared our notes and learned from each other. Wow. So insightful here, because again, she's pointing out.  The curiosity requirement. I think if you're not curious, you're not going to spend the time it takes to investigate and to learn more.   We're going to cover a few more.  You're listening to Craig Peterson and online@craigpeterson.com. We're talking right now about InfoSec, information security. Have you thought about maybe taking up a bit of a new career? Well there are some estimated 2 million open jobs in this one.  Of course, this is Craig Peterson.  We were just talking about this article that appeared in dark reading. Now, dark reading is an online magazine, right? It's a website. And they had this article that I absolutely had to read because it reminded me of someone I know. One of our listeners, who decided he needed a new career. He'd lost his job. He'd been out of work for over a year and he had been managing a retail camera shop and they shut it down. He was stuck. What do I do? He'd been listening to the show for a long time. He decided he wanted to go into information security. He took some courses on it and he got himself a job. A full-time job being the chief IT security guy for this company after just a few months. So that tells you how desperate these companies are. Kind of jerking his chain a little bit, but not right, because he just barely had any background.  If you want me to connect you with him, if you are serious about thinking about one of these careers, I'll be glad to forward your request to him, just to see if he's willing to talk to you. Just email me ME@craigpeterson.com and make sure you mentioned what this is all about. So I know what's going on.  Ran Harel, he's a security principal and product manager over at Semperis said, when I was growing up, I was quite an introvert, by the way, that sounds like a lot of us in it. I didn't realize until much later on in my career, just how great the security and tech community are looking back. I realize how quickly I could have solved so many issues, by just asking on an IRC channel or forum.  IRC is an internet relay chat, a bit of a technical thing, but it's an online chat. I would tell my former self, the problem you are facing now is probably been dealt with multiple times in the past year alone. Don't be afraid to ask the InfoSec community and then learn from them.  That's absolutely true. I found an online IRC channel basically, and they were set up just to talk about CMMC is this new standard that department of defense contractors are having to use. As you probably know, we have clients that are manufacturers and make things for the Department of Defense and they have to maintain security.  It's been interesting going in there answering questions for people and even asking a couple of questions. It is a great resource. This particular kind of IRC is over on discuss. You can find them all over the place. Reddit has a bunch of subreddits. It's dealing with these things, including, by the way, getting into an InfoSec career. So keep that in mind.  There's lots of people like myself that are more than willing to help because some of the stuff can get pretty confusing. All right. The next one. Is from Cody Cornell, chief security officer, and co-founder over at swimlane. He said, apply for jobs. You are not qualified for everyone else is. Man. I have seen that so many times everybody from PhDs all the way on, down throughout a high school and who have sent me applications that they were not even close to qualified for. Now, you can probably guess with me, I don't care if you have a degree. All I care about is can you do the work. Can you get along with the team are you really going to pull your weight and contribute?  I have seen many times that the answer to that is no, but I've seen other times where, wow, this person's really impressive. So again, apply for jobs you're not qualified for because everybody is. Security changes every day. New skills techniques and the needs of organizations are always shifting. And to be able to check every box from an experience and skills perspective is generally impossible. Looking back at 20 years of jobs in the security space, I don't believe that I was ever a hundred percent qualified for any of them, but felt confident that I could successfully do them.  So keep that in mind. Okay.  Again, imposter syndrome, we're all worried about it. This applies to more than just InfoSec. This applies to every job, every part of life, we all feel as though we're impostors and that we're not really qualified, but the question is, can you figure it out? Can you really do it? Next up here is Chris Robert, a hacker in residence, he calls himself over at Semperis and he says, overall, the most important lessons that I'd tell my younger self are not tech-based. Rather they focus on the human aspect of working in the cybersecurity industry. I think cybersecurity professionals in general, tend to focus on technology and ignore the human element, which is a mistake and something we need to collectively learn from and improve.  I agree with him on that as well. However, we know humans are going to make mistakes, so make sure you got the technology in place that will help to mitigate those types of problems.  Next up, we've got Marlys Rogers. She's CISO over at the CSAA insurance group that's a lot of four-letter acronyms. You are nothing without data. Data is queen. Coming from an insurance person, right? Without hard data, you can only speak to security in more imagined ways or ways. The board and C-suite are aware of in the media cost-benefit is only achievable with related data points. Demonstrating how much we are fighting off and how the tools, processes, and people make that happen. Next up we have Edward Frye, he's CSO over at our Aryaka. When I first started out, I was fairly impatient and wanted to get things done right away. While there are some things that need to be done right now, not everything needs to be done. Now have the ability to prioritize and focus on the items that will have the biggest impact. I think one of the biggest lessons I've learned along the way is while we may need to move quickly, this race is a marathon, not a sprint.  Patience is essential for security pros. I can certainly see that one.  Chris Morgan, senior cyber threat intelligence analyst over at Digital Shadows, despite the way that many in media liked to portray cyber threats, not everything will bring about the end of the world. For those getting into incident response and threats, try to have a sense of perspective and establish the facts before allowing your colleagues to push too quickly towards remediation mitigation, et cetera.  Expectation management amongst senior colleagues is also something you'll frequently have to do to avoid them breaking down over a mere phishing site. The quote, one of my former colleagues try to avoid chicken, little central.   I've seen that before as well.  The next one is things are changing daily and the last one is the perception of security is still a challenge.  So great little article by Joan Goodchild. You'll see it in my newsletter, which we're trying to get out now Sunday mornings. You can click through on the link if you'd like to read more.  As you can see. 2 million open jobs while between one and 3 million, depending on whose numbers you're going at in cybersecurity.  You don't have to be an expert. As I said, one of our listeners went from not knowing much about it at all, he can install windows that's it, to having a job in cybersecurity in less than six months.  I'm doing a special presentation coming up next month for the New England Society of Physicians and Psychiatrists. We're going to be talking a little bit about what we will talk about right now. What can you do to keep your patient information safe?  What can we do as patients to help make sure our data's safe.  You'll also find me on pretty much every podcast platform out there. Just search for my name, Craig Peterson. I have a podcast and it makes it pretty easy. I've found some of them don't understand if you try and search for Craig Peterson, tech talk, some of them do. I've been a little inconsistent with my naming over the years, but what the heck you can find me. It's easy enough to do.   I've got this new kind of purple-ish logo that you can look for to make sure it's the right one. And then you can listen to subscribe, please subscribe. It helps all of our numbers. You can also, of course, by listening online with one of these devices, help our numbers too. Cause it's you guys that are important.  The more subscribers we have, the way these algorithms work, the more promotion we'll get.  I think that's frankly, a very good thing as well.  What do you do if you need to see a doctor, that question has a different answer today than it did a year ago. I won't be able to say that in about another month, right? Because mid-March is when everything changed last year, 2020, man, what a year?  To see a doctor nowadays, we are typically going online, aren't we? You're going to talk to them. So many doctors have been using some of these platforms that are just not secure things like zoom, for instance, which we know isn't secure. Now, the fed kind of loosen things up a little bit under the Trump administration saying, Hey. People need to see doctors. The HIPAA PCI rules were loosened up a little bit in order to make things a little bit better. Then there's the whole DSS thing with HIPAA. All of these rules are just across the board are loosened up.  That has caused us to have more of our information stolen.  I'm going to be talking a little bit about this FBI, actually multi-agency warning that came out about the whole medical biz and what we need to be doing. Bottom line, Zoom is not something we should be using when we're talking to our doctors.  Now, this really bothers me too. Zoom is bad. We know that it's not secure and it should not be used for medical discussions, but Zoom has been private labeling its services so that you can go out and say, Hey, zoom, I want to use you and I'm going to call it my XYZ medical platform.  People have done that. Businesses have done that. Not really realizing how insecure Zoom is. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt here. You go and you use the XYZ medical platform and you have no clue of Zoom. Other than man, this looks a lot like Zoom, that's the dead giveaway. Keep an eye out for that because a lot of these platforms just aren't secure. I do use Zoom for basic webinars because everybody has it. Everybody knows how to use it.  I have WebEx and the WebEx version of it is secure. In fact, all the basic versions, even of WebEx are secure and I can have a thousand people on a webinar or which is a great way to go. It's all secure end to end.  Unlike again, what Zoom had been doing, which is it might be secure from your desktop, but it gets to a server where it's no longer secure. That kind of problem that telegram has, frankly.   If you are talking to your doctor, try and use an approved platform. That's how you can keep it safer. If you're a doctor and you have medical records be really careful. Zoom has done some just terrible things from a security standpoint. For instance, installing a complete web server on a Mac and allowing access to the Mac now via the webserver. Are you nuts? What the heck are you doing? That's just crazy. Just so insecure.  This is all part of a bigger discussion and the discussion has to do with Zero trust architectures.  We're seeing this more and more. A couple of you, Danny. I know you reached out to me asking specifically about zero trust architectures. Now Danny owns a chain of. Coffee shops and his family does as well. He says, Hey, listen, what should I do to become secure? So I helped them out. I got him a little Cisco platform, and second Cisco go that he can use as much more secure than the stuff you buy the big box retailers or your buying at Amazon, et cetera, and got it all configured for him and running. Then he heard me talk at about zero trust and said, Hey, can I do zero trust with this Cisco go, this Muraki go, is actually what it is and the answer is, well so here's the concept that businesses should be using, not just medical businesses, but businesses in general and zero trust means that you do not trust the devices, even the ones that you own that are on your network. You don't trust them to be secure. You don't trust them to talk to other devices without explicit permission.  Instead of having a switch that allows everything to talk to everything or a wifi network where everything can talk to everything, you have very narrow, very explicit ways that devices can talk to each other. That's what zero trust is all about.  That's where the businesses are moving.  There's zero trust architecture, and it doesn't refer to just a specific piece of technology. Obviously, we're talking about the idea that devices, and even on top of that, the users who are using the devices only have the bare minimum access they need in order to perform their job. Some businesses look at this and say that's a problem. I'm going to get complaints that someone needs access to this and such. You need that because here's what can happen. You've got this data that's sitting out there might be your intellectual property. You might be a doctor in a doctor's office and you've got patient records. You might have the records from your PCI your credit card records that you have. I put on. Those are sitting there on your network that is in fact a little dangerous because now you've got something the bad guys want.  It's dangerous if the bad guys find it and they take it, you could lose your business. It's that simple.  They are not allowing you to use the excuse anymore because of COVID. That excuse doesn't work anymore. The same thing's true with the credit card numbers that you have the excuse of I'm just a small business. It's not a big deal. Doesn't work anymore. They are taking away your credit card privileges.  We had an outreach from a client that became a client, that had their ability to take credit cards taken away from them because again, there was a leak. So we have to be careful when you're talking and you have private information, or if you don't want your machine to be hacked, do not use things like Zoom. I covered this extensively in my Improving Windows Security course. So keep an eye out for that as well. If you're not on my email list, you won't find out about this stuff. Go right now to Craig peterson.com. If you scroll down to the bottom of that homepage and sign up for that newsletter so you can get all of what I talk about here and more. Hey, thanks to some hackers out there. Your application for unemployment benefits might've been approved and you didn't apply for it in the first place. Turns out somebody stealing our information again. Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here.  Hey, this is a big concern of mine and I've often wondered because I have not been receiving these stimulus checks. I did not get the first round. I did not get the second round and I contacted the IRS and the IRS says depends on when you filed for 2019. Oh my gosh. Of course, I was a little late filing that year. They still haven't caught up. I guess that's good news, right? That the IRS data processing centers are terrible.  It goes back to aren't you glad we don't get the government we pay for is the bottom line here, but I've been concerned. Did somebody steal my refund?  Did somebody steal my unemployment benefits, did somebody steal my stimulus checks? It is happening more and more. There is a great little article talking about this, where someone had stolen the author's John personal information again. Now we probably all have had our personal information stolen, whether you're aware of it or not. As usual, I recommend that you go to have I been poned.com and pwnd is spelled, pwn, D have I been poned.com and find out whether or not your data has been stolen and is out there on the dark web.  They have a really good database of a lot of these major hacks.  Many of us have been hacked via these credit bureaus and one in particular Equifax who have all kinds of personal information about us, had it all stolen.  It's easy enough for people to steal our identities file fake tax returns. That's why the IRS is telling you, Hey, file your return as soon as possible. That way when the bad guy's file, we'll know it's the bad guys cause you already filed it. As opposed to you file your tax return and the IRS comes back and says, Oh, you already filed. We already sent you a refund or whatever. You already filed it.  That is a terrible thing to have to happen because now you have to fight and you have to prove it wasn't you. How do you prove a negative? It's almost impossible. At least in this case, hopefully, the check was sent to some state 50 States away, another side of the world. So you can say, Hey, listen, I never been there, then they can hopefully track where it was deposited.  Although now the bad guys are using these websites that have banks behind them, or maybe it's a bank with a website that is designed for people to get a debit card and an account just like that. That, in fact, it's what was used to hack my buddy. My 75-year-old buddy has been out delivering meals and had his paychecks stolen through one of those.  These fraudulent job claims are happening more and more. It's really a rampant scam. We've had warnings coming out from the FBI and they have really accelerated during the lockdown because now we've had these jobless benefits increased, people, making more money staying in their home than they made on the job. Disincentives for working, frankly. He's saying here the author again, John Wasik, that a third of a million people in his state alone were victims of the scam. This is an Illinois. This is where he lives. A third of the people in the state of Illinois, including several people that he knew.  We've got some national tallies underway. I don't know if you've seen these. I've seen them on TV and read about them, California. It is crazy. People were applying for California unemployment that didn't live in the state at all, would come into the state and once you're there in the state pick up the check, right? Cause that's all they were doing. Some people have been caught with more than a million dollars worth of California unemployment money.  Of course, it wasn't a check, it was actually a debit card. The same basic deal and California is estimating that more than $11 billion was stolen. Can you imagine that tens of millions of people could have been scammed because of this? This is the third time the author had been a victim of identity theft and fraud.  He wanted to know how could they get his information. Well, I've told you, check it out on, have I been poned. It'll tell you which breaches your information was in. It does it based on your email address.  It'll also tell what type of data was stolen in those breaches. So it's important stuff. I think you should definitely have a look at it.  He is very upset and I can understand it. Data breaches last year, more than 737 million data files are ripped off according to act.com.  Frankly, that was a digital pandemic, with more and more of us working at home. I just talked about the last segment. Your doctor's office and you are talking to your doctor. How now? Cause you don't go into the office. There are so many ways they can steal it.   The FBI's recording now a 400% increase in cybercrime reports that we had this mega hack of corporate and government systems. This whole thing we've talked about before called the SolarWinds hack, although it was really more of a Microsoft hack, and it went out via SolarWinds as well as other things. Be careful everybody out there. If you find yourself in these breach reports on, have I been poned make sure you go to the website. Set yourself up with a new password. At the very least use a password manager.  I just responded to an email before, when it went on the air today, from a listener who was talking about two-factor authentication.  He's worried about what to use. I sent him my special report on two-factor authentication, but it is the bottom line, quite a problem.  Again, Use one password, use two-factor authentication with one password. Don't use SMS as that and you'll be relatively safe.  I don't know I can't say do this and you'll be safe. I don't think there's any way to be sure your safe.  Having these organizations, businesses, government agencies hacked all the time that don't seem to care about losing our data, right? Oh, it's a cost of doing business,

Les diasporas donnent de la visibilité à la terre natale et font évoluer les musiques, parfois de manière inattendue. C’est ainsi que nous retrouvons Pierre Kwenders (José Louis Modabi), né à Kinshasa et grandi à Montréal, avec son nouveau complice, le francilien Clément Bazin (Woodkid) et le pionnier de la musique électronique, chanteur et compositeur congolais Bony Bikaye qui, après avoir été le directeur musical de Zaïko Langa Langa (Papa Wemba), a sorti 2 albums cultes dans les années 80 (Noir et Blanc, Mr Manager) avec Hector Zazou (Pierre Job) alors journaliste à Radio Nova. Pierre Kwenders et Clément Bazin sont nos invités pour la sortie de l’Ep Classe Tendresse. Deux ans après la sortie de son dernier album, le producteur et instrumentiste français Clément Bazin est de retour chez Nowadays aux côtés du chanteur et activiste montréalais Pierre Kwenders, du brûlant collectif Moonshine, pour un premier EP en duo suave et délicieux. Entre steel pan, sonorités africaines et chant pop, à la découverte d’une palette de sentiments au service de l’universalité, à cheval sur les styles et les genres. Ainsi que Bony Bikaye pour la réédition de l’album Mister Manager chez Crammed Discs, agrémenté de nombreux inédits et toujours ce synthé Modulaire CY1 qui est la marque de fabrique du duo et d’autres ingénieux colleurs de sons de l’époque comme Brian Eno et David Byrne. Alors que l’Europe des années 80 gambillait sur le Yéké Yéké de Mory Kante, des irréductibles cherchaient de nouvelles voies, accompagnés de machines et d’intelligence artificielle… Programmation Pierre Kwenders & Clément Bazin Sentiment, Ego, voir le clip Compliqué extrait de l’Ep Classe Tendresse Zazou Bikaye Nostalgie, voir le clip extrait du Cd Mr Manager Extrait Mistinguett El Manicero, La Rumba d’Amour Extrait Zaïko Langa Langa Subissez Les Conséquences Zazou Bikaye Soki Akei, Angel extraits du Cd Mr Manager. Pour aller plus loin - Pierre Kwenders globalise les pleines lunes afro-électro sur RFI Musique - Zazou Bikaye par Nova - Qui est Morton Subotnik dont parle Bony Bikaye ? sur Arte - Hector Zazou (papier 2004) sur RFI Musique. (Rediffusion du 5 décembre 2020) #CongoKin #Montréal #popexpérimentale #synthémodulaire #krautrock #jeanfrançoisbizot