Dec 1, 2018
This week there is some very cool stuff and very scary stuff going on in the world of technology.
We're going to talk about some Brain Implants that lets fully paralyzed people use tablets. The project is called BrainGate2. Listen in and then check it out. It is very, cool use technology that can really help patients.
Did you hear about the new Patent that Google got? You'll want to listen in because this is pretty scary for sure -- Google is planning to monitor our mood, our movement and even our children's behavior at home.
These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
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Transcript:
Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.
Airing date: 12/01/2018
Brain Implant Lets Paralyzed People Use Tablets - Google And Amazon New Monitoring Patents
Craig Peterson: 0:00
Hey, good morning, Craig Peterson here. We have another show ahead
of us. We're going to be talking about a few things as usual one,
of course, security. That's kind of the big topic as it is every
week. As we try and get more and more businesses and people more
secure.
Craig Peterson 0:18
We're going to talk about Amazon, some kind of scary technology.
They just got a patent on maybe, maybe you've seen movies that
did this before the island was one of them. But these new high tech
toilets are going to be monitoring, new privacy on LinkedIn. Google
has now revealed some plans to monitor our moods, our movement and
our children's behavior in our homes.
Craig Peterson 0:42
Yeah, you have one of those Google Home devices are you sure you
want to keep that thing around? We've got more news now by the
hackers of these NSA hacking tools we talked about last year, those
that were stolen from the NSA or given away I'm not sure how you
want to look at this, but these tools are now being used in more
sophisticated ways and we're certainly seeing them every week and
law enforcement is now using a new tool, kind of a mysterious tool,
in order to unlock cell phones. We've talked about some of the
tools before we'll get into that a little bit more. Facebook ads
are urging Facebook staff to leak secrets on this is quite
interesting.
Craig Peterson 1:27
A company was terminated over this Facebook says they're not
tracking who is doing what but it looks like there might be some
George Soros ties and all of that. If you want to read any of the
articles, of course, this is all from the news just this week you
can go right online to my website http://CraigPeterson.com. You'll see
all of this stuff on the homepage or you can always go to
http://CraigPeterson.com/radio-show. Hey, everybody that's
listening on podcasts as well would really appreciate some
feedback. It's nice to know people are listening and are hopefully
getting some good useful information out of the show and I get
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live, and I have applied a few times to get the podcast up on the I
heart app so you can listen to it there but for some reason, I
don't know they just haven't been putting it up I'm not sure what's
going on there with iHeart but anyways go to http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes.
Just take a minute it's only going to take you a
minute. http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes.
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Take a couple of minutes to do that. That will also help me with
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the iHeart app, people might pick it up from that to who knows,
I've been doing podcasts for longer than almost anybody. And I went
What about two, three years without really posting anything. So
we're trying to get back into that, trying to get the information
out and really help people out.
Craig Peterson 3:47
Hey, I want to thank also all of the people that are responded, I
sent out an email two weeks ago now just talking about to get
together. And I've been taking time every day to respond to people,
I had so many responses. And I'm responding to them all
individually. So forgive me, if you haven't heard from me yet, you
will hear from me, I am putting some real time into this. And some
thought. And of course, that takes time as well. You should have
gotten my normal weekly show notes this morning. And of course,
last Saturday morning as well. But this was just a thing about a
get-together. And I'm trying to figure out what I can do best to
help small businesses out. So if you haven't seen an email from me,
I respond, I will be responding and I've been asking questions and
trying to kind of figure out what people are thinking out there so
that we can help them out. I'm just fed up with every week having
more and more of these types of hacks to talk about. It's just been
going crazy, frankly. So we're gonna start out here by not talking
about a hack. Let's talk about well, I guess you could call
this a hack. This is an absolutely amazing step forward.
Craig Peterson 5:05
You've probably seen people before on TV, Stephen Hawking is one of
them who had physical problems, he had a disease, you, of course,
paralyzed, he can just do some very basic things. You've probably
heard his speech system that talks to him, it's very slow, it's
very hard to do. But, he is able to mostly control a computer using
that. Well, three people who are paralyzed from the neck down now
have been able to use on modified computer tablets. Isn't this
amazing. In this case, they were Android, but on modified Android
tablets, to text their friends to browse the internet to stream
music. Very cool stuff. So you know, typically, as you've seen with
Hawking, I'm sure he has a thing that he puts into his mouth, and
he uses his mouth in order to manipulate it and move things around.
Sometimes these systems track the eyes of the paralyzed user as
they look at things. And they'll select letters and compose words,
put it all together. And all of that is really kind of cool. But
they've always had to use very, very specialized hardware that
computers themselves had to be designed to work with them,
obviously, right, because they have to select letters and words.
And it kind of does some predictive stuff with words to make it a
little easier for them. Well, in this case, it is absolutely
unmodified, I think it's phenomenal check it out online is called
BrainGate2. B-R-A-I-N-G-A-T-E, the digit 2. BrainGate2. They have a
lot of information there about the research projects that are
underway, obviously undergoing some field trials right now. They
accept donations if you want to help them out.
Craig Peterson 6:55
But this system uses some microelectrodes that are implanted into
the brains of these paralyzed people. And in real time, the neural
signals that are in the brain that are associated with the
intention to move a limb like an arm or leg are intercepted and are
used to allow them to type on a keyboard. It's just amazing. So
there are three people who are involved in this trial, they have
these electrical grids implanted over part of their motor cortex.
Again, that's a part of the brain that helps control movement
picked up the neural activity. And that neural activity then
indicated that they were thinking about moving a cursor on the
street screen. And guess what happened, the cursor moved on the
screen. So it's just using their intentions. And they were able to
perform all kinds of tasks. Now, some of the tasks like multi-touch
that you might have on one of these tablets, they couldn't do but
give a little time they'll get this workout. And ultimately,
they're not going to have to these things that the thinking is that
we'll be able to put sensors kind of like a hat that they were
right on their head. And they'll have a brain-computer interface.
So I thought that was a very cool way to start out the show again,
it's called brain gate two. And this is for paraplegics. It's
absolutely amazing. All they have to do is have a working brain and
they can go online and just do all kinds of incredible things.
Craig Peterson 8:30
Well, we've been inviting Amazon Alexa as into our homes and the
new Google Home. Some of us have that really good sounding series
speaker from Apple, although app or Amazon is coming out with one
as well, that they claim is really good. It's available right now,
I think. But I think it's still limited quantities. They sound
great, they answer your questions, we have an echo show in the
kitchen.
Craig Peterson 8:57
And you can ask it for recipes. It'll show you the recipe, it'll
play the videos, they're really, really helpful. Well, in both of
these cases, Google and Amazon are doing some things that are a
little bit scary. Now, we talked in weeks past that those machines,
although they're listening are not streaming all of your audio up
to the cloud, they do not retain all of your audio. So those are
both important points to remember. And we talked about it in the
context of police departments trying to do investigations. However,
Google just got a patent here, when apparently, they're planning to
monitor our mood, our movement and our children's behavior at
home.
Craig Peterson 9:46
Those of us that have the Google Home, you know, again, they like
it because you can and ask questions, Atlanta and stuff. But Google
is totally into trying to get all of the information they can get
their hands on about you about anybody. And to me, that is very,
very scary. We've given up our privacy to Google. And obviously,
Facebook, we've seen some of the things Facebook has done has done
and others. Now, Amazon, of course, they track thoroughly what it
is you buy them make suggestions, ways to save some money. So I not
really knocking them for all of this. But in this case, the
patents are revealing that Google's developing smart home
products that are capable of eavesdropping on us throughout our
homes.
Craig Peterson 10:40
They want to learn more about us, our families better target us
with advertising. It goes even further than that. And further than
the Google Home speaker that's promoted to just
answer questions right now provide useful information, these
nest thermostats that are measuring environmental conditions in our
homes. Some of these devices in the patent also have cameras on
them. And the patent describes how these cameras can recognize even
recognize the image of a movie star on a t-shirt. So you're in your
home, you're walking around, you've got a t-shirt on with your
favorite movie star. And now all of a sudden, you're going to start
seeing ads for that new movie that the stars in where's the line,
right? How about when you're running around in your underwear in
the house, you know what of that information is going to get out
there, what's going to get hacked.
We don't have any good laws about this right now, no good rules or regulations, the companies themselves have not been doing a good job of policing themselves, they just keep pushing and pushing that envelope.
Craig Peterson 11:49
One of these patents says that the smart home environment may be
provided with a smart device environment policies that use smart
devices to monitor activities with their smart device environment,
report on the activities and or provide smart device control based
on these activities. So it's pretty clear from this. And what they
want to do is monitor us and report back what we're doing. I the
patent goes on a lot more detail here, but it may include image
recognition technology to identify particular occupants or objects.
In other words, the goal is to track us throughout the home
observing who is in each room, because they also have the facial
recognition technology where we are moving within the house and
what we are doing alright, this patent was awarded by the way to
want to Google's teams, the guys that developed the Nest
thermostat, of course, Nest thermostat summit technology was
purchased. But this is a breakthrough product with a microphone,
you can talk to your Nest thermostat and have an answer
questions.
Craig Peterson 12:54
I don't know, it gets kind of scary. And then Amazon what they're
doing, they've got some new technology that recognizes accent. And
the idea behind this is that Google will recognize your
characteristics like voice feature. So in this particular case,
this patent that was issued in October will recognize things like a
language accent, the ethnic origin, your emotion, your sex, your
age, and background noise.
Craig Peterson 13:29
So it's going to be immediately extracted is going to be tagged put
in the user's data file, and it's going to be used for more
targeted advertising. I don't think that's going to be a surprise
to anybody, right. So what they're trying to do here, it's also
apparently going to consider this is, according to the Amazon
patent, consider a customer's physical location, and that's based
on their IP address, the primary shipping address or browsing
browser settings to help determine the accent will see, we'll see
what happens. It's unclear how much accent detection they can do
right now. But it's going to introduce all kinds of questions on
our part about surveillance, privacy violations, maybe even
discriminatory advertising or practices, civil rights issues that
could be raised by this. And of course, the government might be
interested in the accent data and technology as well. So if a
voice-based accent detection in sitting there in whether it's
Amazon or someone else, but if that detection can determine a
person's ethnic background,
Craig Peterson 14:38
it opens up a whole new category of information that's very
interesting to the government. You can find this article, it's from
the intercept, you'll find it up on my website, and
ttp://CraigPeterson.com. If you want to find out more Jennifer
King, Director of consumer privacy over at Stanford Law, she had
some very, very interesting comments whether people might speak
Arabic or Arabic, accented English, are these users belonging
to a religious or ethnic group, because it could be listening in
here, your prayers here, other things going on, I'm not sure where
that line should be drawn. But I don't think it should be drawn
that far down the road, that's for sure. And we're going to talk
about this, this other problem, because
Craig Peterson 15:26
when government gets this technology, when government gets us
information, eventually it gets outlook at what just happened last
month, with the government's Obamacare website, where 10s of
thousands of people's personal private information was stolen,
social security numbers, health information, names, addresses,
everything was stolen from the government. So if they're starting
to track all of this, what's going to happen? We had a break in
Amazon. Also, this wasn't a break in this wasn't a hack, but right
before Black Friday, this was like how I think it was Tuesday,
right before Black Friday, Amazon lost a lot of people's names and
email addresses due to a bug and anyone that had that information
last they send an email, you should get an email from Amazon
telling you what happened. And you know, they did fix that problem.
But again, it's a big problem. How far should we let the government
go when it comes to tracking us? And when you're talking about
something like Obamacare, wow, that this next article really starts
to come into play.
Craig Peterson 16:48
Even the hacking tools at the NSA had were stolen, right? You know,
it's how far can this all go? Well, the island great movie, if you
haven't seen it, in the alike side, You've got to see the island.
But part of this was that the characters, the primary characters in
this movie were monitored 24 seven, they wanted them to be the
ultimate of health very, very healthy, and so they were monitoring
the urine output of all of the resident. That's something we
already do in our space program. Our astronauts that are up in the
space station, their urine every time they use the toilet, it is
taken a sample of it's taken and it is analyzed. So they know
what's happening. Of course, we want to know more details and want
to understand space exploration better. And, and that makes a whole
lot of sense.
Craig Peterson 17:44
Well, our gear, arguably, our bathrooms are the last bastion of
privacy, but it looks like there's a new high tech toilet that's
coming our way that's going to track our every movement. We've got
the European Space Agency teaming up with MIT and some sanitation
specialists to create what's called the FitLoo, loo being British
slang for the toilet. And this FitLoo screened human waste for
early signs of disease. So they've got data sensors that are
sitting there in the toilet bowl to gather information. I'm not
sure how far this goes, I don't even want to think about some of
it, right? But this really
Craig Peterson 18:34
provides an incredible opportunity for people to gain control of
their health. And it's designed initially to go to the doctor when
they're sick. So that data isn't it may be captured but it isn't
shared with anybody you know, I want to go on and on here but the
articles interesting because they're quoting a spokesperson
from the toilet board coalition, if you can believe there is such a
thing they're quoting the spokesperson is saying, you know, we just
don't listen to our bodies. And, and I gotta say, I've seen that in
my extended family. I have right now a sister in law who's in the
hospital because she wasn't listening to her body is stuff that
could have been taking care of a long time ago, but wasn't taking
care of, and the toilet listens and free time, right, when we use
it. And we flush I guess today it is technically it's not
listening. But but it will be listening very soon. So take this and
take what I was just mentioning of that website that was hacked,
right? The Obamacare website, the government healthcare application
site, what's going to happen if there is government controlled
medicine even more control than it is right now? Or let's say that
the HMM most want to go another step further?
Craig Peterson 20:01
What are they going to do? Look what's happening right now, with
cars, I think it's Progressive Insurance will give you a discount,
quote-unquote, discount if you put the put this little device into
your car. So it links up with the car's computer, and it tracks how
many miles you're driving, which of course, is your or their
exposure to risk? And how you drive? Are you breaking hard? Are you
accelerating harder, you're going around corners hard because the
computers record all of us in our cars. And many times the computer
data from our cars, the black boxes have been used in court cases
to convict people of things. And it was maybe 10 years ago that I
talked on this show about giving tickets out, there are, now,
tickets being issued because of this data that's being collected.
So Progressive says, hey, listen, you can save money, you just plug
it in. And of course, I said, quote, save money, unquote, because
if you are a bad driver, there's going to be a surcharge on your
bill. So with government's involvement in health care with these
Hmm. Most involvement with health care, what do you think's going
to happen with these types of new toilets that are coming out,
right? If if you have a FitLoo? Are they going to come back and
say, Hey, listen, you got to stop eating bacon? Or you can have to
change your lifestyle in this way. Or that way. Because of what
your toilets been recording, right? Good question, isn't
it?
Craig Peterson 21:38
So, you know, our privacy is going away a little bit at a time, a
lot of bits here and there, frankly, and I think we got to be a lot
more careful with it. And what we're allowing people to do with our
data. So to that, and I'm not gonna have time to get into this. But
there's a great article by Mike Epstein or on life hacker again,
you'll find it at http://CraigPeterson.com. But this is how to
protect your privacy on LinkedIn. Now, we've, of course, talked
about Facebook before and protecting your privacy on Facebook, of
course, to a degree, one degree or another, you need to be careful
about the data you post on LinkedIn. Microsoft owns LinkedIn now,
and they are doing some interesting things when it comes to
privacy. We'll kind of leave it at that. But this article goes
through in some detail about what you should do, what you shouldn't
do what you want to be careful about when you're online with your
data sharing and everything. So check that out how to protect your
privacy on LinkedIn. That's the number one site for business people
for contacts is kind of a social network, certainly not on the
order of Facebook as far as a social network goes. But a lot of
people use it to find jobs, to find employees, etc, etc. out
there.
Craig Peterson 23:12
Now this I I don't know how to how to have everybody understand
this, you guys you listen to the show, you're you're smarter than
the average bear, you know more about security than the average
bear, believe it or not, because if you've been listening
regularly, I talk a lot about security. But more than a year after
patches were released to thwart these NSA exploit people still have
not applied them. So what we're talking about are the tools that
our national security agency had developed. And we're using in
order to break in and monitor computers. And of course, its design
intent was, hey, listen, we have a legal right to monitor these
people because of a Pfizer court order or some other court order.
So we're going to monitor them. The easiest way to do that is to
play some malware on their computers. And once a malware is on
their computers will be able to see what they're sending what
they're receiving, who they're talking to. The same trick when it
comes to your phones, they have some workarounds for your phones.
So there were patches that were released by all of the major
software vendors that were affected. And of course, who's the major
software vendor affected it is, of course, Microsoft and Microsoft
Windows. So first, these tools were being used to spread ransomware
I remember last summer the huge ransomware attack the knocked off
so many businesses completely off the air, including multinational,
huge corporation because they did not do the right thing with their
security. Thank goodness, we were able to protect all of our
clients so I didn't have to deal with it and try and restore from
backups. But a lot of people didn't even have a backup. So that was
number one use the NSA tools for that ransomware and then it was
cryptocurrency mining, they decided they would use your computer to
try and find bitcoins and other things in the cryptocurrency realm
that they could then use and trade while now researchers are saying
that hackers are using the leak tools to create an even bigger
malicious proxy network. Now Akamai is the one who just published
some of these new findings they see a lot of the internet traffic
and they're saying that they're the bad guys are using these NSA
tools to take over our routers and send data overseas we know about
that we've talked about that here before if you haven't patched
your router patch it now if you don't know how to patch your router
buy a brand new one okay it's really good just that simple well now
they've gone the next step and they're using even more powerful
exploits are burrowing
Craig Peterson 26:07
through your router and they're infecting individual computers on
your network and then they start spreading within your network so
it's pretty bad they're using a couple of these major exploit were
stolen from the NSA make sure you update your computer I had
someone this week sent me an email asking about how to update How
do they know if those patches are legitimate? If you're interested
just email me@CraigPeterson.com. I will send you that information
that I wrote up just me@CraigPeterson.com about how to tell which
updates are legit which ones you should install because a lot of
people are very confused about that and that's understandable so
the last two articles I'm not really going to be able to get to but
you'll find up on my website http://CraigPeterson.com. And if
you're on my email list you should have gotten the show notes this
morning make sure you subscribe if you haven't because I do keep
you up to date. I don't pester you to believe me. This is a lot of
great free information. http://CraigPeterson.com/subscribe
is a way to sign up. http://CraigPeterson.comc/subscribe.
You will get my weekly show notes when there's a big hack underway
I'll let you know when I'm holding the free master class I'll let
you know about that as well and we have master classes coming up on
how to do backups how to install patches how to use the free tools
in order to keep your home computer safe and the tools you need to
keep your businesses safe as well as some master courses which are
paid but everything else absolutely free I just want to get this
information out so have a great rate week. http://CraigPeterson.com/subscribe.
http://CraigPeterson.com/subscribe,
and we will be back again next week. Take care bye bye.
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Related articles:
Brain Implant Lets Paralyzed People Turn Thoughts Into Text
How High-Tech Toilets Could Soon Be Tracking Your Every Movement
Amazon’s Accent Recognition Technology Could Tell The Government Where You’re From
Google Reveals Plans To Monitor Our Moods, Our Movements, And Our Children’s Behavior At Home
How To Protect Your Privacy On Linkedin
Hackers Are Using Leaked NSA Hacking Tools To Quietly Hijack Thousands Of Computers
Facebook Ads Urge Its Staff To Leak Secrets
Local Law
Enforcement Using Mysterious New Tool To Unlock Cellphones
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