Nov 12, 2018
Craig is on with Jack Heath talking about the midterm elections, the voting machine hacking, and China hacking our telecoms networks.
These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
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China Has Been
'Hijacking the Vital Internet Backbone of Western
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Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.
Airing date: 11/12/2018
Florida Election Technology - China Hijacking Networks
Jack Heath: 0:00
Craig Peterson, our Tech Talk guy. His show Tech Talk. Craig Peterson joins us now at the Auto Fair listener lines. Good morning Craig.
Craig Peterson: 0:05
A Good morning. I've been following what's been going on with the
Florida week count of ballots. The technology behind all of that
stuff Jack, it's really kind of interesting.
Jack 0:16
Yeah? Well, interesting is one way to put it. And who knows what
the outcome will be Craig. Your guess is probably as good as
the people counting the votes.
Craig 0:24
Yeah, exactly. Well, the problem here really seems to be related to
what happened in 2014. Of course the hanging chads, the ballots,
and problems back then. Florida and a lot of states around the
country after the federal government put some funding in in '02,
but Florida bought a bunch of equipment and the equipment they
bought to count the votes was out of date when they bought it. So
now they're trying to count the votes in Palm Beach County and a
few other states have the same stuff. And Jack, they can only count
one the election at a time. In other words, they have to run all of
the balance sheets through the machine that counts for governor and
then they have to rerun, reprogram the machine and rerun all of the
ballots on the machine again, now to count the votes for Senator,
etc, etc. So it's really crazy all of the work they have to go
through. And then the machines themselves are having problems.
Because, you know, Florida has this whole humidity thing. And you
know what humidity does to paper. And with these old machines that
are kind of nearing the end of physical life, as well as technical
life, they are jamming up the machines, and that caused voting
problems, and it is now causing problems with the recount. So there
definitely seem to be some reasons outside of the politics for
these counts, taking so long and being done so poorly,
Jack 1:55
Could be a coin toss at the end of the day might be as reliable, I
just think they could have three different recounts, get three
different results. Is that close?
Craig 2:03
Yeah, it does go that way. Many times in some of these recount, and
there's talk now in Florida, that there could well be a manual
recount. But you know, on top of all of this, there appears to be
some incompetence, mixing in folks that were already deemed to be
invalid with valid votes. And we know from two years ago,
destroying ballots even though the court order they not be
destroyed. So there's the person side of all of this, as well as
the technology side. I think more than anything else, in order for
people to feel confident that the votes count, we've got to keep up
with the technology, we have to be secure. In fact, these machines
in Florida two years ago in 2016, were known to be vulnerable to
attack and not be secure. So we've got to keep this up so that we
can count on our election results being but at least partially
valid.
Jack 3:03
Yeah, well, who knows? Who knows where that's. I'll tell you it's
gonna be quite a process can be quite some time to in the Lago
coast, you know, imagine being these candidates and their campaigns
and the intensity in and around this is going to show and not
dissipate anytime soon. What else is catching your eye from a Tech
Talk point of view?
Craig 3:19
Well, we've got some more evidence about China and China hacking.
In fact, right now, we're seeing that China has been involved very,
very heavily in hijacking networks of US, not just corporations,
but internet service companies. China Telecom, you've been involved
in this for a number of years now. And the bad part about all of
this, and the way China's doing it is people just won't notice some
of these hijacks that have happened, have taken all of the data
that was going to or from a company, the websites, their emails,
everything else, routing them through China breaking encryption and
doing who knows what with that data. So again, this is something
that the course the Trump the whole Trump Organization is looking
into now and the government but just trying to figure out what's
happening? Why is it happening? And I think the administration's on
the right track China has been really taking advantage of our US
corporations and I picked up a new client a few weeks ago they are
small manufacturer right here in New Hampshire and their
intellectual property. All their designs are everything that
they've worked on for decades now is in the hands of the Chinese.
So now they get to compete against their own designs from a
manufacturer in China because the Chinese People's Liberation Army
hacked their systems and they have no idea. This is a huge problem,
Jack and something I've been doing some training with the FBI on on
those webinars that I run, but it's happening every day. We gotta
be careful not to do something more about it.
Jack 5:07
All right. To learn more, go to Craig Peterson with an O-N.com.
http://CraigPeterson.com. Thanks, Craig.
Craig 5:12
Hey. Thanks, Jack.
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