Preview Mode Links will not work in preview mode

Thanks for joining us! Let me know if there are any topics you'd like us to cover by sending an email to me at craigpeterson . com!

Jun 14, 2019

I am planning a Security Summer for my listeners.  I will have some free courses.  I will also introduce you to some of the software that I use for my clients and how you can use it too.  Also, I have some limited opportunities for businesses who have had enough with their security issues to work with me and my team and put their security problems to rest once and for all.   So watch out for announcements on those.

The News Industry says Google is skimming billions from them -- listen in to hear the whole story.

Have you thought about automation and jobs in the future? Microsoft planning for future jobs in a unique way, I'll be talking about this more today.

The NSA is warning about the seriousness of a new vulnerability -- solution PATCH now! I will tell you why they think it is so dangerous.

For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

---

Transcript: 

Below is a rush transcript of this segment; it might contain errors.

Airing date: 06/15/2019

Is Google really skimming billions from the news industry, Microsoft planning for future jobs in a unique way, The NSA is warning about the seriousness of a new vulnerability -- solution PATCH now!

----

Come on, is this true? Could it be true?

Are publishers losing money because of Google and Google's news service?

Or is it getting better?

We'll talk about that interesting article from New York magazine and the big complaint by the New York Times.

This last week, we've got another hack to talk about! My gosh, this is just amazing. Another Federal Government database got hacked this week. In that database, there were tons of travelers information, including photos that the government's been hoarding, er I mean collecting.

By the way, you might remember, I was told you a couple of weeks ago about the feds putting in these new facial ID systems at some of the airports, ports of entry various places and the success that the beta test they conducted. They were using that to track people who were here legally or illegally, with an emphasis on illegally, for various reasons, I think, frankly and they also found some impersonators. So we'll talk a little bit about that and what happened there.

Next, we have a murder trial that is getting underway involving a guy arrested last year. Now you've probably heard about the Golden State killer, but I don't think you've heard about this guy. We were hoping this case might set some seriously relevant precedents going forward, but it looks like it might not. However, maybe it will happen in some future cases.

Of course, this is Craig Peterson. And we talk about tech every week right here. And more particularly, we tend to talk about security, because for close to four decades, it has been my passion. I first got hacked back in the early 90s. It was a worm, you know, think of computer worms like the kind that happened here or what a year and a half ago when millions of people were majorly inconvenienced by the what happened with the WannaCry worm that crawled through the internet and ransomed machines galore. It bought whole businesses down, except for my clients, right? I gotta, put that out there. We're going to talk about that today, too.

Hey, this week the NSA took an unprecedented step and issued a warning which is something they rarely if ever do.

Also, Microsoft did something amazing that they have never done before, so we'll get to all of that as well.

But let's go back to my original question here today. And that is, frankly, Google and the New York Times. They have well been going at it, and I would call it a fight if you were to ask me. It boils down to a report that came out of the industry. Now can you believe the industry, right? The industry report, this is from the News Media Alliance - Voice of News Media Industry‎. It is an industry group within the publishing news media. You know what, I love that term study because it can be used for almost anything, right? I'm at Starbucks, and I asked a couple of people questions. Well, I just completed a study, and it showed...

Well, in this particular case, the News Media Alliance says, that Google earned nearly $5 billion in revenue by stealing news articles from them.

So how does that work? If you search for something on Google, they will intermix some news articles in the search results and provide you with a little summary. If you go to news.google com, I don't know if you've ever done that, but news.google.com, you might want to check it out. It has new stories on all kinds of topics, including your local news.

How do you get that information? Or I should say, how does Google get that information? Well, they go out, and it does what is called scraping, and it scrapes news sites that are out there. Scraping is an awful thing, frankly. Because there they are, stealing stuff.

So, let's talk about what I do and what other news commentators do. You know, this is an editorial, Right? I'm a commentator on the news. I'm not a writer, and I'm certainly not a journalist. I'm a commentator, frankly. So when I'm looking at an article, you'll hear me talk about it. So, for instance, I'm going to refer to some material from New York Magazine here. And they've got some great quotes in it, and I am commenting about it, perfectly legal, I can do all of that.

Well, how about Google? When we're talking about the Fair Use doctrine that's in place, and it has been forever in our copyright law? Is it fair use for Google to look through a news site, find an article, summarize that article using some machine learning algorithms. They have some programs that rip thru these articles and summarize it, grabbing a sentence here and there, put it all together and put it up on their site. Google did not write that article. Google may have written, you know, a little bit of the stuff they're showing, but typically, they're just stealing the paragraph or so from the article.

If you were not aware, the courts have heard arguments about this very thing, and the way the law stands right now is that Google has the right to do what they are doing because when you click on that search result, it takes you directly into the original site.

You might remember the lawsuits that happened a few years back, on what they called, deep links. These were where various companies were saying, "No, no, no, We can't link to an article," you can only link to our homepage. That was because they wanted people to have the experience of going through their website. Well, the experience of going through the website, of course, was to see the ads on their homepage, while you were trying to find the article you want to see. By going through a few other pages, they were collecting hits on these pages, which gave them more impressions. More impressions meant more ad revenue. Why? They base ad revenue on the number of impressions. It depends on the algorithm chosen, impressions vs. clicks. That is a different type of payment.

Well anyways, they were hoping they'd get more money. Eventually, those died out as the lawsuits began dying out.

So it was decided, no, you can have a deep link, as I do. I have deep links, where I refer to an article, and it says read more typically, you click on that, bam, it takes you right over to the website that has a synopsis of the article or an editorial commentary and then a link to the original article itself.

So Google is being accused by this news media alliance of stealing their revenue. There is a great article, as I said, it's from New York Magazine, and you'll see reference to it up on my website at Craig Peterson dot com. It noted that Google estimated that Google News or product without ads brought in an estimated 100 million dollars in yearly revenue back in 2008. So that's more than a decade ago. So what happened was the played fast and loose with that number, and extrapolated forward saying, well, that hundred million in revenue means an estimated 4.7 billion of revenue in 2018 to Google from news content. I am sorry, but that is total crap. What does that $100 million number mean? It was Marissa Mayer, you might remember her, she floated that number at a conference when she was the head of Google search, a decade-plus ago. So what does it mean, frankly? Well, it means that Google estimated the value of its news service.

Now, remember, they're not running ads, they're not getting money directly off of that. What's the back end? Well, here's the bottom line on the back end, Google is showing news articles. They have them all there on the news.google.com site, and they're putting them into the search results, as well. The reality is that the traffic from Google search to news publishers sites has risen by more than 25%. Twenty-Five Percent. Now, wait a minute. You're complaining that Google is stealing your news articles, which yes, they are, technically. And you're complaining that this is a massive $5 billion hit approximately, to your industry. But yet, you also in this same press release from the News Media Alliance say that traffic from Google search to the publisher sites went up 25%? Doesn't that stat show that Google News is beneficial to these news organizations? I tend to think so. Frankly, I do.

Now you can't deny that Facebook isn't a significant influence out there. Along with YouTube, Hulu, and now Netflix and HBO, and all of these others that have great content available for cheap money. So maybe it's not just losing traffic, because of the, you know, the fact that Google shown it on the new site. Perhaps, it's because the eyeballs are going elsewhere. In the long run, Google is helping them. I don't know. It is all very confusing. I think maybe that's part of what they're intending. It does not appear to be hurting their business at all.

Hey, I was thinking this morning, as I was listening to some music. And I was thinking, you know, I used to have to buy CDs, and before that I used to have to buy LPs, right? Earlier it was 45s and back before that there were 78s, remember those things? I remember playing in my grandpa's basement, and he had a real old Victrola. He always had some extra needles sitting there next to it, so we could put in a new one when they wore out after playing on those old brittle records. It was quite an experience. Anyhow, you remember those days. Well, I was thinking, you know, when we're talking about Google News, and we're talking about streaming new sites, and streaming video, and streaming audio, how things have changed. Right now, if you subscribe to Apple Music, or Amazon music, or Spotify, or you name it, Pandora out there. Right now, if you're willing to pay about ten bucks a month, you can listen to as much music as you want to, from current artists through old artists. I am talking about decades of music, 10s of millions of songs for ten bucks a month, ten dollars, that's less than it used to cost for a CD. Think about inflation, Right?

When you bought a CD, when did those come out, in the early 80s is when they became quite popular. They were more expensive than an LP. Although they cost a lot less to make that an LP, an LP would cost them about two bucks to three bucks to produce whereas a CD would cost them five cents, but hey could charge more for the CD. Why? The music quality was better, Right? The audio experience was better. So, they could charge more. Oh, I get it. Buying one of those CDs in today's dollars is what about 30 to 40 dollars to listen to, to get one CD, to get less than an hour's worth of music. Typically, sometimes it is only about a half-an-hour or less. Now we get it for ten bucks. It is time for the News Industry to wake up. Everything has changed. Everything is changing. That it's the only constant in the universe, Right?

Of course, there's climate change. There has always been climate change. There will always be climate change. No one I've ever heard of denies that. It's just a fact of life. That gets the big question is, have we caused it?

Well, of course not. But we're not going there right now. Right? If we wanted to have a discussion, think about Star Trek, for instance. Where there is a global calamity going on and the globe is warming, or it's cooling. We have to assume that in Star Trek, they've got 1000 years worth of climate studies and AI that can predict the weather, climate, etc.

Unlike us, who can't get our current weather, right? Even for tomorrow. Artificial intelligence is a real potential, and they have a lot of possibilities here soon and in the future. We don't know what's going on and as someone wise once said: "The only constant, is change."

When you're talking about your business, I want you to think about it for a few minutes here. Whether you're an employee, or the owner, or the CEO of the business, what's going to change in the future? Remember, the future is going to be different than the present. It doesn't matter; there will always be change. Well, that's an interesting problem. It's something that, surprisingly, at least to me, Microsoft is trying to address.

What Microsoft has done is they are launching what they're calling an AI hub. AI is artificial intelligence, and while we don't have real artificial intelligence, today, and it'll still be a while before we do. They predicted that by 2020, we'd have AI running around, not so much. We do have machine learning and a couple of other types of technologies out there. But artificial intelligence where you don't have to train it, and it learns all by itself. Where you don't even need to teach it how to play a game, but it can figure it out by observation or whatever. Is that AI or is that machine learning? I think most of us would consider that machine learning. AI is coming, but here's the problem. Whether you call it AI or you refer to it as machine learning, this type of automation is going to disrupt a ton of jobs and a lot of lives. There's a great article, in CNET, about this right now.

Microsoft has launched this AI hub, and they've done it, explicitly avoiding the east and the west coasts. Now, if you think about the schools that are, you know, on the East coast or West Coast. Right here by me, well just south of me, you've got MIT, you've got Harvard, you've got BU, you've got UNH here in my state. There are all kinds of excellent schools here. Head to the West Coast then you've got Stanford, Berkely, USC, CalTech and many others. And the list goes on and on. So, Microsoft said, hey, listen, we need to find a city where automation will have a substantial impact. That may be in the rust belt or the Midwest. We need to train these people. We need to help them to understand AI help them to understand the transition that will take place. Remember, change is the only constant.
During the industrial revolution, we had people all upset. Of course, you don't remember it personally, and neither do I because none of us were alive back then. I don't think. But do you remember the transition from the horse and buggy to the internal combustion engine? Do you remember what happened? What people were doing? What people were saying? You know, we're going to lose all these jobs as teamsters, think of New York City, you had people whose job was to go around with a shovel and a wheelbarrow and clean up after the horses, and not just during parades, right, this was a constant thing. Those people are going to lose their jobs. The people that provide the feed for the horses, the stables for the horses, the ones who breed the horses, that sell the horses, that drive the horses that load the carts and make the carts and make the wheels, and this is all going to change and it is going to be a horrible world.

Well, of course, what ended up happening was the exact opposite. We ended up with even more jobs. That's been the case with all types of technology over the ages. You know, I have got a great article that we wrote up on my website at Craig Peterson dot com, you should probably read if you're a CEO or business owner, because it addresses you and your problems, when it comes to automation. If you don't pay attention to this, you will be out of business. Okay, so it's a great article. Craig Peterson dot com, you have to read it.

So let's get back to Microsoft here. This project that they're doing is intended to upscale people on how to work alongside AI and robots. They're going to create this learning lab to prepare communities for jobs in the years ahead when this frankly, automation are going to disrupt the economy and the workforce. So, where did they go? What are they doing? They're explicitly avoiding hiring PhDs. And nothing against PhDs. I have a daughter working on hers, right now. It's, it's all well and good, but they tend to be very narrow. It tends not to be the real world, mainly when you're talking about people who are going to be losing their jobs to automation. Yeah, there's going to be some positions lost due to automation. We were talking a minute ago about these newspapers, well, they're all going to lose all of the writers as it will be entirely automated once AI kicks in. Then the same thing holds, for the editors, I don't know maybe editors are going to go first. You can still have people who pick some of the subjects, but eventually, AI will take that over two, because it's going to be better at that as well.

Well, Microsoft chose Louisville, Kentucky. Why Louisville? It is because 28% of the jobs in the Louisville area are at risk from automation.
Louisville has a strong manufacturing base, you know, you talked about Rust Belt. That's the definition of it. And in Louisville, about 12% of all jobs are in the manufacturing sector. So, Microsoft is investing in some new energy, some resources in the area. They're going to be building a center downtown, a real training center. They're going to hire four people to run this. They want people who have a four-year college degree or less. They're going to train them in how to train people in AI automation, working alongside automated systems, Right? Putting it all together. So kudos to them, frankly, great quote from CNET here, saying "we're really interested in seeing if we can help onboard people who have a two year degree, or most a four year degree, they're going to empower them with the tools, the resources, they're going to need to help everybody out. We think that in the next ten years, we will see more change in our society than we've seen in the last 250 years. Where that takes us, we don't even know. There's so much potential for us to reimagine ourselves and our community. That also means that we have to get ready for what the future holds for us."

AI is going to eliminate a lot of low-level jobs, a lot of repetitive tasks, and responsibilities that are easy to automate, like the writers that we talked about. Where are people who are already doing that? I don't know? If you read an article, and you say, man, this is not a very well written, the grammars maybe not great. Well, today people are going out and hiring others that are do something called spinning an article. I hired a writer two years ago, year and a half ago. And she was supposed to be writing original articles for me. She knew that. What I would do is say okay, Here are two or three articles on this topic that have some excellent points. Here are the points I want to emphasize. The idea was I would give her those articles. That way, she had an example of the topic, my detail, and then I would tell her what I thought she should put in the article.

That's pretty simple, Right? That's what you usually do. That's how people write books. That's how people get blamed for plagiarizing because they might have just taken a whole bunch of excerpts from other articles put them together, and then you go through, and you rewrite it because it's the expression of the thought that is copyrightable. The ideas are not copyrightable.

So, what she ended up doing was she'd take the article, and she would run it through some software that spun the material. What the software would do is change some of the verbs, some of the tenses move a few things around in minor ways. That way, it would pass the tests that I would run on it, Right? I'd run it through Grammarly and Hemingway and a couple of other programs. By the way, if you've never used Grammarly, man, you have to sign up for that. Be sure to sign up for the pro version, because it helps you with grammar and you will become a better writer as you see the corrections that it makes to your writing. Also in the paid or the pro version, it lets you know if any of the wording you used is stolen and or plagiarized from copyrighted material somewhere else. So I would run it through that and quickly double check it and clean it up because her grammar was not very good. Then we would post it. Well, I began taking a closer look at her work after a little while when I noticed some patterns. I fired her on the spot because it turned out she was using this spinning software. None of the stuff she had written for me was original content. I went back and tried to find everything that we had posted that she had put up and removed it.

That's what's happening with AI. As AI gets more advanced, and not much more sophisticated, just machine learning gets more advanced, more and more of the articles we see are going to be written by machines. It is estimated right now about half of the new content. Half of it, more than 50%, of the original content posted on the internet is, in fact, machine generated. So consider that.

Consider that with your business. What's your business? Is there any chance it could be automated? If you're, you know, an accountant or a tax preparer, automation can easily replace you. In the security business that I'm in, it is getting automated as we go forward more and more. Like the stacks of security software, that we sell at mainstream dot net and the firewalls, they are all fully integrated. There are a billion endpoints that are part of this, and each one is under constant monitoring. We pay to be part of that network and part of that community. That way we know within an hour when something new is spreading and automatically it's taken care of so, our customers don't get hit with it, Right? All of that happens, but we know it's going to be changing. So, keep that in mind.

At Craig Peterson dot com, got have a great article that we wrote, we did not spin it up on the website right now. It's aimed at CEOs and business owners, and it's talking about what's going on. We've only got a couple of minutes left.

So really quickly here. Maine became the first state in the Union that's prohibiting Internet Service Providers from selling users personal data, without explicit permission to do so. It is from futurism com. It may be the most comprehensive data privacy law in the US. And here's why this is from The Hill. It's the first data privacy law in the US that doesn't put the burden on consumers to make sure they've opted out of the company's privacy infringing practices.

In other words, you have that by default. It's going be interesting to see. Well, I'll let you know how it goes, and I'll keep you up on it.

Haha, there's so much we didn't get to this week. Cybersecurity all about business, not about consumers.

A great article from Alabama regarding the National Cyber Summit conference in Huntsville that happened last week and the two things that came out of the meeting. 1) to some degree, everybody's at risk. 2) nobody cares, according to Dr. Wesley McGrew. We'll have a look at that useful information for all of you.

A hack on a Federal database of photos of travelers coming into and out of the US occurred recently.

There is a murder trial, that's going to allow DNA evidence from a genealogy site, kinda-sorta, maybe you can read more about that. I have it up on my website from wired com.

Man Oh, man, oh, man. When we go into a company, and one of the first things we do is we install software that keeps all our their services, all of their systems, their servers, their desktops, everything up to date, entirely up to date.

Now, it sounds like when Microsoft releases Patch Tuesday, and you have automated patches turned on, okay, maybe that's going to take care of your Microsoft patches. By the way, we don't do it right then when Microsoft releases them. We wait a few days a week, typically, and test them, unless it's ultra-critical to make sure it doesn't break things, right?

Well, now the NSA is warning about this Windows OS bug. It is a huge bug, a huge deal. Its thought that right now, that particular bug could spread as far as WannaCry from a year and a half ago. Okay, this is huge, huge, huge. You heard it here first. It is a massive vulnerability CVE-2019-0708. If you're my client, don't worry about it. We have you taken care of here.

But not only is the NSA issuing a warning notice about this saying to update your systems.

Microsoft has issued patches to address BlueKeep, that's this bug, including taking a nearly unprecedented step of issuing patches to versions of its operating system going back to Windows XP. It is enormous, huge, huge, massive. Okay, it could put you out of business.

If you're home user, this could lock up your computer, maybe forever. So you've got to take care of this.

I think we're going to try and do a webinar on this. Showing you how to use the free tools Microsoft gives you. There's much more you can do and should do as a business. If you want more information, reach out to me, and we can help you — just me at Craig Peterson dot com that is: me at Craig Peterson dot com. If you have any other questions during the week, you can always text me. I am glad to help you out. Just call 855-385-5553 If you join my email list, you can also keep up to date on technology and let you know about seminars, webinars that are coming went up and other essential things, just 855-385-5553 and check to the newsletter from this morning.

As well as, of course, Craig Peterson dot com and have a great week ahead. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye

--- 

Related articles:

Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Artificial Intelligence are Replacing Our Workforce - What Are Our Options?

CEOs and Business Owners Aren't Taking CyberSecurity Seriously - And Are Facing Huge Penalties

Week After Week Vulnerability After Vulnerability

Using You for Profits

Multiple Logins The Bane of Modern Online Life

Technology and Databases have Murderers and Rapists Crying Foul

--- 

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553