Apr 12, 2019
Are we in the Matrix? Well, An MIT professor says our whole experience could be a simulation thing. So we'll get into that today
Are Amazon workers to your Alexa conversations? Well if they are it is for only max 30 seconds. They don't have context. I get it. It may be an invasion of privacy but could they tell anything about the context. We will delve into this more today
Why are conservatives (or so-called conservatives) saying we've got to start regulating the internet? I will be covering the reasons why today.
Is China selling high tech tyranny to Latin America? And it's true, and it's scary and we will discuss it.
Then there is Malware that is attacking our Critical Infrastructure sites. Today. it's on our list to discuss.
We've talked about autonomous cars, and about insurance and liability for them before? However, the bigger concern is DATA! Did you know that a car can generate about 25 gigabytes of data every hour, and as much as four terabytes a day? So, who's getting that data? Listen in for my take on that
For all this 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: 04/13/2019
Government Regs Killing Internet - China Selling Tyranny To Venezuela - Russian Malware Infecting Plants
Craig Peterson 0:00
Hello, everybody Craig Peterson here. We've got a lot of security
and technology to talk about today, including one of my favorite
topics, you might not be aware of this. But wow, you're going to
love this. It is from an MIT professor. And he agrees with me
about this whole simulation thing. So we'll get into that in just a
few minutes. I was watching the news this week. In fact, it was
yesterday on Friday. And it was kind of crazy because they were
talking about oh, my gosh, Amazon workers are listening to what
you're telling Alexa and the, you know, invasion of privacy and all
this other stuff? Really? Really? I don't think so. Okay, so we'll
talk about that. What's really happening there. Your car? We know
we've talked about autonomous cars are about insurance before?
Where's the liability shifting? Is it something that you really
have to worry about? Well, how about all of the data? It's saying
right now, this is an article from Roll Call, that a car can
generate about 25 gigabytes of data every hour, and as much as four
terabytes a day. So who's getting that data? And what does it mean
and what's going to happen? We've had more and more calls for
government regulations over the internet. Now, we've seen a lot of
those in Europe, we're going to talk about what's happening right
now in the US. We've even got so-called conservatives, who are
saying we've got to start regulating the internet, because, of
course, they feel their voices are being squashed. So we'll talk
about that. China selling high tech tyranny to Latin America. This
is from the Washington Examiner, in kind of an intriguing headline.
And it's true, and it's scary. We've got another piece of malware
out there. It's called Triton. And now it is infected a second
critical infrastructure site. This is a bad, bad thing. And one
more that's in my show notes for this week. And we may not get to
all of us on the air today, right. So make sure you visit them
online, you're going to have to go to http://CraigPeterson.com. And
you can subscribe right there to my weekly show notes. You get all
of the top articles that I have found during the week, right there
in the daily or the weekly newsletter comes out Saturday
morning.
Craig 2:43
But this particular one's interesting because 16 months ago,
researchers were reporting and unsettling escalation in hacks,
targeting power plants. This is from ArsTechnica.com. And we talked
a little bit about that before. And, you know, we know about some
of the compromises that happened, for instance, in Iran that was
conducted by the US and Israel. But what's unprecedented in this
attack is the use of advanced malware that is targeting the site's
safety processes. So it's shutting down all kinds of things that
are going to help keep the plants safe. And when you think about
gas field pressures, reactors, reactor temperatures rising, it gets
very, very nasty, you know. Some of this stuff is designed to
automatically close valves to really mess you up. And when we say
mess you up, we mean to make that whole nuclear power plant go into
a meltdown.
Craig 3;48
So what's happening with this? There's some researchers over at
FireEye who are saying that this same security firm, by the way,
discovered Triton, and it ties it to Russia, that they've uncovered
an additional intrusion use the same malicious software framework
against a different critical infrastructure site. So I guess the
big question here is, Does this mean that countries like Russia,
for instance, are using malware as kind of a first strike
opportunity? Right? It's hard to trace, it's hard to prove that
it's them that that attacked you. Right? How can you prove it?
Craig 4:30
Well, frankly, you can't in most cases, it just has fingerprints,
like the Russian language, or this is attacks we know, that have
previously come from Russia. Those are the types of things that
we've got to watch out for. And we now know that Russia has been
involved in some this hacking. We know China has been involved in
some. North Korea has been involved in some to let me tell you,
it's a different world. And the next war we have is going to be a
much different war, that's for sure.
Craig 5:03
Let's talk about this China story here, where China is selling some
high tech tyranny to Latin America. This is, as I mentioned, the
Washington Examiner. And this is very, very concerning. Because
what we found now is China has been working with these companies
like Huawei, which we know about, it's been a very, very big deal.
And Huawei's devices have been banned from US military bases, and
from others, but it's also saying this ZTE, is tied into this. And
we know about the concerns with 5G and ZTE and all of the stuff
that's going on all this stuff they're doing. And we're getting
really concerned now because what's happening is that China is
taking these tools that they've developed in order to monitor their
people within China and really displace the United States. They're
putting all of the surveillance equipment all around the US and the
Western Hemisphere. Well, not so much in Canada, although,
obviously with 5G rollouts, we do have some of that Chinese
equipment going up there. But they're supporting right now
Venezuelan strong man, Nicolas Maduro, the current president who's
really clinging to power, after the western democracies, I think
all of them said, Yeah, you got to be out of there. And recognize
the opposition lawmakers, the interim president, China has been
exporting technology that helps a South American socialist to
monitor and strong arm the Venezuelan people, which is what he's
been doing for quite a while. So here's an example of politics
being really promoted and expanded the power base due to some of
this technology. So think about that now. China is really now
intertwined in the Western Hemisphere and things that are going on.
And they're able to surveil, monitor, surrounding the US, that's
all part of the Asia Pacific influence that they've been building
here for a while. And it's very concerning very, very
concerning.
Craig 7:24
Maduro, by the way, paid ZTE as part of this, but to build a $70
million database and payment system for what they're calling a
homeland card. Now, what's concerning about this is this so-called
homeland card, that ZTE sold the technology to Maduro for is
designed to be used to control access to food, to cash, bonuses,
social services, a social credit system for a political control
mechanism. In fact, it's even used to track your voting. So they
know how you voted, it's recorded right there with the card, it
goes into the database. This is all part of their smart card thing.
And if you don't vote the right way, what's going to happen? It's
just like in Chicago, right? If you don't pay the local Chicago
thugs in the party that's in control in Chicago, you know, all of
the criminal activity that's been alleged there for years, much of
it's been proven, in fact, you end up with potholes in your street
that won't get fixed, because you've been speaking out against the
local candidate for the town, for the city, for the county, for the
state. It's just it's still so corrupt in Chicago. It's
unbelievable, how bad it is there. Well, it is much, much worse in
Venezuela using these Chinese technologies that the Chinese have
been building. Have you seen the Black Mirror episode, for those
that are sci-fi fantasy, it is a series out of UK, it's a really,
really good one. And the whole idea, the whole premise behind this
particular episode is that every time you do something, you get
social credit, or you get credit taken away from you. And this poor
lady just ends up in a downward spiral and, and has no credit left,
right? It gets to be really, really bad. Well, in China, now, they
have facial recognition technology all over the place throughout
all of the major cities. If you jaywalk, you get points taken away,
because the computers know who you are. And now you don't have the
social credit. And if you don't have the social credit, because
you've done things that the socialist, communist government doesn't
like, you cannot vote, you can't get on an airplane, you can't get
on a train even they block you from those if you don't do what
you're told to do. And if you're not politically correct. Free
speech is just going down the tubes worldwide and very, very scary.
So let's talk about friends speech here for a minute.
Craig 10:01
Here's an article from the Daily Mail. And course they are ahead of
us in some of this stuff, right? Free speech is outlawed in the
United Kingdom. Now, it's legally outlawed in Canada, you cannot
say certain things. You can't even ask legitimate questions,
legitimate political questions. You cannot have a dialogue about
certain things. You know, if you question about somebody's birth
sex, and now they say, well, you have to use this gender when
addressing me, or you're supposed to go on bended knee to his or
her royal highness and request permission to speak to them what's
going on? Because in Canada, and in the UK, if you say something
they don't like, you can go to jail. And it's that simple. So there
is no freedom of speech there. And in the US now, we've got these
fascists running around, who are beating people up, threatening
people, yelling, screaming, trying to stop free speech rights. And
that is the definition of fascism, isn't it? It's a definition of
socialism or communism, they all do it. They all try and stop free
speech because they don't want the free exchange of ideas because
their ideas are right. And the only reason it hasn't worked before
is because of what? Well, because the other people weren't smart
enough. We're smart, our generation is smarter than all generations
that have ever come before us. Right? That is not what they say. So
now we're tying technology into this. We're seeing it in China. Big
time, big time. And we're now seeing it in Venezuela, as the
current president tries to hold on to his socialist powers to
control everyone's lives. And of course, people are dying, they're
starving, They're digging through trash to try and find food.
Right? A socialist utopia, just like the Soviet Union became?
Craig 11:57
Well, now we're looking at government regulations. In the US over
free speech in places like the public square. Is Facebook, the
public square? Is Twitter the public square? Obviously not. But we
passed laws in the US that said, Hey, listen, we're going to
consider you as a public square, all you have is a faucet. And all
of these ideas are coming out of that faucet. And therefore, we are
not going to allow anyone to hold you liable for the things that
your users say online. And that's the sort of thing that you expect
from free and open fair discussions from a democracy, right? You
expect that kind of free speech, and you don't want to have
regulations or restrictions on the people that are providing those
free speech areas, just like the public square. You could go get a
soapbox, you could stand up in the public square, and you could say
anything you wanted, no matter how crazy it was. Right? That that
was the idea of the public square. That was the idea behind the
laws that are protecting Facebook and Twitter and, and others
online.
Craig 13:14
Well, now we found that they are doing various types of censorship,
let's put it that way. Google is being sued. And just this week, a
big lawsuit was announced, because Google's showing search results
that favor them versus their competitors. Now, I gotta say, if
you're writing code that's going to give good search results, of
course, you have to discriminate against materials that you don't
consider to be, you know, up to your standard that people aren't
looking at that aren't, aren't popular.
Craig 13:52
But if you're looking for an unpopular opinion online, you know,
remember, the majority isn't always right. Right? Slavery. The
majority of people endorsed it, but it wasn't right. It was never
right. So just because of the majority says something should be
done. And just because political correctness would lead me to
believe that that's what you should do. That doesn't mean that it
is the right thing. Well, China's walled off a lot of Western
services on the internet, you've heard about the Great Firewall of
China before. The UK now is planning to hold executives personally
liable for posts on social media that they consider harmful or
illegal because remember, there's no free speech in the UK anymore.
And this came out in the government white paper on Monday this
week. They say this would put the country at the far end of
internet censorship and further fuel, what they're calling now this
splinternet. This is a term circulated for, you know, more or less
a decade here, this gained some popularity recently. And this comes
in the tail end of Mark Zuckerberg saying, you know, Facebook's
chief, that he wants a common global frame that a framework of
internet rules, which is never going to happen, right. Tim Burners
Lee, you might remember him, he started the worldwide web's,
software. And he came up with what he called a contract for the web
that establishes an ethical sense of principles for the internet. A
whole lot here. The New Zealand Christchurch mosques, massacre, you
remember, this was very recent as well live streamed online. It's a
heightened sense of urgency in New Zealand. They just knee-jerked,
passed laws within two weeks that change the face of what's
happening there. Huge debates in the US and the EU on curbing what
they're calling incitement to violence. Now, obviously, you can tie
this into, can I yell fire in a crowded theater? Right? There's a
lot of things that you could do here.
Craig 16:10
In free speech, that would step over lines like that. So how about
the line for inciting to violence? What is that? What does it mean?
Well, in Australia, there's a law now it's a new one that can jail
social media executives for failing to take down violent extremist
content quickly. A proposal in Britain that makes executives
personally liable for harmful common content posted on social
platforms. How do you define this? How do you define harmful
content? Where is the line? If someone says, Oh, my feelings were
hurt? Is that harmful? Well, of course, it is, because their
feelings were hurt. So does that mean we can't say anything that
might upset anyone again, refer back to that, that Black Mirror
episode of the UK proposal, this is from a White House technology
advisor, who's now over at MIT says that it's a very bad look for
rights-respecting democracy to do what they're doing in the UK
would place the UK toward the foreign the internet censorship
spectrum.
Craig 17:19
And the UK culture Secretary says, you like that? They got a
culture Secretary over there. The Culture Secretary says the
proposed laws will not limit press freedom. Okay, so where's the
line on the press? Look what's happening right now, the Ecuadorian
embassy in Britain. And you have a guy who is now under arrest,
who's claiming he is a publisher, right? He published documents
that were stolen by two military members, one was a military
contractor and one, another military man who was working with
secret information. Was he a publisher? Did he help them steal it
by providing instructions on how to sneak classified information
out? Was he a co-conspirator? There's just so much right now going
on. And you know, when we're looking at free speech, I think free
speech is almost absolute.
Craig 18:23
If it can be shown that something caused physical harm to someone,
you know, that's kind of where the my you're right to swing your
fist stops where my nose begins. Now, obviously, at some point,
while that fist is being swung, I'm feeling threatened.
Craig 18:42
But where do you draw the line? Well, I think you draw the line at
touching me, certainly at hitting my nose. And this is something
that the internet pioneer has never really thought about. Remember,
I've been on the internet since 83. Of course, it wasn't called
that back then. We had different types of networks and things. But
since 83, and free speech was always a big deal. We didn't really
get free speech until September of 91 online, because it was still
heavily controlled by the federal government. Remember it was a
federal government research project that funded it, but then they
kind of let loose of it in 91. But man, what a world out
there.
Craig 19:22
Let's get into this Amazon article right now. I was listening to
the news. I was watching a morning news program, in fact, this
week, and they were talking about how bad it is that Amazon Alexa
workers are sitting there listening to you. Okay, so that's one
level. And then they said, Oh, and on top of it now, they won't
call the police if they hear something that might be bad. Now, I
like it. I like that, right. And I understand the first part. And I
like the second part. Because you know, the second part, you don't
have the full context, you've got a 3o second snippet. You know,
somebody wakes up that that Amazon device, or that Google device,
or whatever it might be. You wake it up, it records for up to 32nd,
sends it up to the cloud, processes it, and then execute your
command. So they're listening to max 30 seconds. You don't have
context. You don't know what's going on. And you certainly don't
want to destroy people's lives over a vague suspicion. Right. So I
like that. I really like that. It's just like as when I spent 10
years in emergency medicine, we were all mandated-reporters. But we
did not have to report unless we thought there might be something
going on that's reportable.
Craig 20:52
So I think that's a pretty straightforward thing. I think that's
pretty simple to look at and understand because it didn't think
that something was reportable, then I never reported it. And so
different people had different bars, right? How high that was. Now,
let's go to the first part of this where they were very upset that
Amazon employees were listening in.
Craig 21:17
It's very limited when Amazon employees are listening in and
they're not listening to all of the audio coming from your house.
So listening to at most that 30-second snippet, when you told
Alexa, that you had a command for her. That's it. That's that
simple. And what they're doing is they're using your audio to
better the speech interpretation, better the machine learning, so
that it understands how people are asking questions, what sort of
accents they might have, how it works. For instance, when I talked
to Alexa, I get great responses, because she understands me. She
understands me speaking, hopefully, you guys do too. But my wife
has issues with it. I have a son that has issues with it. And that
has to do with your cadence, your clarity of speech, right,
enunciation. And how do you improve your software? You improve it
by testing. How do you test software, that design that's intended
to be able to process human speech and understand what it's going
for? Understand what the goal is of that human that's asking you to
do something? Well, this is the only way to do it. Right? They
don't have these employees that hear the audio don't have your
name. They don't have your account number, they have no idea who
you are, they don't have the email address. All they have is a
snippet of sound, and how the Alexa voice processor processed it.
So they can listen to what they can see was Alexa correct in
parsing much you said? And was it correct in understanding your
intention behind what you said? So it's pretty simple, it's pretty
straightforward. Don't get too freaked out about this. And there
have been court cases where Amazon has been asked for and did
provide under court order, the audio that has been captured. But
remember, it's very limited audio. And unless that device has been
hacked, and you know, it hasn't happened in at least a couple of
years that I'm aware of. If it's hacked, it is possible to make it
so it's recording. But the way the hardware setup in that Alexa, it
cannot record you, unless that little light is on. It's a physical
hardware limitation that they purposely built into it. So it's not
as though they can just turn on the microphone and life is good.
It's like on your MacBook Pro, the hardware that when your camera
is active, that light comes on. It's all designed in one piece. So
unlike many Windows machines, you can't just turn on the camera and
not have that green light come on. The same thing with Alexa. Now,
if you have physical access to the device, there may be you know,
there's always ways right ultimately, to get into that.
Craig 24:22
Man, we are almost out of time. Three technologies that could
create trillion dollar markets over the next decade. I got that
from Barons, but it's up there on http://CraigPeterson.com. Very
interesting. And they talk about some genetic stuff and quantum
computing and material science. You'd find that fascinating, I'm
sure and I have it up again along with all of these at my website
http://CraigPeterson.com. And if you go to
htttp://CraigPeterson.com/radio-show, you'll see my show notes, but
you also get those in the email if you signed up. This is the one
that I really am interested in.
Craig 25:03
Are we living in an illusion? Did you notice back in 99, there were
three movies that came out that were implying, inferring, opening
our minds to the possibility that we are living in a simulation.
And I had a guest on my show about that time. He's just a regular
engineer. But he had done a lot of thought a lot of research and
put together a book that was specifically addressing that question.
Very thick book, very convincing book. And he did all the math
behind it. And basically, what he said is that, eventually, any
civilization will get good enough to be able to have a virtual
reality that's indistinguishable from the real thing.
Craig 25:52
And the odds are that within 20, 30 years from now, that'll be true
here. You'll be able to plug yourself in one way or the other and
live in whatever worlds you want to. Have a vacation in Fiji and
just enjoy it and not have any jet lag okay. That's coming. So if
that happens, basically he said the odds are millions to one that
we are living in that timeline that invented this virtual
reality.
Craig 26:28
We may be all running this, this whole world, this universe that we
perceive around us, is millions to one likely to be a simulation.
We are not likely to be that very first time through. And what's
interesting is this ties into a lot of religions as well. Because
again, God created the heavens in the earth. He did it in six days.
Oh, maybe he did. Maybe we're running in a simulation, and on a
computer in somebody's basement? Who knows what we're doing? And
are we all just artificial intelligence programs? So this is
fascinating. When I get this book, Rizwan Virk, I may try and get
him on the radio show. He's a computer scientist. Video game
developer, he leads PlayLabs at MIT. And his book's called The
Simulation Hypothesis. I love it. I love just the mental gyrations
you kind of have to go through to think about this and the
potential of being a simulation.
Craig 27:33
Well, I appreciate everybody being with us today. We will be back
next week. And course I've been releasing podcast now, six days a
week. Most weeks, it's you know, it's between two and six. But most
recent six weeks we have you know, It's A Security Thing where
we're talking about current recent security problems businesses
have had what could have been done to prevent them what you can do,
and then also just talking about all these great articles that we
send out in our show notes. So have a great day. We'll see you next
week and thanks for listening. http://CraigPeterson.com for more.
Bye-Bye
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Related articles:
Amazon Workers Are Listening To What You Tell Alexa
Mysterious Safety-Tampering Malware Infects A Second Critical Infrastructure Site
China Selling High-Tech Tyranny To Latin America, Stoking US Concern
Are We Living In A Simulation? This MIT Scientist Says Itβs More Likely Than Not
3 Technologies That Could Create Trillion-Dollar Markets Over The Next Decade
Your Car Is Watching You. Who Owns The Data?
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