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Feb 27, 2020

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt and Marty (who was sitting in for Ken.) We had a good discussion about election technology and what different states are doing to assure that they are secure.  We also talked about the FBI and Homeland Security about Passwords and Passphrases and security.  Here we go

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

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig
If the Secretaries of State get hacked, I'm not sure we can feel comfortable. Would they even know that hacking occurred? If they did, it would be much after the fact.

Craig
So well, this morning, I was talking on WGAN in their affiliates about some of the voting technology, you know, Super Tuesday is coming up. I compared some of the election technology in different states. What's good. What's bad. We talked about the new FBI press release that came out, that is I hope going to have a significant impact on security. It is fascinating stuff. So here we go.

Craig
By the way, I talked a little bit about our tutorials and coming up. Yeah, man, You won't believe the work that went into these all for you. It is part of my give back. I am not trying to sell you, upsell you, or anything else with these. Anyways, here we go with this morning on Ken and Matt more. Joe things technology.t tech guru Craig Peterson is on right now on the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt.

Matt
Alright, we're back ladies gentlemen it is 738 on the WGAN morning news with Ken and also Matt. There is no Ken today. There is a Marty Groman he is over there. He is still wearing the Mardi Gras beads.

Marty
I am, Yeah, the party's just wearing off now. How many Mardi Gras jokes Do you get to do? Is it a party for me?

Matt
You know, I should have a whole roster of them.

Marty
But you don't work out times in the early 90s. Back in the good old days. The real Mardi Gras. Yeah, way down there. The crew of Baucus indeed.

Matt
Well, I don't know if Craig Peterson's ever been to Mardi Gras, but he joins us now to go over what's happening in the world of technology. Craig, How are you this week?

Craig
Hey, I'm doing well. Yeah, there's a lot of party stuff. A Marty McFly, Cartoon Network has one of their top shows right now as Marty character in it to see. So yeah, he's getting around.

Marty
Everyone's getting on the bandwagon.

Matt
I don't know how to segue. So we're going to go ahead and just move into the attack already. Well, we do have an election coming up. Craig Peterson. Of course, in South Carolina, we've already seen a few primaries as well. And they've all gone smoothly with no trouble as we all know. There is an evolving question, though, that every time we have an election, we sort of debate and talk about and ask ourselves a very similar question? How can we make sure that these things are on the up and up? How do we make sure that our voting is secure? How do we make sure that it is all done correctly, and that nobody hacking and changing votes and manipulating things? On a more fundamental level? How do we protect our elections in technology?

Craig
Yeah, real big question a big problem. There are a few states have and, in fact, quite a few now that are using these election machines that we've grown to know and love, where we have a piece of paper effectively. And you fill in those little ovals there using the pencil or felt tip pen, right. You guys are familiar with those, right? Because you voted, right. Yeah. Those are right now, anyway, the best type of technology used for voting. There are other states and go all the way on the other side, and use these touchscreen voting machines that are running Windows XP. Now Windows XP hasn't been supported for many, many, many years, and they are connecting them to networks. When you vote, you just you touch the screen saying you're voting for so and so but some of these machines, they've got configured steal tickets. So you say, I'm voting Republican, or I'm voting Democrat. Or maybe you have Libertarian in that in a state right. People have repeatedly complained that the machines are improperly registering their votes. They'll say I'm voting for President Trump but somehow was recorded for Bernie Sanders. Right? That's, that's kind of the nightmare scenario. We don't want to see this Fall. If you vote and your votes not counted or correctly counted. When these things hit the news, and there is no audit trail like in some of these states, all you have is this computer that identifies that you voted for Bernie Sanders, even though you meant to vote for Donald J. Trump. They hit the news, all of a sudden everyone's all worried that somehow maybe my vote didn't count. Maybe there's cheating going on. Both of these could be true when using some of these types of technology. So there is a $10 million contract that has been awarded, it was awarded last year to come up with a secure voting machine. It looks like it's going to be more of a secure method of voting. There are so many ways that voting can be hacked. I just mentioned the machines themselves. If they are connected to a network ever, there is a potential for hacking. Optical Scanning machines used in New Hampshire are never connected to networks. They're loaded up, they put a little, basically a thumb drive into them, and they dump what the load is all about. But ultimately, there are multiple places that it could be hacked and could be hacked at the Secretary of State's office, where they're compiling all the votes from all of these machines throughout the state. It could be hacked again at the Secretary of State's office but on the website, where they post results, and where the federal government goes to get the results from the Secretaries of State. There's nothing fancy about how the votes are collected nationally. So your question going right back to it, Matt, have Can we trust the election? How can we trust the vote? Right now, I'd say here in Maine we are in pretty good shape. In the majority of states are in pretty good shape. There was a lot of money. I can't remember the numbers, exact number but a lot of money that was set aside and given to states to upgrade their voting machines. The temptation is always as we talked to with Ken here about this a couple of weeks ago. Should we buy the Betamax right or buy the newest, greatest latest, and coolest technology? We see right now from the FBI and Homeland Security reports, generally speaking at this point, it doesn't look like there will be a lot of problems this year. There was disclosed some significant issues in few states in the 2016 election with problems with hacking attempt, explicitly directed at the Secretaries of States in several different countries. Those Secretaries of State have been informed about it, those of them that come out recently. Ultimately, I guess we won't know how good it is until sometime after the fact. That part of it doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy, is that the average time to figure out a hack occurred is your business is around six months. If the Secretaries of State get hacked, I'm not sure we can feel comfortable, would even know that they've been hacked. If they did, it wouldn't be much after the fact. So just let's stick with the old fashioned way for now, because it's the best way, the brand new way, by the way, that $10 million award. It looks like they are leaning towards a paper solution as well. So it's an electronic voting machine. And you touch the screen so that you vote for people you want. It spits out a piece of paper with your votes on it, you then take that piece of paper with your votes on it, and you give it to ever to whoever is, is running that little local election, they run it through a scanning machine. That is not much different from what we're doing today. And that's, that's a suggestion as to what the most secure type of voting will be.

Marty
Craig, it's, it's Marty. So yeah, it fills in the Oval for you then. But let me ask you if I may change topics on you a little bit. These trackers kind of drive me bonkers, right. When I when I visit, you know, the onion dot com or something the banner ads seem like they take forever to load.
I added the DuckDuckGo extension to Google Chrome, and it cut that right off. I mean, what is your take was was that a good idea? A bad or bad idea?

Craig
Well, we've just had over 500 extensions removed from the Chrome extensions store, store, even though they're free, right, you have to pay for them. And as a general rule, I advise against using those extensions. In about two weeks, Marty, I'm going to have some training that I'm going to be releasing that's free. I'm not trying to upsell you or trying to sell you anything about some of these extensions that are going to keep your information safe. Now DuckDuckGo is well known as one of the best guys out there when it comes to blocking your tracking. Some of the others that I'm going to be covering in training include Ghostery, and you should be using HTTPS anywhere, which does something a little bit different. pundants amazing. You block origin and others. I'm going to go through those a couple of hours worth of training that I'll be releasing here in a couple of weeks, but Marty, I think you're right, use DuckDuckGo for your search engine. And there are more and more these extensions that are trying to keep your privacy. And I haven't looked at goes. But as a rule, those guys have been great and make sites load faster. Over to you.

Marty
That's what it does.

Craig
Ultimately, you know, all of these different extensions that I just mentioned in there, we're going to be doing this training on all of them will make it load faster. And you take a site like forbes.com that just has a crazy number of trackers on it. And the ads that you mentioned, like the ads, loading, and taking time, it makes Forbes go from about it took four minutes for me the other day to completely load everything on Forbes homepage. It was that bad. Then when I turned on these blocker extensions, it went from four minutes down to five seconds. So they're not only tracking us, but they're making our lives miserable. Trying defined to stuff we're looking for on the page. Right, Marty kids are there cluttered with all this junk too, right?

Marty
Yeah, it's awful. I frankly, I don't miss it. But it does make it all a little bit
cleaner. But back over to Matt, I think you had a question. Sure.

Matt
I got one more quick one for you before we let you go, Craig. The password that I am going to be required to change in like, I think, a couple of days here at the radio station is among the 8000 different passwords that I have to change all the time. And there are no new recommendations. I understand it from the FBI that we are using passphrases instead of complex passwords. So like instead of d3, 724 dashes, but you know, period, whatever, some crazy combination of letters, whatever we should be using passphrases Why don't you explain that a little bit.

Craig
Yeah, well, get this quick. I'm going to go into this more on my show on Saturday at 1 pm So you can tune in there. And it's a two-hour show, and we go into quite a bit of depth on some of these things. But I'm glad you brought it up because this is one of the essential pieces of advice in the security world in the last five years. About five years ago, a study came out saying that rather than those types of complicated passwords that you just mentioned is not practical based on today's technology. Here's the bottom line recommendation from the FBI and from the research that's been out there, use a string for random words together, and just put a dash in between each of the terms, or space, whatever you'd like. A passphrase is something that might make sense to you, something that might not make sense at all, but something you can remember, and that's the essential part. Now, if your business, like for instance, Matt, your business might require some more company passwords, you might want to share this article with them. So you still might have to have those crazy ones or numbers, letters, uppercase, lowercase, special symbols, etc. But in reality, those are not the best passwords nowadays, make sure it's at least 15 characters long. Throw a few non-related words. For instance, making America great again would be a lousy password.

Marty
I thought I was going to use I can't drive 65. So there you go. That's probably not one to use now that you mentioned on the air Marty, that's true.

Craig
Yeah. But those types of passwords are the best.

Matt
All right, well, Craig Peterson He is our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening. Excuse me in the world of technology. Craig one more time promo for the show, when is it? What time where can you listen to it? What are you going to be talking about? Give me that one more time before you go and then, and then we'll say thanks.

Craig
Okay. I'm not the automaton that Marty is when you ask that question.
The show this Saturday, every Saturday from one till three, I talked about the latest in technology with an emphasis on security. We're going to be talking about some of the cloud services that businesses are using thinking that somehow they're safer, right? But how to make it safer. We'll talk a little bit more about the passwords. Ransomware is on the rise right now. Apple Macintoshes. It turns out there's more malware out there and get a few more things as well. But this weekend shows Saturday at one we're kind of focusing on cloud software.

Matt
All right, his name is Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what's happening in the world of technology. Today was no exception to that, Craig, thank you very much. And we will talk to you again next week, sir.

Craig
Gentlemen, take care. Bye-Bye. All right. Appreciate it, Craig.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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