Aug 11, 2018
Have you heard of random number generation? Well, listen in today as I tell you about the unique method that the company CloudFlare is using.
The military finally sees my point of view on Fitness trackers.
If you have been listening for a while you will know that I
discussed this a year or two ago, but just recently the Military
has begun to agree with me and has now recommended judicious use on
bases.
Would you trust Facebook with your financial information?
Listen in as I explain what Mark Zuckerberg wants banks to
do?
What is the effect of social media on our kids? Listen in as I discuss some of the latest research on this subject.
Are your suppliers serious about their security? Today, I will tell you about what can and did happen to a company and what it could mean to you.
Craig is putting up a new membership site (Yes, it is free, but you have to sign up) On it will have all his special reports that he puts out and you will be the first to get them.
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: 08/011/2018
Lava Lamp Security. Fitness Trackers. Social Media and Mentality. Two Factor Authentication.
Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey, Good Morning, everybody. Everyone is listening around the world its really kind of cool to see some of these stats. We've got people in Ireland, of course, the U.K., in France, and Belgium, and Canada. Just really all over the world, Australia and Russia, it's very cool. So, welcome, of course. this is Craig Peterson. We've got a lot of stuff to talk about today. One of the things I think is so cool we're going to talk about is lava lamps, and you might be asking yourself what does that have to do with technology? Isn't that from like the 60s or 70s? This is very, very, cool what's happening with lava lamps. One of the world's top security companies says social media is giving children the mentality of 3-year-olds, and it isn't just kids that are having these problems. Facebook is trying to expand, and part of that expansion is trying to find out what your bank balance is. The Pentagon. This is so long overdue, they are finally restricting the use of fitness trackers and we'll tell you why these two-step or two-factor authentication schemes have some major major holes. If they're using your cell phone, we'll tell you why, and how you can get around that, and keep your bank and other information secure from places, not just Facebook. Computer viruses, yes they do cause major problems and they've just hit one of the big companies when it comes to tech. And that is Apple. We'll tell you how Apple is affected by this massive virus, and how to make sure no one is spying on your computer.
[00:01:40] If that's of interest to you, or if any of these articles are, you can text me right now I'll send you a link to them. My Number 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53. That's 8 5 5 3 8 5. Fifty-five fifty-three. Let me know what articles are of interest to you. We will send you a link to that. And this one, making sure people aren't spying on your computer actually has links directly to some of the software. So, here we go stick around. We're going to spend a little time on this lava lamp thing because I think this is absolutely phenomenal. There are a number of companies out there, of course, and their only purpose in life is to help you in business and government with security. And that's something I've been doing for almost 20 years. Of course, for my business clients is really making sure their networks and computers are safe secure and working, Right. You don't want to put in some massive security system and not be able to get your work done, Right. Putting everything in a vault - is that really going to fix your problem and turn off the power. No, no, it's not. So, we have to walk this line between security that is functional and useful and security that is just going to get in your way so much that people are going to resent it and not use it. Just like last week I was on the radio, and with Matt Gagnon and Ken Altshuler.
[00:03:12] But, anyways with Matt and I explained some of the major problems that are happening right now with smart TVs. These smart TVs are using Android and I explained why it's a problem, what they're doing, how they're watching us, monitoring us how bad guys are using the information. And he shrugged his shoulders well whatever I don't care. I'm still going to use my android stuff. And, I just had to shake my head. Now I understand that some are, just so useful. And, in fact, for the first time ever I have an Amazon Echo in my house and I've never had one before. There have been major security problems but this tech has been out there now for a couple of years. They've gotten rid of some of the problems. Locally the machines figure out when you're calling their name their wakeup word that I am not going to use right now. But for Amazon or Apple et cetera. So, it isn't streaming up to the cloud like they did when they first came out. Now Apple didn't do that. But we're not going to get into any of those details right now. So, that's been a major security problem for me. And now that problem solved I have it in the house and I am finding it just to be amazing, really useful, really fun. And bottom line, I'm so glad I did it. You know I got this little Amazon Echo and it's unfortunate, that Apple's fallen behind Amazon is beating them like crazy, like a rented mule, right.
[00:04:41] Amazon's beating Apple because the Apple stuff is more expensive, it's harder to tie in. Amazon, now from your Echo you can control basically anything in your home. There's devices that attach into it. It's just phenomenal what they've been able to do. They've made it extremely useful and the price point is fantastic. In fact a bit of a side note. A study came out that said basically Amazon can give these Amazon Echo devices out for free, and still make money, because the average person that has these things is spending over 400 dollars a year with them on Amazon. And you can use them also to order things, it just makes life so much simpler for you. So, you know problems, problems, problems, but it's all security related. We have to watch what's going out from our homes, from our offices, what's coming in, and how do you do that. Well, this one particular company called CloudFlare does it with lava lamps. Now you remember these things. There is a guy from Britain who came up with them and what was his name. Edward Walker, I think Edward Craven Walker that is it. So his lava lamp made it into the late nineties cultural comeback but he didn't see what happens now because inside the San Francisco offices of Cloudflare they have 100 lava lamps on shelves. So, there the right on top of each other shelves. It's really kind of cool. And of course the lava lamp. Think about what's in it there you've got I think it's oil and water and wax and it heats up and it swirls randomly and it's really kind of peaceful to look at.
[00:06:24] I've always enjoyed lava lamps. Make a nice little present. I had one or two more recently that ended up breaking and I didn't have. Remember they used to have a light bulb underneath them and that's what was used to heat it up. Nowadays, they're not used in the light bulbs but if you think about the patterns in the lava lamps, they are continually changing they're continually morphing. And when the light comes in from the outside window and heats up or the temperature in the room rises or drops these are all factors that influence what that lava lamp is going to do. What the wax inside and that's what you're typically looking at is going to do. So, they figured at CloudFlare. How about we just put hundred of these things up and get them running. We'll put them in the lobby and then we will put cameras, shoot video of these lava lamps and use that as kind of a random number generator because random numbers are pretty darn hard to generate just in general. So, you can use things you can use background radiation and that's been used for a long time it is really, rather random. We can't predict any of that type of radiation, the background radiation. But they figured this is probably just as good maybe even better. So, they are watching these things.
[00:07:48] Any change in the video, causes a change in the random number generation, and what used to maneuver or manipulate, it is called a salt and it uses all of that. So, if you're walking in their lobby you're part of that randomization if the sun's coming in as part of the randomization.
[00:08:10] Now, they've taken a couple more things that aren't there in that lobby so, it can't really be hacked and can't be predicted. But it is really, really, cool because there's never twice the same scene. It's virtually impossible, statistically impossible with 100 of these things running so, really kind of cool and it's super-powered way to generate these cryptographic keys. I'm just, I'm tickled pink because it's just such a real cool way of doing it. OK. Next, here we're going to talk about kids and social media. Now, what we know about kids, right. We've we've been kids, were around kids some of us have kids, grandkids and kids like to play with things. When I was young we used to go outside, and we'd get kicked out of the house if we were in the house. We'd have to go outside and we'd play and we'd have just a gas. And in the summer living up in Canada up north up, in Canada, it would barely get dark at night. And so we'd be out playing. I remember kicking the can, I've shared this story before at about 10 o'clock at night 10:00 11:00 o'clock and we think it's just Twilight it's starting to get dark and probably should think about going home and my mom coming out and finding us and getting upset because we were out so late.
[00:09:34] Well, I didn't have a watch. Did you expect for me, right? Well, kids love social media. They love playing video games and when we're talking about kids here we're not just talking about really young kids. I know a lot of 30-year-olds that play a lot of video games, and to me, that's such a waste of time. But anyways, that's me right. I'm a much older generation. Well, there's an interesting thing that came out this week in The Daily Telegraph over in the U.K. where Baroness Susan Greenfield. Now, she's the former director of the Royal Institute of Great Britain, said that social media and video games have left children unable to communicate with one another and unable to think for themselves. Children who have been raised around these devices, much worse than when we were raised, and we had some TV, right that we were plopped in front of. But, these kids are constantly looking for something to distract from and she's predicting that and "here's a quote "I predict that people are going to be like 3-year-olds, emotional risk-taking, poor social skills, weak self-identity, and short attention spans." Now, that's really something since.
[00:10:52] Look at her background here. She's a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford. She has supported her claims by looking at a study that was conducted by psychologists a few years ago at Virginia and Harvard Universities. She found that students are she didn't But, these studies found that students who would prefer to give themselves an electric shock, they'd prefer to give themselves an electric shock than to be left alone to think without distraction for 10 minutes. That's just crazy. She went on to say and this is an interesting article. Daily Telegraph they require a subscription. But, the study says. According to Her, people need a constant stimulation from their environment. Every single moment that implies they are no longer able to be left to contemplate their own thoughts. And that's something I've had to do many times, right. Think about your thoughts. There's a digital detox expert also out there she's the author of Stop staring at screens and her name is Tanya Goodin and she's claiming that reducing the use of digital devices can offer significant benefits to children. I could not agree more with Baroness Greenfield she tells the independent. A study from UCLA found that children who had all digital devices removed from them for a week were better able to read nonverbal communication and others than a group of children who carried on using screens.
[00:12:19] And so think about this when you thinking about your kids or grandkids or maybe even yourself. This is a real problem. What's the first thing you do in the morning, right? How many times have we heard this test? The first thing you do in the morning. The last thing you do at night if it has anything to do with touching your smart device there is a problem and we've got to deal with that problem. As humans, we've got to deal with each other. Now many people are saying while over time we're just going to have our brains hardwired directly into some of these machines, we're not going to have to communicate with other people, we're not going to really have to think for ourselves. I don't buy any of that. People buy things from people, and you have to understand people, you have to have relationships with people, you have to have a relationship in order to build a family, have a family, right. We've got to watch this and we've got to watch it with our kids. All right let's talk about Mark Zuckerberg and what he's up to here? what does this all about? He wants to know our bank balances. Wow.
[00:13:28] Well, we know Mark Zuckerberg has been out there trying to make money.
[00:13:31] You saw a couple of weeks ago a massive plunge in the market value of Facebook, their stock went down. What was it 20 percent or so? Really, really big. And Facebook has announced that they expect over the foreseeable future. Bottom line here that they are going to continue to lose eyeballs, so people are starting to leave Facebook. They're not paying as much attention to it. And I think that really when you get right down to it they've done it to themselves in so many ways and started complaining a couple of years ago when they made a massive change to their programs, where the programs were at that point, starting to not show you articles from people you follow even though you wanted to see what they had to say. And frankly, it's just gotten worse and worse. So, I would expect just like every other big company Facebook's finally going to fall out of favor here, at some point. So, they've also struggled with some concerns about data privacy. You certainly heard about that, and what happened when he had to testify in front of Congress. We also know what happened with the Obama campaign getting the information on pretty much every user in the world. But, certainly, the Obama campaign from Facebook got information on everyone in the United States that was likely voter. And, then how the Trump campaign got some information on tens of thousands. Nowhere, near what Obama's campaign had. But by that time people were sensitized to it, right.
[00:15:06] Obama didn't get any criticism for it. But I think that even though he did a much much worse thing people just weren't paying attention, much worse than what Trump had done in the 2016 election campaign. So, now people are sensitized to it we don't want it to happen again. And, yet there are some other articles in the news this week, who won't be really touching on but they are talking about how Facebook is having major problems trying to identify, who it is that is putting out these fake news, and ads out on their Web site trying to influence campaigns. Now, used to be pretty easy you'd look at an ad and the wording would be bad, the grammar would be bad, There might even be spelling mistakes, and you say this is this is obviously fake. Now, they're going to regular U.S. based Web sites and just stealing the copy from those putting them into the ads. I don't think things are going to improve much in the 2018 or 2020 cycles, because the bad guys are just getting better at hiding, and you know where they are, and what they're doing. When we're looking at Facebook it has become entrenched. Many of us are paying a lot of attention to it. I am involved in a few different groups on Facebook and we're helping each other out with things and I help people with security problems and stuff. In fact, I had a closed group that really I know we had about almost 300 odd people in it.
[00:16:33] And I just plain didn't use it. So, I shut the group down and maybe we'll bring it back to life at some point. But what we're talking about right now is Facebook, and where they want to go, because Facebook has warned analysts that active users could decline, the number of active users could decline and the amount of time they're using it for the foreseeable future. And they also came out with another announcement which was Facebook is planning on tying into your bank accounts. And even though they lost 20 percent in one day from the first problem, the second announcement drove shares up about four and a half percent. So, they approached apparently some large banks, Bank of America said forget about it. We don't want it. We don't want to have anything to do with this. Other banks are taking a kind of a wait and see type of an attitude which I think is a really good way to do it. Facebook is saying we want to integrate your bank accounts into messenger so that you can check your bank account balances. You can send money to receive money. They really want to be in that financial business. Now we talked about that before and how Facebook has been experimenting with blockchain technology, in an attempt to do a few things, solve a few problems, one of which is they want to be involved in every transaction. And one of the things they're asking the banks for is what are you buying.
[00:18:06] So, if you have a credit card, a bank account, checking account whatever you're using to buy things they want to know everything you're buying so, that they can offer you ads for that category of stuff. Do you want Facebook to have that? We've already got privacy concerns with Facebook, right, Do you know about those. Those have been high in the news we know about hackers trying to get into all the systems out there. Do we really want another area of exposure? You know I I really don't know. OK, fitness trackers why you may not want to use one. And finally, why the Pentagon has finally come out and said, No. We talked about this a year maybe two years ago. You know we have people using the fitness trackers that they're really kind of cool. And they have GPS built into them. Some of them some of them use your cell phone to get the GPS so you can track your runs, right. That makes sense. Easy to do. It's kind of fun to do. You can compete with other people. So, hey I did that same run as you did. I did it faster. You can keep track of how much exercise that you've had how far you even walk to right there not necessarily only for running, but here's the problem. We have had cases, for instance, down in New York City down in Central Park where the bad guys, in this case, potential rapists and others, have been tracking the movement of cell phones and the movement of fitness trackers.
[00:19:48] So, they know who was running by a tree, for instance, So, they'll have the little receiver up there listening for the Bluetooth signature or the Beacon or the Wi-Fi signature or the beacon. And, that's obviously a real problem. That's a problem I think everyone should be concerned about if you're using the fitness trackers. Well, there's another one the military has, that we talked about well over a year ago, and that is some of these fitness trackers are uploading all of your data all of your runs to a Web site up on the cloud. Now, that's kind of interesting, right. So, you can see a global heat map I pulled it up I shared it with you guys a year or more ago. It's published by the GPS tracking company called Strava. S T R A V A and they use the satellite information that they're getting from these fitness tracker companies, in order to track where you. So, heavily populated areas are going to be well lit. But, when we're talking about the war zones like Iraq or Syria they're showing scattered pockets of activity, which could denote military bases or government personnel using fitness trackers, as they're moving around because the locals there are not using them. So, it's a reasonable assumption. And, so I use that data you can go into the heat map yourself and have a look at it and I was able to see circles right on Oval's really running along airstrips at air bases, running around the perimeter of bases, on the inside walls or even outside the walls.
[00:21:29] So, you could see where the military personnel were. Now, we have some secret bases and those secret bases were outlined, as well by this GPS information from these heat maps. So, the Pentagon has come out now with a policy, finally, that was obtained by The Associated Press and it stopped short of banning fitness trackers or these other electronic devices that can be linked to cell phone apps that can do the exact same thing. But, it didn't ban them but it did say these devices presented a significant risk to military personnel. So, those capabilities must be turned off in certain operational areas. So, under this new order, the military leaders in different areas have the ability to use their discretion to figure out whether or not troops under their command can and should to use GPS function on their devices. And, that's obviously going to be based on the security threat in those areas are on that base. Good. Good article. Interesting article a lot of different opinions out there. Well, we're not going to be able to get to the two-factor authentication stuff and how texting you a login code, just isn't enough. We're not going to be able to cover this computer virus that's crippled iPhone chip maker out there. The big guy the number, one contract manufacturer of chips in the world.
[00:22:51] Yeah, they got a virus right. What would happen to you? I betcha this has hurt the Apple stock, right there. But, you know they got back online because they had the right stuff in place, even though they got infected in the first place. And, then I think maybe the most important article is something you're going to have to read. And this is how to make sure no one is spying on your computer. Great article. You'll find it on my Web site. Craig Peterson dot com or as I mentioned the very beginning if you have any questions at all. Go ahead and text me. You can call, as well, but texting will get through. Phone calls are going to probably end up in voicemail 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53 I answer all of the questions. We go directly. This is my number 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53. More than glad to help you out, but this article goes through some of the software that you probably should be using for yourself to protect yourself. And if you'd like me to put together a special little master class on that I'd be glad to do that. We've done them before free webinars. Let me know more than glad to do one for you guys who are listening, right now. But you have to let me know you'd like to see it and then I'm more than glad to spend a few hours in putting it together and online with you.
[00:24:15] I think actually the last webinar, took me out a week to put together. But let me know 8 5 5 3 8 5 55 53. Have a great week and we will be back with you again next week. And, usually Monday Tuesdays and Wednesdays I release a podcast as well so keep an eye out for that. Craig Peterson dot com slash iTunes or just search for me in iTunes or SoundCloud or wherever you get your podcast. Take care. Bye-bye.
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