Jan 30, 2019
Craig is on the WGAN Morning News with Matt and Joe. Joe sits in for Ken this morning. They talked about the Apple FaceTime bug that lets you hear what's happening to the other end of the line even before they answer the call.
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: 01/30/2019
Apple Facepalm - Why Is Apple Making These Mistakes - Can We Trust The News
Craig Peterson 0:00
Hey, Top of the morning to your Craig Peterson here. And it's been
a very busy week. Hopefully you've been getting my emails this week
leading up to a big deal. Next week, I'm going to be doing some
more free teaching and helping you we're going to do handheld,
guided through cleaning up your computers at your office. So this
is exciting to me. I've never done this before. And it's something
that I'm really dedicating 2019 to do help small businesses clean
up their security stance. So this morning, I was on with Ken and
Matt will actually Joe and Matt because Ken was out this morning
and we got into quite a deep discussion when it comes to this whole
face palm problem. Yeah, the problem that Apple's having right now
and why is it what happened when Steve Jobs left? What did he
really leave behind when we talked about the Apple as the
corporation. And we talked about privacy in general are tied it
into Khashoggi tied it into surveillance capitalism. And it was
quite the discussion this morning. In fact, we went a little bit
long in that segment. So here we go and shout out to all of our
listeners. And I got some notes this last week to from people from
who listened on the weekends. I thought that was kind of cool. They
kind of binge listen to my podcast on the weekend, so shout out to
the binge listeners and to all of you who reached out to people in
the gym and driving into work, etc. etc. Anyways, here we go. with
Joe and Matt
Unknown 1:45
Back again. 7:38 WGAN Morning News Wednesday. That means time to
talk to Craig Peterson. He is with us Joe Reagan in for Ken
this morning and Craig is on the phone. Craig, how are you? Hey,
good morning. And I understand you guys have some questions.
Unknown 2:00
About face time. Talk to you. Matt will mention a little bit
earlier, Craig. We have questions about so many things, so many
things. But yeah, I was gonna start and lead off with the FaceTime
thing. So is it true that if I dial, you know, a friend of mine on
FaceTime, I can secretly hear everything he's doing, and I can spy
on him and then use it against him later for blackmail. Oh yeah.
And it records it in a broadcast to the CIA and the Russian mafia.
The Russians got a bit yeah, yeah.
Unknown 2:30
What about the Chinese time Oh, well, that's only if it's a Huawei
phone right yeah. Huawei they got a new laptop out to the looks
pretty cool but I wouldn't buy it they here's what's going on Apple
course has some FaceTime for a long time. One of apples real big
things that they're constantly bragging about. We talked about this
before is how they put security first, they're not in the business
of selling your information. They want to sell you a new
people.
Unknown 3:00
hardware or some software, etc. And because of that people kind of
expect Apple to always be the most secure device out there and it's
time for the globe to turn on and off if you have any gloating
music there man gloating music that's a good one. I've gotten a
good ones. But hold on. Let me look for it because I do want to
gloat. So
Unknown 3:25
you should probably just keep talking while I'm looking for it.
Because I don't think I have anybody go for it. Okay. No gloating
music. So here's what happened. Apple introduced a new feature on
FaceTime. And this feature set up for group calls. kind of the
thing you might have done with Google Hangouts or some of these
other pieces of software out there so you can get all your family
and friends on and have a call with someone Happy birthday, etc.
Really kind of a cool feature with one minor problem and that is
that this specific feature in FaceTime this group calling
Unknown 4:00
Had the bug that you mentioned. And this particular bug what it is,
as soon as you call someone, and their phone started to ring to let
them know, hey, there's a group FaceTime call coming in that the
microphone would go hot on the devices that were being called. So
now you could listen in while that phone was ringing because it was
transmitting to you and either the audio from the other side. So as
you said, All you had to do is make a group FaceTime call and you
could listen in and kind of spy on whoever you're talking to. are
going to talk to that even answered the phone yet, and you could
hear what was going on. So it's a big phone pod, no question about
that. And it is a flaw that was reported to Apple apparently a
couple of weeks ago, Apple has turned off the feature so the group
FaceTime is where there was a problem there was never reported
problem with regular face time but it has
Unknown 5:00
has been turned off until they can fix this eavesdropping flaw and
it was fired by the way by a kid
Unknown 5:07
a 14 year old man yeah exactly the cleanest the face poem by
security researchers. In other words, Apple's faces in their palm
at this point because Apple security team should have known better
should have been tested a little bit better. And a lot of people
are saying, Hey, listen, this is what's been happening with Tim
Cook. He's a bean counter. He's not in love with this technology.
Like, of course, you know, the previous slide that other guy that
was there before
Unknown 5:39
and we're seeing more books slipping through, in fact, the latest
upgrade to iOS and again, what does Apple brag about it Hey,
listen, unlike most of the Android phones out there, you're going
to be able to get updates are going to just install automatically.
In fact, Apple Now by default is automatically installing updates
include security fixes.
Unknown 6:01
Just going to install is just going to work like just going to be
good you know haha you guys with the Android phones they can't get
support for new security sorry I can't hear you Craig. I'm playing
my gloating music
Unknown 6:19
out there now Apple latest update is breaking many people's ability
to receive phone calls and use Wi Fi so yeah Facebook is kind of an
understatement and apples really got a bit of a black Okay Can I
ask you a question though about you know since you just mentioned
Tim Cook and how we might not have quite as hands on obsessive of a
style as somebody else who may have previously held his job
Unknown 6:48
Why does that somehow result in bugs I Why is the CEO involved in
that at all like why should Steve Jobs Tim Cook etc be even
responsible in the at the end of the day for a bug cropping up?
Unknown 7:00
For the technology being a certain way or whatnot, I mean, I
suppose they certainly give leadership to the organization and
whatnot. But but that really, I mean, this is a really big company
with a lot of engineers and people that are creating software and
and people that are creating hardware and whatnot, how in the world
would it get to the point where Steve Jobs would have to be yelling
at people in order to make sure there was no bug well, but that's
the culture that was built inside Apple rather than building a
company where you have smaller teams who are you know, have a
visionary in them and saying this is really what we want to do with
this design and and other software teams that that do code reviews
and go through it all have more individual responsibility. Steve
Jobs set up a company where he was the man he was at, and as you
pointed out here, Matt was in I am for that anyway so much you said
Steve Jobs would go to the these small group
Unknown 8:00
meetings that were implementing one feature in an Apple device and
he would just rip them to shreds and check. Can't believe you
didn't do this. And there's this problem and that problem because
he was so involved. So these teams ended up getting a little bit
lazy by most business standards. And we're basically relied on
Steve Jobs come down, scream at people and even fire whole
departments. Remember what happened with Apple Maps where Apple
Maps was a major mess up a piece of trash and he wants in the
meeting and said, So who's responsible for this and fired the whole
department. It was just crazy. The whole team so I think that's the
problem. Now in order to get around that we've got to cook is out
there. Now he has a bug bounty and they're paying people who find
bugs and Apple software thousands to even hundreds of thousands of
dollars at a cracker conference.
Unknown 9:00
Just a couple of years ago, Apple made a surprise announcement that
it would pay bounties for bugs as high as $200,000 to hackers and
responsibly turned over crucial flaws. So instead of finding most
of these flaws internally because you're not going to find every
one of them, you know, the team that wrote the software is not the
team that should be looking at what the flaws are. But they
decided, hey, we'll just go to the bad guys and have them pay us
well, you know what a major bug and Apple software is worth a lot
more than $200,000 look at this other article I have on my site
today about to showcase this Israeli company called the NSO group
is a creator of some software was called Pegasus and Pegasus sells
for millions of dollars and it's used by governments. It's used by
oppressive regimes and apparently it might have been used by the
Saudis to find peace.
Unknown 10:00
Yogi and it uses bugs in software, Apple software, Android
software, you name it software in order to get around security
that's some place so you end up with a person like Khashoggi you
know whether you liked the guy thought he was credible or not but
being tracked the software being sold to the worst of the worst
according to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and use to track
people. So if someone's going to go to Pegasus over there, and
Israel, the Santa soul group and say, Hey, listen, guys, for a
million bucks. I'll tell you how you can just call someone and
listen in to the conversation or they gonna go to Apple and say,
please Apple, give me $1,000 because I told you about this major
problem, Craig and that there is an interesting point because you
have a lot of you mentioned a couple times here just some of the
mean just part of the the general business model of how tech is
evolving towards and you know, also one of the things you're
talking about today is there was a new book by Trish
Unknown 11:00
Zubov about the business models about how this is all playing into
it. And really how this is creating kind of an environment of this
surveillance capitalism where we as a as a as a as individuals have
ever really surrendered some amount of privacy in order to achieve
convenience and because we're not paying for any of these products
you know we're not really the true consumer we are at the end of
the day the product of this market where our data our our location
and all this stuff is being sold and I don't think there's really
been a whole lot whether it be whether your government that's
that's exploding this or whether your private business there really
hasn't been a whole lot of conversation on that right? No, not at
all. And there's going to be a conversation because people are
getting more and more upset. Look at what's happening with Facebook
10 years ago. Nobody was worried about the we know what Facebook
was tracking today and and you had Zuckerberg in some early
messages that had been released due to a lawsuit in the year
Unknown 12:00
union we had Zuckerberg said he couldn't believe what fools people
were giving him this information. So there's going to be more of a
conversation. Facebook's kind of pulling up that saw people are
eventually going to get completely upset about it Apple is be
eventually they're going to go the way of the dinosaur or they're
going to pull up their socks. But that's true of every tech company
out there. And Joe, when we talk about this surveillance
capitalism, where our information becomes the capital that's being
used. It's a very concerning thing. And it's something that the
industry is talking about. Now. They are putting together some
groups they are starting to come up with standards. And by 2020, we
are going to see some real privacy standards in place by the
industries and we'll see if government tries to do anything about
it. But frankly, laws rules and regulations they're always five or
more years behind where that
Unknown 13:00
technology now, he talked about that. And there's you know,
recently with, you know, the European Union has been talked about
for the past probably a year, year and a half about some of their
things that they've started to bring forward on privacy related
legislation. It's caused a huge a lot of questions to be raised
about foreign tech companies that might be holding data offshore
and in the rights to who owns that data and how and you know, and I
think it's funny because I can't tell you any times I've seen
someone post that's stupid thing on Facebook that talks about, you
know, oh, I hereby resend all my personal data and Facebook has no
ownership and that's that's really she's not yes i like about five
of those yesterday. Yeah, still making its way around for some
reason. Yeah, yeah, there is a big problem guys and gals. If you're
concerned about your privacy, there's really only one way to do it
in this day and age and that's just connect your devices don't go
online. But you know what, I don't think that's ever happened.
Unknown 14:00
You know, but no, it's not. Yeah, well, and I think another thing
that's interesting too. And it's funny because I watch, you know,
the computer I'm logged on to right now, obviously, I am a guest
host here.
Unknown 14:10
So I do not have an account. So I'm operating off a guest account
in the news that feed that I get on this computer is completely
different than the news feed. I get on my personal phone. Now, it
has two questions. One, what is Ken been searching because I'm
getting a lot of the things that must be related to his profile.
But how much of that, you know, when you look at how the algorithms
and the automation that occurs in presenting information to a set
of eyeballs? How much of that controls that information and really
raises questions is the legitimacy of of what we're reading each
day and taking for faculty. Oh, man, we can talk about that one for
hours. But here's the bottom line. We thought the internet was
going to be this place that kind of democracy, democratized
information. We thought the internet was going to be a place where
we could have open discussions and that maybe we could come to some
agreements we could negotiate we could have
Unknown 15:00
Understand the other side. But ultimately what's happened is the
Internet has provided us a place where we can go and we can be more
polarized than we have ever been before. And part of the reason for
that is what you kind of mentioned here, Joe, that these news feeds
know what we like we have a big companies like the gray lady, it's
a New York Times that says, if it was not for anti Trump articles,
they would not be in business anymore. So with the New York Times
is obviously catering to the anti Trump crowd. But that's being
pushed through out all of the technology throughout all of these
news sources from Twitter, if you want to call it a new source on
out where they are catering to what we want to see and not
necessarily what we should see. We're seeing stuff from our news
feeds that is biased towards our thinking at least.
Unknown 16:00
This bias towards what they think that we're thinking and they
think we want to see. So it's bad now it's getting worse as news
organizations look at the Huffington Post look at what's been
happening with a number of online news sites. Now they're laying
people off because people aren't going to their site so they're
getting more dramatic they're putting more stuff out there that
just really clickbait they're making up stuff. They're lying about
technology news all the way through political news, just to get
your eyeballs to sell advertising and Joe that means we're in a bad
spot. And that's why Frankly, I think, you know, radio and I heart
is doing so well because we have these discussions, but you aren't
going to see those on the Huffington Post. not see anything on the
Huffington Post. They're laying off people left and right. Craig
Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday.
Unknown 17:00
Appreciate it. Craig and we'll talk again next week. Gentlemen,
take care. Thank you much Craig. You know you mentioned but you
know we only have about a minute before the break.
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