Jun 12, 2019
Craig is in the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. This morning, we touched on a whole bunch of topics in the news. We discussed whether we should trust Google. We talked about Autonomous vehicles and the societal implications and I talked about two-factor authentication and how you can protect yourself from sim-jacking.
These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
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Related Articles:
You Need Two-Factor Authentication Even If Google Screwed It Up?
Autonomous Cars — Are they ready for Prime Time?
Why Are We Still Trusting Google?
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Transcript:
Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.
Airing date: 06/12/2019
Can You Trust Google?, Security Summer, Autonomous Cars, Two-Factor Authentication
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Craig
Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I heard "Big Papi"
took his first steps in the hospital today. So, that's good. It
brings back thoughts of everyone that has family and friends in the
hospital that aren't celebrities and people that are injured. My
thoughts and prayers go out to everybody every day. It's just a
reminder of how fragile things can be in this life. This morning I
was on with our friends Ken and Matt up at WGAN. And as usual, we
spoke about a few different things. We had quite a little
conversation about trusting Google, should you trust them? Can you
trust them? There was a surprising revelation that came out, in
fact, just last week about them, and what they've been doing,
during the previous 14 years, a significant security problem. We
had a chat about two-factor authentication, and I gave them
workaround, a way to make it safe, even if you have to use text
messages SMS for two-factor authentication because that's not
secure. But there is a reliable way to do it.
We talked about a little bit more of course about autonomous cars
which are all in the news again, and what's the safety factor
there? How far away are we? I took a couple of different angles
than I made with Jim Polito on that discussion today, as well. So
here we go. Also, don't forget, we've got our security summer,
starting up in July, I will start sending out some emails next
week, things have been crazy around here. As you can imagine, with
all of the companies now getting hacked, and the losing money
coming to me, and you know, everyone in the security business,
which, of course, is way understaffed. And shout out to those of
you who are trying to get into security, I got another email this
last week from someone that was starting into a security career,
and he's in his 50s. So there's something to be learned there, I
want to encourage everybody. Remember the adage, "You can teach an
old dog new tricks." It's a terrible saying. But you can learn a
lot of this stuff, you really can. And there's a lot of people out
there who have been trying to convince you that you can't do that,
really all you need is their little bit of anti-virus software, or
whatever it is, you know, they're selling that to you. Because
that's all, they have. That's all they know. Well, they're not
doing you any favors. They are trying to mess with you. You can
learn this stuff. That's what the security summer going to be about
this year, and I'm going to be teaching this some free classes. You
know, I get paid for doing this too. And if you want more in depth,
then you're probably going to want to sign up for one of my
courses. But I want to get this information to everybody. Because
if you know me well enough, you know, I got hacked. That was 30
years ago, about now, a long time ago. And it scared the daylights
out of me. And I started to learn about this and trying to figure
it out. It's taken me years, decades, to get to the point where I'm
at now. And I am excited to share a lot of this with you.
Just watch for my security summer. If you want to find out more,
email me at Craig Peterson dot com, ask any questions that you
might have. And I'll make sure you know, when I'm starting this
whole little program up, because I want you to be aware of all of
the major points here, right, I'm not trying to turn into security
experts, that takes quite a bit of work. However, I do want you to
be familiar with all of the problems. All the talk about hacks that
have happened, how it happened, what should have been done by those
companies give you an idea, but as well as what you can do to
protect yourself a few tips on how to protect yourself, it's going
to be kind of a busy summer. And if you sign up, and you'll be able
to get a notification as to when these little courses are going to
happen. And I'm going to leave them up for about a week or so you
know because it does get stale. And I do need to revisit them. I
don't want want to put them up blankly for the world to see
forever. So keep an eye out. Email me at Craig Peterson dot com,
and now we'll go to Ken and Matt. I want to encourage you guys, and
you can learn this. There are the people that just been messing
with you. You know the bottom line.
Ken
Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at 738 every Wednesday, and
this is 738 on a Wednesday, which means you're talking to Craig
Peterson. Craig. Welcome to the program, sir.
Craig
Hey, good morning. It is a Wednesday but is it every Wednesday?
Today?
Ken
That's a good point. And you know what it is a lie in and of itself
because I believe we did not talk to you last Wednesday. So it's
most Wednesdays.
Craig
That's true. Yeah, I took a bit of vacation. I'm a motorcycle guy.
And I have a motorcycle that is 32 years old. It's a 1987 BMW with
143,000 miles on it now. The only thing I had to do is replace the
rear wheel on that bike. It's just been a phenomenal bike. So, I
went up to like George in New York, and we rode around with some
buddies for a week. And it was just fantastic.
Ken
Well, good. But that doesn't mean tech news stops. I hopped on your
website, Craig Peterson dot com. To see what kind of top stories
you had there and you have one topic here. Why are we still
trusting Google?
Can you answer that?
Matt
Great question. Well, they did say early in Google's history that
they that their whole operating philosophy was Don't be evil,
right. Are they evil? Now? Did you notice they took that off of
their website? Right?
Craig
Yeah, exactly. I don't know why we're still trusting some of these
different companies out there. They are selling all kinds of
information about us. And, you know, that's not necessarily a bad
thing when you get right down to it. Because, frankly, do you want
to see car commercials all the time? Or would you rather see a car
commercial when you are looking to buy a car, right? And, again,
goes back, Matt, to what you've said many times, and that is if
you're not paying for something, you might want to consider that
you're the product and not the customer. And they have been doing
all kinds of things. We're selling our data. But the other big
problem that came out very recently, within the last couple of
weeks is that in fact, Google has been storing our usernames and
passwords for people that were using, basically their G Suite
services. But it's been out there for 14 years in the clear.
They're pretty good about security, although Android itself isn't
the best out there. But now their G Suite customers are a little
upset because of what's been out there. I was talking just
yesterday with an employee who had been working at a company that
was collecting personal information. They were collecting home
addresses, phone numbers, and they were taking donations and were
selling them. It was a great little company doing just all kinds of
super things to raise funds for some good charitable organizations.
It turns out they were using Google Forms to collect all this
personal information about donors. You know, come on, guys, we
cannot trust Google, we're using more and more of these online
websites, software as a service. Think about Google Sheets, for
instance, as well as Google Forms. And we're putting data in there
that may end up getting exposed. We should not be doing that. Think
twice about it. In our profession, we refer to this as shadow IT or
shadow information technology. Historically, we had these big
rooms, these big glass rooms with all of the computers in them. And
we had true professionals that were running them, and making sure
data was being kept safe, and information was not being stolen and
leaked out. Now we've got the marketing department going out and
creating contracts with companies that have online services, we
have the same thing happening with sales and manufacturing and
distribution and our purchasing managers are our data is not safe,
and it's never been less secure. So be careful what you're putting
out there, what you're given to Google what you're given to these
other companies because frankly, it's a real problem.
Matt
Craig Peterson, our tech guru, joins us, most Wednesdays at this
time to talk about the world of technology. And today is one of
those days, Craig, while you're talking, I'm looking at a story on
CBS This Morning about Uber's secret self-driving test facility for
their self-driving autonomous cars. I know you had a story also
about whether or not autonomous vehicles are ready for prime time.
And I think it does beg the question, how prepared for prime time
are these things? I know, it's a conversation I've had several
times, and it seems like the older the person I'm talking to the
more it freaks them out that there's no driver behind the wheel. I
think it freaks everybody out. It just freaks out, you know, people
in their 50s, 60s, and 70s a lot more than it does everybody else.
But statistics, you know, are being what they are, you know, often
they can be safer, then human behind the wheel. So what do you
think? I mean, are they close to ready to take over the roads?
Craig
Well, I really like I mentioned this yesterday. I liked this story
that came out in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago. And
it said that autonomous vehicles, these self-driving cars are 90%
ready and all we have left is 90% to go. In other words, yeah,
there's a lot of things that look like we're ready to go and it
might be just a few more years, and we'll have autonomous vehicles.
In reality, it's probably going to be quite a while yet. And you
talk about you know, older guys like Ken and myself who are over
30. And we're looking at some of these things. And we're concerned
because we've seen failures before. Do you remember Cadillac v
864?
Matt
Back then, I wasn't much of a car person.
Ken
I did have a Mustang in 1960.
Matt
Do you remember the Corvair? Unsafe at any speed?
Craig
I do, and you know, Ralph Nader thing, we still have Nader dots on
our tires. But that was an example back in the early 80s of
Cadillac trying to make cars more efficient, the engines more
efficient, and they had a V-8 engine. And what would happen is if
you got onto the highway and you started driving, of course, at
highway speeds, you're going down the road, you don't need as much
horsepower to keep a vehicle going at a pace as you need to get the
car starting at that speed. So they said okay, well, we're going to
have the system that automatically shut down cylinders. So you'd be
a V-8, and you'd be just roaring up and you getting on the highway
and you're often running. Then it would cut back to six cylinders,
even four cylinders. The concept was wonderful. But what ended up
happening is that engine would say, as you're at a stop sign, oh my
I need more horsepower, counteract the braking. Of course, They
were not thinking about the brakes very well at the time. And then
the car would lunge into the intersection so that you could get
t-boned. Fast forward not very many years, and we had the Toyota
with a sudden acceleration problem. That turned out to be a
software error, where much the same thing was happening. A car
would jump into the intersection. We're not going to get into all
of the details behind it all. But I think with age comes from
experience. And we've had some horrible experiences over the years
with vehicles and some of this newer technology. So Matt, to answer
your question, a lot is going on the autonomous vehicle space.
In some cases, the cars are much, much safer, you look at millions
of miles driven, compare human drivers to these autonomous
vehicles, and the autonomous vehicles almost always win. But we
also now have prejudices against the self-driving cars, social
warriors are, you know, get on your horses here. Because there are
people who when there's an autonomous vehicle on the road, or they
think it's a ton of mess, they behave differently. Now they've been
tested have been run, I don't know if you've seen any of these
pictures with autonomous vehicles, where they took the driver's
seat, and they made it quite a bit deeper, think of thicker padding
on that seat. And they hid a driver inside the driver's position.
You could not see them unless you looked exceptionally close. You
could not see that there was a driver in the vehicle. Then the
driver just drove around, caught down and of course, the cameras
everywhere so they could see what the people's reactions were.
People were going out of their way to mess with the car. They
pedestrians were jumping in front of it. Vehicles were cutting it
off, slamming on their brakes, doing everything they could to make
it so that autonomous vehicle would get involved in an accident. I
don't know. Maybe they're just trying to see what it would do. Of
course, it wasn't an autonomous vehicle. There's a human driver in
there. We, as a society, as people, are not ready for these yet.
And frankly, I think the Wall Street Journal's right - We're 90% of
the way there. And honestly, we have 90% of the way to go. Because
there are so many things, we haven't even considered yet.
Ken
When he joins us, most Wednesdays at 738, to fill us in on tech
news.
We at the radio station. I don't want to be critical of our radio
station. However, they started this two-factor authentication. So
every
time I get some on my email, they have to send me a text message
with a code. I think this is a royal pain in the butt. I want you
to tell me they shouldn't do that.
Craig
Okay, can they not do that.
Ken
Thanks so much. Thank you for joining us today.
Craig
I will leave it at that. Yeah, here's what's going to, first of
all, there's a big problem with the way they're doing it. That is
that there is something called SIMjacking or hijacking of your SIM
card. So if they're sending you a text, that is very dangerous.
What's been happening is that if you are a target, now they're not
doing this in a broad fishing attempt. If you can are a target, and
the criminals know they want to go after you, they can now take
over your cell phone, and they will get the text. So it doesn't do
a whole lot of good from that aspect. We use something called DUO.
D-U-O, which is fantastic. For two factor authentication, we use
something called Yubi keys, which are very good as well. If your
company's requiring you to us a text message for authentication,
there is a relatively safe way of doing it. And that is you can use
something like Google Voice, assuming your Google account has not
been hacked, right. But Google Voice, where there is no SIM card,
there is no cell phone that SIM card to hijack. If you use this and
it is what I do for places that have to have a text message sent
for two-factor authentication. So if they have to send you a text
message, it goes to Google Voice. I have my own little phone
company, and I use that as well. That way the text message will
come in via an app to your phone, you can check the app, and now
you're reasonably safe. But yeah, in this day and age, you know
two-factor authentication is something that that does make sense.
We do have to draw a line, and that one does it make the most
sense. I'd like it to authenticate you at most every four hours or
once a day, particularly for emails, if you have to do it every
time. It gets a little bit old, pretty darn fast. But you know it's
the reality of today's world.
Matt
Craig Peterson, our tech guru, he joins us at this time every
Wednesday to find out exactly what's happening in the world of
technology. Craig, we only have a couple of minutes left. So
lastly, I will ask you whether or not you judge everyone on social
media? Are you part of the mob that rules everyone?
Craig
Oh man. I am not. I don't jump on anybody's back. I just had that
happen to me with a significant hacking group. As you know, I run
the national webinars for the FBI Infragard program. I'm pretty
visible out there in the security world, right. I do lots of radio
interviews and TV and stuff. I posted an article on my website and
got jumped on by a small mob out there. We've got to be careful
remember it's so easy to say something negative online. Our kids
are getting bullied every day. Bullying seems to be quite a habit
nowadays. I don't know what happened to free speech. We have these
militant people out there these fascist like the Antifas. Total
fascist don't want to hear what you have to say. And these internet
mobs have become a real thing and a very negative thing. From my
viewpoint. Anyways.
Ken
Good news as our tech guru joins us most Wednesdays at 738.
Thank you, Mr. Peterson. We will talk to you next Wednesday.
Craig
Take care.
Matt
All right. Thanks a lot, Craig. We appreciate it.
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