Jul 19, 2019
Craig is in the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. This morning we talked about Deep fakes and the future for actors, Why you might want to delete Facebook. and About the new Apple MacBooks.
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: 07/17/2019
Deep fakes and the future for actors, Why you might want to delete Facebook. and About the new Apple MacBooks.
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Craig
Hello again, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I've been thinking
about maybe trying to send out a little survey. I don't know, would
you guys respond to it? About what content you really would like to
see in my security summer? I may end up doing that. Let me know if
you think that'd be a good idea because I'm, I'm looking at what we
put together, and it's six weeks, five episodes per week. And
should we do that I'm looking out my window here. And there's a
deer right outside my window eating the grass in the backyard.
They've been eating our flowers, and they got into our tomato
plants and ate them all. Right now she's just sitting there eating
wagging her tail. The chickens are staring at her. Watching her out
there. That is so cool. Anyhow, what topics do you want me to cover
in this free security summer summit stuff? Please let me know, and
I'll be glad to, to bring you up to date on that. Anyhow, this
morning, I was on with our friends Ken and Matt. And we got into a
couple more things here more about deep fakes. And what is going
on? What's the future for actors? And are they going to put these
deep fakes humans right out of business? And we talked a little bit
more to about deleting Facebook, and I even came up with a couple
more reasons to get rid of some of these things and stop using
Google and stuff. I don't know. I don't think I'll ever completely
stop. But anyway, here we go.
Matt Gagnon
It's that time yet again, ladies and gentlemen, Wednesday at 738
means it is time for a technology update from Craig Peterson tech
guru extraordinaire, a friend of the show, and he joins us now
Craig, how are you?
Craig Peterson
Hey, good morning doing well but I am not looking forward to these
high temperatures
Ken Altshuler
From Oklahoma. That's the difference between you and me, Craig?
Ken Altshuler
Yeah. I was going to ask you about the MacBook Pros. Once again, I
have to bring my computer into Apple to fix the T key that fell
off. But rather than that, I want to talk about Steve Wozniak
first, who, of course, one of the Apple founders, who is saying,
and I'm shocked by this, he says, You should delete Facebook. I
can't believe he suggests that.
Craig Peterson
Exactly. Well, you know, we've heard so many reasons to remove
Facebook right to delete your account to destroy all of that
information. And most of them have to do with privacy. And you
know, it's a legitimate argument. But it also sucks.
Matt Gagnon
FaceTime, or what is it that you call my face? Face my face by my
face? Yeah, my face,
Ken Altshuler
Face, my face, face,
Craig Peterson
Face to face. There you go, My space. One of the big reasons for
this something that I'm sure Matt knows about it. We've had some
fascinating revelations that came from Project Veritas. These are
guys going to go and do these interviews with people and they tape
them without anybody's knowledge, and then they report on it. Well,
there is a huge deal going on right now when you are talking about
Facebook and Google. And remember, Facebook isn't just Facebook
anymore. Now they've got a bunch of different platforms that people
are using to communicate. But the real big deal has to do with the
manipulation that's going on. There's a new site up right now
called Spinquark (https://news.spinquark.com/), you might want to
check it out. And the first link there on their homepage takes you
to a fascinating article. And what these guys did is they went
online to LinkedIn. And they searched around LinkedIn for the
senior people on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Were talking about
the upper-level managers, directors, etc. And what they found was
in all of these companies, of the predominance of them were
left-wing, I mean, really left-wing. They found 31 people who were
senior people in the Obama campaign and administration, who were
all senior managers of these social media companies. 25, associated
directly with the Clinton administration, and the Clinton
Foundation. 16, who came straight out of the DNC, the Democratic
National Committee, and five who worked directly for Speaker
Pelosi. When you're talking about people like this, who are
involved in very high levels on everything from who should be
censored, what should be censored, and what can be said. Then have
some of these people coming out directly saying that we cannot
allow a mistake like President Trump to occur again. We must do
everything we can to stop it from happening again. The Los Angeles
Times is even reporting on this right now. Although it came out a
few months ago. There was a psychiatrist out there in San Diego,
who had done a bunch of research, he looked at several people
47,000 searches that were done by undecided voters. And he looked
at three specific newly elected democrat reps from 2018, Porter,
Rouda and Levin. He looked at the searches that were done in their
districts to try and figure out is there a tie? And if these
conservative people had a point. His research found that based on
their searches about 35,500 undecided voters or who were on the
fence could be persuaded to vote for democrats. How? Entirely due
to the "news" that they saw on their feeds from these social media
and news sites. We've got to think when we're thinking about a
Facebook account, or even at Google, where we're doing searches
about things from poisonings search results, which can be kind of
fun sometimes to do. So what will happen is someone's searching for
something, then you can manipulate the search engine to give them a
different result. And maybe it should carry through a Facebook. So
for instance, when you first got your Facebook account, and you
followed someone, you imitate the celebrity, you would get all of
their posts and your feed. And then what Facebook did is they said,
Hey, listen, you know this is a little much, we should probably
give them information we think they might interest them. If someone
mentions a birthday or Congratulations, those are more likely to
show up in your Facebook feed, then anything else, frankly. If they
are friends of yours and are sharing something more likely to show
up in your feed. But now it's come out just this past week, that,
in fact, for part of what they're doing is they are purposely
manipulating your feed to sway you. Now, when we're talking about
influencing you to remember how these guys make money, they make
money through advertising, they make money by selling things. So if
they have an advertiser that's selling something that you might not
otherwise be interested in, show you that end. But it turns out
that there may be a lot more manipulation going on, then we
thought, and they might even be trying to get you to do into a
whole new category of products. Or in this case, also the Los
Angeles Times reported. And this is professor, author of algorithms
of oppression, how search engines reinforce racism, how they are
using their power, by being such big powerhouses in the social
media search spaces, to manipulate undecided people. That's what
this particular study was about, into voting for the Democrats. So
fascinating stuff, you know, because you, you get information from
every direction. And nowadays where we've got these photorealistic
videos, where they're pasting people's faces, other people's faces
on to other people's bodies, etc. And it's hard to tell, how can
you know what's right or wrong? You have to listen to Ken, Matt,
and Craig. Mm-hmm.
Ken Altshuler
All right, we're on with Craig Peterson the tech guru joins us
periodically. Now let's talk about MacBook Pro. Shall we buy new
ones or are they're not changing. The keys now are that you just
you're never going to give up the key thing? I'm not, and it is
unbelievably irritating to me. Yes.
Craig Peterson
They are. The latest rumors are they're going to whole new design.
They're getting rid of the butterfly design entirely. After three
iterations, I think it has been event butterfly keyboard design,
that has been a disaster, they are going to be switching. And what
it does mean is a slightly thicker computer. I think it's like a
few millimeters thicker. Like who cares, right, two or three
millimeters, it's going to be slightly thicker. To use different
technology, they're not going to go back to the old Chiclets
designs, which I kind of like, but they are going to change it. So
can you can about time rest easy. Yeah, this is a rumor. You don't
know this, the Chinese manufacturers that all of a sudden cancel.
So other keyboard orders because they got a large order from some
Unknown, Unknown manufacturer. It's all tied back to Apple. But
they did do a couple of significant changes here recently in the
Mac Book line just within the last two weeks. And those do not have
these significant changes yet, so we should be seeing them come
this fall.
Matt Gagnon
We're talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this
time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology. Craig, I
have to ask you about one of the more interesting stories here in
your rundown about the future of acting because you see
increasingly in a lot of movies. Actors do age to look sort of kind
of like they used to 20 years ago you're seeing dead people come
back into movies. Well, exactly. I mean, you got the new Star Wars
movie coming out later this year the test her, and she's dead. And
you had the guy from the very first Star Wars movie, who was put
into the last the Rogue One Star Wars movie there. There are
holograms of dead people like singing with people in Vegas. You
know, there's just crazy stuff happening. I guess the question
comes down to this. Will we even need actors anymore in the future
or work everywhere? Can we can we can produce? It is, you know,
fake or digitally created person to act for us and the future?
Craig Peterson
Do you remember the movie, Simone? Did you see that with Al
Pacino?
Matt Gagnon
I did see that movie, believe it or not?
Craig Peterson
Yeah, it's spelled S-I-M-O-N-E. Exciting movie because it's taking
this on head-on. And what happens in this movie, it just the basic
I'm not going to give it away here even right on what writers in
this movie. But it's an artificially created actress. And you have
someone who is still voicing that who's always talking who's again
doing the acting. That's our next step. You even will have an actor
like the terrible job they did with Carrie Fisher phase in Rogue
One was awful.
Matt Gagnon
Targeting grandma off-target was not that great either. That way.
There's that uncanny valley thing where it's like, and you could
tell Something's Weird About It. You know, even though it sort of
looks real. It looks a little rubbery or something. Something's
messed up with it. Like they're not quite there yet. They're
closed, but they're not
Ken Altshuler
All the way scar.
Craig Peterson
Yeah, it'll be about five to 10 years. And here's why it's going to
take a little while. Our brains are excellent at being able to tell
the difference between phasers, and you know, you think about it,
and how can we tell you two apart? You guys look identical? No, we
do.
Ken Altshuler
We like twins.
Craig Peterson
It's like twins, and it's like five years different. You know, you
could argue it. So how can we tell people apart? Well, because our
brains have become very, very good at recognizing faces and, and
flaws. So anything that shows even a little wrong, you look at like
if you look at somebody get plastic surgery, most of the time, you
can say oh my god, they need to see a new person plastic surgeon is
you can tell. So it's going to be a while yet before we get to
this. We've got the further live interaction with Dumbo. And with
the Lion King, that's coming out with some animation. CGI, this
computer-generated stuff is excellent. When there's not a human
face a real human face involved. Stylized, it's very acceptable.
For instance, a leader I don't know if you saw that latest movie,
where again, it's computer-generated, but it looks
computer-generated. Yeah, they made the eyes big and stuff to say,
yeah, yeah. So that you don't catch it. How long man, it's not
going to be very long, frankly, we're going to be able to with
within five years, we'll see this being relatively commonplace. And
within ten years, only the best the biggest blockbusters are going
to have real people, you know, in every role in there. Because
there are some things that humans can't do, even if they have a
stunt double. And you will be able to do with science fiction and
stuff with some of these fake actors here. Frankly, I think it's
kind of cool. I think it's kind of scary. You know, I think we've
talked before a little bit about the risks to our security. When it
comes to this. We've already got new emails coming in telling the
CFO to send money to some vendor that isn't a real vendor, and
they're trying to scam us right with phishing attacks. Artificial
Intelligence is going to get more involved with this. That's going
to improve it dramatically. That's why I say in five to 10 years. I
think most actors and actresses are not going to be able to have a
job doing that anymore. Voice actors probably sell for a while, but
even that's going to go away.
Matt Gagnon
Well, considering the Emmy nominations and probably wouldn't be any
significant loss anyway. Craig Peterson Tech guru joins us every
Wednesday. 738. Thank you, Craig. We'll talk to you next week.
Craig Peterson
Hey, gentlemen, take care. Bye-bye.
Ken Altshuler
Alright, so we're going to go to a quick break here. When we come
back.
Craig Peterson
If you do have suggestions on topics you want me to cover in this
security summer, email me at Craig Peterson dot com. That's me at
Craig Peterson dot com. All right, everybody. Take care.
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