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Feb 27, 2019

Craig is on the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. They talked about Zillow helping to flip houses, the YouTuber who discovered a pedophile ring in YouTube, and an app that might help stop you from procrastinating.

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

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Related Articles:

Youtuber Claims Online Pedophile Ring Operates Freely On Youtube

Prevent Procrastination With This Chrome Extension

Zillow Wants To Flip Your House

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Transcript:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 02/27/2019

Keeping Your Family Safe Online

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hi, Craig Peterson here. Have you ever wondered how you can keep your kids off the dark web or maybe what you can do for free, that's going to really help keep the ransomware off of your machine out of your house, out of your very small business. So hope and do it all for free. While that's one of the things I talked about this morning with Ken and Matt. It's also something we're doing a deep dive on this week in my course on DIY cyber security. So here we go. Learn how to do it right now.

Unknown 0:36
Well, guess what? We're back again. It's Wednesday at 7:38. And it's Craig Peterson time. He's here to join us to talk about all things technology. Craig, how are you this morning?

Unknown 0:45 
Hey, good morning. Doing well. Looking forward to 20 whole degrees this afternoon.

Unknown 0:50 
That's a heatwave. We're having a heatwave. Tropical heatwave. But you know, I don't know that much. You know, I want to stay inside. It's cold outside and I thought I don't have anything else to do. Why don't I go look at the dark web and see what's there. Is that a good idea?

Unknown 1:05
The dark web is an interesting place and there's there's a few ways to get on to it. But basically it's probably 90, 95% maybe even worse on the bad side. This is where the Silk Road website was and those the Silk Road website was a place where people would go and they could buy drugs illegally online if they can factor all kinds of illegal activities activity and it was tracked down. They were using bitcoin and and other types of currencies out there in order to do a little trading back and forth and they thought they were safe because it was on the dark web in the dark web supposedly is like 100% faith and they were using bitcoin cryptocurrency because that's supposed to be untrackable as well.

But I attended a really interesting lecture by the Secret Service talking about how they tracked it all down. And they arrested the guy that was running the Silk Road there on the dark web. And it's it's not a safe place. There are all kinds of nastiness that we're not going to get into right now, including things told read rooms and others that have questionable at best backgrounds to them. So you do, generally speaking, want to avoid the dark web. It is a place for various types of political activists as well. Good guys and bad guys together and do a little communications but it's also the place where they're trading our personal information. They're selling it online. I just checked it. I had a webinar that I ran to the FBI Infragard program just this week and So we went on to the dark web and poke around a little bit. And we found all kinds of stuff, including software you can use to hack people's computers for as little as $1.99 US. It's kind of a scary place, you might not want to go there Ken.

Unknown 3:16
So I should go now.

Unknown 3:19
Yeah, exactly. That's why we're not really telling them how to get out to the dark web. Because I'm sure there's some kids out there that might want to go there. And as a parent, you kind of want to keep an eye on this. It doesn't look any different. They're still going to use web browsers are still going to use the web browsers are probably already using although you can certainly use other web browsers kind of depending. But it's kind of hard to police as a parent as to where your kids are going online. That's why I really advise it. And this is part of this week's course that I'm doing. I really advise people use something called OpenDNS. There is a free version online. It's O-P-E-N-D-N-S. And I can send you more info if you want about it. But what that does is it allows you to reconfigure your web browser shows you how to do it that your web browser but your computer it shows you how to do it. They're on their website. Once you start using this it will stop your kids from going on to places like the dark web. It automatically blocks pornographic sites. And it also helps to completely almost completely eliminate ransomware. Open DNS is where you'll find it online. http://OpenDNS.com, they have a paid version which you know, it's probably a really good idea to use. And if you're a little bit more advanced, you can also use a version a version that's only 40 bucks a year and it allows you to reconfigure your router in your home so that even if your kid is a little more technically advanced and knows how to get into the DNS settings of the router in your home who is going to give out OpenDNS for every device, including those nasty Internet of Things, devices in your homes or in your small business.

If you're a larger business, you should use Umbrella. But you have to get that from special vendors like like myself, as it turns out, but the OpenDNS stuff is absolutely fantastic. If you do configured on your router in your home, it's going to help protect your whole a whole home and it'll keep Ken from going to the dark web.

Unknown 5:31 
Which he's known to do.

Unknown 5:34 
Nothing can stop me from it.

Unknown 5:34
He'll go hell or high water. Right. We're going to talk to you here. Craig Peterson here a little bit more about technology as we do every Wednesday at this time. Craig, you know, I was looking through some of these stories to talk to you about today. One of them stood out to me, the the Zillow flip house thing is pretty interesting to me because I've always been trying to figure out exactly how accurate these things are in the first place when they're sort of estimating home value because if some of these things are right then, boy, I'm sitting on a pile of cash right now.

But there are people that are exploiting the, the, like the Zillow and places like it on the internet that basically value your house and and look at things to like look for values to flip. Why don't you talk to me about the story a little bit?

Unknown 6:18 
Yeah you've got an interesting angle on it too when you're talking about this, Matt, because the question is how do you get a good value for your house? You go to someone who wants to buy your house and say, yeah, I'll pay 50 grand for you go to somebody who maybe wants to buy your house for the low price or somebody who wants to sell your house for a commission who says yes, yes, this was 75 grand and then you sit on it for a year or two or three because they've overvalued the house because they want to get every penny of commission out of it they possibly can get right and so that's your I think that's kind of part of your premise, Matt.

Is Zillow legit? Is the price that they're saying correct? And they've got these estimates on the Zillow site. I love Zillow. I poke around on it quite frequently, especially when I'm traveling to see what local real estate prices are. So, Zillow has been doing that for a while they use public records and they try and compare your house do to other houses in the area and come up with a reasonable price. But now with all of the flipping that's been going on they're taking a little bit of a different angle which is kind of cool you know there's all these show shows I don't know about you if you watch some I know my wife and kids love these shows on the Home and Garden TV I think it is, that is how to flip your house right? There's a couple that in Waco, Texas. Magnolia I think his name of their company and they buy homes and small buildings, business buildings and fix them up and and then turn around and sell them. And there are constantly people out there with the training programs on how to buy homes with no money down and then fix them up and flip them. And my wife and I looked at that at one point. And we actually went to one of these weekend webinars or seminars, I should say, and we learned a lot, but we didn't feel comfortable enough to do it.

So what's happening now with Zillow. Zillow has these estimates you mentioned. They call them Zestimates. And what Zillow is doing now is they're thinking that their database is so good that they will allow you now to go on to the website. Depending on where you are. You can look up your home and see what the value of it might be. And then you can ask Zillow, Hey, I want to get out of my house right now. I want you to buy my house from me. And so Zillow will kind of backup their Zestimate as to what your house is worth and they will buy the house and then sell it for you and what they're going to do, once you sign up with them to do this as they'll send someone out to just double check, make sure there aren't some major defects in the house that they don't know about. They will give you a very hard offer for your house. And then they'll chart you between 6 and 9% for that house for commission which is a lot more. It's almost double what most real estate companies will charge you and they they're done you're out of your house and they can just take a matter of days. And then Zillow will come in and they'll have a crew come in and fix up things that need to be fixed. Paint it up and resell your house.

So it's interesting to me to see hey wow. Now the internet is is really putting his money where his mouth is in the case of Zillow. They will backup that estimate for your house they will buy your house and you can be out of that house the matter of well, however long that however long it to do a quick inspection and the closing So, Matt, it's an interesting angle.

Unknown 10:06
We're talking to Craig Peterson our tech guru joins us, Wednesdays at 7:38. You can always go to http://CraigPeterson.com and get all the information if you can't wait to hear him on Wednesday at 7:38. You know some people believe that Matt procrastinate quite a bit. I'm not one of those people. But there are many people who think they procrastinate.

Unknown 10:26
I disagree, but I'll get to it later.

Unknown 10:28 
Is there an extension that he can do to kind of help him on this. I'm trying to help him.

Unknown 10:31 
Yeah, there's a few different things that I've used in the past that I really liked when it comes to help him with procrastination. I use something called Vitamin-R and it allows you to break your day into chunks of it. All you're really focused on at that point is what am I going to do for the next 20 minutes or so. And it's based on a message that came out of the mentality and method and the result there's whole books written on

This, but the idea is let's go ahead and focus and let's focus for short periods of time. Let's accomplish something, take a five minute break and then move on. And there is a new extension now for Chrome that is come out. It's called HabitLab and you'll find it online. I have it up on my website as well. And if you're kind of compulsive, if you're always kind of poking around on different websites, you get distracted at work or at home. This is going to be interesting for you. Yeah, I think you should have looked at it. It's based on some research that came out of Stanford University and they have all kinds of encouragement in HabitLab, some of them kind of gentle the two back on track other ones just going so far as to say no, you can't go to Facebook or wherever it is, but it really can be a time saver. A big one for people depending on what you want to do. It's got nudges built in based on the book called Nudge, which was really popular with Hillary Clinton and the Obamas to try and get people to do things. But it's based on all of that technology, some more research that came out of Stanford. And if you are online and you have the Chrome browser that you're using, have a look at it. It's called HabitLab, Ken, and it'll help you get your work done, and it'll help you from procrastinating as well. It's really kind of cool.

Unknown 12:33
We're talking to our friend Craig Peterson, our tech guru is here to talk to us about technology. Craig, you only have about a minute, two minutes to answer this question. But there's a YouTuber out there who is scaring some parents about a pedophile ring that might be operating around YouTube. Is this true? Should I be running and screaming in terror? 

Unknown 13:01
Well, man, this is something that I wish we didn't have to talk about. Well my whole tone has changed. You can probably tell about a week ago Matt Watson who is a YouTuber exposed what he's called it a wormhole into the soft core pedophilia ring and what these guys were apparently doing or are apparently doing is encouraging young kids who are under 13 years of age to post a compromising basically pictures of themselves on YouTube videos of them. Now I mentioned that 13 year age because of the fact that YouTube has a policy against people under 13 posting online. In fact I don't think they can have an account. And yet these were accounts controlled by kids under 13 and posting these pictures and these videos which means if parents were allowing them access to smartphones, were allowing them to have a YouTube account we're monitoring this close enough, but Watson's claiming he found links to actual child porn on the site. We had YouTube ads being pulled by dozens of major corporations when this came out. For some reason that didn't really hit the news, but within less than 24 hours, there is a whole hashtag campaign about this. If you're a Twitter user, check out the YouTube white top hashtag campaign. So it has hurt substantially YouTube's bottom line. Hopefully they'll do something about it. And frankly, just enforcing this under 13 years of age. You're not allowed to include these kids in any videos and they're not allowed to have any accounts. Just enforcing their existing policy would stop this ring. Hopefully people are waking up and complaining to YouTube and YouTube is going to really do something about it this time. 

Unknown 15:00
Alright. Craig Peterson our tech guru joins us Wednesdays at this time to go over the world of technology. Craig, as always, thank you very much. And we will talk to you next week sir. 

Unknown 15:00
Take care, gentlemen. Thanks.

Hey, if you are in my course here, the master course on DIY cybersecurity. I just want a quick note. Sorry I had hoped to get stuff out yesterday. It looks like it's going out first thing this morning. At least the first part of it I put way more work into it than I thought I would. Because it as I was going through some of this course material for this module, I realized that it could be really confusing for some people. So I went seriously above and beyond on this but it's taken me about another day. So sorry about that. But I think you're going to like the results. It's really going to help you just walk right through in making frankly all your computers and your business and your home a lot safer. So anyways quick apology to those people and we will be back hopefully tomorrow will be able to do another one of my real quick here security things so stick around. We'll have more here on this podcast. Bye bye.

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