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Feb 22, 2019

YouTube and Soft Porn? There is a YouTuber, named Matt Watson who exposed what he called a wormhole into a soft core pedophilia ring and posted this out on YouTube. In less than a week he essentially caused the cut off of advertising, some very big advertisers on YouTube. I'll tell you more about that today.

You know, I've been warning you about these smart devices and today there is a real-world example of the bad guys at work and the true invasion of our private lives.  

The Dark Web is in the News.  We'll talk about what it is, What's available. How do you access it? What you can find.

We've got Windows Defender. This is something I'm talking about in my new master course over the next couple of weeks.  Where I will teach how to secure your computers and secure them effectively.

Do you put things off?  We all do.  We'll talk a little bit that and procrastination. I will tell you about an extension for Chrome that just might help you out.

Facebook may not be trying to protect the rest of us, but they are trying to protect their own. Yes, indeed, Facebook is using its apps to track people. And we'll tell you why and how.

Flipping Houses.  Has it ever intrigued you?  I know it has me. Now, Zillow is helping you get the information you need if you are interested in buying or selling properties. They have a couple of new tools that I will talk to you about. 

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: 02/23/2019

Flipping Houses The Hitech Way - Smart TVs Chrome sticks Hacked For-Profit - Pedophile Ring Operating On YouTube

Craig Peterson: 0:00
Here we go again Craig Peterson. Man we just keep pushing to that thousand week mark this is so cool. I have to thank everybody course at Clear Channel and iHeart and even before it was either one of those for putting up with me all these years and for you guys for listening right. If it wasn't for listeners there just wouldn't be a radio show and podcast. So, hey thank you very much. Of course, you can listen to me live on iHeart app. I'm not sure why they're podcasting isn't picking me up but yeah we never been able to resolve that maybe I should get somebody to work on that one as well because there was a lot of people that really enjoy it and if you want to listen to the podcast it's just http://CraigPeterson.com/iTunes and you'll find it right there. I'm also on a bunch of other ones. I'm in a SoundCloud I think I'm know I'm in TuneIn and a few of these other distribution networks out there. So have a look for it Tech Talk with Craig Peterson and don't get confused with this other guy that's been trying to steal my name and my show out in the Seattle area. No, no, no, no, it's me. I have a kind of distinctive voice. And so from that, hopefully you'll be able to figure out which one is which. Because I am the original

Now, okay, moving on. Today, we've got as usual, a whole ton of stuff. Our email should be back to usual for you guys. So, this morning, Saturday morning, you should have received the weekly show notes and those show notes go through all of the articles that I think are worth covering in the news. So let's get going. We've got a YouTuber here who has cut off essentially, he has caused the cut off of advertising, some big advertisers on YouTube will tell you about that. You know, I've been warning you about these smart devices that are out there. We're going to tell you about why. Here's a real-world example of what a bad guy has been doing. And he says he's going to stop doing it now. The dark web, what is it? What can you access? How do you access it? What can you find, and we've got Windows Defender. This is something I'm talking about in the course, my master course over the next couple of weeks about how to secure your computers and secure them effectively. So we'll talk a little bit about that and procrastination. This is kind of cool. How many of us get on the computer, we open up Chrome, we start poking around on the internet. And we end up wasting a lot of time. Well here's a Chrome extension that might help you out. Facebook may not be trying to protect the rest of us, but they are trying to protect their own. Yes, indeed, Facebook is using its apps to track people. And we'll tell you why and how. And we'll start out with this one because I think this is really cool. You've probably heard of Zillow before, it's an app. It's a website. I've used it before, you know, you go into a nice neighborhood or area of the country and say, Wow, I wonder what it costs to buy a house here. So you pop up Zillow and Zillow comes up and says, hey, yeah, here's what it costs and in this town, and here's all the houses are for sale that even now tells you about rentals and rental availability. And Zillow has been keeping a very close eye on the real estate market. It's pretty much right almost all the time. It even has a tool that will estimate what a house is worth. So it'll have its little Zillow estimate. It'll let you know what the taxes are, what the was paid for that house originally kind of pulls it all together.

Now, you've been watching on TV, there's, I think it's home and garden TV, HDTV. My wife loves this channel, and some of the stuff that's out on it. But they have these house flipping shows, there are these twin brothers that do one, there are these people in Waco, Texas, a husband and wife, I guess they're having marital issues. Now, I'm not sure. But this whole Magnolia thing and how popular it is, it's gotten so popular that even our target has picked up her chain of household decorations and everything, which is really kind of cool. When you get right down to it. And think about it. She has really built an empire along with her husband, I think it's mainly her. But you know, it's hard to tell, maybe it's him driving it. And she's just the voice for the most part. But she's definitely the decorator type. Well, these shows have become very popular, they are inexpensive to produce, at least for the most part. And the idea is that the host, and I only mentioned two shows there's a lot of them, but the idea is the hosts go in, they find a house maybe a distressed house somebody's about to get foreclosed on or something else is happening. But they find the house and they try and buy it at a deal. And oftentimes they are on foreclosed homes and they don't get a chance to inspect them beforehand. But they're still able to make a bunch of money. And that's how they're compensated. Of course, they get money from the show's production company. And there may be other money's involved to go between all of these different people involved. It's fairly expensive, obviously to produce a show. But, because the host can make so much money it costs a lot less to produce these shows and people love them right. I like those shows also where they go to different parts of the world. I saw when they were in Panama and they the show that couple three different properties and they have to decide which one they want to buy and sell your their guests and against your wife trying to figure out what it is right? Aren't those things kind of cool. Obviously, I'm not the only one that likes these just based on the numbers that are out there. And if you've seen them, you might have thought a little bit about maybe flipping a house. And there have been ads on this radio station that I'm on and others for seminars you can attend where they'll teach you everything you need to know about how to make money fast, and you do it in the real estate market. And you use other people's money. I took Bob Allen's course. read his book, and he and Mark Victor Hansen got together they put together this whole thing and I bought it all and I went to some of the seminars. I've been to these before. Multi-day seminars on buying houses and flipping them and things. I never did it because it wasn't something I was comfortable doing. You know what do I know, I certainly have done renovations in my own home before and I mean, done them, you know, built everything. Built the cabinets from scratch, and, and the whole nine yards. So, I know a little bit about it. But I never felt comfortable enough to go out and do it all on my own. How about you guys, right?

I guess it's the same thing with computer security. Most of the people that signed up for this latest master course for me were kind of wondering, what should they do? How should they do it? They didn't even know where to start. And that's kind of where I would be. And even after attending these seminars, these live events, I didn't feel comfortable enough to go out and start flipping houses, right. Well, this is interesting when we tie in Zillow because you can use it a little in order to kind of figure out is there a house I should flip. And bottom line if you are going to be buying homes and flipping them, which means you're going to renovate them, you're going to turn them into a valuable property from whatever they are now and sell it for a higher price. And hopefully higher than what it cost you to buy it and renovate it. Right? That's what flipping is when talking about flipping a house. So hopefully, you know the neighborhood. Everybody that I've read and the seminars I've attended, say get to know a neighborhood. It might be your neighborhood. It might be a close by neighborhood but know everything, know all of the houses, what are they sold for? What are they really worth? How long have they been sitting on the market? That information can help you also get a really good deal on a house.

Now, remember, I mentioned Zillow. Have you used Zillow before? Have you wondered what their model is? How do they really make money? It is obvious that they're taking somebody from the real estate agents that are are advertising in there and the leads that they're getting from Zillow. But, this is very interesting because Zillow is now getting in the house flipping business. Isn't that something. So you can now go on to Zillow. And this is cool, I even saw an ad I have it up on my website. When you look at this article that came out of Bloomberg, they have a little ad that right out of a print media about flipping your house, my you know, we want to buy your home. So people have these problems all the time where they're trying to sell their home, but they can't buy a new home until they sold the current home. And once I sold the current home, they're in real trouble now, because I got to get out of that home and 30 days or 60 days, whatever it is, which means that's all the time they have to find a new home and that just not going to work out very well for them. Been in that position before. So should I do repairs on the house before I sell it? How much repair should I do? Should I just paint the walls white, I've got to replace this floor or that flooring. I gotta fix this roof leak that's been there for a long time, right? All of these things you guys have dealt with this before. Right? And if you've ever sold a house.

Well, the company that came up with this whole business thing and came up with the programs and the website. And now the apps have something called Zestimates. Z-E-S-T, Just like Zillow. Z-I-L-L-O-W. You check it out if you haven't checked out that app or website yet.

But Zestimates now, and it's kind of a Kelley Blue Book for American homes. And they've started an instant offers business. The idea behind this is if you think you want to sell your home, you go on to the Zillow site and you get a Zestimate. And the whole idea behind this is Zillow has a pretty good idea of what your house might be worth. Because they're using some machine learning. They have all of this data about homes that have been sold in your neighborhood in your town, and what they're all worth. So if you sign up for this, it's part of this whole new breed of high tech home flippers. They've been called iBuyers before. There are some Silicon Valley startups that are doing this and real estate brokerages that have instant offer operations as well. So Zillow has kind of pulled this all together the information from Wall Street, and the finances and Silicon Valley capital, and all of these algorithms they've developed. And they can make very detailed and fine and correct really predictions about home prices.

So, these investors are buying homes on a massive scale. And because it's such a big scale, unlike the Magnolia people we talked about before, they only have to make a just a small profit out of each flip. So that's putting these real estate investors that have been flipping homes the old fashioned way, it's putting them in a bit of a bad spot. But it's interesting because this Bloomberg article goes through a specific example in the Phoenix area. And what happened was, they listed their home, they weren't sure what to do, what to fix what not to fix, normally, what would happen, right, you'd have a real estate agent come out, they look at the house and say, Well, if you fix the bathroom, you're going to get your money out. If you do the kitchen, you're not going to get your money out. And you got to fix the roof because it's got a second roofline or whatever, all of those things are right. And then you do it and you have your fingers crossed, that you're going to be able to sell that house at some point in the future. Well, in this case, what happens is Zillow make some really good estimates based on what's happening in your neighborhood. And they now have this great opportunity because they might make a good deal on it. So they hire someone to come out at that point and look at your house. So they have an appraiser who comes out and has a quick look around, makes sure there's nothing like terrible with your house, which would lower its value on the market. And then Tada, you're done. It's just absolutely amazing.

So, you know, agents in the past have really resented Zillow is market power. And they've been complaining about this whole idea behind this Zestimate and Zillow as had these estimates for a long time and saying that they're creating unrealistic expectations. But now Zillow with Zappraisal might be a way to put it has a very good business model and a very good idea of what your house is actually worth. So, keep an eye out for that if you're looking to buy a house right now today. You can go to Zillow and find out what there's Zestimate is their Zillow estimate for the value of the house. just generically speaking, assuming there are no major flaws in the home. And you can now also have Zillow buy your house from you and flip it. Now, because they only need a very small margin, you might actually do better on one of these Zillow flips. And they do charge like a six to I think it goes as high as 10%, which is higher than your normal real estate agent. But you're also guaranteed a sale and the sale is going to happen very quickly. So you know, I have to take all of that stuff into consideration when you're looking at it.

Well, we're going to come back here in just a second, I want to talk about this guy called TheHackerGiraffe and why my warnings about smart TVs are coming true, what he's been doing and why he's retiring. So, here we go.

So, this guy calls himself or called himself, I guess TheHackerGiraffe. And he said he's retired from hacking smart TVs. This is really, really interesting, because, you know, I've warned about this before, before, excuse me, we've had manufacturers who have installed cameras in your TV. And the idea is, the TV looks back at you. It's watching you while you're watching TV. And the idea for that type of spying on people is to try and figure out are you paying attention. Are you paying attention during the ads, when you look away, who's in the room, there's facial recognition software, some of these vendors are using, so they know oh, this, it's this person. And they always watch this type of show. It's that person, oh, we've got a whole family in here recognizes there's like, three, four or five faces and how often they're watching TV. And of course, that's a true invasion of our privacy. And there was a great article this week about Paul Vixie, a guy who I've admired for years and loosely worked with on some of the DNS stuff. I've used his code forever, you know, kind of advanced, techie geeky stuff on the internet. But he was all upset because he installed a machine that was calling home. And it was, I think it was a Google Home device. And it wasn't using his DNS and there's no way to change. And, you know, these devices we're putting in our homes, and we're using this Internet of Things, frankly, can be dangerous, and it can be spying on us and worse and can be used to find out by the bad guys when are people not home. That's the time to rob the house. Right? It's breaking and entering versus some form of assault that might happen.

So people should be concerned very legitimately, I think, be concerned about all of this. And when you're talking about the smart TVs, there's, even more, this guy, TheHackerGiraffe, he hacked not just smart TVs, but he hacked these Google Chromecast streaming devices and others, and his whole idea was to promote a YouTuber that he liked. Have you heard of this guy, this PewDiePie guy, you might not have a very strange guy. Very, very strange guy. But he had a popular YouTube channel he did some things that kind of forced him out of favor and that was a problem because he started losing followers. I think in fact he got completely delisted off of YouTube and he managed to get back on.

Well apparently this guy, TheHackerGiraffe and I'm looking at this article from Graham Cluley, thanks for forwarding this along it's kind of interesting just see that I don't know that he was paid I think he was paid yeah In fact he was he used Patreon in order to get paid but he was going out and hacking people's smart TV its TVs and smart TV devices and had it set up so that you turn on your TV you'd be watching a program or whatever and up would come and add to watch this PewDieGuy for his channel. There he was here's his YouTube channel click on it sort of thing it's kind of nuts when you think about it and he was doing it not just for PewDiePie he was doing for other people too.

Now I have long criticized the Huffington Post because they used black techniques in order to get followers. In other words, they cheated and lied, they did a lot of things that people have accused all kinds of people on the internet for doing but you know the ends justify the means to these people. And in this case, the Huffington Post the ends justified the means we got to get our message out there. So we've got to get bigger and stronger and last year and in fact, that's exactly what they did. Well by getting bigger and stronger, and nastier they increase their base. They  increase their base and then the rules changed and you could do the practice these dark arts back in the day to try and fool people into following your website but you couldn't do it anymore because they started getting clamped on people didn't like it and the FTC came after them saying this is illegal unfair etc and so they stopped doing it and it's not just the Huffington Puffington Post its many of these different websites and did it over the years.

So now this guy was paid to go on to your Smart TV or Chromecast devices and hack them to get you to watch their internet channel so a lot of people were asking them, Chromecast owners Why their TV suddenly showing a video promoting this YouTube superstar PewDiePie and Chromecast owners complained to Google who looked into this and started finding out oh wait a minute now this all happened because of again incorrectly configured routers that had this you p&p enabled you might have heard of this before. It's a way for you to get out to the internet and then have the internet get back to you. But it's interesting. Just because it's misconfigured doesn't give you carte blanche access to it right. I misconfigured my WiFi Why does that somehow mean to you that you have every right to kind of break in on me? That's the question.

And this guy, TheHackerGiraffe has decided he's going to retire. He posted his retirement notice online and we've seen the PewDiePie fans doing all kinds of things. Just last month, they defaced a section of the Wall Street Journal website. And of course, this TheHackerGiraffe guy and PewDiePie both claim they had no involvement in the attack. But it frankly it's interesting to look at right because we are seeing major changes in the internet and major changes in what we consider to be acceptable. So that brings us to Facebook and pedophiles. Believe it or not

I'm not saying that everybody is a pedophile on new I said Facebook, but it's YouTube on YouTube. But it's kind of interesting to look at this here. Obviously, not everybody is a pedophile on YouTube. And I'm also not saying that YouTube has pictures that are showing minors in various seriously compromising positions if you will.

But this is kind of interesting because a YouTuber by the name of Matt Watson just this week exposed what he called a wormhole into a soft core pedophilia ring. And he posted this out on YouTube. He uploaded it on Sunday. So it hasn't even quite been a week yet. But his video claim to reveal a frankly, what's not so underground YouTube community of adults who are encouraging very young children to upload videos of themselves in compromising situations. I don't want to go into all of this because it just disgusts me, frankly. And I'm sure would you too. Now what's happening here, because of this coming out, is major corporations have pulled all of their advertising from YouTube once this came out because remember, Facebook is supposed to be policing itself. In fact, it entered into an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission years ago about self-policing. And Facebook's been accused of not following through with the plea deal. YouTube is also trying to be self-policing. But remember I said we've seen a lot of changes over the years where you know what is acceptable is not the same today as it was a few years ago. Obviously, this is not acceptable. So all kinds of people pulled funding. YouTube's trying to figure out how can they deal with this how can they find the pictures because these are not naked pictures that are easy enough to find through a computer an algorithm that showing a certain percentage of skin etc right that you normally would look for for the typical pornography. So, in this case, it's very difficult for them.

There's a hashtag campaign over on Twitter and you might look it up if your Twitter user to find out more about this the hashtag is YouTubeWakeUp and within 24 hours these advertisers had caught on. It's crazy. We've got multiple ads from McDonalds Disney  Grammarly, Chromebook, Purina, IKEA, Glad, GNC, Lysol and many others that just said forget about this. So, Watson's calling this as a small victory. It certainly is a victory. This battle still ongoing. And frankly, the public's known for a long time about child exploitation on YouTube. But so far, YouTube has failed to adequately address the issue according to Watson and some of these other people out there.

Now, this video came out just days after multiple innocent YouTube channels were wrongly deleted after being flagged for tagging their videos with the abbreviation for child porn. And that happens all too often as well. Someone who doesn't like a YouTube channel, somebody that's a competitor in the financial space with a YouTube channel will go and flag, inappropriately flag content is being inappropriate wrong kitty porn etc. etc. So YouTube has a nightmare on their hands, right? It is like the boy who called wolf we just had that rest just this week an actor on TV who apparently came out and hired a couple of Nigerian guys, big bodybuilders to supposedly beat him up and put a noose around his neck and dump bleach on him. The accusations are flying on that front. But people do this kind of stuff all the time. So how is YouTube supposed to be able to deal with this? Even ads getting ads pulled down because of so-called inappropriate content or doesn't meet the Facebook guidelines or you know all across out there. It's difficult as an advertiser nowadays to figure this whole thing out. So interesting these videos that Watson exposes this week obviously slipped under the radar but we'll see what happens that YouTube if it simply enforces its rule that forbade uploads from users under the age of 13 that would have stopped all of these videos that we're just talking about.

So a lot more my website. Check it out. http://CraigPeterson.com. You can find everything we talked about today. Plus more including what Facebook's doing to people who threatened employees. Procrastination. This is great. a Chrome extension you should look that up. You'll find it on my website. Why Windows Defender antivirus is the most deployed antivirus and big, big businesses out there and what is the dark web how to access it what you'll find it's not all necessarily bad there certainly is enough of that but it's not all bad out there all of that. http://CraigPeterson.com, and make sure you get my newsletter because that's going to keep you up to date on all the security stuff and get you the weekly show notes as well.

Have a good great day and we'll see you next week. Take care. Bye-bye.

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Related articles:

What Is The Dark Web? How To Access It And What You’ll Find

Did Your Smart-Tv Start Showing You Shows You Didn’t Subscribe To?
“TheHackerGiraffe” Says He’s Retired From Hacking Smart Tvs To Promote Pewdiepie

Youtuber Claims Online Pedophile Ring Operates Freely On Youtube

Why Windows Defender Antivirus Is The Most Deployed In The Enterprise

Prevent Procrastination With This Chrome Extension

Facebook Uses Its Apps To Track Users It Thinks Could Threaten Employees And Offices

Zillow Wants To Flip Your House
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