Welcome! Remote Work, Patches, Updates, Security, Tools and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

Welcome!  

Today's show will cover all the different aspects of remote work.  During the Coronavirus Pandemic, social distancing, and self and mandated quarantines there is a lot of technology to talk about.  If you are not on my email list, sign up at Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. It is a busy show -- so stay tuned.

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

---

Related Articles:

Being Successful While Remote Working

FCC Asked ISPs to “Keep Americans Connected Pledge” during Pandemic

Malware Infecting PC’s of Those Just Wanting More Coronavirus Infection Information

Proceeds from Cybercriminal Activity Results in Charges Against an Atlanta Criminal Gang 

For 60 days everyone gets unlimited data upgrade from Comcast and T-Mobile  

Security Must Be In Place Prior to Remote Work 

Your Employer Says Go Home and Work --- Now what?

 

---

Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Hey, hello, and welcome everybody to the show. Of course, we put this out on as a podcast as well and all of your favorite podcasting sites, and we're heard right here on WGAN every Saturday from one until 3 pm. Of course, I'm on with Ken and Matt for their morning drive show, which is every Wednesday at 738. Well, their morning drive shows every day. As you might expect, we have a lot of coronavirus related stuff today. But this is not going to be so much on the medical side. It is going to be more on the - How do you work from home? How do you make your business a success, when you have many of your workers who are out for whatever reason. We'll be talking about the technologies of working from home, as well as what the FCC is doing to help make our lives a little bit easier in this set Coronavirus match. You might have seen and how viruses in and of themselves are kind of a big problem. If he were to ask me, we're going to talk about this massive Atlanta based money laundering operation that the FBI brought down. A colossal business email compromised bust that also brought down dozens of different bad guys. What they did and how they're trying to take advantage of the coronavirus to steal even more money from you. Some free upgrades that have come from Comcast and T Mobile. We probably we'll talk a little bit about what WebEx is doing for us as well when it comes to free conferencing systems and team systems for 90 days or more. We will discuss how the more secure businesses out there are making it very difficult, in fact, almost impossible, in some cases, absolutely impossible to work from home and some advice from my wife and me. I've been working at home for more than 20 years, what have we learned over those years, and what have other people been saying that I thought might make a reasonable discussion. Now you'll find all of this, of course, on my website at Craig Peterson dot com, we try and post all of these articles up for everybody to be able to see. And we'll also be talking about this a little bit more in some of our webinars. You might have attended my webinars this week. Last Sunday, I had a great webinar well attended. We covered a lot of ground frankly, about the whole work from home thing and VPNs and some of the technology you should and should not be using. We're probably this week going to start up this coming week and have some specialized ones as well. We're going to be talking about VPNs, the hardware and software you need, and the routers in your home office. Some of the plugins you should be using and what you can do about DNS. So that'll all be coming up this week. There's only one way to find out about this and to get registered. These are free and are essential for you as a worker, as a business owner, or as a manager. All of those people you're going to benefit a lot by checking in with me on these webinars. So how do you get on? Easy just go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. I am not one of these spammers. I'm not one of these internet marketers. I haven't been in the online space now for many, many decades. And it's kind of scary to think about blizzards four-plus decades actually in the whole networking space, and the computer security space for this as well. So I guess you could say I've seen it all, at least most of it. And so I've been taking questions from everybody. What do you want? What don't you want to see? If you do sign up for the list, by the way, I've got three little surprises that will come your way some great gifts of information that are available for you just for the clicking and signing up. Again Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, keep an eye on your mail mailbox because I will be letting you know about these other webinars that are coming up this next week.

You know, being the tech guy that I am. Sometimes, I think it's kind of like the cobblers kids without any shoes or repaired shoes. In my case, it was ill-repaired technology and of course, when you needed it, you know just isn't there for you. This week, the problem I've been having has been with my email. If you responded to me, I have to apologize because my email system has not been working correctly. You already know I have thousands of people on my email lists, and I've been trying to keep everybody up to date on Saturday mornings, you get my special emails about what the news is this week. Then pretty much once a month, more or less a week after Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, I tell you what the most critical patches are to install and apply and give you all that information. If you haven't caught that one yet, its because we haven't sent it out, however, we have the very first of that edition all set and ready to go, and we'll probably be sending that out pretty darn soon. And what we're trying to do is save you a lot of time, Microsoft had over 100 critical patches this week, and there's no way that a regular company can keep up with all of these patches. So what do you do? That's what these exclusive newsletters are for, telling you here are the most critical ones, the ones that are in the wild right now. Bad guys are using them. That's easy for them to use to get into your system. So How can you protect yourself? All of that stuff in that newsletter? So I think it's going to be handy. It's one of the things we've heard the most complaints about from people is just what patches Do I need to apply because you can't possibly patch them all. I also had a great discussion this week that I want to bring up while we're talking about patches. And this is for the listener, in fact, in Maine, and a business owner, small business owner, and he is using Android devices sticking with the Google devices. Google makes a phone called a pixel. It's not necessarily the best of the Android devices out there in many measures. But the good news about it is the Google does release updates for it, and those updates can cover all of the critical patches that you need. But the point I made to him, and I want to make sure it is clear for everybody who's listening is that most of the vendors In the Android world do not support vices devices for more than two years. So you only get two years' worth of patch support. And that includes Samsung. And it frankly, if I were buying an Android device, I would probably buy the Samsung Galaxy more or less top of the line, because I know they'll be supporting that for two years. So first of all, check when the device came out. So if you're buying a new Samsung Galaxy phone, and it came out eight months ago, remember, that's eight months off of the two years' worth of support. So you're going to get what a year and four months' worth of support, hopefully, out of Samsung, and then after that, the problem is you're not going to be able to get patches anymore, and that means your security is going to go right down the drain. Keep that in mind. So our basic rule of thumb when it comes to Android devices, if you're going to buy them, you need to buy a new phone every year to make sure That you're able to get the updates. If you are using an Apple phone, you're good to go for five years, five years. So again, the same trick applies. When did Apple released that phone, and you're getting going to get support for five years from when it was released. So with the Apple phones, we advise every four years or just keep an ear to the ground.

Apple's good about not only giving you the updates, and automatically installing them, but also having them not break your phones as well as letting you know when the end of life is for each device. We recently saw the end of life for the iPhone six. The six S is going to be coming up later on this year. So you know, if you have a success, you're probably going to have to replace it. Then the sevens will probably be good until next year. They just last, right, and Apple supports them and keeps all of these security patches up-to-date, which is super duper exciting. For us, particularly in this day and age, one of the things I mentioned this week on one of these webinars was, hey guys huge deal here.
Because what we're finding is that we're at war and you may not realize it, they're certainly not talking about it on TV. And I'm not talking about coronavirus. I'm talking about war with real live enemies. Just like in the old days, we've got Iran we've got China, and we've got Russia all attacking us actively attacking us. But this is a war in cyberspace. We're not attacking them anywhere like they're attacking us. And it isn't just bad guys living in those countries. We're talking about a war that has been declared by and is officially being run by their government. Now we have retaliated for some of these cyber strikes. Still, it is a real war, and we can expect more of it. We can expect it to increase here with the coronavirus spread because we're all kind of distracted, aren't we? From soup to nuts, the military is distracted. So we have to make sure that we are covering ourselves with security, and that's part of what I will cover in these webinars coming up.
I begin with the basics of remote work, including what to look out for and what you need to know. In these webinars, I always answer all the questions everybody has so that you can get the right answers. And I am just you know, it's content-rich, where we're, we're answering your questions, we're giving you all the information we can, and I'm going to be selling here probably in the next week or two, a more advanced course. That does a deep dive step by step all of the tactics and things you need to do and how to do it to lock down your Windows computers, lock down your network, your Wi-Fi, etc. I've heard from so many people that it's confusing going online, searching Google trying to find the information, and no one has it appropriately organized because everybody has their little bit. So we're going to be doing a full paid course on that one. It is for anybody who has to maintain computers, primarily for businesses, where you have to keep these things secure. It will help you make sure the security is going to work for you. Okay, so to subscribe, make sure you get on those lists by going to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. And when we get back, we're going to be talking about working from home some of the things to consider from the tech side. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN.

Hi, everybody, Craig Peterson back here. I was feeling kind of punky this weekend. If anybody else kind of felt that way. I don't think it was the coronavirus or Covid-19. I have been, maybe about a week feeling run down. I was kind of moving slowly, and it was not much fun, but I'm feeling so much better right now. That's why I didn't have as many of these webinars last week that I wanted to have. I was going to try and do like one a day, but I ended up with more like one last week. Next week is going to be bigger better. I am feeling well. We're going to talk a lot more. Now that you guys have had a little experience working at home and answer even more questions than we could have answered before now that you kind of know what you don't know right a little bit. Get you safe, get your safe at home and get you're using the right tools. We have even put together a little survey to help you check your preparedness to work remotely. We're going to be releasing information about some of the tools and hopefully help you find some tools that are going to help you at home help you with everything from efficiency, through security at with your work at home setups. And we're we set up a Facebook group, and I'm not sure if we're going to use it right away. You know, when I surveyed you guys a couple of weeks ago, there was only I think there's only like one or 2% of people that wanted to do these lives on Facebook. zero percent, by the way, that wanted to do them on YouTube. And the vast majority of people wanted to do regular webinars, so we did it on zoom. I may use WebEx as well depends how many people sign up because my zoom only supports 100 people, my WebEx, which is what I've used for Some of my bigger training supports up to 10,000 people. So we'll you know, we'll see. But you have to sign up. Just go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. And that will also be sending you a few really kind of cool cheat sheets and things that I think you could use. And so all of this is free, absolutely free. And then you will find out about the webinars that I'm doing this week as we do some deep dive webinars as well this week, so it should be a great week, coming up this week. All right, so let's get right down to it. Now. Our first topic really for this week. Well, maybe our next one, right. But this is from the verge. And Kim Lyons wrote this, and it's about how to work from home. And I when I did my surveys of you guys who are on my email list this last week, actually we can half ago, I found that the majority of you who went to the webinar that I held Last Sunday, said that you had never really worked from home before, that this was the very first time. So congratulations to you, I suspect you're like most of these people. We were able to answer all of their questions in the webinar. That's what they're for is to get the information out and answer your questions. It can be kind of fun, and it is kind of different. Many people are just sitting at home in their pajamas and till noon. Now it's time to get back to work because we're looking at an extended period. If you're in the 80-year-old range, even above 70, many of us are still working right. Above 70 years old, you are in the kind of that critical age range where the recommendations are that for the next three months, you need to limit going outside and meeting with people heavily. If you are above 60 or above now, they are warning us that again, and you need to be very, very careful. Although most of these deaths are people who are 80 and older, anybody with the compromised system must be careful, and down till about 25 years of age. So if you are one of these say diabetics or you have emphysema, COPD, or many underlying illnesses, you've got to be very, very careful. So for you, this might be an extended period, we might be tar talking, you know what to see here, March to April, May, mid-June, July, maybe even August that you're going to want to be working from home. So there are a few ways that you can be productive at home, and you know, again, we go into a lot of detail in the webinars. It is just a quick radio hit right today. So, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe to make sure You're signed up. If you're planning to work from home for an extended period, here are some things that you might want to consider. Remember, too, that the best ways to work at home are going to vary from person to person. What you have to do is figure out what helps you to stay focused and to separate your work life from your home life. And this is something that frankly, I have had a hard time doing. Because you already know I give away a lot of time. And I'm doing that right now too. You'll probably see another email from me this week, where we're volleying to volunteering to spend 15 minutes half an hour with you on the phone to help you with whatever setup you have. And we can even do remote tech support for you. Anything that you need help with, and we're just volunteering this for free for people. Again, you can just email me at Craig Peterson dot com. If you want some more information if you're having trouble if you're trying to make this work me at Craig Peterson dot com, and you're just having trouble with that. But the problem I've had over the last couple of decades of working at home is that separating my work life from my home life. I get up in the morning, and one of the first things I do is I pull out that laptop, and I start checking my email, I'm checking my client's systems, I'm checking our systems, I'm checking on the VPN that clients are using. I'm checking the firewall logs to from our clients as well as for us. Just see if anyone has been trying to hack in. Then we have a look at the alerts that have come up from those firewalls, and other you know, emergencies that might be pending, and solve all of those. Then I get up, and I do my running and some weightlifting down in the basement. I have this great treadmill that one of my daughters had bought for herself. It is a Livestrong brand, from back when Lance Armstrong wasn't a bad word and is a great treadmill. Then I go up, and I shower, and I get back to work. I work all day and then when the evening comes, and we might turn on a TV show while I am, What? Yes, while I'm working on my laptop, and taking care of things for people. That's what I do. Right? I love helping people. I remember when I was about 20 years old, maybe it was 19. And one of my coaches told me, he said he sat us all down. He said I want you to write your obituary right now. You're 20 years old, give or take, write your obituary. What Would you like your headstone to say, try and get it that short? Just a headstone? So we're not talking about multiple paragraphs, you're just talking about multiple words, frankly, what would you like it to say? And I thought about that seriously thought about it. You know what, it has been the mantra for my life here for another 40 years after that, and that is he helped others. That's what I wanted on my headstone. And that's what I've done, right? My wife and I, we've raised together our eight kids, we homeschooled them, all the way up to college. They've gone on to have just extraordinary lives. I still have two of them working with me, which is a real blessing. It's been wonderful. So I haven't solved this problem of separating my home life from my business life because, for me, they've been one-in-the-same. There might be something I need to do with my family during the day. And so I will do it. Because that's the most important thing to me, there might be something that comes up for a client, and I might have to work at it even overnight all night long to get them to the point where they have a smooth operation the very next day at work. That's what I'll do. That's what my family will do. That's what we do for our customers and friends and have forever. And I don't know if that's a bad thing or not, you know if you're going to be doing that if you don't want to do that, but you have to make the decision. Where are you going to draw the line? Okay, we're going to continue this discussion when we get back after the break. We're going to talk about some other things you should be looking at when we talk when we're thinking about the physical side of working from home. You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN, and on the podcast and streaming pretty much everywhere. Stick around. We'll be right back.

Hello, everybody, welcome back, Craig Peterson here, on WGAN, and of course, online streaming sites everywhere. Just look for me, Craig Peterson, on your favorite streaming app. I listen to podcasts all the time and use them. You know, I mentioned in the last segment that I spent some time in the morning every day on the treadmill, trying to keep my heart rate up into that right range and double-check with your doctor if you have a question about what that range is. It used to be kind of your maximum heart rate was 200 minus your age. I'm not sure what it is. Now, I've heard people say it was like 220 or whatever. But double-check, double-check, double-check. You don't want to stress your heart. I've been amazed at how well I have done for me. I've been doing this daily running, walking, jogging, kind of a combination in terms you know, again, intermittent. You know, go fast, going slow well relatively slow. I started this before Christmas last year. So I've been doing it now for three months. A solid three months, and it has made a fantastic difference. I'm surprised how quickly my heart rate drops now after I've been exercising and how not out of breath I am. Currently, my heart rate is in a healthy heart range. It's been just phenomenal for me. Some people are saying that it does help. I think it's Dr. Fung who says to get your core body temperature up because when it comes to some of these viruses, and it is harder for them to live in heat. There is nothing like a little hard exercise to make that happen. Get that old cardio going. Alright, so back to what we should be doing on the physical side when it comes to working from home. I have a separate workspace, and I'm blessed to have it. We built this house, 25-30 years ago, now. When we designed the house, we created an office off of the back. It reminds me I'm thinking back of that I had two T-1 data lines in here, which was like crazy fast, who could use so much data? It cost about $5,000 a month. Can you believe that back in that day and age, it was rather expensive? Now we've got three and a half gigabits worth of data up and down here. Because, as you know, I run all types of pieces of training and everything right out of here. It has been phenomenal. It's so much cheaper. It's like a 10th of the price of what it used to be for those two T-1 lines, and I have way way more bandwidth, and it is a lot faster, a lot cheaper. I do have that physically separate workspace, but it isn't necessary. You don't need a dedicated office. And I remember thinking that I did and I went out, and I said, you know, I'm not going to rent space for my company per se, like go out and rent this office and have room for Secretary and other people or whatever. And I went to one of these rental things where you can get space as you need it. I went to Regis, so I went to, and we got an office, and we used it rarely, right because it was home. Why not work at home because this is remote work, right? I was remotely working doing stuff for clients. I found it was such a pain to go there, and then you have the office space to maintain, but again, I have a physical office off the back of the house, which is great. What you might need to do is to find a room with a door that closes. In many cases where you have a much smaller living space, that could be impossible, right? What doors do you have? You have closets, and you have the bathroom, maybe you have a bedroom door, maybe you have, you know, the living space and the bedroom space all in one. And, heck, I've lived in those spaces before myself. Here's what you should do. You need to have a space that's dedicated for you to work, and that can just be a corner of the room. That can be a chair that you the chair that you have that you turn around to a specific angle. A small desk set up in a corner, a table a folding table that you pull out a laptop, But that you put on the end of the kitchen table, anything like that, so that you have a space that you go to that is prepared for you to work. And the idea behind this is a fascinating psychological principle that when you have a physical area that you go to that is set up for doing a certain type of work, and your body will go into that mode. It's kind of like when you go to bed at night, and you should not be doing what I do. I don't do this at night, I do in the morning, but sitting there with your laptop or sitting there with your cell phone and doing stuff on it. Your bedroom is for sleeping and maybe one or two other activities. That is so that your brain gets trained that when you go into your bedroom, and you lay on your bed, it says, Oh, it's time to go to sleep. And you then go to sleep. It's the same sort of thing. You're Going with you've got that laptop at the same end of the kitchen table, your brain says, Oh, I'm going to work now. You don't want to use a place like your bedroom or the couch, Chesterfield. sofa, whatever you call it. It should be a place that is not used for relaxation but used only for work. Now, the other trick is to train other members of your household to understand that when you are in this space, I am working. You should not bother me. You shouldn't be coming to me with questions, etc. and let them know that hey, you are going to be around during coffee breaks if you will. And you'll be glad to take their questions, and you'll be glad to do the "honey-do's" then, you know those little things that your husband or your wife wants you to do. It's going to take a little bit of trial and error to figure out what's going to work For you, but it is going to be important.

Some people find that one of the hardest parts of working from home is the part that I explained to the very beginning of this discussion, and that is that you can end up working 24 seven. In reality, the best way to do it is to start work around the same time every day ended around the same time, take your breaks, including meals about the same time, every day. Again, don't eat in the work areas, don't sleep in them, don't lounge in them. But, you know, I don't intend to eat at my desk, and I do that less lately now that I've been thinking more about it and thinking critically about it. I try and go to the kitchen to eat, and that does make a difference. You also need to be careful about kind of stir crazy. So you should get up every once in a while, walk outside if you can, I use something called the Pomodoro Technique. I use a timer in which I use a timer that says, okay, you're doing 20 minutes' worth of work right now. So what are you going to do? What's your goal? What are you going to accomplish in this 20 minutes, you set that little timer.
I use software for it. But in retrospect, one of those little kitchen timers, you know, the little tomato things where you, you twist the top, and now you've got your 20-minute timer going would be more than enough. That might be kind of nice because it sits there going tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, reminding you that you have work to do right. Now the other side of this is feeling a little isolated at times. We'll talk about some of the applications that you might want to use to collaborate and work together. Also, other rules that I think are important for us as we work from home. It's a little different if you're trying to start an at-home business, I think most of these rules still apply. Still, it's a little bit different than working from home for an employer who expects specific results at certain times and expects certain types of unification. So we'll talk a bit about that when we get back as well. You're listening to Craig Peterson. Make sure that you go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe right now. Craig Peterson, that's S-O-N slash subscribe and get on some of these webinars I'm holding this week, and we'll be right back on WGAN.

Hi guys, welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. You know you can get me as well every Wednesday morning on with Ken and Matt at about 738. Last week I got bumped by the governor, but you know what the heck? It's an excellent way to get my segment bumped, I guess. Usually, every Wednesday at 7:38 am with Ken and Matt, and of course, online, you can catch me on pretty much every streaming platform out there. And make sure you join me for these webinars we're having over the next couple of weeks I'm going to be going into more detail answering every question you guys have on working from home, the technology to do it, the ways to do it securely.
We're opening up our calendar for people who need some help with their businesses. How to get this working securely, using the existing equipment we have, and maybe some free software to get my people who are working at home, working efficiently and effectively, so I'm going to be doing some webinars on that as well. Let's finish up the topic of workspaces when you're working from home. One of the essential things to also consider is, if you do have enough room while you're working from home to have more than one space, then you can do something quite useful, very efficient, and that is you use different areas for different work tasks. So, for instance, in my case, I am running the business paying bills, depositing checks, doing all that sort of thing. So I have one space where I do that. I have another area where I'm at right now that I use when I'm doing my radio show, television interviews, running webinars, that's another space. I have yet another area when I'm reading or trying to do some studying. I have a space for meditation. All I'm doing is moving around in one room. That's all you need to do to program your brain. When I am in this position, when I'm sitting in this chair facing this direction, I'm doing this. Then with the Pomodoro Technique, where you're spending 20-minutes doing something and then taking a 10-minute break, I always get up, I walk out of the area entirely. I might talk to the family, get myself a glass of water or a cup of coffee, whatever it might be, and do a little socializing and help with whatever needs doing. Then I go back to my space. I get back to work. It's a unique way of working. If you do have people around that can help you with feeling a sense of social connection. But if you're working remotely, you can feel isolated at times. As part of your routine, you're going to want to try and interact with your co-workers regularly. It's kind of like the old water bottle, where you all kind of meet around there and chat and talk and what did you do last weekend? You know, don't feel bad about talking that way. We all need that even if you're an introvert. We need to have relationships with other people. We need to talk to other people. What we do in the office is we use one of these team apps. Now the one we use is the only one that's secure for doing all of this. That is Cisco WebEx, and they have different levels. We use the most secure level. Now, if you are a doctor, I've got to point out right now that there are some temporary rules in place that's part of this whole Covid-19 or Wuhan virus thing that allows you to use things like Slack and Skype, neither of which are secure. Keep that in mind. Those rules will change again, and HIPAA regulations will not allow you to use them. We use WebEx. You can get it for free right now for 90 days. It is phenomenal. It isn't just for meetings, and you know where you've got the camera on your laptop or your computer, and you are having a remote meeting, and you can see everyone, which is wonderful. But it is also for the team collaboration-side of things, where you can have rooms where you can all chat with each other. Now, one of the other advantages of using Cisco WebEx is over everything else is that it provides any level of security that allows people who are outside of your organization as part of a team. So we haven't set up, so some of our vendors are in certain team rooms, and we can talk to them our customers are in individual team rooms so we can talk to them. Now, we have the whole thing fully integrated with our phone system as well. If people call, it drops the transcription of that voice message they might have left into a room for so we can see it all in Cisco teams. If you want, you can go and set it up yourself. But, if you need a little help, or here's the other side. If you purchase it through us, we can set you up with a more advanced demo than you can get on the website. So again, you can just email me at Craig Peterson dot com if you are interested. I'd appreciate it. You know, we don't make any money off of it from the demo. Hopefully, you're going to continue to use it, and we make a couple of bucks a month from it. We can provide you a little bit of support and a little bit of training. It's a good thing, just email me at Craig Peterson dot com, and we can help you with that. We also integrate things like WebEx into large phone systems. It's actually what the military uses, and what the White House uses. They have some very, very secure systems as well, depending on what you need. Keep in mind all of the CMMC regulations that are going into effect in June. If you have to have it for compliance, CMMC, HIPAA, high tech, etc. It is the system for you. You can get the necessary set up for free by going to WebEx dot com. However, if you want a little bit more, I'd appreciate it. If you'd come through my company, Mainstream. Do me a favor and just reach out to me. That's me at Craig Peterson dot com. My team and I can help you out there with getting it all set up and Mgetting you in the place you need to be. So there you go chat over these messaging apps, hold meetings with them. The one you might want to look at, as I said, WebEx is the only one integrated and completely secure at the levels we can provide to you. You cannot get it on their general website. You have to get it from a Cisco partner like my company. Slack is great, and I have used it a lot in the past, but it is just not secure. It is not even close to providing the features that WebEx provides. You might look at Zoom, although it is terrifically insecure, but not as vulnerable as Skype is. But Zoom is quite bad. They made some major design decisions that opened up security holes you can drive a Mack truck through. It is just crazy. I do use Zoom but never for applications where security is an issue. If you've been on some of my webinars, some get hosted on zoom. Mainly because a lot of people use it and are familiar with how it works. I'm not so worried about security on Zoom for my webinars.The problem with the Zoom from a security standpoint is Zoom has a back door. They punched out of the network to allow them to control some of the aspects of your zoom conferences. That why we don't use or allow its use in any of our clients that have CMMC or high tech restrictions. That is a big No-No. They recently got slapped by the regulators. Check these things out. If you are using Microsoft Office, three 365, they have some collaboration tools too. I'm going to talk more about the collaboration tools and my webinars again this week, and we covered some last week. I have not made replays available of these webinars because I want you to attend them live if you can. I think coming up, and I will make replays available. So if you register, I will let you watch a replay. But I want you guys on these webinars. I know 70% of people say they will never attend a webinar and never sign up for a webinar. These are not high-pressure pitch event events. They are where I'm trying to help you out trying to get you going and trying to answer your questions. Okay. So make sure you do sign up. Now the last rule and the rule that I violate most often is trying to end work at the same time every day. So obviously there's going to be times when there are deadlines or project needs after hours, attention. There are times where I mentioned that I would work 24 hours, I've gone three days straight to try and solve a problem which we didn't cause, but the client needed to have solved. We stepped in and worked with other vendors, and we got the problem solved. In most situations after 10 pm work, email can wait until the following day for a response. Remember when we're at the end these work at home environments, that some people are going to start work at 6 am, some at nine, some at noon, and complete their jobs 8 to 10 hours later. They might be on a schedule where an 8 pm email goes out from them. We all project right, and they're going to project, and they're going to kind of expect you to be working the same hours they're working, although that's not necessarily the case. Even though they may sound a little anxious, get them used to the fact You're working from eight till five. And that's it. I'll get back to you tomorrow. Don't even respond to the email that comes in at 10 pm. I think that's important for a lot of people's sanity. For me, I just enjoy this so much. If I did not get paid to do it, I'd still do it. As you know, I do a lot of it and don't get paid for it. I guess that is a testament to the bottom line. Wow, the hour is up, I can't believe it. We're going to the top of the next hour. When we get back, we're going to talk about what you need to think about from your ISP, your internet service provider. That's how you get your internet. So what are some of the considerations here? What has the FCC done this week? What are some of the major providers doing as well? To make our lives and work from home a little bit easier, and don't forget, you know, I'm going to repeat this, sign up, sign up now so you can get all of this information. You can find out about my webinars that we're going to be doing some of the classes all of the free stuff, I want to help you out. Craig peterson.com slash subscribe. That's why I've been on the air now for about 25 years, just trying to help people understand what's going on in the security realm, the technology realm, and we need to understand it right now. So stick around. We're going to talk about that ISP and what that means to you. What are the things you need to consider and subscribe to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, and you're listening to me on WGAN and, of course, and online at Craig Peterson dot com.

Hey guys, welcome back. Craig Peterson here, of course on WGAN online at Craig Peterson calm. We had millions of people this week, working from home for the first time connecting to their offices trying to get things done trying to do a little collaboration and getting themselves in a little trouble as well. We have seen a significant increase in security problems because of people working at home. But I guess that shouldn't be a huge surprise to anybody that listens here. I have already done some webinars about working from home. I explained the pros and cons of working from home, and some of the technology required to be secure at home. And we're going to be doing more of those free webinars this coming week. We're going to start getting a little more long tail, if you will, drilling down deeper into some topics like VPNs, what are the best ones to use? When do they work? Well, when don't they work? We're going to be talking about your firewalls at the house and the office, and should you be linking them together? How can you split your network? When should you? Why should you, we're going to be covering in a lot more detail some of the questions that we've had popped up and people have been asking us. Then, of course, as always, we will take all of your questions. If you don't want to attend a webinar, if you have made the oath of never attend webinars, then you can always email me just me at Craig Peterson dor com or respond to one of the emails I send out about these webinars. If there are enough people interested, maybe what we should do is take it and get a webinar transcribed for you, maybe some screenshots. Perhaps you can even suggest what might work for you if you don't want to attend a webinar. But they have been very well attended. I've been quite pleased with that. That's after only making one announcement this last week. There was one email that went out is a little bit more than a week ago. I've been working with those people that responded. There are a lot of people I know that want to know more. So make sure you pass it along as well. If you have friends or family or other co-workers that have questions or if your boss has questions. If they're not letting you work from home and you want to work from home, make sure your boss gets on one of these webinars as well. And you can sign up to find out more about them. Just go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, and we will be sending you all have that information. As part of signing up, you'll get some different cheat sheets. I think I have included three different cheat sheets. Some of them are multi-page, to help you with your online security, which is, of course, very, very important. We see an uptick in business, email compromises, and other things that are out there. We'll tell you a bit about that in the next segment. We will discuss what is going on with the whole Coronavirus and its ties into security problems. Well, we have had our president deregulating like crazy now for a week or two. Some people would say that our president is stupid. I think it's a brilliant thing to get rid of some of this regulation. You know, we don't live in a socialist country. However, we have many of the problems present in socialist countries. It can take years to get anything through these vast bureaucracies. Bureaucracy has a mind of their own, whether it's socialist, or in our case, a more of a free-market society. Cutting through the red tape meant this last week that they made some changes at the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission. Our FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, has done some amazing things so far with making it just so much more streamlined than smooth out items for customers. He got rid of some of the crazy stuff that was in the works previously, which would have increased at the internet expense for everybody. There are so many crazy things going on in increased regulation. The FCC has been putting pressure on internet service providers. These are the companies you're familiar Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon, all of your phone carriers. With everybody using smartphones now that we have people who are working from home. So one of my daughters, for instance, works in a call center. And what they have done is sent home their call center people with laptops, that they then connect up to the internet. And in this case, it was a hard-wired internet that you needed to have because she's in the financial services arena. And of course, right, it's my house. So, of course, we have Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, in fact, gigabit for her out to the internet, no problem. And so she hooked up, and she's able to get onto the systems at work, but the way it works With her for the call center and this is very common for call center people working at home or out of the office is the call center software placed a phone call to her cell phone. So now her T Mobile cell phone is going to be racking up thousands of minutes. That could be a problem.

So the FCC has been putting pressure on internet service providers and these phone companies etc. to do a couple of things. All of the major ISPs are committed and have pledged to waive late fees and keep customers connected when they miss payments due to this coronavirus pandemic. Now, of course, I get a little bit concerned about what happens if you miss payments for two months or three months? Because you just don't have the income, right? You lost your job. Maybe you were getting paid hourly piecemeal work whatever You don't have a regular paycheck, so you're not getting unemployment. Now you've got three months' worth of bills. The coronavirus is declared, you know, over or was victorious. So whatever the endpoint is on this thing, which is always a problem, right? It's like we go to war. And so how do we, how do we know that we've succeeded in that, but anyways, it comes, and now you have a three months payment to make, or they're going to catch off. So hopefully, that's not going to happen. They call this the keep Americans connected pledge. And we'll see, the FCC has not been able to convince these internet service providers to waive their data caps during the pandemic, but some of them may end up doing that. Home internet mobile providers that sign this pledge include all tests at TNT CenturyLink charter, Comcast Cox, frontier media comm sprint, T Mobile track phone US Cellular, Verizon, Windstream, and dozens of other small ones. Here's the pledge itself. Number one, not terminate service to any residential or Small business customers' because of their inability to pay their bills due to disruptions caused by the Coronavirus pandemic. Number two waive any late fees that any residential or small business customers incur because of their economic circumstances related to the Coronavirus pandemic, you know, how are you going to prove this stuff to these guys? Number three, open its Wi-Fi hotspots to any American who needs them. So that is actually that third one is kind of handy. Because I know a lot of people have over the years jumped onto their neighbor's Wi-Fi service unbeknownst to their neighbor, right? They were over at their house one time and got the password and continued to use it. Well, for instance, with Comcast, if you see an Xfinity Wi-Fi anywhere, and they are pretty much everywhere you see an Xfinity Wi-Fi, you can now hop on and use it for free. Which is when frankly pretty good for people. The FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said I don't want any American consumers experiencing hardships because of the pandemic to lose connectivity. It's a good thing that they're stepping up, and it's going to help maintain this social distancing. He also called these broadband providers to relax or data cap policies. But we'll see if they do the pledge doesn't require that. at&t said that it's waiving home internet data caps. So that's a good thing. And see overcharges are for raising profit, so they're not going to do that Comcast had not promised as of this last week anyway when I did some research on it. He's also asking telephone carriers to waive long-distance and overage fees. And even that ISP says surf schools and libraries should work with them on remote learning opportunities. So this is all excellent stuff, right? Up and restriction. So some of these companies have automatically Comcast doubled the amount of bandwidth available to some customers, other customers increased the bandwidth by 50%, which is good. That's going to help from working from home. Remember, and you've got upstream and downstream bandwidth. If you're working from home, that upstream might be the killer for you. So we'll see what happens here. The FCC has done some things that pushed them in the right direction. You know there are both pros and cons to all of this, as there always is. Now, we have coming up this week, several webinars, free webinars, I'm going to be doing deep dives, these are live. I'm answering all of your questions in real-time. You are going to want to attend these, believe me, whether you're a home user business user, whether you're working from home,

or not lots of great information. I'm taking my decade's worth of experience and putting it out there for you. I'm going to have some of my team members on these as well to answer questions that maybe go a little more detailed or, you know, are out of my bailiwick. But all of that can only be found one way, and that's if you're on my email list. I do not hound you. I do not annoy you. But you have to sign up Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. That's Craig Peterson with an o dot com slash subscribe. Stick around.

Welcome back, everybody. Craig Peterson here. Hey, if you missed that URL to sign up and get all those free cheat sheets and to find out about our exclusive webinars during the coming week. Make sure you subscribe that URL is Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, Craig just like a town C-R-A-I-G and Peterson P-E-T-E-R-S-O-N dot com slash subscribe, all lowercase. You can get on to my email list. You'll also be getting my weekly newsletter that includes the recap of the top tech stories of the week. We have a new newsletter that we've put together, and I'm going to start publishing that explicitly goes through what the most critical patches are that you need to apply. So that comes out monthly. It's kind of coordinated with Microsoft's Patch Tuesday, comes out about a week later is what our plan is. And that gives us a chance to analyze the patches like this last month, and they had more than 100 high severity patches they wanted to have you apply. If you want to know what are the ones I have to worry about, although this is for you, so you'll get that as well. And you will have the opportunity to sign up for all of these free webinars, learn about different pieces of training, webinars, pop-ups that we have kind of everything all rolled into one. So make sure you check that out and sign up Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. So let's get into our next article about the Coronavirus maps. I got one of these weeks ago, and it was an email sent out to the media. Come check this out. We've put together this new map. And at the time, I didn't think twice about it. I do have multiple layers of security on this network and multiple-layers of protection on my Mac as well. I clicked on it, right, duh. And I was taken to a site that did have a map. I was lucky because I did have the advanced malware protection, the AMP stack from Cisco on my Mac, and it was all appropriately caught by the firepower firewall.
I think it is what found it at the network edge. It saw it and what it was doing and stopped it immediately. Even this spread of coronavirus you want to call it Covid-19, which is similar to the SARS. Coronavirus, also known as Wuhan virus, which is where it started. We've got, you know Lyme disease because it began in Lyme, Connecticut, SARS, you know, all of these diseases because of the rivers, they were first found out and stuff, but whatever, this Cova 19, we'll just call it that, which is the disease. But the bad guys are using this as an opportunity to spread malware and to launch cyber attacks. They were fast about doing that.

There's a threat analysis report that was released by this company called reason cybersecurity. They had a good look at this to get an idea of what's going on. They found a file called Coronavirus map.com.xe. Yeah, how's that for common right.com.xe, which is where they will try and get you to download it thinking it's an executable. That could be helpful, helpful for you. But in fact, it's not. But there are a lot of people who have downloaded it. I'm looking right now at a table showing where downloads are occurring. What's going on? How many engines detect it. And here's an example of how useless antivirus software is nowadays. As of now, now, this is about two weeks that this particular piece of malware has been in the wild, about two weeks 58 out of the 72 engines that they tested over virus total, only 58 of these antivirus engines even detect it as being a problem. Ours identified it about two weeks ago. So you know, again, more reason not to trust antivirus software in many ways. That's not what we're talking about right now.

What we're doing now is this is a new threat, and they're using an old malware trick. And this is kind of part of the whole business email compromise stuff that we've heard about over the last couple of years. I've talked about it. The FBI has published statistics, and we're talking about many billions of dollars victims have had stolen. A very, very big deal. We've got local state officials, federal officials, who have been trying to track it down. The US Attorney's in the Northern District of Georgia, came out saying that dozens are getting charged in this Atlanta based money laundering operation. It funneled $30 million in proceeds from computer fraud schemes, romance scams, and retirement account fraud. It is all stuff that we've talked about before on this show. This announcement was last Friday. Friday the 13th was a bad day for those guys. It says that federal agents have arrested 24 individuals for their involvement in a large scale fraud and money laundering operation that targeted citizens, corporations, and financial institutions throughout the United States. Business email compromise schemes, romance fraud scams, and retirement account scams, among other frauds, duped numerous victims into losing more than $30 million in the course this release goes on for quite a ways. But the bottom line is this new Cova 19 scam where they are saying, Hey, here's a map. You can download it well that one's giving you a virus when you go ahead and try and do that. Of course, their more advanced malware platforms are not going to Luck that through. The next one is business email compromise schemes. And this is where they try and trick businesses into thinking that they owe money to somebody, they need to wire money to somebody, they haven't paid a vendor, etc., etc. It's a standard scheme, and it's up right now. The romance fraud scams, I suspect those are going to be pretty successful right now as people are self-isolating and maybe are feeling though a little bit isolated. And the romance fraud scams are things like, you know, getting somebody to kind of fall in love with you appreciate you. And then you go ahead and say, you know, I've got this bill hospital bill, it's 2000 3000. It's $5,000. And in some cases, it's my nephew, my knees, my wife or ex-wife or whatever. Right. And they have already scammed you into feeling for them, and then they get you to send them money.
In some cases, it's Hey, I want to meet in person. And it's going to cost you know, 20 $500 for me to fly over there. And people are wiring them the money. So there's your romance fraud, scam, retirement accounts scams. Oh, man. It's, especially in these cases, with a down market right now. It's, hey, you know, we've got a certified investment plan, and we are still even in these downtime showing the return of 5% or more, you know, they don't want to make it sound like it's too good. And get people to wire the money into their accounts. Think of Bernie Madoff and what he did many other frauds, and they're trying to dupe the victim. So we have to be very careful when we're out there. Watch for online fake dating profiles, third party administrators for retirement investment. So these, see these are the people that have a whole list of them.
Just a glance is showing they're about 30 years old in general. That's a shame. There are a lot of foreign-sounding names. All of the people are in Georgia, except for a couple in Texas. Somebody in Nigeria has an A in Missouri. Alright, when we get back, we're going to talk about the next topic here Comcast and T Mobile. Some other things when it comes to working from home. Make sure you get on to my email list so that you can get notified about this week's webinars and other topics at Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. You are listening to WGAN. We'll be right back.

Hey, welcome back, everybody, Craig Peterson, here. Glad you guys could be with me today we've only got about a half an hour left in today's show with a few more topics to cover. But this has been a big week for people all over the world. For the very first time, many are working from home. That this includes, of course, people right here, people across the United States, Canada, Mexico, even France. Although the demonstrators are wandering the streets over there trying to spread the disease, well, they are French. Now and shout out to all of our people who listen from France. We do have people listening in France, so they know what I'm talking about. I have been putting together some detailed deep-dive webinars for this coming week, where I'm going to be answering all of your questions. I might do one or two Facebook Lives. We'll see how it all goes. I'm not a big Facebook Live fan myself, but you know many people are. So maybe you would like to get involved if you would. Again, these are all free, and I am trying to help you guys out. Believe me. You can sign up for my email list, which is Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. You'll find out about these, and you'll get my regular email every week that comes out the newsletter with the top stories of the week all of the stories we discuss here on the air and elsewhere. We also have a new newsletter that we have the first one in the can we probably will send it out this week. It is about security and what the top patches are this month that you need to worry about a little bit of a deep dive there. We give you all kinds of links to the sites to find out exactly what to install, how to install it, what to do with it. All kinds of stuff that you won't get anywhere else, and you're going to get it for free. Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe where you need to sign up. Make sure you go there and go there right now so that you don't forget Craig Peterson dot com slash, subscribe, believe me, I'm not going to be pestering you. I'm telling you all kinds of great stuff. Hardly anybody ends up unsubscribing. It is very, very rare. I have one of the highest open rates in the entire industry near as I can tell in talking with other people, and that's because people appreciate it. You know, I appreciate you guys too. I have been talking a little bit about tools on some of these webinars. I did a deep dive, and I'm going to do a deeper dive this coming week about the tools you can use when you're working from home. If you're a business owner or an IT person, you will hear about the types of tools that are going to help your teams. One of the things that I just wanted to bring up here now is that Comcast and T-Mobile have both said they are going to upgrade everyone to unlimited data for the next 60 days. They are going to suspend the enforcement of the data cap and overage fees during the Coronavirus pandemic. I think that's good. The statement says while the vast majority of our customers do not come close to using one terabyte of data in a month, we are pausing our data plans for 60 days giving all customers unlimited data for no additional charge. Normally Comcast charges an extra $50 per month for unlimited data or $10 for each additional block of 50G after you exceed one terabyte. They're also making their Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspots free for anyone to use. I mentioned that earlier in the show. So if you are somewhere and you need the internet, and you see a Wi-Fi network called Xfinity, you can hop on and use it. Now from a security standpoint, there are considerations, and we go into those in more depth in the webinars coming up this week. And I have a whole course that gets into a lot of depth on that. But it's great Xfinity just look for that Wi-Fi hotspot on your phone, no matter where you are. They have millions of them all over the country. Anyone that has Comcast, for the internet is going to be providing unbeknownst to them, and affinity Wi-Fi hotspot, okay? Now, normally they are free to Comcast customers, and everybody else needs to buy a pass to use them. They're going to be free for 60 days. They are the largest home internet provider in the nation. And I know there's not a whole lot of them in some of our communities, but they are very, very big at&t, which is the second biggest home internet provider that enforces data caps announced that it would waive the caps as well. So that's great news, frankly, unlimited smartphone data for the next 60 days. Excluding roaming, By the way, so don't think you can get roaming for free, and that applies to any T-Mobile plan Metro by T-Mobile prepaid pant plan as well. It's also giving all of its T-Mobile customers an additional 20 Giga mobile hotspot tethering service for the next 60 days. Sprint, which is being acquired right now by T-Mobile, is taking No coal steps. So there you go. There are your main guys now really, it's just it's down to Comcast is providing smartphone service, not using all their towers though, and T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint are all doing it. Now to help low-income Americans, T-Mobile is working with Lifeline. And it's going to provide customers and extra free data up to five gigabytes and gigabytes I should say, per month over the next two months. Lifeline, by the way, is a federal program. It gives discounted service to people with low incomes, and many Lifeline providers resell T-Mobile service instead of having networks of their own. By the way, T-Mobile also has a 55 and older plan for those of us who are in that age group, and they have discounts for that group as well. So there you go. There is a lot to cover. center there, and thanks to Comcast, at&t, T-Mobile, and the dozens of other ISVs that are going to be providing us with more service for free during these tougher times. Now, one of the things I talk a lot about when we're talking about security is linking networks and having people working from home or remote offices and the use of VPNs, and other security problems, right? Well, here's a real eye-opener. There are many businesses considered part of our critical infrastructure. The businesses that are under FINRA regulations these businesses are in the financial businesses, particularly banks, manufacturers. Anyone who's making anything for the military or DFARS contractors, but the bottom line is, the more sensitive the systems are, the less you want those systems to connected to the internet in any way. And in those cases where you've got the critical infrastructure intelligence agencies anywhere, you have higher security networks, working at home is not an option at all. Well, there are some ways around this problem. And I don't mean around it as in trying to skirt the security issues, but around it in a very secure way. And it depends on how you're working and what you're doing and really how critical and sensitive the data is. You know, the old orange book standards were there for a reason, and people can read some of the older CRTs and things remotely. These new LCDs and LED displays we have are harder to read remotely, but in those cases, forget about printing. Never going to be able to work from home right if, if the information is only available in a SCIF, forget about it, you're not going to be able to work from home, or getting kind of technology there with those TLS and SSL. But anyway, we have to be careful if we are in a business that has this type of sensitive information. So we'll talk about that when we get back. And then we have one more topic for today, and we're going to cover another angle of working at home and what does that mean to you and me, so stick around. We're going to be back. You're listening to Craig Peterson. On w GAN online. Craig Peterson dot com. And make sure you sign up on my email list right now. You have to subscribe by going to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, and you'll find out about all of our free resources for working at home. Stick around. We'll be right back.

Hey guys, welcome back. Craig Peterson here. We've been talking a lot about working from home. And if you missed any of today's show and you are working from home or your business, who has people who are working from home or considering having people working from home, you're going to want to catch the replays of today's show. And you can usually find those right by going to Craig Peters on.com slash iTunes. You can also find it and almost anywhere in any podcast platform out there. Just search for Craig Peterson, and you'll find today's whole show they're available as a podcast. We covered a ton of topics there, and we're talking right now about those companies that are kind of high stakes security. Intelligence agencies, critical infrastructure, anybody who's developing things for the DOD contractors, subcontractors, sub-subcontractors, and we've got this whole CMC thing going on. And I'm talking with people who have attended these briefings on it and just don't understand what they need to do and how to do it. And they just won't do it because I can't believe they're required to have all this security is crazy. But here's the bottom line. Last week, the US government cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency issued an advisory to critical infrastructure companies to prepare for remote work scenarios as this whole Covid-19 spreads. They told people that they have to check that their VPN networks are up-to-date, that the companies have implemented multi-factor authentication, that they have tested out the remote access scenario. Of course, there's a lot more to it than just that. Cybersecurity consultants, like me, who work with those high stake clients know that remote work and security don't mix unless you understand what you are doing. In this Ars Technica article here, they discuss electric utilities, oil, and gas firms, manufacturing companies, and say that it's not always so simple for many of their most critical customers and even more so for intelligence agencies. It should be a wake-up call. If you are a company that has to meet any of these higher security standards. Most notably, if you have to meet the DFARS standards. The ITAR standards, the new CMMC standards, which are all of the military standards. The NIST 171 standards say you can not have people working at home. Okay, so here is a statement from a team lead over the Department of Energy and should be a fairly good wake up call. You need to figure out a way that if individuals cannot physically access the control system for a service that cannot stop, like electricity, water, wastewater, similar services, you ensure continuous operation. Even in the face in an environment where you might be risking your employee's lives if they continue to commute into the office. So think about that amazing statement here. For many industrial networks, the highest standard of security is an air gap, and this is what we do with our manufacturing clients. It means a physical disconnect between the inner sanctum of software connected to the physical environment and the less sensitive internet-connected IT systems. So there are very few private sector firms that are using air gaps. In other words, there is no physical connection. There is the obvious exception for highly regulated nuclear power utilities who have implemented actual air gaps and my clients for whom we have put air gaps in place in 100% of the cases where it's been possible. But again, my clients want to have their networks secure because they don't want stuff stolen. They don't want to get sued by releasing personal identifiable, identifiable information, and they don't want to shut down the manufacturing line, which is quite severe. All of these restrictions we're talking about can create these massive chokepoints for hackers and also for remote workers. Think about that. There are things, like jump boxes, we've used before, depending on the software used. If you can put those in place, then we've got administrators bumping each other off as they try and work and log in. Because these jump boxes, these, you might call them gateways. You SSH into that box, and then SSH into a different part of the network. So you have to kind of jump around. Some of them only allow one of the administrators to be on at a time. So think about that. If you fit into any of those, you have a bigger issue, and I'd be glad to talk to you guys. I mean, talk to you and help you with what you have. I have set aside some 15-minute time blocks. I'm going to send out an email again this week to let people sign-up, if your business is having problems, reach out to me, right? I'm a resource here. Don't let my 40 plus years of experience with this go to waste. I want to help, and I can help. You don't have to be a client, okay? And I will dedicate up 15 minutes or half an hour to help you out to get you going. Okay, because this is that important. I know what it's like to own a business. I've owned a business for many decades. And I know I get very frustrated when I feel like I'm kind of all left alone. Okay, that's off my chest. You can do that just by emailing me at Craig Peterson, it is me at Craig Peterson calm, or you can go to my company's website as well, mainstream dot net and there is a contact form on there where you can leave a message, and I'll get back to you or another member of my team will. Let's get back to a great article, by the Ars Technica staff, on working at home. They've done it for 22 years Ars Technica has. And as you know, I've been doing it for more than a couple of decades as well. But let's kind of run through what their suggestions are here to kind of finish up the show. One work-from-home suggestion from them was about snacks, supplies, a pet, and dolls. Now, you know, I don't recognize our I don't recommend snacks because I practice intermittent fasting, right? A pet. We have a pet. We have a Great Dane and have lots of supplies, and I don't have any dolls. But anyway, you should consider upgrading to a more ergonomic workstation. It is particularly true if you're working from home for a long time. For instance, I have these tables from SIS. SIS is a company that makes office furniture, and what these are about six foot long, and maybe two or three feet deep. And they raise and lower a few feet. I can sit in a chair, I can sit on a ball here, kind of a big exercise ball or I can stand up, I can move around. It is phenomenal. And I have these and most of my workstations. They're just phenomenal. I love these things. Before these, I had one that I just attached to a regular table, and I could raise and lower my keyboard, mouse, and screen, and that was just wonderful as well. So remember that it is convenient. Let's see other suggestions from Ars Technica. They said they've done this since 98. Okay, so this is from Jade Timor senior science editor your office needs to have View he says, trees, birds open sky just something you find appealing so that when you raise your head from your screen to clear your mind, there's something there that you want to see. I do have a couple of windows here in my working area, and I can kind of see the sky. So it's not too bad but I again I get up move around. The author goes on to say to have an exercise and activity routine. Many studies have shown that getting up and moving a bit is incredibly positive for your health. That's what I do. I don't get completely sedentary. Senior tech policy reporter Timothy Lee says have a physically separate workspace. I talked a lot about that earlier in the show. Again, you can find the show at Craig Peterson dot com slash iTunes and subscribe there as well. So, he says to put it as far as possible from the kitchen, laundry room, TV, and other sources of domestic distraction. Senior technology editor Lee Hutchinson, he says it's not slacking. In my experience, what helps me more than anything is to have co-workers who are also virtual. At a past job, I held for a year or so where I was the only remote teammate in a large Bellevue Washington based admin team. I was secluded from my team at home and missed everybody. He goes on to say that they use slack now. I don't particularly like slack. It is not secure. It does not meet any of the security standards. The only thing that does is the high-level version of WebEx teams, which is what I use. Our clients that need security and have their security requirements are passed down by law. We have to be as secure as they are, or at least his as they're supposed to be. So that's what we use, we use the WebEx teams. If you'd like this 90-day free trial, we can set you up we can get it going, and we can give you a higher level better version of it then you can get right now at the WebEx dot com website. However, if you don't want to bother me, I understand you can get it yourself, but please do me a favor and just email me. me at Craig Peterson dot com and ask me any questions, including about this, and we can get you set up with this trial. Jennifer Ouellette, senior writer and she is saying that it makes a huge difference having everybody working remotely Now remember, Ars Technica, they publish they do writing little different than a manufacturer. But she had online communities. That's what she likes. Groups of friends who are science writers, and she's always loved it. It's got a picture of her cat here to kind of a cute cat. But anyway, there's a whole bunch of others that I have up on my website as well at Craig Peterson dot com. You'll see those in the blogs off of the homepage. And again, make sure you sign up. I'm going to be having some deep-dive webinars this week, answering all of your questions we'll be talking about VPN, some of the tools you can use, basically about everything. But you have to subscribe, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe, do it right now. Go to your computer, type in this URL, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. You'll find out about all these webinars and much much more. Have a great week, and we'll talk to you Wednesday at 738 with Ken and Matt.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

---

More stories and tech updates at:

www.craigpeterson.com

Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:

www.craigpeterson.com/itunes

Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:

www.twitter.com/craigpeterson

For questions, call or text:

855-385-5553