Welcome! Business surveillance, WordPress vulnerability, and Big Tech and more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

Welcome!  

For being locked down do to this Pandemic there is certainly a lot of technology in the news this week.  So let's get into it.  We are finding that managers are surveilling their employees, probably a little more than necessary and an uptick in VPN usage. Big Tech is strangling us and WordPress has a vulnerability plus much more   So sit back and listen in. 

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

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: Hey everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. Spring is in the air. I am so excited about this, you know, I love pretty much every season. I was just thinking the other day how I missed not having, you know, like crunchy snow that you can walk on. I know you might think I'm crazy, right? I know other family members of mine who absolutely think I'm crazy, but it's, maybe it's just a thing from my childhood, you know, being 40 degrees below zero and being outside and just walking in the snow and just having a crunch, crunch, crunch.

[00:00:40] But you know, so wintertime makes me enjoy spring makes me enjoy summer to a bit of a lesser degree, but I love going motorcycling so that works right? In the summertime. And then I really like fall probably my favorite season and then winter is pretty good. I'm not a winter sports kind of guy. I should probably do a little bit more of that.

[00:01:01] Well, if you saw me on the TV news this week, you know that I was talking a lot about this new surveillance society that we have. Yeah. I'm not just talking about general regular surveillance that we've talked about before. I'm talking about surveillance in the workplace. And now there are two sides of this.

[00:01:23] Of course, there are like two sides to everything and there's the side of the employee and then there's the side of the employer. And so we're going to spend a little time right now going through some of the things on both sides. If you're an employer, why you might want to be doing surveillance. In fact, in some ways, why you should be doing surveillance, if you're an employee, what are your rights?

[00:01:46] What can you do about it? We'll be talking about that. And then some of the software the businesses are using and what you can expect. So let's sort of been talking about a lot this week over on various radio stations and on television as well this week. So getting right into this, and you'll see some articles about this up on my website as well, at Craig peterson.com

[00:02:10] Oh and man did I get a kick in the pants this week, you know I've been doing a little bit of work on the website because we're putting some new stuff together for people. For y'all and I, I went to CraigPeterson.com/subscribe and just tried to check it out. So guess what. It doesn't work. Slash Subscribe to me. I just hate it when that happens.

[00:02:35] So if you have tried to subscribe on my website before to get my weekly newsletter or get some of my special reports because you get, I think it's four of them when you subscribe, I send those off to you and you went to CraigPeterson.com/subscribe to subscribe. It may not have worked. So I'm going to be working some more on that this week.

[00:02:58] I got that problem and then I've got a problem as well with the text number, the [phone] number. And I guess it's kind of like the cobbler's kids that have no shoes, right? Where man. There are so many things that I need to do and I've been doing for customers and lately, I've been doing even more for non-customers, is trying to help everybody out because there are so many people that are in such dire straits right now.

[00:03:26] You know, all businesses have changed. Talking about the pivot and pivoting to work at home has been a very big deal. In fact, I'm going to. Probably have a little course on that coming up here in a couple of weeks. What to do if you a business and you're kind of pivoting to homeworkers maybe permanently, but certainly for the next little while.

[00:03:45] What should you be doing from the security standpoint? I think it's really important for everyone to understand and to do. Many managers are turning to surveillance software and. I got this idea about a norm reminder really from the Washington Post this week now, Washington post, you know, I don't trust him at all for any of their political coverage because they haven't been honest with any of us for quite a while, but some of their technology coverage isn't bad.

[00:04:14] It's kind of like the New York Times. It's such a shame because the New York times has such great. In-depth articles on so many things, and then they completely misrepresent politics all the time, like a hundred percent consistent, and it's, so, I'm just always torn. Do I pay any attention to these guys or not?

[00:04:35] You know, I certainly look at their coverage too when it comes to the political stuff, cause I have to make a judgment call myself. But man, I don't mind supporting the regular things, but their editorial things are in their decisions as to which stories to run. Sometimes they're just so antithetical to everything, I believe.

[00:04:55] But anyway, enough of that. So the Washington post article. Kind of got me thinking about it. So I did a bunch of research and I have one, two, three pages of a bullet point that I want to go through with you. Because I did research. I looked at a lot of things online. I looked at some of the websites of these companies making this, I don't know if you want to call it spyware, but that's kind of what it boils down to and figured out what's going on there. I had looked at some of the legal issues from the federal government side and from the state government, and here's the bottom line. When in doubt, assume you're being watched now.

[00:05:36] I think that's a reasonable assumption in this day and age, right? We've all got our smart devices. We're online. We know that companies like Google and Facebook are compiling information to sell it about us, and I'm not sure that that's an absolutely horrific thing. I get more concerned when we're talking about employers surveilling us because if you have a bad boss or not so great boss, what's going to happen when that boss comes down on you for taking a break.

[00:06:09] Right? Even a short break, you know? Yeah. You took a 15-minute break or whatever it was that was not, you know, necessary for them to come down on you. That's where I started getting concerned. People losing their jobs over this. Now, in some cases, if you're a transcriptionist and you're paid by the word, well, you know, why would they bother?

[00:06:29] Monitoring me. I'm paid by the word, right? Who cares? You know? Obviously I have to deliver in a certain timeframe, but if it takes me all day and I have a 24-hour guarantee and I'm only typing one word a minute,  it's no skin off my employer's nose. And on the other end of the scale, if you are kind of intellectual work and you're working.

[00:06:52] At a higher level, if you will, right? You're not just selling your, your keystroke, your fingers. You're actually thinking about problems. You're trying to logically analyze what's going on, what should be done, what shouldn't be done. If you're that type of person while then it's a completely different thing, right?

[00:07:12] Again, how do you measure that? Because you might be reading a book, you might, you might have read a book last night and now you're in the office and you're looking at that book from last night cause you want to make some notes on it because you're one implemented into the office and now your employer's looking at you saying, well why hasn't your screen changed.

[00:07:31] So that's the other side. So I get really concerned with the employers somehow thinking that this type of monitoring is a panacea for them. It's not going to motivate their employees to work. It just totally reminds me of when I was a professor on faculty out at Pepperdine University, and I taught, back then it was called MIS management information systems 422 out at Pepperdine.

[00:07:57] And one of the things we had to look at was something called the Hawthorne principle. And they had done a study in Hawthorne, California of workers on a manufacturing line. And the big question was do they perform better when they're being monitored or when they're not being monitored? There were some interesting studies to this looking at music in the background.

[00:08:21] Do you perform better when you have music playing in the background just at a low volume or better when it's quiet? Well, in all of these cases, it depends on what you're doing. Workers tend to perform better. With music in the background when they're doing kind of a rote task when they're working on an assembly line, and it's the same thing over and over and over again, that tends to help those people.

[00:08:50] But when we're talking about an intellectual worker who is planning, who's thinking things through, who's writing marketing materials, who's doing software development, in most cases. They perform worse with music in the background and they're better off just having some basic white noise going on, which could be as simple as a fan.

[00:09:13] It could be office chatter, et cetera, and I actually use some things in order to put that into the background myself, and I find them to be very, very helpful. You can find all kinds of them online. If you wanted to know exactly which ones I use, send me an email and I'll let you know, just [email protected] but I have a plugin that goes into my browser.

[00:09:37] That has a coffee shop, the ring of fire, burning, you know, outside a bird chirping, wind blowing, water lapping just, it has a few of those things. And, and I can select what I want and if I need to kind of focus on something, I find that to be very, very helpful. so when it comes to monitoring in the Hawthorne effect.

[00:10:04] What they found is that yes, in some cases monitoring people. Worked out better, they produce better than not monitoring people. And that kind of reminds me of a good war movie that I absolutely loved. I don't think it was a great escape. Oh, no. I remember what it was. it was Schindler's list and there were supposed to be making hinges.

[00:10:28] These are, of course, prisoners, that are being used as slave labor. And. They are supposed to be making these hinges. And so the guard comes over, lets me see, we make a hinge and he makes one in a matter of just seconds or minute or whatever it is. And then under the Hawthorne. That'd be principal here.

[00:10:48] If he makes one hinge in one minute, he should be able to make 60 hinges in an hour. And yet they were only making, I don't remember what any of these numbers were. It's been a long time since I saw that movie. But, he didn't make his many, so obviously he got in trouble, as did other people who were on the assembly line. You know, if there's a gun to your head, maybe you will work better, maybe you will work faster. But in most cases, that's not true. And that was certainly true of these people who were confined to slave labor. They're in the Schindler's list movie. So we're going to talk a lot more about this when we get back because nearly half of the US labor force is now. working from home.

[00:11:30] That's according to a study by MIT researchers in April, so just a couple of weeks ago, stick around. We're going to talk a lot more about this when we get back. You are listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN, and you'll hear me every Wednesday morning, give or take at 7:30 on with Matt.

[00:11:52] Stick around. We'll be right back.

Craig Peterson: Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig Peterson here, on WGAN. I hope you're enjoying your Saturday, or if you're listening to me online, whatever day it is, you're listening, and of course, you can get that online experience through any podcast app. I'm on tune in. I'm on pretty much everywhere. You'll just be able to find me by looking for Craig Peterson.

[00:00:28] The easiest way is just go to CraigPeterson.com/your favorite app when it comes to podcasts, whatever it is, and it'll just do a redirect for you, send you right to the right spot, whether it's iTunes or Spotify or whatever it is. So we were talking before the break about what's happening here with surveillance scene, surveilling our employees out there.

[00:00:55] And we're seeing some major changes. Now, some of these started actually a few years ago because businesses are rightly concerned about their intellectual property being stolen, and they need to know if an employee is. About to leave and leave with their customer list. And I have certainly seen that happen before.

[00:01:17] Unfortunately, we often get these phone calls after the fact, after the data's already been stolen, the employee's gone, or whatever it is. But you know, that's kind of the way it is, right? Most businesses and people aren't willing to do anything about it until it goes over the cliff and this case. So what do we do as employers if we want to protect our information?

[00:01:41] Because it's proprietary, right? That's called intellectual property for a reason, and the reason that it's proprietary is you just don't want it stolen and it gives you the advantage that you need to have. MIT researchers, as I mentioned before, are saying the nearly half of the US workforce is now working from home, which is absolutely massive.

[00:02:06] We're seeing. VPN usage way up, and you know, I have a whole course on VPNs, the free one that I've been doing, and VPNs are not a panacea at all. In fact, they can make things much worse for you if you're trying to be secure. We've got these tattle wearables. Programs out there now that are doing everything from watching what you're typing and alerting the manager if you're typing in certain words that they think might mean that you are leaving their employee.

[00:02:40] Right? So going to a website and employment website could cause, could cause a phone call from your manager. But we do have to check this. We do have to be careful. If you are going to be monitoring your employees, you need to make sure it's in the employee handbook. You want to be upfront with your employees and from the employee's side, remember that some of the software will do everything, like keep track of your keystrokes, watch the websites you're visiting, which is always the case.

[00:03:13] A reasonable business is going to be tracking website visits. So keep that in mind. But, They're also going to potentially be screen capturing and maybe even capturing a picture from your camera. Some of them also will listen on the microphone and I get it. You know, it can be very demoralizing.

[00:03:36] You've been working for a company for years, maybe decades, and now all of a sudden you've been, you're being spied on. Right? You think you've been a good worker, so talk with them. There are no federal laws against employee monitoring. In the private sector. There are a number of state laws, but many of these employers are crossing these ethical lines by continuing to track the employees after they've clocked out for the day.

[00:04:05] So if you're an employee. Your best bet may be to just turn off the computer, turn off the laptop. If you have a smartphone that's been issued by the company, turned that off as well. If you have an app that is from the company, you might want to kill it. So it's no longer tracking and make sure your settings on your iPhone are set to only allow tracking while the app is active.

[00:04:32] So those are a few things. You can talk to your HR department if you think something's happening that shouldn't be. And if you filed an internal complaint and nothing is really happening, you can file the same complaint with the securities and exchange commission, the equal opportunity employment commission, or the state organizations.

[00:04:53] All right? By the way, you don't have to be informed that you are being spied upon. So keep that in mind.

[00:05:01] So next step here, I want to talk about something from American thinker.com there's a great article there about big tech and how it is frankly strangling us right now. We have that 1984 ad.

[00:05:17] Do you remember that? where. All of these people were sitting in a kind of Orwellian room, a socialist room. Everybody's dressed the same because you only have one type of clothes you can buy. Yeah.

[00:05:29] By the way, Hey, thanks, guys. For this, what has it been two months exhibition of what socialism's really like? There's nothing on the shelves right now.

[00:05:38] What do you remember that they're all sitting there and they're fighting this technocratic elite. When that woman runs down and throws the hammer at the screen. And obviously it was a pretty gloomy spot that ran, and I think it didn't have first run during the super bowl if I remember. Bottom line, but the tech giants now, like Apple and Google, all of these guys have really morphed into what is now, I think, near totalitarian giants.

[00:06:13] No, they are controlling our speech. You got Candace Owens, brilliant woman. She's suspended from Twitter for challenging the Michigan governor. Facebook has flagged the declaration of independence as hate speech. It's incredible what's going on. We see Aaron Renn reporting that conservative and left-wing groups are being pulled down at Twitter, and that was back in 2016 2019 YouTube has been blocking some British history teachers from.

[00:06:49] YouTube entirely for uploading archival material related to Adolf Hitler. Yeah. Heaven forbid that we remember what happened with him and YouTube said that these British history teachers were breaching. Guidelines banning the promotion of hate speech, even though they weren't promoting it, they were trying to let people know, Hey, this has happened before.

[00:07:15] It can happen again. It's absolutely incredible. And, and where is that line drawn with the national socialists in Germany? Right? You remember? That's what they were. That's what Nazi stood for. National socialists. So the socialists there in Germany, they put out all kinds of a propaganda film about how great they were.

[00:07:35] We were only telling half-truths. Sound familiar, right? and they're these British history teachers. Apparently we're putting some of these apps so people understood what it looked like to have manipulation coming from the government. So they deleted the videos, abrupt loaded to help educate future generations about the risks of socialism.

[00:08:00] It's absolutely incredible. Now, Michael Cutler wrote just a couple of years ago that Twitter has, I love this language now morphed into a means of thought control. Through the control of language. Now we have, through the government, through the legislature and the federal level, we have given these companies immunity from prosecution in most cases because we say, Hey, it's like a public bulletin board.

[00:08:30] People are up there saying stuff and YouTube and Twitter, et cetera. You're not liable if someone posts, posts, hate speech, et cetera, on your site. And now they're acting as though they might be liable. And so now because they're acting this way, should we remove their, their special treatment of being basically common carrier?

[00:08:57] They're, they're saying, Hey, listen, we're, we're more like the telephone company than anything else than a newspaper. We don't have editorial control over the content and we don't control the content. Well, guess what? Those days are long past us. We need to make some changes here, okay? These big internet companies know more about you than you know about yourself, frankly.

[00:09:20] And there's a study that came out, this was a years ago, where average consumers are checking their smartphones 150 times a day, and that number. Has grown, so we've got to make some changes. All right, everybody, stick around. We'll be right back. We're going to talk about some attacks that are going on. If you like to go online, visit websites, or particularly if you have your own business or personal website.

[00:09:46] I got some news for you about attacks that are underway right now. Stick around. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN.

Craig Peterson: Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN yeah. Big tech is strangling us. We talked about that and how laws really need to change. I know that Chairman Pai over the FCC has been trying to tighten the things up a little bit, but there's been a lot of pushback from the left end from some people in their bureaucracy.

[00:00:26]We also all already talked about the managers turning to surveillance software. And I understand why many of them are doing it to protect their intellectual property more than to make sure you're working at least. That's been the case historically. Now they're doing a little bit differently. They're actually trying to make sure you're working.

[00:00:46] So if you are someone that has a website and it could be just a basic website, like something that you have for your local boy scout troop, or many, many of the other ones out there, your very likely to be using some open-source software called Wordpress.

[00:01:07] WordPress is a great piece of software and I've been using it for many, many years. I used to hand-roll websites, which means I was sitting there writing the HTML code and putting everything in and it just wasn't very pretty. And then I moved over to an Adobe product. To do it. And then, then I went to something called WebGui, which was another piece of software to help run websites and build them.

[00:01:35] And then I ended up on WordPress and I've been there for many, many years. Basically, since WordPress started. It has been quite a great little. Tool. So if you're thinking as well, by the way of putting up a website, let's say you want to start a business. Let's say you are a brick and mortar business, and frankly, you're looking to transition from brick and mortar to online first, which is what I think every business needs to be doing.

[00:02:03] I want you to have a serious look at this. You can find it online. There are two WordPress sites. There's wordpress.com that you can go to online. And WordPress dot com just takes care of everything for you. They, they're a hosting company. They have themes. You can use a, they make it really quite simple.

[00:02:25] It is not the most flexible but let me just give you a little bit of warning, but. All right? In this day and age, it's like 35% of the web is built on WordPress, so I'm looking at the numbers here on their website or their pricing plan. And for personal use, it is $4 a month. That is if you are paying for a year at a time so that that's hard to beat, isn't it?

[00:02:59] And for premium, which I say is best for freelancers, it is $8 a month. Again, if you pay a yearly small business, they've got $25 per month and e-commerce. $45 a month. Now, the main difference between all of these different price points for WordPress. It has to do with domain name registration. Like if you're free, you probably don't have your own domain.

[00:03:28] If you're a business, you're going to need your own domain name. Some of them have live support, 24/7 some of these, the basic packages only have email support. Premium themes are only available in the higher packages. You know, the business ones, which are premium business and commerce, they've gotten marketing and monetization tools that you can use at the business level.

[00:03:54] Some search engine optimization, some advertising analytics, they have just a whole bunch of things that you can do. And then, then the highest end in e-commerce, they're adding on accepting payments and 60. Plus countries. Integrations with top shipping carriers, unlimited products or services, eCommerce marketing tools, premium customizable starter themes for 45 bucks a month.

[00:04:22]So then this is kind of a duh, if you are looking to start a little business and have it online, if you have a business and you're looking to move it online, we're talking about WordPress right now. So wordpress.com is where you go for all of that. Now I get more complicated, than any of these provide for.

[00:04:45] So I can't just use wordpress.com and I actually use WP engine as well as I self hosts some sites. In other words, I have my own servers because of my company Mainstream, we have our own data center. So why not? Right. But in some cases, like my bigger websites, I have up at WP engine and they maintain everything for me.

[00:05:10] It's actually running on a Google platform, but they will automatically size it, resize it, and I can do absolutely anything I want. So if you want to be able to do anything you want, you're not going to use a wordpress.com. You're going to go to wordpress.org. Now, wordpress.org is the software that is behind wordpress.com and it's the software that I, again, 35% or so of the web uses.

[00:05:43] I actually think it's probably higher than that, and most places use WordPress nowadays, and it's just so flexible. It's no longer just a blogging platform. And they have some built-in beautiful themes. I use something called Divi, which is a page builder. There's a few of them out there, Beaver, Ellementor.

[00:06:03] Those are the three big ones. And if you're interested in, in thinking, Hey Craig, maybe you should do a class on this for us. Well, let me know. I'd be glad to put something together, but you got to tell me. Right? I just don't know. Otherwise, me, [email protected] if you'd like a class on this, and I know some people like Nancy Fields out there who she'll help people with their sites and put them together, but wordpress.org is where you go to get the software you need to put on too.

[00:06:36] Some of these hosting services that you can use, and there's a million of them out there. Really. There's a lot, and then the kind of the ultimate, if you will, as the WP engine guys, but I brought this up to let you know the basics, right? This is what you want to look at. If you're thinking about going online.

[00:06:54] But on the other side, I want to warn people right now because security teams and businesses have their hands full dealing with these COVID-19 related threats that are out there, and there are a lot of them, and right now the biggest problem isn't the hackers. The biggest problem is people clicking on emails and then getting ransomware.

[00:07:16] We have a client that just. Yes. No, it was earlier in the week, I think it was Tuesday, one of their employees downloaded some software and he needed some software for windows to do some screen grabs cause he wanted to just grab a few things for off of the screen and save them the, save that graphic and use it in some documents.

[00:07:38] So he went online, he did some searching and he found some screen. grabbing software, and lo and behold, there's this wonderful screen grab software for free that he downloads, and guess what? It's ransomware. So because we were doing all of the stuff for them and we had the really, the top anti-malware software that's out there very advanced stuff.

[00:08:03] It detected it, it stopped it, it stopped it from spreading almost. Instantly, and that was just a phenomenal thing to have happened. It stopped it and it stopped the spread right away. So right now in WordPress, we're seeing a 30 fold increase in attacks on WordPress websites out there. , this is just dramatic.

[00:08:27] So if you are running a word press word site or website, you're going to want to really, really have a look at it, make sure it's completely patched up because just like windows and Mac, iOS and iOS and Android, you have to apply patches. Man. It's like a grand central station here today. People in an out.

[00:08:48] Anyhow, let's see. A million websites were reported, attacked, in the week from April 28th for one week. On May 3rd alone, they counted in excess of 20 million attacks against some half a million WordPress sites. It's just absolutely crazy. And by the way, they're coming in from more than 24,000.

[00:09:10] Distinct IP addresses. What that means people are your machine to have been compromised and the bad guys are using them to launch attacks against websites and other people, which is not news, but it is news to most of those 24,000 people whose computers. Are being used to launch attacks.

[00:09:32] You are Listening to Craig Peterson. Stick around because we're going to be right back. Talk a little bit about Zoom and how they are going to fix their chats. Stick around. We'll be right back and of course, visit me online at CraigPeterson.com.

Craig Peterson: Hello everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. You can hear me here every Saturday from one till 3:00 PM and on with  Matt  Gagnon Wednesday mornings at 734 this week because the mayor was on, let's see, it was Friday at like eight Oh eight or something like that. So. Was very, a little bit, off. But I'm here from one til three.

[00:00:31] Anyways. And for those listening online, of course, I am on pretty much every podcasting app out there. And in some ways, I'm one of the pioneers of this thing. I've been doing this podcasting stuff for over 20 years, so for a very, very long time. I don't know, it kind of makes you feel old. So, so far today we just talked about WordPress and how you can use that.

[00:00:53] For your business where you can go online and order to find the right hosting environment for your WordPress site. We talked a little bit about how WordPress also has security vulnerabilities like anything else and what is going on right now. I also spoke about half an hour ago here about how big.

[00:01:16] Technology is a drag, just strangling, just totally strangulating all of us with their censorship free speech just doesn't exist when you're talking about the big guys. And then, of course, we started out the show talking about surveillance software in what managers have been doing with the surveillance software over the years.

[00:01:42] It's really bad, frankly. What's been going on. And right now we're going to talk a little bit about something. Pretty much I think everybody in the country's been on, and that is zoom. Now, if you have not been on zoom, let me just explain it really briefly, and that is zoom is a video conferencing. App, it's been around for a while now, was written by a couple of kids and they did a terrible job with the security side of things.

[00:02:14] It works well, it's easy to use, and so they did a very good job on that. And frankly, if they hadn't, they wouldn't be kind of the premier video conferencing app right now. We just used it for mother's day. I set up a zoom conference for my mother and of course my stepfather, and we did another one for my, my father, and my stepmother, and we had the kids on there like 16 people called into it, and I chose zoom.

[00:02:48] Knowing that it was easy to use, that a lot of people use zoom and really like it, but also knowing about the major security problems. Right? We're talking about mother's day, so I'm not worried about losing intellectual property. I'm not really worried about having people's zoom bombed me, and that is where zoom bombing has been going on like crazy.

[00:03:12] But zoom bombing is where somebody. Gets onto your zoom conference and does something nasty. anything from sexual stuff through, I, I've heard of, swastikas coming up, you know, the good old socialist national socialist party of Germany and world war two I've heard about all just all kinds of terrible things that have been coming up.

[00:03:37] So I wasn't worried about Zoom by me, so because I wasn't worried about privacy. Intellectual properties, zoom bombing. Okay. It's fine because I have a small business account on zoom. Now when I am doing something for my business, this business-related or I'm concerned about intellectual property or security, then I use WebEx because it is a, not just a regular WebEx, but a secured WebEx because it is a.

[00:04:05] Very well known commodity out there, something that many people, have been looking at and the federal government uses, military uses, et cetera, et cetera. So that's kind of what I do. So zoom has had a very, very bad rap as of late and for, I think, frankly, it's for many, many good reasons. And I'm, I'm on Google right now, and you know, I recommend you use duck, duck, go.

[00:04:32] But I'm going to use Google because of the fact that that's what most people are using. And I wanted to have the same results you'd see. So I just went into Google news and I said, zoom security. And it's got a, the latest updates, the highs, the lows. Here's what you need to know. Avoid the app and do this instead.

[00:04:53] Here's why. It's from Forbes. Zoom five offers new security and privacy features. That's the new version of zoom, the new major version that they've released. In case you didn't get that notification, make sure you upgrade zoom. zoom settles with New York attorney general over privacy and security concerns.

[00:05:13] This is just two days ago. Zooms tips for safety as recommended by video conference, express zoom issues, play security issues, plays a spotlight on other video platforms, privacy troubles. but here's the one that I think is kinda interesting. This one's from. Forbes and that is Zoom buys key base in bold, new security move.

[00:05:37] How this could change everything. If you've been listening for a while, you know, I've been talking about how there are still security jobs open. You know, right now, security is kind of at the bottom of the list for most of the businesses out there because businesses are saying, Hey, we just don't know what's going to happen with our business going forward.

[00:05:59] So, let's just drop security who need security, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's a bit of a problem if you ask me. And so because of that. I, you know, there, there's probably been a drop, I think, in the number of security jobs that are currently open, but we were talking about two and a half million, you know, up to 3 million open cybersecurity jobs before this whole pandemic.

[00:06:26] It is, frankly, we need security now more than ever as business people and at home because we're under attack more than ever. But this is Zoom's first acquisition. Now I would actually call it more of an acquire than an acquisition. And if you're not familiar with that term, it's big probably because it's a pretty new term.

[00:06:52] And an Aqua hire is where you find a company that has talent in it that you need or you want. And so how do you hire those people away? You probably can't, and it is a team of people working there, so you got to figure, they probably work together. They know how to work together. They know what some of the things are they need to do to work together.

[00:07:19] So you just go ahead and you buy the whole company. So they're calling it an acquisition. In reality, this seems more like an acquire and Zoom got this 90-day plan to improve their security in this whole video conferencing system. We'll see what ends up happening. The terms of this deal weren't disclosed.

[00:07:41] I'm sure a part of it is usually, Hey, all of the employees have to stay, or these key people have to stay. And then as part of the acquisition, they'll pay everybody some sort of an amount. So it isn't just the stakeholders. They're stockholders that make money off of this. Everybody stays around, but this is their first acquisition zooms nine years old in case you didn't know that if you thought they just came out of nowhere.

[00:08:09] It's one of these overnight successes that took nine years to get there, but they're saying that as of a couple of weeks ago, there were 300 million people. On zoom, that's dramatic. In December, it was estimated that there were 10 million people. Now for the FBI InfraGard webinars that we were running, the FBI wanted us to use Zoom.

[00:08:34] I don't know why, but that's what InfraGard wanted us to use. That's what I used. So we were part of that 10 million. To up to 300 million. Can you imagine that kind of growth so you can see how they had to do something, do something fast? They could not just staff up for it, but they're planning on creating a secure private and a scalable video communication system.

[00:08:58] Part of the problem they've had recently when it comes to scalability is they have been routing people's teleconferences through China and other parts of the world. And of course, those really upset people when they found out about it because of course China sits there and spies on everything that's going on now.

[00:09:19] The company that they acquired is called Keybase. They spent the last six years building a secure messaging and file sharing service. And with this, users can chat and share with team members and communities knowing that the messages are end to end encrypted. So the other thing with this acquire that zoom may be getting is the ability now to have chat and file sharing, which is something that.

[00:09:49]Microsoft teams have that WebEx teams have, right? That's what the team's apps have. And even Slack has built-in now some communications ability. You can have small meetings and make calls to other users. And zoom is planning on putting this encrypted end to end meeting mode in for the paid accounts.

[00:10:12] So if you have a free account, you're probably not going to get it, at least not initially. And then they're going to use public-key encryption, which is something that is, say, Pattonville a little bit of a go. But it's absolutely the way to do it. So I'm glad to hear that there are some adults in the room now over at zoom and they realized, not invented here syndrome is not going to help them grow.

[00:10:37] It's not going to solve their security problems. And so they, I acquired a company that has been doing this type of security for quite a while. So, okay, here we go. This is a, an article from, this is dark reading, I think. Yeah. and they're saying as part of the deal, key basis, team members will become zoom employees.

[00:11:00] So there you go. Okay. they, so they are planning on publishing a draft for their cryptographic design, next Friday. So it's coming up pretty soon. So we'll keep you up to date on this. I promised I would in the past let you know what zoom is doing and how they're doing and where they're going, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:11:21] So I'm really glad to hear that zoom is pulling up their socks. So we are going to go away for a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about one of these companies that has smart hubs and what they have done. And this is kind of a story about what happens at end of life. And it's something that every business needs to think about.

[00:11:48] If you're using salesforce.com Microsoft, you name it. Those companies are eventually going to go out of business. What happens when they go out of business? What's going to happen to your data? Whose data is it anyway? And in many cases, these companies are saying. It's my data. We own it, and if we lose it, we don't know you.

[00:12:17] Anything. Real problem. If you asked me, so stick around. We'll be back here right after the break with news, et cetera, and we'll be talking more about all of this. You're listening to Craig Peter's son, right here on WGAN, and make sure you visit me online. Go to Craig peterson.com make sure you sign up for my newsletter so you can find out about the various cool stuff we've been working on and then we'll have out for you very, very soon.

[00:12:45] Take care of everybody and stick around cause we'll be right back.

Craig Peterson: Hey everybody. Welcome back. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and of course online as well at craigPeterson.com. We have been talking about a bunch of stuff today and you know, if you missed any of it, you can go to my website, Craig peterson.com this includes why businesses are using surveillance software.

[00:00:25] To where what you can do as an employee if you think they are spying on you and what are your rights when it comes to some of this stuff, I talked also about what is happening with big tech and censorship and it really is a big problem, WordPress and how you can use that as a business. You know, if you are brick and mortar, you probably want to try and transition to more of an online model.

[00:00:53] But even if you have a little bit of both, maybe WordPress is the way to go. So we talked a little bit about that when you can get WordPress as a service and also what you can do about it yourself. And by the way, attacks on WordPress are have gone up 30 fold in just the past few days. And then just before the top of the hour, we talked about zoom.

[00:01:17] And how they have acquired a company in order to have end-to-end encryption on zoom. And I bet you also because of this acquisition, who they purchased the zooms going to be seen a new feature here where they're going to be doing a little bit of conferencing and. Collaboration. So I think that's going to be a good thing.

[00:01:40] It's going to give a little competition to WebEx teams and also to our friends at Microsoft teams. Now, how many of you guys out there have been using some of these services. For your internet of things devices now, internet of things, devices that I'm talking about here. My kind of definition is anything that would normally be considered just a piece of hardware, you know, something that you turn on and use.

[00:02:10] A good example would be some of these thermostats many of us have right. We've got these, now it's Google nest thermostats or some of the lights that we have. Well, many of these devices require what are called bridges because they using different technologies. So for instance, in my home, I've got some.

[00:02:35] Now Apple home equipment, and of course we use Apple equipment almost exclusively in my business, and we have iPhones with iOS and Apple's home. The Apple home is the most secure way of controlling near your internet of things devices. The problem is that not many people make devices for Apple home, and that is because they are a little bit more expensive to make.

[00:03:05] You have to have better encryption software. You have to pay the Apple tax because Apple developed it and Apple is going to charge you as a manufacturer to use their technology. So many of these companies have kind of gone off and done their own thing. We have some hue lights as well. H U E from Phillips.

[00:03:25] Great lights, by the way. And those are all, again, controlled remotely, and we've got it tied in so that our iOS devices, our I-phones can turn on and off. The hue lights can turn on and off like our family room lights, et cetera, and can change the colors of lights. But because my internet of things devices are not directly compatible with Apple home, we had to get some special hubs.

[00:03:58] So we have a small hub, and that hub speaks both the hue protocol. It speaks to a protocol that is used by the light dimmers in our main rooms, and it speaks Apple's protocol. Now. Were totally geeked out. So guess what? We have Linux running on a box. It does all of that stuff for us, right? So we can maintain it, we can update it, we can upgrade it.

[00:04:23] We know what's going on. Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're really not after me. Right. Well, there is a company out there called Wink that many people have been using for quite a while. Wink, I should say, looks pretty darn good. It was launched first about six years ago, and the idea was to be able to connect and control all of their devices through just one master wink interface. So wink exists to really kind of simplify life for somebody, right?

[00:05:00] That's really into the internet of things. You've got your lights, you got your locks, your thermostat, your cameras, your appliances. And they're all coming from different brands and they need different apps to operate.

[00:05:13] Nowadays. You even see refrigerators and ovens. Man, I think I saw the first internet-connected one about six years ago as well. Our washing machines, dryers, all of these things, and they're different brands, and even though they might be using the same protocol, it doesn't mean as implemented the same way.

[00:05:35] So these devices just can't speak to each other. Enter wink. Now there are a number of different devices out there that can be used as a smart hub, but speak to different, you know, different protocols, different vendors, everything else. But a lot of people went to wink because you bought it once. And that's it.

[00:06:00] It was free for the rest of your life. Now, wink cost more yes than some of these others, but you did not have a monthly subscription fee that you had to pay. Well, as of this week, Wink is starting to charge on a monthly basis for their devices. The quote from Wink and obviously then they're looking for cash.

[00:06:24] Now, who isn't? Wink has taken many steps in an effort to keep your hubs blue light on. That's the light on the Wink Hub. However, long-term costs and recent economic events have caused additional strain on our business. Unlike companies that sell our data to offset costs associated with offering free services, we do not.

[00:06:48] Little jab there at Google. Data privacy is one of Winks core values. And we believe that user data should never be sold for marketing or any purpose. So basically what they were doing is, no grandfathering. The mandate here is to pay up or we're gonna shut you off. Here's what they said. Should you choose not to sign up for a subscription, you will no longer be able to access your wink devices from the app with voice control or through the API, and your automation will be disabled on May 13th your device connection settings and automation can be reactivated if you decide to pay up,  excuse me, to subscribe at a later date.

[00:07:35] So there's no warning. It's now $5 a month per device. Think about how many devices are out there and how many devices people might have. Right? I'm a little unclear as to whether it's only $5 per house because you might only have the one Wink Hub or if it's $5 per month per device. That's kind of how I read it, so it could be really, really expensive and people are very upset about it.

[00:08:05] You know, on Reddit there are thousands of responses to this company's tweet that was posted there. Most people are just absolutely angry. You know, they paid a lot more to get something that had lifetime support, and here it is, no life-time support. Right? So this feels like a variation on a familiar theme because it's happened many times.

[00:08:29] You know, these internet-connected light bulbs. Many of them no longer work as a company went out of business and the servers got shut down. Smart scales. Some cases they just got dumb and they show you your weight to no longer show you your history or weight loss or anything, and in some cases, they just don't work at all because the companies pulled the plug on the apps.

[00:08:51] These pet feeders. We've talked about a couple of cool ones here. They've gone. Out of business, they completely stopped feeding pets. How about these vacuums that we have in our homes that are all automated? They're running around cleaning the houses. So this is nothing new. We have seen companies go out of business before, right?

[00:09:12] You've seen companies go out of business, right? Tell me. You have told me I'm not crazy. And when the companies go out of business and they're providing a monthly service for you. Then what happens? This gets to be a very, very big deal, and I also want to caution businesses because it reveals a major hole in this whole cloud business.

[00:09:40] You know, we look at the cloud and say, it's going to make my life simpler. It's going to keep my costs down. I don't have to worry about the side of it anymore. I'll just use this cloud service like Salesforce for instance, or, or Dropbox or whatever it might be in reality.

[00:09:59] Now, remember that your core business information, your intellectual property regarding your customers, regarding your orders, regarding your sales, your inventories, all of the stuff that is now in the hands of a third party. So what's going to happen when that third party. Goes out of business, it could be really, really bad for you. And for me.

[00:10:27] So one of the things that we always advise our customers is to make sure you have a third party in a place that's securing these cloud-based apps and is doing backups for you.

[00:10:43] So for instance, most of them, Microsoft. Office through the, what do they call it now? Windows three 65 plans or whatever it is. Those email accounts don't have backups and there's no guarantee from Microsoft that they will not lose your data. So are you backing that up as well? That I think there's a lot of lessons for all of us in this, and be careful when you're buying something.

[00:11:11] We just got a new dryer. I made sure you were not internet-connected. I don't want a dryer from a company sitting in my house on my network, even though I've got it separated out into the internet of things network. I don't want that device sitting there potentially providing a breach for the rest of my network.

[00:11:34] So think about that, be careful with that. You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN. Stick around because we're going to talk about how Microsoft is getting rid of passwords. We'll be right back.

Craig Peterson: Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. Thanks for joining me today. I always appreciate it and I love getting your emails. I've got a couple of great ones this week. Again, Gary was out there letting me know what he was having some problems with. In fact, I even ended up getting on the phone with him to help him out a little bit with this whole tracking thing.

[00:00:26] He was thinking that his GPS was being used to track him, and some people were really trying to mess with him while he's trying to make some money driving around. So I explained how the app he's using as a paid driver works, how tracks him, and how he can stop it from tracking him when he's not working.

[00:00:47] So if you're driving for Uber eats or grub hub. Et cetera. That's, that's the sort of thing he's doing. And he was really kind of wondering about, because some people were changing the delivery point on deliveries and he'd show up at the new address and there's nobody there, and there's nobody at the old address.

[00:01:07] And so he was really having some issues. Yeah. Obviously that can be a problem. So if you have any questions, whether it's about grub hub or anything else, by all means, just email me, ME@Craig peterson.com. Let me know how I can help. I'm always glad to give a little bit of help for absolutely nothing.

[00:01:28] And obviously this is what I do for a living as well. So you know, if, if it's a lot of work, then I'm going to have to charge you. But anyhow, Microsoft. Now. passwords have been kind of the bane of my existence forever. I remember the very first time I had a password, I don't remember what it was. It would have been pretty simple back then but that was the early 1970s, and it was a non-online timeshare.

[00:02:00] The Computer, an HP, I think it was like a 2000 access or 2000 after that got upgraded to an a and it was so totally cool. It was my first real computer access and we had a teletype, a TTY33 yay. Seven level. Yeah. So it was an a, it was really, really cool.

[00:02:24] And that was my first major introduction to computers way back then and we had passwords now, the head of the, of the math department, and that's where was at the time I was in school then it was inside the math department. He always used some variation of his name for his password. And I still remember to this day, his name was Robert Allen Lang.

[00:02:53]So, hi, Mr. Lang. If you're, if you're still around, actually, if you're listening, but He would always use a password that like R A lane or R Allen lane or, you know, you could always guess what his password was, so we would guess his password. And we'd use that to get more access. So for instance, our accounts could only have so much storage and the accounts could only have so much time per week to be used.

[00:03:26] We just loved using as much time as we could. Oh, man. One of these days, I'll tell you some stories. And so we would hack into his account. And once we're in doing his account, we then gave ourselves upgraded privileges and online time and kind of everything else. So yeah, you know, that's what you do when you're a kid, but anyhow, you know, teenagers right?

[00:03:54] Fast forward to today and passwords are still a problem. I've been using pretty darn good passwords for a very, very long time now, and as you probably are aware, if you sign up for my email list, I'll send you a special report on passwords, but you might be well aware that I really like one password.

[00:04:16] It's by far the winner. There was some other half-decent password managers out there last pass being one of them, but 1password, absolutely the winner. And we also use DUO, which is a two-factor authentication system. So between the two of them, we're pretty secure and I have it generate passwords for me, which is really nice, and it'll generate passwords.

[00:04:39] It's funny, many times I'll have a like a 20 plus character password and the website I'm on just doesn't support that. Sometimes it'll ask all, you didn't put enough special characters in, which, as you know, just doesn't count anymore. So make sure you get my password special report so you can see what the current advice is.

[00:05:01] And it's really changed recently, current advice for passwords and what you should do. So we've got world password day and every year we talk about passwords and what you should do. And this is the first year I think we're seeing more people starting to really use new forms of authentication. We're working from home even at work, and people are starting to understand just how insecure and ultimately how costly passwords really are.

[00:05:38] Our cybercriminals don't need advanced techniques when they can just bet on human behavior. Ponemon Institute did a survey in 2019 and this is all on security behaviors. Okay. And they found that 51% of 1700 information technology and information technology security professionals reused an average of five total passwords again and again and again across both their business and their personal accounts.

[00:06:17] Now that is a very bad thing to do. There's something called password stuffing where they steal your password. And remember a couple of weeks ago I mentioned a, "have I been pawned" or powned website? And there's a feature that I put out as well. I don't think they're airing on WGAN, but they are on some other stations all about powned passwords.

[00:06:41] Well, Once a password has been stolen and they know what it is and they know what your username is, they just start automatically going and checking banks, trying to log in with that email address and that password. So having the same password that you're using on more than one system is a very, very dangerous habit because if they get ahold of just one password, they know they can use it on other sites and they're probably going to be able to get in.

[00:07:16] So this single compromised password can create just this chain reaction of theft and liability, frankly, on your part. And on average, one in every 250 corporate accounts is compromised each month. Think of that one in one in 22 really accounts is compromised every year. Wow. That is huge. I don't think I've ever seen that stat before.

[00:07:48] So this expense of using passwords is really continuing to grow because we're using more business applications online, aren't we? I just talked about the cloud and some things she needed to be careful of with the cloud. Well, the cloud requires passwords and we're using those same passwords. Man. That is bad.

[00:08:12]By the way, password reset is one of the highest support costs, especially in larger businesses. And that means that companies are dedicating 30 to 60% of the support desk calls to just resetting passwords. So. We all have to understand it better. We all need a multifactor authentication. The very least two-factor authentication and Microsoft now has this passwordless login.

[00:08:43] You might've used it, you might've seen it where it's using the camera on your computer, and sometimes it's using other biometrics, like your fingerprints, et cetera. And there are new technologies out there that are being deployed, including in web browsers that we'll be talking about in the future as they get a little bit more well adopted.

[00:09:03] But some of these keys, these USB authentication keys have a built-in, it's called Fido - FIDO so if you're interested, you can always dig that up and we'll be covering that. To a, you know, a future show, as I said, and I do do some training on that with my mentorship site. All right, everybody, stick around.

[00:09:25] You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and I'm going to talk a little bit about remote work and now. The security fight that's happening in the cloud. Make sure you join me as well. Wednesday mornings at 7:34 with Mr. Matt Gagnon morning drive time as we talk about the latest in technology.

[00:09:50] Stick around. I'll be right back.

Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning everybody. Craig Peterson here. We started out this whole show talking about surveillance here that managers are doing as they're surveilling their employees. I want to talk now a little bit about surveillance where we should be keeping an eye on our cloud devices. And our endpoint.

[00:00:28] So let's start out with the cloud. You know, I call them devices. In some places, you might be using a server that's living up in maybe Microsoft Azure or Google's cloud, Amazon cloud, Amazon web services, et cetera. Those systems can all be compromised. And yeah, they're sitting in the data center. Yeah. You don't have to pay for the hardware or the electricity or the cooling, which is really nice.

[00:00:58] Yeah. You don't have to hear all of the noise they make in the background, but many businesses have found that, wow, the cloud really isn't the panacea. I thought it was. And they're actually moving it back out of the cloud. And that's particularly true of businesses that have security concerns due to regulations because moving to the cloud does not absolve you, from these regulations.

[00:01:27] Now we've got this additional problem of people working from home, so they're using either their own computers or maybe a company computer at home. They might be connecting to the office, but it's just as likely, maybe even more likely that they're connecting to a cloud service somewhere. Not, not just for collaboration or for meetings, but to do their basic work.

[00:01:51] As more and more businesses are saying, Hey, why should I be paying for the software or hardware, et cetera. Let's just move it all to the cloud. And we're seeing now States and cities that are starting to lift some of these stay-at-home orders, but frankly, this increased level of employees working from home.

[00:02:12] Is not going to disappear. Sure. It'll get a little smaller. Many businesses are going to be calling people back and they are going to be working from that office, but many people are in businesses that are going to continue that move over to the cloud. So what are the security challenges that come from a hybrid infrastructure?

[00:02:35] Almost three-quarters of companies expect at least 5% or more of the former onsite employees to work from home on a permanent basis. That's not a lot, but 5% when you add it up over all of the small businesses, that is a lot because half of all employees in the country work for small businesses. And a quarter of businesses are planning on keeping at least 20% of their workers out of the office post-pandemic.

[00:03:06] And this is according to a survey of chief financial officers by the, it's maybe you guys know Gartner right? Gartner group. They're research firm, so their numbers are usually considered gospel in the business world. With this remote work comes even more cloud usage, and that could be a problem for a lot of companies that have issues with the visibility into the security of the cloud.

[00:03:33] Now. You might be as a business relying on maybe some permitter defenses or maybe some on-premise security software and appliances to help keep your systems and data safe. Now, most of the time, small businesses aren't using the right stuff. They're just using some equipment that they got from, you know, a random break-fix shop or heaven forbid at staples or where they ordered it from Amazon.

[00:03:59] You can't, you just can't get the good stuff from any of those places. But that's not going to work anymore at all. When we're talking about remote workers cause people are in their homes and they're using cloud services that you just don't know the security level of, you might not know what the patch level is of windows of the software that's running on windows.

[00:04:26] You might not know any of that stuff. Right. But we are going to see a major shift so. Let's talk about it a little bit here. We're just seeing, you know, massive, massive growth. I'm looking at these numbers in telecommuting. It was growing slowly before, but now many technology firms, particularly marketing companies, are relying almost exclusively on people working from home.

[00:04:53] IBM had moved people to work from home and then found that experiment to be a failure and moved everybody back into the office. Now, that was back in 2017 they pulled them back in and made them work from an office in one of six cities. While IBM now has moved almost entirely to remote work and they've got 95% of its current workforce working outside of the company offices.

[00:05:21] IBM, by the way, is a major player in the cloud in case you weren't aware, they were way more prepared for this problem than many companies. It com and infrastructure information security groups. Absolutely true. So coming out of this, we need to embrace the fact that we have to continually be ready for full.

[00:05:43] Remote workforce. What is going to happen? And, and I'm, I'm on governors, the governor's task force here on education, on re-opening education. What are we going to do? And of course, I'm the security guy, the technology guy, actually one of the technology people on that task force. And we had a meeting this week and we were talking about it.

[00:06:07] Okay, fine. So we've got the COVID-19 thing and it's eventually going to be a thing of the past. But thinking about the teachers that are 60, 65, 70 years old, what happens when there's another virus? What happens when the annual flu or curves. Are we going to be shutting down our offices again? Are we going to be shutting down our schools again?

[00:06:32] Are we going to maybe try and do quarantines as we've always done in the past where we say, Hey, if you are sick. Or if you are vulnerable, you just stay home because this is happening more and more. We, we had SARS very, you know, that wasn't long ago. Right? That was another covert virus that we had. We had to MERS.

[00:06:56] That was another COVID virus that we had. We've had a number of these things. I'm thinking about Ebola, which I don't think was a COVID virus. They're happening more and more. And as we have more and more people in the world, the likelihood of them occurring is going to be even greater. So if you are a business person, and then the case of where I'm on the governor's task force, looking at education, if, if we are a school, what are we going to do in the future?

[00:07:30] And I really think we have to realize that we have to be able to have our businesses basically work remotely. So I want to encourage everybody to really keep that in mind as we're looking at this going forward. What can you do in order to make your business covert proof? Now, it isn't just the COVID-19 what happens if there's a fire in your building burns down.

[00:08:00] What happens if there is a major lightning strike and it burns up all of your computers just zaps them. What's that all going to mean and what's going to happen with the next 12 months? Are we going to have another massive spike in the COVID virus or are you ready for that? We got to think about it.

[00:08:21] The other side is the endpoint devices and we're seeing right now. Six and 10 remote workers using personal devices to do work, and almost all of these workers believe that the devices are secure. CrowdStrike had a look at this and said that people are naive. Six in 10 remote workers are using personal devices to do work and all.

[00:08:48] Almost none of them. Are properly secured, and we've got attackers now focused on targeting the remote workers. They're going after VPN technology technologies, which is part of the reason I say don't use VPNs, right? It's where the people are and it's where we're getting it back. So be careful really overnight.

[00:09:12] The attack surface that the bad guys can use against us has increased a hundredfold. So be very, very careful out there. And that's according to the 2019 cloud security report. When we come back, we're going to talk about US broadband. What is the future? What's going on? Is it going to hold up under the strain?

[00:09:35] Make sure you get my weekly newsletter. You get all this information. You get my password special report and more at Craigpeterson.com. We'll be right back. Stick around.

Craig Peterson: Hey, welcome back. Craig Peterson here. Another two hours of technology excellence. To quote Mr. Limbaugh, and I can't believe it's coming to an end. It just goes so, so fast. I used to do a three-hour show every Saturday as well, but it takes a long time to put this stuff together. As you can probably imagine.

[00:00:25] And so I just had to give it up, which is kind of a shame. But we've gone through a lot today. We'll kind of do a little bit of a rundown before we end today, and as always, I want to remind you, you can get all of these articles, all of this information, listen to my podcast, find out about the free pieces of training, find out about the courses and other materials by just going to Craig peterson.com and signing up.

[00:00:53] It's really that simple. So I want to encourage you, I get all kinds of great compliments from people. I just had someone who signed up this week. I have a few people who sign up every day on average every day during the week, but this one gentleman responded saying, I can't believe how great this material is.

[00:01:13] Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Because it's making a difference in his business right now because he is. He's got the special reports on, not just the passwords now, but the basics of computer hygiene, both physical and software, and we've got so much more than that that we give away every week. Again, Craig peterson.com.

[00:01:37] And as you can tell, we have a great Dane in the background there and somehow black fly just got in here, huh? I hate those things. So let's talk about the US broadband. This is something that we have all relied on. In fact, I had a really fun chat this week. I was on television and was talking with the investigative reporter off the air.

[00:02:03] And we were talking about how the whole internet here in the US is so much better when it comes to handling this volume. And the reason is we've been doing online streaming of television and other things for many, many years. If you look into Europe, that I know some people have said is kind of the panacea, right?

[00:02:26] Yeah, yeah. Europe, look at. They've got better phone systems. They have all of this stuff. It's just fantastic. In reality, I'm not so absolutely wonderful when it comes to this pandemic. We're seeing some new stats out there from a company called Okla. Now, you might be familiar with them. They have a website called speed test.

[00:02:48] I've used it many, many times, and they keep track of the information that they glean from you. By running speed tests. So you may want to check it out right now. I'm going to go there. we had, let me see how I spell it, right. We had talked about this before. We use this online as well. So if you go there, speed test.net is going to come up.

[00:03:14] It'll have a big button in the middle. It says go and there's a bunch of ads, right? That's part of the for how they make their money, and so I'm going to hit go. It's showing me on a Comcast business. Circuit. And so it's going to connect me to Comcast in Boston, and it must be the closest for this business circuit.

[00:03:35] And it's telling me what I am getting for my download speed. So right now. I'm getting about 50 megabits a second download speed, and my ping speed is four milliseconds. So was very, very fast. And I suspect my download speed has obviously interfered with a little bit by all the other people who are online and my upload speed.

[00:04:02] So remember I said my download speed was about 50 megabits. My upload speed is almost 100 megabits. Wow. That is really, really nice and you can check it out too. Speed test.net so they've been taking all of this information and putting it together, and they found that the broadband speeds in the US have largely flattened out, right?

[00:04:27] That Corona curve, we have flattened the curve people. There was a slight dip in speeds between March 15 and 22nd. At speeds in Canada are continuing a slow decline. While Canada doesn't have as good a network as we do, but both Canada in the US have considerably better broadband than Mexico or most other countries out there, which I guess isn't a big surprise.

[00:04:54]Europe as well. So the average speeds, they're saying right now, or between 110 and 140 megabits per second. Which is frankly pretty good. That's pretty fast here. Mobile broadband speeds are slightly down week over week, but it isn't a sharp decline. There's nothing in the US or Canada that looks like a giant drop in mobile speeds that they saw in China.

[00:05:23] Over the Chinese new years holiday, which kind of makes sense, right? Everybody kind of calling home. It's a big thing for families over there, so we'll see. We'll see how it goes. AT&T says that all of his network traffic was up 19% month on month last Sunday. It did not break out. It's wireline versus mobile usage.

[00:05:44] I'm looking at the chart. Yeah. They frankly pretty flat here. U S. We're getting much better speed than Canada or Mexico. Mexico is terrible. Wow. I'm looking at it right now and the kind of the flattest region for the US showed about 140 megabits per second download. And that's in the US and Canada.

[00:06:06] It's about 130 so not much different. Mexico's about 40 which is a lot slower, but we were at 40 not too long ago, and in fact, as I just said right now, why you have 50 megabits a second right now, so we're not getting nailed too badly. But even if the speed test shows that things are working pretty well, you still could have problems.

[00:06:32] Your zoom calls, your WebEx calls, et cetera, could still be a bit of a problem because we're using our home broadband more than we've ever used it before, and we're also using it in new ways. So many of us have gone and gotten new televisions recently. Maybe we've got a new step set, top box, or heaven forbid you're using a smart TV.

[00:06:57] Absolutely don't use a smart TV. Turn that off. Don't catch it on the internet. Use an external set. The top box is going to be a lot safer for you. And if you can, I know it costs a little bit more, but I saw them for as little as $70 at Walmart so he can get an Apple TV as opposed to anything else out there.

[00:07:18] Okay. And it does cost a little bit more because Apple is not selling your information like Roku and some of the others are. So while the internet backbones are doing just fine, your home wifi network may not be because you might be hitting the bandwidth cap on your service plan or on your wifi network itself.

[00:07:37] Okay. So in Italy, apparently. Microsoft teams have seen a huge spike in traffic over there. Microwave ovens can have fear interfere with some of the older wifi networks. Try and switch your home router to five gigahertz if you can. That's going to help as well. And, you know, we quantify signals just aren't going to cut it for online schooling or for working from home.

[00:08:06] So there you go. A little bit of a Roundup of what's happening with ours. Wifi and the strain of working from home. If you have questions, if you're having problems at home, reach out. Okay. Just email me. M E, ed Craig peterson.com all right, let's keep this simple. So we just covered, of course, the US broadband and the fact it's holding up.

[00:08:31] We talked about remote work becoming the norm and how our fight for security has moved to. The cloud as the way we work has changed. Microsoft is trying to get rid of passwords and for once they're kind of trying to do it the right way. So we talked about that as well. How and why to ditch passwords.

[00:08:55] If you have a wink smart hub, you know what's next? They discontinued service. Supposedly you're going to get service for free for as long as you owned it. No longer true. They want five bucks a month idea per device. And what does that mean to you as a business owner or as an employee? Or maybe you're even just uploading your home photos to a cloud service.

[00:09:22] So we talked a lot about that. Attacks on WordPress sites have surged, and we also talked about how WordPress might be a savior for your business. We talked about Zoom and how they're trying to fix some of their problems with encryption. We also talked about big tech and how it is really strangling our ability to communicate.

[00:09:48] And we started out today talking about why and how. Businesses have started to use surveillance software always on webcams, screenshots to surveil employees. What are the legitimate reasons to do that? And as an employee, do businesses need to inform you? Is there anything you can do about it? If they are monitoring you and what you're doing, so we covered all of that today.

[00:10:17] If you want to listen to any of it, if you want to recap, I'm posting them online. You can check it out at Craigpeterson.com this week. I'm going to try and get this, this shows up over on Facebook and also gets it up over on YouTube and also of course on my website. I'm going to try and share some of this stuff on LinkedIn as well.

[00:10:41] And you can find all of that just at Craigpeterson.com. Now, I also want to make sure you guys know that I have a newsletter or you know, I have some paid ones, but I have a free newsletter that you can get a listener to this radio show. And every week I send you this summary of the articles that I talk about.

[00:11:03] I send you links to them. Sue can listen to them. When I do interviews, you get to hear the whole interview, not just a cutoff of the interview. And you do that by going to Craigpeterson.com and while you are there. Make sure you subscribe. There'll be little subscribe thing that pops down from the top of the screen that you can go ahead and fill out.

[00:11:27] Now we are starting to transition back to a regular business environment, and so I want to warn businesses, you really have to pull up your socks now. It was one thing to try and quickly get online, try and quickly get some workers working from home, and in some cases, of course, you were able to get PPP money or maybe some SBA money.

[00:11:55] And so you basically shut down the company and ran off of those loans, and that's all well and good. That's fine. But now reality is setting in and part of that reality is we need to make sure that we are securing. Our homeworkers though. We're securing our networks and that we're doing it the proper way.

[00:12:16] So by all means, make sure you keep an eye out. I have these free webinars that I put on. You're going to want to attend them because I talk about all of this and what you should do and how to do it, and I'm going to be doing more. Facebook lives and YouTube lives and other things. And of course, I'll be back on Wednesday morning at seven 34 with Matt Gagnon and we'll talk about what's new in technology next week.

[00:12:45] Every Wednesday at 7:34 right here on WGAN and online, CraigPeterson.com.

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